ABSTRACT
For Rosa Newmarch, ‘the renascence of music in England’ was as much – if not more – about audiences as it was about composers or performers. The new audience for the arts that was such a feature of the late Victorian era was the very one she cultivated in her aĴempt to position herself as an authority on Russian music in the early twentieth century. Untutored yet open-minded, it shared her own catholic tastes and zeal for cultural self-improvement. And in describing this audience, Newmarch drew parallels between public participation in the arts in Russia and the evolving situation in England. Russia was not just a new and exotic culture to be discovered and consumed; rather, it offered a model of an ideal relationship between artists, critics and audiences that could be transposed onto the native context.
