ABSTRACT
Books are amazing vehicles of intellectual transportation. Through the agency of the piano-vocal score, the "opera" can be transported from the public sphere of the large opera house to the private, intimate setting of the home parlor or drawing room. By playing the overtly "public" music of the opera house at home in the private space of the parlor or drawing room, amateur pianists effected a radical dislocation in the genre's reception. Interior affections and sentiments inculcated in the private arena of the family could become objects of public identification and debate through their propagation in such widely circulated and discussed literary genres as the novel. According to Jurgen Habermas, the publicity-oriented sphere of the court and state began to be contested in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries by the gradual emergence of an independent bourgeois public sphere.
