Zenei nyilvánosság és polgári viselkedéskultúra. A 19. századi hangversenyterem társadalomtörténeti látószögbõl
Musical Publicity and Bourgeois Culture of Behaviour. The 19th-Century Concert Hall from the Perspective of Social History

Summary/Abstract: It is only in modern bourgeois society that music has become an independent area of cultural practice, organised on a financial basis, and public concert the central category of musical culture. Public concert hall, accessible against the payment of an entry fee, as a public space with a special function, serving the functions of a public social life, has become one of the “coulisses” of the modern city. The present study deals with musical concert as one of the scenes of modern urban public life, where the norms of behaviour which later came to determine the public sphere can be observed relatively early, already in the first half of the 19th century. As an introduction, the author surveys the origins of the public concert in Europe, from the residential musical performances through the “subscription concerts”, and musical academies to a public musical life already organised on more or less purely market principles. Bourgeois musical life was characterised by a certain twofoldedness right from the start. The norms regulating the “consumption of music” suggested that the art of music occupied a sacral status in an increasingly secularised society. Yet in the eyes of the great majority of those in the middle classes going to musical concerts was no more than one of the requisites of belonging to “good society”, and their consumption of music correlated with the popularity of the product to be consumed. The cult of virtuosi which flourished in the second quarter of the 19th century can only be described with terms borrowed from the sociology of fashion. It was with the generalisation of musical consumption and the transformation in the composition of consumers that the marketing procedures of modern market economy emerged. Public concert was based on the twin principles of free accessibility and the temporary equality of the listeners. The emerging audience – the middle classes continuously enlarged from below – had to learn the ability of exerting regular self-control. In the institutions of high culture there developed a set of norms regulating behaviour, which socially devalued everything which went against the passive attitude of spectator/listener, that is, spontaneous, emotionally-driven, uncontrolled, attentionprovoking behaviour. Other features of the civilising process, such as the diminution of the differences in behaviour between the upper and lower strata of society, and the differentiation of the set of rules, can also be observed in the music hall. It was only the acts of expressing pleasure which offerred for the passive listeners opportunities to become somewhat more active participants. In the first decades of the 19th century a differentiated order and rich language of expressing pleasure emerged in Europe, with important local varieties alongside general tendencies. That the concertgoing audience in the Hungarian “reform era” was still at a very early phase in the long process of internalising

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