Musical Patronage and Social Change in Beethoven's Vienna

This article attempts to account for the initial phase of the emergence of serious music ideology in late 18th-and early 19th-century Vienna by examining elite receptivity to the news ideology as it occurred against a backdrop of change in the organizational basis of music sponsorship. The decline of the private house ensembles (Hauskapellen) resulted in a social broadening of music patronage and thereby tended to erode the traditional institutional means for aristocratic authority in musical affairs. The exclusive function that the qualitatively different ideology of "serious" music could provide reaffirmed traditional cultural boundaries through ideological rather than institutional means and enabled Vienna's old aristocrats to emerge after 1800 as the city's "most brilliant" dilettantes.