Salon Music in Nineteenth-Century Greece
Salon Music in Nineteenth-Century Greece

Summary/Abstract: This paper aims to give an overview of musical salons in Greece over the course of the 19th century. Musical salons formed part of the general Westernizing and Europeanizing trend of Greek culture after the foundation of the Greek state ‒ a trend that reflected the Greeks’ wish to distantiate their identity from their Ottoman past. Most Greek salons of the 19th century followed the fashion of the European salons of the period: they were held by cosmopolitan elites; Italian opera excerpts and light dance music were the key repertoire; the piano functioned as a bourgeois status symbol; women enjoyed a certain prominence in them. However here we will focus on the particularities of the Greek 19th century as well as on the aspects of musical hybridization that reflect the cultural amalgamation between Greece and Europe that was taking place in salons.

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