3 - Female Agency in the Early Nineteenth-Century Viennese Musical Salon

Summary

This chapter explores Viennese salons, where arrangements were performed in early nineteenth-century Vienna, and the purposes they fulfilled, such as fostering sociability and advancing social and aesthetic understanding. It examines how various types of opera arrangements extended the meaning and experience of public concert-going. They could allow domestic performers and listeners to engage with ideas about political freedom, class, and nationalism that were being raised in the Viennese salons more generally. Audiences for opera in Viennese salons could listen to works with revolutionary themes and potentially politically inflamatory plots that would not be tolerated in other art forms or more public venues. The chapter considers three prominent female ‘arrangers’ who were significant agents in rearranging the social order in early nineteenth-century Vienna: Fanny von Arnstein; Caroline Pichler; and Maria Theresia von Paradis. It discusses the musical and literary activities they organised, and the degree to which class and gender mixing persisted in their more or less private music-making, especially through the vehicle of musical arrangements.