Zagreb Salon Music in the Second Half of the 19th Century: “The Darker Side of the Moon”?
Zagreb Salon Music in the Second Half of the 19th Century: “The Darker Side of the Moon”?

Summary/Abstract: In the mid-19th century Zagreb has definitely established itself as a political, social, economic and cultural centre of Croatian historical lands – Civil (or stricter) Croatia, Slavonia and Dalmatia with Istria. While in the first half of the 19th century salons and salon-type of music were greatly making part of the newly emerging Croatian national movement, in the second half of the century the situation has changed when the society at large was developing towards mature bourgeois type of civilization. In this, a modern Central-European type of musical culture was established, where the entertainment music started to be separated from the sphere of so-called art or high-brow music. This research has discovered that in the second half of the 19th century more than twenty aristocratic and bourgeois locations existed in Zagreb where music was privately cherished. There participated several dozens of musicians, among them 23 pianists, 26 violinists, 15 violists, 11 cellists, one flutist and seven unidentified instrumentalists. In Zagreb both outstanding and minor composers often composed music which was more an old-style mixture of intellectual and entertainment elements, and it was only at the turn of the centuries when composers emerged who completely inclined to musical entertainment in their compositional output.

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