Wagner’s relationship with Paris was a career-long struggle with a highly developed music industry that aligned badly with his aesthetic priorities. On repeat visits for what we would now call career networking, he rented in marginal areas of Paris, tried to get on the publishing and performance ladder, courted imperial favour, conducted concerts of his own works, and finally succeeded, briefly, in getting an opera staged at the Paris Opéra (the ill-fated Tannhäuser in 1861). Thereafter, Wagner cults – always contested – began in the concert hall, where anything from riots to hushed listening greeted programmed excerpts of his works. Cultishness intensified after his death – in the press, in artistic and high-bourgeois salons, and finally at the Opéra. This chapter explores the spaces, networks, and contexts within which Wagner attempted to carve out a Paris career which allowed the full concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk to blossom only posthumously.

The final chapter summarizes the significance of the findings presented in the book and indicates future directions of research. Far from being an obscure aspect of the Neapolitan musical milieu, instrumental music formed a vital element in the artistic culture of the capital. It was used as a tool to display power in the rapid shifting of regimes occurred at the turn of the eighteenth century, and became the expression of the social and professional opportunities open to musicians. The circulation of music and musicians attested the fertile exchanges with other European centers and put Neapolitan music culture along the main political and economic routes. The cultivation of instrumental music in Naples was not interrupted with the creation of an independent kingdom in 1734. If King Charles of Bourbon gave to the opera a new venue with the construction of the San Carlo theater, instrumental music was still performed in the private salons of the aristocracy. The importance of these findings lies in their contribution in delineating neglected paths of research, pointing at common mechanisms of formation, practice, and patronage of instrumental music. Yet aspects such as concert life and venues, and the development of the concerto in Naples with its specific mechanisms of promotion, remain largely unexplored areas.

Viennese courtly Kapellen were in decline by the time Beethoven began his career as a symphonist, with the result that one of the most important contexts for eighteenth-century symphonies was no longer available to the young generation of composers. This decline, along with various other developments in Viennese musical life during Beethoven’s lifetime, led to a reconfiguration of the symphony’s role. Public, rather than private concerts became the main platform for symphonic performance in Vienna and abroad by 1800. The organisation of Vienna’s concert life meant that symphonies were increasingly conceived as grand, individualistic works, rather than routine household entertainment music. Furthermore, select members of the Viennese aristocracy, including some of Beethoven’s supporters, continued to cultivate symphonies, with the result that Beethoven was better placed than some of his contemporaries for securing the performance and subsequent publication of symphonies. This chapter contextualises Beethoven’s first three symphonies within the broader culture of symphonic composition and performance at the turn of the nineteenth century.