ABSTRACT
In the mid-1830s, London saw the establishment of public chamber-music concerts, a phenomenon that gave prominence to instrumental music by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, and attracted well-heeled metropolitan listeners with both musical leanings and a desire to expand their cultural capital. Offering a new high seriousness and inwardness, as well as an intimate, salon-like social experience for both audiences and performers, these concerts differed from modern chamber recitals in that they included vocal numbers – many shorn from operas – which were interleaved between the instrumental works. To modern eyes, the elements of outward-ness, drama, and display inherent in such vocal music often appear at odds with the largely inward chamber-music aesthetic. This chapter addresses the conundrum of why operatic songs and duets were such a staple of these events by resource to context, situating programming decisions and patterns against the inherited conventions and practical, commercial realities of London concert life. Identifying overlaps between opera and chamber concert audiences, it goes on to identify synergies between the programmed vocal excerpts and the chamber-music ideal. Organizational principles of concert programming, which emphasized juxtapositions and symmetries, find parallels in the conventions and practices of fine dining that upper-class and bourgeois Victorians took for granted.
