The etchings of noble women working as non-professional artists outside the commercial spaces of the print trade have long been under-appreciated and even dismissed for their amateur status. During their lifetime, etchings by Isabella Byron, Lady Carlisle; Lady Louisa Augusta Greville; and Miss Amabel Yorke, later Lady Polworth and her younger cousin Miss Caroline York were valued and preserved in the private spaces of albums compiled by the prominent collectors Horace Walpole and Richard Bull. With this reassessment, the legacy of their work, its cultural and social currency, and its reception among contemporaries can be reinserted as a vital component in the broader story of women printmakers.

This chapter offers a reassessment of the life and work of the French professional printmaker Catherine Elisabeth Cousinet (born 1726), also known as Madame Lempereur through her marriage to fellow printmaker Louis Simon Lempereur. Over the course of three decades, Elisabeth Cousinet created a range of impressive, single-sheet engravings after landscape and genre paintings owned by important and well-appointed individuals in Paris, Europe’s cosmopolitan cultural center. Her connections to these collectors integrated her into networks in the French printmaking industry and, by extension, abroad. Despite the dearth of historical evidence, her biography provides a broad outline of, and a few tantalizing glimpses into, what the career of a successful women professional printmaker in eighteenth-century France might have looked like.

This chapter explores the people at the centre of the vogue for opera arrangements in Vienna around 1800, the amateurs who bought, organised, and performed operas in their homes. It considers the profiles of Viennese amateurs, including class and gender, and the meaning of ‘amateur’ (Liebhaber, or ‘dilettante’) in Viennese music-making around this time. It first considers how we trace the musical amateurs in question. Sources regarding private-sphere activities, including published accounts of amateur musicians and music, are considered in this chapter. One-off published lists, which group amateurs or ‘dilettantes’ active in Vienna with their instruments and voices, and reviews of arrangements destined for amateurs, help understand the Viennese amateur in terms of skill level and gender. These accounts have to be read with care, though, as they tend to emphasise the excellence of the Viennese; and they were compiled from sources such as word of mouth, personal knowledge, and newspaper advertisements – certainly not random sampling of the population of musical Vienna. The music itself is analysed in several ways for what it says about amateurs’ identities and skills.

As popular print ephemera, comics hold a complex and precarious relationship to preservation and duration, which has marked their status as “archivable” (or “non-archivable”) materials. This chapter sketches some of the different ways that institutions, producers, and audiences have coped with this fragility and have defined practices of preservation and collection. The chapter subsequently analyzes comics in libraries and archives, collecting practices by readers and fans, uses of archives in comics production. At each step, it pays particular attention to the importance of materiality, senses, formats, manipulation in the preservation of comics, connecting them to matters of copyright, library policies, and commercial interests. The importance of these parameters is set out against changing notions of archives and archival practice, especially under the impulse of their digital transformation. The broader picture considers the importance of medium specificity in an age of online archival plenitude.

Incentives to attend parliament should have been common to both the French and the English nobility . Yet only the English nobility ended up being regularly involved in parliamentary proceedings. Their presence was fundamental for functional fusion and institutional layering to occur. Only where the nobility was compelled to attend parliament, especially in connection to its judicial functions, did the crown have a regular forum to raise taxation. Justice provided the regularity that taxation did not, allowing the institution to consolidate. Conversely, when the most powerful groups were regularly present in a central institution, they were able to solve their collective action problem and cooperate to oppose the crown. The chapter thus shows that the capacity of the English crown to compel nobles for judicial and political service was greater than that of France. The point is further established through the literature on Legal Origins, which explains the divergence of Common from Civil Law, as well as by an assessment of the remarkable level of conscription of English subjects to perform judicial functions that were disbursed by paid officials in France.

The fifth chapter examines Forster’s ironic representations of musical scholarship in its institutional form, analysing his negative portrayals of two rarely discussed women characters, Vashti in ‘The Machine Stops’ and Dorothea in Arctic Summer, as his championing of musical amateurism and his criticism of the professionalization of musicology. The chapter analyses Forster’s satirizing of early twentieth-century academia’s antiquarian interest in folk revival. What problematizes his satire, the chapter argues, is Forster’s conception of gender: on the one hand, Forster exposes that professionalism is often constructed by gendered discourses that depend on the conventionalism mind–body dualism of patriarchal culture; but on the other, he casts professional women in roles against which his narratives rebel. Asking whether the portrayals of the two women hide his misogyny, the chapter explores how Forster’s advocacy of musical amateurism is at the same time an attempt to negotiate women’s place in his often homoerotically charged envisioning of companionship.

This chapter by Marian Wilson Kimber explores the relation between music, dance and poetry in late nineteenth-century amateur dance performances in the United States, specifically Delsarte. With reference to little-known archival sources (musical scores, photographs, programme leaflets and educational guides), Wilson Kimber examines how elocutionists combined their recitation with posing in imitation of ancient Greek statuary. These performances grew from the expressive physical fitness movement named after the nineteenth-century French musician and teacher Delsarte. The practice is itself rooted in elocution, recitation or public speaking that was a common form of entertainment on programmes with chamber music throughout the United States. To the accompaniment of hymns, women recited and posed to entertain one another, but also with the goal of self-improvement. Describing these practices, Wilson Kimber articulates a historical case of what we might call choreographic legitimization, considering ways in which dancers sought to elevate the seemingly suspect status of their art with reference to ancient Classical values and sacred music.

Edinburgh was the first Scottish city where amateur music-making actually formed a major part of a city’s musical life and developed an institutionalized profile. Over the course of the eighteenth century the Edinburgh Musical Society (EMS) eventually created more demand than their members could provide, which led to a growing involvement of professional musicians. In this chapter it will be shown, how the growing professionalization of the concert life was accompanied by an increasing number of benefit events. Like in other regions of the UK, the beneficiaries of these events were mainly the performing musicians themselves. Nevertheless, they did not just follow other British examples as outlined in the other chapters. Through newspaper advertisements, the minutes of the EMS, and other surviving sources, it is possible to closely investigate various benefit concerts in Edinburgh and to distinguish between the different types that were organized either mainly for charitable purposes or that were meant to contribute to the performers’ income. Furthermore, the sources help to reconstruct the background of these events in regard to their venue, their inner structure, and their repertory.

Throughout his lifetime, Brahms accompanied dozens of singers in a variety of settings, ranging from huge public halls to his friends’ homes, and conducted many others in choirs. Some of those working relationships were one-offs, arising from the widespread practice of including a set of piano-accompanied songs within most concerts and the expediency and cost-effectiveness of using local talent. Others were deep, enduring partnerships; the timbres and interpretative approaches of those singers are surely ingrained in his vocal music. Overall, Brahms’s singers were generally not part of the international operatic elite associated with Verdi, Bizet and Massenet. Figures like Julius Stockhausen (1826–1906) and Raimund von Zur-Mühlen (1854–1931)were almost exclusively concert singers and, later on, teachers. Most hailed from German-speaking territories, reflecting Brahms’s own concert career.

During his lifetime, Brahms accumulated a sizeable fortune. Although the early days were not without difficulties, his finances then accumulated steadily and virtually uninterruptedly. When he died in 1897, he left behind not only manuscripts of his own works, but also an extensive collection of other composers’ autograph manuscripts (including of Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, etc.) as well as bonds worth over 181,000 Gulden.The size of the sum is evident when one compares the rent that he paid his landlady Coelestine Truxa between 1887 and 1897 for his three-room apartment in Vienna’s Karlsgasse, which amounted half-yearly to 347 Gulden and 25 Kreuzer.

Brahms grew up in the Hamburg‘Gängeviertel’, an area of workers, small-scale artisans and tradesmen in modest circumstances [see Ch. 1 ‘Childhood in Hamburg’]. Later on, when he could determine his own lifestyle, luxury still held no appeal.

Throughout his lifetime, Brahms accompanied dozens of singers in a variety of settings, ranging from huge public halls to his friends’ homes, and conducted many others in choirs. Some of those working relationships were one-offs, arising from the widespread practice of including a set of piano-accompanied songs within most concerts and the expediency and cost-effectiveness of using local talent. Others were deep, enduring partnerships; the timbres and interpretative approaches of those singers are surely ingrained in his vocal music. Overall, Brahms’s singers were generally not part of the international operatic elite associated with Verdi, Bizet and Massenet. Figures like Julius Stockhausen (1826–1906) and Raimund von Zur-Mühlen (1854–1931)were almost exclusively concert singers and, later on, teachers. Most hailed from German-speaking territories, reflecting Brahms’s own concert career.

It is difficult to overestimate the importance of private musical activity as a testing ground, a compositional setting and, indeed, as a pleasurable activity for Brahms. ‘Private music-making’ deserves a word of explanation first, since private spaces were not always in the home, performers were not always amateurs and repertoire was not strictly divided according to public or private consumption. While Brahms was clearly often concerned to write music suitable for amateur performers, such repertoire was not automatically excluded from the concert platform as a result. Indeed, since the public lied recital was an innovation during his lifetime, some of the pieces which had previously found readier advocates in the domestic space were pushed further into the limelight thanks to pioneering programmers such as Gustav Walter and Amalie Joachim [see Ch. 19 ‘Singers’].

Three days before Brahms was born on 7 May 1833 in Hamburg, the first weekly illustrated magazine, the Pfennig-Magazin was published. Following on from the success of the Penny Magazine, which had appeared in England since 1832, the Pfennig-Magazin also aimed to reach a broad public. A few months later, the Hamburg music publisher Julius Schubert announced a new music periodical, a Pfennig-Magazin für Pianofortespieler, which offered ‘selected piano compositions for beginners, experienced players and virtuosos’.

Brahms was born at a time in which the market for printed matter, and especially music, was burgeoning as a result of newer, cheaper printing methods and the growing demand from music-making (especially piano-playing) amateurs [see Ch. 14 ‘Private Music-Making’]. Arrangements were very profitable, but since resulting copyright issues were still unresolved, this led to many copyright disputes between publishers from the 1830s onwards [see Ch. 11 ‘As Arranger’].