Schubert acquired the art of improvisation from Salieri, who had trained him in the old school of a kapellmeister, a proficient keyboard improviser able to compose, in a short space of time, a mass, symphony or opera, and furnish publishers with songs, chamber music and piano repertoire. Schubert’s friends dismissed his teacher’s theoretically grounded practice of keyboard improvisation as old-fashioned, unknowingly realising that numerous treatises were lamenting its disappearance from musical pedagogy.The skills Schubert acquired were finely honed in Viennese salons. Whereas pianists of the mid nineteenth century played for a vastly expanded concert audience with a lower level of musical education, Schubert’s improvisations – unlike Liszt’s or Hummel’s – were exclusively in private, elite company, where he was immediately understood. Sonnleithner recalls Schubert’s multilevelled improvisations, where he played light waltzes for friends to dance to while others gathered around listening, as he satisfied simultaneously popular and learned tastes. Louis Schlösser remembers Schubert improvising fantasies on Hungarian tunes, which shows the pleasing, popular side of Schubert’s improvisations. One of the most distinctive elements resulting from Schubert’s ‘improvisatory’ compositional technique is his use of harmony at local and structural levels, and novel use of form whose roots are in his improvisor’s fingers.

This study takes a novel approach, privileging opera arrangements over original operatic compositions, and the perspectives of amateur performers over those of composers. Several studies of opera arrangements from the era in question have already been published, which focus on particular composers or particular arrangement forms; and the emphasis lies on arrangements’ function as reception documents. This study differs in considering arrangements’ multiple functions, and ‘end users.

Translation plays a significant role in Chapter Ten, which maps out women writers’ contributions to a transnational European culture, focussing on British and French fiction. Although not exclusive to the Romantic period, connections between literary women were particularly productive. If Staël served as an important model, other influential women whose lives and works complicate notions of a distinct national literature also contributed to an international Romantic culture, including Brun, Genlis, Charrière, and Krudener. Popular genres that engaged with the foreign in the 1790s included émigré novels and travel writing. Women also participated in the public sphere through the unfairly trivialised salon culture. After reviewing a number of salons, including those of Albrizzi, von Kurland, Varnhagen, Moira, and the Hollands, the chapter then explores female contributions to education theory, including Madame de Genlis’s British legacy; women’s place in the novel market, contextualising Austen by placing her side by side with two little known novelists, Mary Charlton and Elizabeth Meeke; female translations as important forms of cultural mediation, particularly those of Isabel de Montolieu; and, finally, female-edited or -authored periodicals, concluding with Sarah Harriet Burney and her possible translation of Feijoo’s defence of women.

Critics, commentators and historians have seized upon the ridiculous, comedic elements of Molière’s portrayals of salon culture and allowed the satire to upstage reality. Molière has been understood as belittling women’s attempts to influence expression in order to distance further salon culture from mainstream literary culture. However, considered in his seventeenth-century context, the playwright is not satirising women’s control of language or desire to critique literature in order to censure salon culture; rather Molière revels in exploring this complex cultural landscape that was as integral to the seventeenth century as the Sun King’s powerful rays. Molière’s contemporaries would not have interpreted the dramatist as censoring women’s agency. Posterity has tended to distance Molière from this worldly culture, recreating him as the all-knowing satirist who attempts to bring his contemporaries to their senses and excise worldly culture from the Grand Siècle. But Molière is not Alceste – he does not reject sociability, salon culture and galanterie. To conceive of salon culture and the values and practices associated with it – conversation, galanterie, sociabilité – as limited to a rarefied and marginalised space and practised only by an elite group is to misunderstand Molière’s context as well as the playwright’s intentions and his comedy.

In the German-speaking territories of eighteenth-century Europe, Musenhof courts were sites where rulers surrounded themselves with artists and intellectuals, writers and musicians. They were a conspicuous feature of geopolitical environments where smaller courts and principalities were being fashioned into the larger cultural units of the Holy Roman Empire and Brandenburg-Prussia (later the Kingdom of Prussia). Though aristocratic in inception and genesis, Musenhof courts functioned as bridges and brokers for diverse artistic, social, and literary networks across the German-speaking world. They provided a permeable environment where overlapping social networks straddled the court and the public sphere.

This chapter juxtaposes three contrasting Musenhof courts in order to highlight their contribution as sites for cultural brokering in their regions. It considers three different models of the Musenhof, located in Weimar, Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach; Königsberg, East Prussia; and the Duchy of Kurland, hosted by Anna Amalia (1739–1807), Charlotte Caroline Amalia von Keyserling(k) (1727–1791), and Dorothea von Kurland (1761–1821). Through comparison, it charts a paradigm shift in the history of the Musenhof from aristocratic spaces of (cosmopolitan) sociability and patronage to exempla for socio-political and economic reforms.

Marie d’Agoult was famous in her own time as the lover of Franz Liszt and the mother of his children, one of whom, Cosima, married Richard Wagner. After her separation from Liszt, she made a career for herself as a femme de lettres and wrote a three-volume History of 1848 which was greatly admired by contemporaries including Flaubert who used it as a key source in the writing of Sentimental Education. Carefully researched, elegantly structured, and impressive for its nuanced judgments, her History communicates brilliantly the perspective of the democratic republicans who led the revolution at the outset. These were people who had devoted themselves for twenty years to the emancipation of the “proletariat” but found themselves supporting the crushing of the June insurrection on the ground that, however justified it may have been, it was an attack on the republic. After December 2 d’Agoult’s salon became for a decade a meeting place for liberals opposed to Napoleon III. Finally, she was willing to settle for a conservative republic, not unlike that imagined by Lamartine and briefly led by Cavaignac.

Brahms was among the many avid consumers of the print culture which burgeoned unprecedentedly during his century. The mid-eighteenth century onwards saw a surge in German-language publishing, following the gradual supplanting of Latin as a scholarly language and Johann Gottfried von Herder’s advocacy of popular literature as the highest expression of the national spirit. During the long nineteenth century, a vast amount of printed matter was devoured by an eager public. Apart from journalism, there were huge numbers of magazines that serialised popular fiction, science, geography, history and suchlike, as well as handsome bound collected editions of classical authors such as Goethe, Schiller and Shakespeare in translation, aimed at aspirational middle-class households. Literature was crucial to the wider nation-building agenda to unite the various disparate German-speaking territories and principalities under the umbrella of language. It was inseparable from shifts in religion, philosophy and science, and was shaped and re-shaped by successive waves of political censorship.

We begin our consideration of Brahms’s politics and religion with the great historical turn that occurred in the centre of Europe in the year 1870. With the decisive German military defeat of France and proclamation of King Wilhelm I of Prussia as German Emperor, the German Question was at last given its definitive Prussian-dominated Smaller German solution. Brahms probably would have preferred a Larger German solution that included Austria, Prussia’s traditional rival for leadership in the loosely bound German Confederation that was established by the Congress of Vienna following Napoleon’s final defeat in 1815. But what mattered most was that Germany had at last emerged from its political impotence to become a nation-state possessed of power and influence in the world commensurate with its long-recognised achievements in the cultural sphere.