The benefits such changes were expected to bring were identified earlier, for instance by a French government circular of 1792, which described the postal service as nothing less than
the tie that draws together and unites all people from one end of the earth to the other, letting them enjoy the free circulation of their ideas and feelings through active and reciprocal correspondence. It is thanks to this adroit circulation that progress and enlightenment of all kinds are extended and multiplied, that the benefits of genius spread among the nations, and that society can reap the fruits of all the precious kinds of knowledge that have such an essential influence on human happiness.
Effective attempts to realize these benefits only began with the English penny post of 1840; it was copied in other countries but slowly (partly from fear that radical groups could make use of it), and only in the fin-de-siècle did the habit of correspondence begin to spread to people below the level of the middle classes, aided by rising levels of literacy, together with the still cheaper medium of the postcard, introduced at the very end of the century and costing about half as much to send as a letter.34
Literature and letter-writing had closer ties through much of the nineteenth century than nowadays, in part because many novels, including Rousseau’s and Richardson’s, were epistolary, cast as a series of letters. This gave novels a close connection to another genre that has lost its prominence over time, namely collections of model letters to which people, especially those with little experience or practice, turned on occasions when they needed to write one. Recent scholars have shown that these collections were often read as quasi-novels. One reason this could be the case was that the sample letters often referred to critical moments in people’s lives, relations with lovers, seeking jobs or favors, asking for advice about difficult or dramatic situations. Richardson himself was the author of one of the most widely read compilations, and the plot of Pamela was foreshadowed by some of his models. Letter-books also provided pictures of social relations inside groups of which readers had no direct experience, adding to the possibility for fantasy identifications they created. Such was the case at least in France, where scholars have contrasted the relatively modest position of the readership with the elegant settings often posited for the model letters; the situation may not have been quite the same for Richardson’s readers, since his examples assumed a less exalted social level, but curiosity and fantasy could be fed there too. One French student of the genre attributes much of its lasting success to its ability to serve as a kind of early illustrated novel, a “roman-photo avant la lettre.”35
Letters by themselves had a similar capacity to free people from some of the confines of their lives. One student of eighteenth-century correspondence, Marie-Claire Grassi, notes that letters offered people a freedom to examine and express feelings that ordinary social situations did not, and speaks of an “emancipation of the social space materialized by letters.” What made this “social space” a site of affective liberation was that, like reading, it opened up a realm of relations beyond immediate and local ones, and people inhabited it in moments of privacy, free of oversight by parents, relatives, or other people with a stake in preserving traditional forms of restraint. (Just for this reason husbands in France long asserted a right to read the correspondence of their wives, a practice that was drawing much criticism at the end of the nineteenth century.) Influenced also by the cult of sensibility in which Rousseau and Richardson were central figures, the social space of letter writing became the site of a remarkable transformation in epistolary style, as such traditional formulas as “your humble and obedient servant” declined in favor of direct expressions of feeling such as “je me jette dans vos bras,” “I throw myself into your arms,” alongside an increased use of the familiar tu in French, and a spreading affirmation of the suffering produced by absence.36 It may be that such practices diminished somewhat in the nineteenth century as moral and social anxieties gained more sway over behavior. Michelle Perrot believes that “confidences were muted and intimacy was impossible” between most corespondents.37 This was far from universally the case, however; the participants in the family exchanges considered in Chapter 9 made clear that they felt bereft of important affective ties when the correspondence was disrupted, and the limits Perrot speaks about simply dissolved in the open avowals of affection and even physical longing exchanged between temporarily separated spouses highlighted by Peter Gay in the work cited in Chapter 10. Sometimes very effusive language crops up where we might not expect it, as for instance in Jules Ferry’s letters to his younger brother Charles. The Third Republic luminary addressed his sibling as “mon bon chéri” and “my true other half,” complained that “I’ve lived too long separated from your sweet face, I’m only a shadow of myself when you aren’t here to complete me,” described himself as “like a widower” without news of his brother, and asked Charles to tell him explicitly that he loved him.38
To be sure, not all readers approved of either the public exposure of intimate relations or the freer expression of feeling both novels and letter-collections helped to foster. When Baudelaire’s old friend the writer Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly published the private correspondence between Eugénie de Guerin and her brother in 1864, the highly personal nature of the exchanges and the effusive, quasi-novelistic language in which they were conducted produced not only a debate about the propriety of publishing the texts, but also speculations that Barbey had made at least some of them up.39 The discussion highlighted both the close relationship that had developed between fiction and letters, and the conflict over how far private feelings ought to receive direct, and especially public expression. Some people would likely have been made uncomfortable by the kind of language Ferry used in addressing his brother, but its existence testifies that the space of feeling and expression opened up by the expansion of letter-writing remained an important site of personal affirmation and exploration in the nineteenth century. Like other spheres of modern culture it took advantage of the new and unpoliced sites for private experience made available by the more public character of a realm into which mediated and distant relations were closely woven.
Autonomy and privacy in music
Nowhere is the relationship between the increasingly public nature of cultural forms and the deepening of private experience they fostered more clear and significant than in music, in many ways the central sphere of bourgeois culture. Basic to this connection was a change in the behavior of audiences advocated from late in the eighteenth century but that became dominant only toward the end of the nineteenth, the turn to listening in silence. Eighteenth-century music venues were hardly tranquil places. Until the end of the Old Regime, as James Johnson notes in his revealing study of Listening in Paris, musical occasions (most were operas rather than concerts) were chiefly social events, the scene of often noisy interplay and conversation between audience members, and of a kind of social theater that dramatized the deference accorded to the socially most prominent among them. Individuals visited and moved about, making contacts with others who mattered to them, often listening only sporadically; when the time came to express a reaction to the performance, they took their cues about when and how much to applaud from some prince, noble, or other dignitary. Etiquette books warned people not to express themselves before some nearby “person of quality” had a chance to do so. These forms of behavior came under pressure from around 1770. The expectation of a clear hierarchy inside the audience was upset by the political tensions of the declining Old Regime and the competition between groups and factions for prestige or privilege they generated, reflected inside the hall by rival claims for preeminence in judgment, and the formation of hostile cliques. At the same time, the late eighteenth-century cult of sensibility and feeling fostered an emphasis on more inward styles of both making music and experiencing it. Christophe Willibald Gluck’s operas were at once a mirror and a source of this turn, replacing the attempt to represent external objects through sound (as in Haydn’s �
��Clock” or “Military” Symphonies) with techniques aimed at evoking inner moods and feelings. Critics associated the change with the rise of a new regulator of musical taste, no longer the preferences of the socially preeminent, but the same diffuse court of “public opinion” that was coming to be regarded as having jurisdiction over politics.40
These developments prepared the way for the change in concert behavior that would occur during the nineteenth century, but the shift could not occur so long as Old Regime social principles still reigned inside the halls. It would be hard to imagine the regime of silence becoming established in aristocratic settings, since there musicians never ceased to be regarded as in some degree the servants of their patrons, which meant that the latter’s impulses or desires, not the players’ preferences, set the tone. The weakening of these notions allowed two connected but separable groups to gain influence over the etiquette of listening, on the one hand composers, critics, and performers, and on the other audience members who acted toward others in changed ways. Both seem to have been involved in the early moves toward silence in Germany, where aristocratic forms of behavior had less influence on society as a whole than in France. An organization established in Frankfurt in 1808 and calling itself the Museum recommended silence at concerts, and in his Kreisleriana of 1814 E. T. A. Hoffmann denounced talking during performances. Johnson finds evidence of pressures in the same direction in France during the Restoration and the July Monarchy. Advocates of silence saw themselves as part-teachers, part-police, disciplining others on behalf of an order whose benefits the latter did not yet understand, and sometimes castigating them as “philistines,” a term to which the adjective “bourgeois” was not uncommonly attached. John Ella, the founder (in 1845) of a “Musical Union” in London devoted to serious instrumental works, was described as “enforcing silence with an iron rod” at its concerts, a sign that mere encouragement was not enough. There is considerable evidence that the spread and eventual triumph of silent listening had much to do with the growing professionalization of orchestras after 1850, and that conductors were powerful voices on behalf of it, sometimes publicly chastising audience members who were insufficiently respectful. This was clearly the case in the United States, and in the northern English industrial cities whose musical life was noted earlier. There an important impetus toward listening in silence came from conductors and concert organizers such as Hallé. But soon there were reports of audience members themselves directing harsh disapproval toward those who disrupted listening or left concerts early, and Simon Gunn concludes that “by the 1860s it is clear that audiences were policing themselves.”41
Why did they come to do so? Johnson suggests that for some bourgeois audience members, to impose silence on others was a way of confirming their own sense of position or identity by enforcing manners against “those who didn’t measure up,” while the ones who were ready to sit silently and take their cues from more confident neighbors may have been moved by fear of making a faux pas (a point argued by Richard Sennett). But Johnson also recognizes the spirit of a particularly bourgeois species of equality at work here, in contrast to the hierarchical social relations on display earlier: “Politeness was no respecter of persons; it was anonymous and rule-bound where mid eighteenth-century theater behavior had involved personality and imitation.”42 Silence was a regime that had to be enforced by the audience itself on itself as a collective body of listeners, putting it in the position of the Rousseauian assemblage of citizens, at once the sovereign source of law and the body of individuals subject to it (Rousseau too understood that in practice such a regime did not do away with all disparities in power or influence between the members). By putting an end to the situation in which behavior inside the hall was expected to dramatize the relations of social hierarchy and deference that reigned outside it, the practice of silent listening created an autonomous musical space freed of domination by extra-aesthetic powers or principles, much like the one public museums opened up for experiencing visual art or that Diderot saw in reading. Music itself provided the sole recognized object of listeners’ attention, encouraging them to regard the pieces as “works,” products of the creative power Kant associated with genius.
What audience members actually listened for or heard depended of course on who they were and what performers or pieces they confronted. As today, many were more drawn by virtuosity or display than by inner qualities of the music; performers such as Liszt and Paganini became objects of a cult of sheer skill. A second object of interest to many listeners was a narrative quality evident in much music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the form of many pieces told a kind of story, common to both religious and secular contexts. There was a political aspect to musical narrative throughout the century, especially in operas such as Rossini’s William Tell (whose famous overture was often played alone), Halévy’s La Juive (The Jewess), Meyerbeer’s The Huguenots, and Verdi’s Sicilian Vespers. Henry Raynor thinks that in 1830s France such works presented their material “from the point of view of the new middle class and its monarchy,” but we need to remember that the July regime was riven with conflict, and that works lying somewhere between the two parties of “movement” and “resistance” (both largely bourgeois) might have the widest appeal (an expectation that inspired Girardin’s self-consciously neutral political stance in La Presse).
Whether listeners thought the music took a side in politics or not, the relevance of some symphonic and operatic subjects was another reason for giving concentrated attention to it. That even politically resonant compositions could refer to broader social and personal experiences has been deftly recognized by Edward Rothstein:
An orchestral work is often constructed as a narrative; roughly it tells an abstract story with themes as characters subject to elaborate novelistic adventures. And the stories are precisely those that resonated most strongly with the middle-class listeners who filled nineteenth-century concert halls. Using the tonal musical language, melodies, harmonies and textures were shaped into highly charged tales of solitary desire and communal enterprise, primal encounters and heroic efforts. These compositions are public accounts of a new form of social life coming into being, made palpable in the virtuosic labors of the orchestral ensemble … [They] were effectively autobiographies of a public, mythic accounts of its origins and concerns.
Simon Gunn notes that in northern English writing about music “choral and symphonic works were conventionally represented as a narrative leading from uncertainty to struggle and ultimate triumph. Thus at Manchester in 1876, Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata was reported to depict a movement from ‘gloom’ and ‘grief’ to glory and the ‘impetuous outflow of feeling’, while the great oratorios [of Handel, Bach, or Mendelssohn] involved a biblical transition from trial to redemption.” This language suggests that for some listeners, perhaps especially where, as in England, religious motifs served as inspiration or justification for secular achievement, musical narratives helped to effect the transition. More broadly, people who listened in this way imagined composers as story-tellers, to whose work one of Marx’s favorite classical tags was appropriate: de te fabula narratur, “the tale is about you.”43
For the most devoted and serious listeners, however, these aspects of music tended to be absorbed by the qualities of inner coherence and structure that were the signs of genius. What these individuals aimed to do was, as Dahlhaus puts it, “silently [to] retrace the act of composition in their minds,” thus becoming aware at once of the mental processes by which the composer achieved unity in a composition and of their own parallel attempts to partake of them. “Structural hearing meant immersing oneself in the internal workings of a piece of music as though nothing else in the world existed.” Perhaps the best description of this way of listening came from Wackenröder, who in music as in visual art saw the realm of culture as a kind of secular temple:
When Joseph was at a grand concert he seated himself in a corner, without so much as glancing at the brilliant assemb
ly of listeners, and listened with precisely the same reverence as if he were in church – just as still and motionless, his eyes cast down to the floor. Not the slightest sound escaped his notice, and his keen attention left him in the end quite limp and exhausted.
Such an image of how music ought to be experienced also had implications for the changing attitude toward how works were to be performed. The practice still common at the beginning of the nineteenth century that interspersed movements of one symphony or oratorio with parts of others, alternating vocal and instrumental pieces, fit very well with the attitude that made music an accompaniment to socializing or conversation. But it made following a single work from beginning to end impossible, and the expectation that hearing a work required such continuity was a powerful spur to presenting compositions whole. As Karl Philipp Moritz wrote as early as 1780, “the autonomous work is a self-sufficient entity,” it had to exist in independence from others.44
As the case of Wackenröder’s Joseph makes clear, however, such an experience of music was far from being merely intellectual. Few who spoke of music from late in the eighteenth century failed to emphasize its deeply emotional character. Often this connection of music to feeling retained the religious overtones it possessed in the time of Bach and earlier, but increasingly the kind of affect involved was secular and more frankly sensual, while what raised it to a higher level was its connection not to spirituality but to intellect. E. T. A. Hoffman wrote about Beethoven that his music “discloses to humanity an unknown domain, a world that has nothing in common with the outer world of the senses that surrounds it,” but George Sand told Liszt that the same composer “gives birth to feelings and ideas … makes you enter once again into the most intimate depths of the self; everything you have felt, experienced, your loves, your suffering, your dreams, all are revived by the breath of his genius and throw you into an infinite reverie.” That intellectual and sensual experiences could be opposed was obvious then as now; just for this reason great value was attached to the ability of art in general and especially music to combine them. This was what Kant saw the genius as doing in making his personal, materially embodied way of being the source of rules that could impose a coherent shape on the products of imagination. Contemporary aesthetic theory gave a more general formulation to these notions, as Peter Gay notes: “To the romantics, aesthetic subjectivity consisted of two closely allied but distinct mental operations: the musical – or painterly or poetic – idea welling up from the unconscious, and the schooled introspection that allows the creator to criticize, revise, and refine his creation.”45
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