Opera in the Viennese Home from Mozart to Rossini

That audiences consumed operas and operatic derivations in myriad forms across the nineteenth century—both inside and outside the opera house itself—is well studied in music-historical literature. Reductions and arrangements dominated print-music markets, celebrity singers drew mass audiences with signature selections, and professional and amateur performers alike programmed, paraphrased, and lampooned operas throughout the century. These manifestations of a thriving operatic public sphere offer opportunities to recognize opera histories as inseparable from quotidian histories of the everyday, and musicologists continue to explore the potential to better understand lived musical realities through the home work of the nineteenth century’s operatic cultures.In Opera in the Viennese Home from Mozart to Rossini, Nancy November revisits the opera arrangement specifically as a site of cultural labor and source of social mobility amid ongoing class reorganization and an emerging public concert life in Vienna around the turn of the nineteenth century. She (re)considers the social influence of amateur performers and their reliance on the ubiquity of opera arrangements in various forms to incite overt and covert acts of subversion within the often circumscribed lives of the Viennese middle class under monarchical rule. As “non-human vehicles of agency,” these arrangements served as powerful tools of sociality, and their serious study has the capacity to both “recentre the home in Viennese music history” and recognize the city’s private citizens “as key agents and influencers in musical life” within the public sphere (pp. 8–9). November draws on an impressive variety of sources beyond the arrangements themselves; catalogs, correspondence, memoirs, print criticism, pedagogical materials, literature, artwork, and instruments all play roles in reconstructing the performance contexts and webs of significance in which these arrangements supported amateur musicking as a meaningful sociable practice. The result is an effective, multimodal profile of domestic musical agency and its effect on public tastes.November’s treatment of opera arrangements in Vienna unfolds both chronologically and topically, revealing the rich blossoming of private and semipublic musicking among an upwardly mobile middle class and the depth of individual engagement with opera’s socializing potentials. Covering a period from Mozart’s 1781 arrival in Vienna to the years immediately following Rossini’s retirement in 1829, the chapters chart developing social contexts for performances of opera arrangements and elucidate the roles and identities of the key figures involved. Chapter 1 looks at the marketplace, using publisher catalogs to assess a local operatic economy at the turn of the nineteenth century, how composers operated within it, and the implications for understanding the “opera-centric culture” of a city known for its contributions to instrumental repertories (p. 21). What is revealed is the sheer diversity of opera arrangements that dominated the market at the time—from wind ensembles and string quartets to flute duos and piano variations—and the ways in which composers actively participated in the arrangement process within a highly varied gig economy. Chapter 2 places amateurs in shifting historical realities in Vienna, in which the domestic performance of opera arrangements mediated strictly enforced social boundaries while also affording agency through performance. As further outlined in chapter 3, for November, the salon specifically was a space for the social “rearrangement” of class and gender expectations, and it served as “a zone of transaction between public and private spaces, with musical arrangements as a currency in this transaction” (p. 74). Salons offered a safe space for social role play, middle-class aspiration and aristocratic emulation, personal growth (Bildung), and social mobility among a musically involved professional class.With the profiles of relevant musical-social actors in mind, November turns to the public fruits of their collective labors in Vienna—the so-called “consequences of domestic music-making” (p. 103). Chapter 4 explores the home as a private venue for negotiating elements of public life and chamber music’s role as a facilitator of middle-class agency at a time otherwise characterized by Metternichian conservatism. The crux of this inquiry is the intersection of class and canon formation, and November cites the ubiquity of opera arrangements performed in the home and their impact on musical professionalization and publication as instances of subversive taste making. Focusing on Rossini, chapter 5 makes a clear case for the value of understanding the effects of affordable, popular arrangements on the composer’s popularity and reception, catering as they did to a variety of performers and compounding the manifest repetitions of his tuneful selections, privately and publicly. “Rossini opera arrangements were helping to establish a market for musical works,” writes November, who charts a parallel emergence of professional performers from a semipublic salon culture steeped in opera arrangements (p. 173). All the while, domestic performances of Rossini’s works constituted “risqué” acts that “provided freedom through play in a time of repressive surveillance” (p. 179). Chapter 6 draws these threads together with the case of Carl Czerny to more closely examine the perceived boundaries between key dichotomies: arranger and composer, amateur and professional, private and public, high and low, vocal and instrumental. What November reveals is that the quality, quantity, and sheer variety of Czerny’s arrangements and paraphrases of well-known operas across audiences and performance contexts betray an image of a prolific arranger “actively engaging with operas as a composer and ‘re-reading’ them as a performer” (p. 208).As November makes plain, hers is not a study of opera history per se; rather, it is primarily an interrogation of the contexts, sources, and meanings of amateur musicking in a time of opera’s commercial dominance. In many ways, then, opera histories serve here as a backdrop for individual action. November’s strongest contributions come from her attention to the historical significance of musical amateurs––and particularly the importance of women’s agency––in the transmission of private musical sensibilities to public musical tastes. She centers women’s experiences throughout and makes a point to highlight moments when their work as social arrangers “set a powerful precedent . . . for musical women generally” (p. 102). Middle-class Viennese women thus emerge from the narrative as harbingers of public concert life, wielding opera arrangements with the potential to “disrupt the idea of Biedermeier domesticity” and making space for themselves as interpreters, organizers, and at times virtuosic performers, “from the home, through the salon, and onto the stage” (pp. 226, 230).For opera studies specifically, however, November promises “an ‘alternative’ history of opera to balance a history that to date has been centered on public performance, when it considers performance at all” (p. 9). While this is perhaps somewhat of an overstatement, the book nevertheless offers fresh perspectives on subjects pertinent to opera histories.1 Rather than solely treating these arrangements as material indications of opera’s popularity, November’s approach reminds us of opera’s inherent public and private variability, and it contributes to current understandings of the process of canon formation. In some ways, opera’s inherent variability makes it “difficult now to determine where any given operatic ‘work’ ends and the arrangement begins” (p. 38), and in other ways, this “mutability . . . is part and parcel of the ‘work’ of opera,” making it ideal for a “canon-forming practice” built on “social and communal processes” (p. 136). What is more, such an approach offers an opportunity to reconsider works largely absent from the current repertory. Arrangements of works by Gaspare Spontini, for example, were commonplace in catalogs, and the operas themselves were major draws in European opera houses. In November’s analysis, Spontini’s Fernand Cortez becomes a case study of opera’s proximity to contemporary events—from commercially successful arrangements following a local production in 1812 and continued thematic relevance amid Napoleonic invasions to renewed relevance for salon performances with the composer’s well-publicized appointment in Berlin.Ultimately, Opera in the Viennese Home from Mozart to Rossini provides a nuanced reading of the opera arrangement, its performers, and its social utility in Vienna, and it takes critical steps toward complicating perceived generic boundaries by bringing vocal and instrumental music into the same analytical field. While researchers of opera and musical life in the long nineteenth century will do well to consider November’s findings, elements of her work could also positively shape student learning if woven into music history curricula. One could imagine the use of arrangements as examples in a lesson on the operas of Mozart or Rossini, the pedagogical implementation of November’s subdivided model for understanding social and political changes of the era, or even the inclusion of Spontini on course listening lists. Perhaps the most effective classroom application of November’s work would be through performance.2 How could students benefit from performing these opera arrangements? What would the experience tell them about musical consumption and sociality in the nineteenth century? Just such an experiential approach to understanding performer agency may go a long way in their development as self-aware musicians, and it will almost certainly offer a glimpse into a once vibrant domestic social sphere for operatic engagement.