This chapter provides an introduction to how Vaughan Williams’s music was received in interwar continental Europe, particularly within music magazines and scholarly periodicals. It is in two sections. The first considers the different contexts in which it was heard: choral performances of the Mass and folk-song arrangements, pieces played at International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) festivals, and performances of large-scale works in ‘seasonal’ orchestral concerts and recitals. For the most part, Vaughan Williams’s music was well received, even at ISCM festivals, where he might have been overshadowed by more radical figures; and the increased number of European performances that he received during the period reflected a growing interest among leading continental performers. The chapter then examines some of the writing on Vaughan Williams by continental critics, primarily those from France and Germany. These reveal two contrasting but not necessarily mutually exclusive narratives: one in which Vaughan Williams is presented as the leader of a new English school of composition that is underpinned by the language of English folk song, and another in which Vaughan Williams is considered in a pan-European context, where the influence of French impressionism is more keenly felt. A table of selected performances is also included.

This chapter examines how a variety of twentieth-century popular forms – circus, Las Vegas spectacles, the modern pop/rock concert, living history museums, and theme parks – created new languages of performance and expanded the realm, scale, and scope of spectacle by borrowing and reshaping past forms and methodologies. These new languages of popular entertainment performance engage most directly with threads of technology, narrative, authenticity, and audience engagement. These threads in turn come to characterize the popular and influence contemporary traditional theatre practice, both nationally and internationally.

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.

Subscription series were a relatively late development in North-east England (in the late 1720s and early 1730s) and the first known concerts in the region were almost all benefits given by visitors to the area. This paper looks at the different types of benefits in the North-east during the eighteenth century, the similarities and differences between benefits in the region and elsewhere in England, and the advantages and disadvantages of holding such concerts.

The known benefit concerts in which Mozart was involved will be the main focus of this chapter. In such settings, the focus was on the extraordinary gifts of the young composer–performer, as is plain from prior advertisements in the London press. These concerts will be contextualized in various ways, including private concerts for the Royal family and aristocrats; ‘society’ concerts (principally those of Mrs Cornelys); the Bach–Abel concerts; ‘exhibition’ concerts at which Mozart’s precocious talent was displayed; close analysis of the press advertisements through the lenses of ethics and anthropology; a necessarily speculative discussion of the new compositions (including symphonies) that Mozart may have performed at the benefit concerts; concert representation as a barometer of Mozart’s developing compositional style, including an examination of the sonatas K10–15 in the light of domestic music making; and especially the ‘London Notebook”, K15a–ss, a remarkable testament of his development at the age of eight or nine.

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.

While there is an extensive body of literature on the German reception of Brahms up to World War I, until recently, few scholars have shown an interest in the ways in which National Socialists dealt with this composer. In German publications, there seems to be little acknowledgement of the possible complexities in Brahms reception caused by political influences; most post-war German literature on the composer has simply skirted the issue. Some writers have even suggested that Brahms was not much used for political purposes by the Nazis. Such suggestions are typically supported through direct comparisons with the long-acknowledged appropriations of other composers, notably Wagner.

Indeed, statistics such as those of the Berlin Philharmonic show no change in the frequency of performances of Brahms’s works during Hitler’s rule, even despite the straitened circumstances towards the end of the war. It seems that with concert-goers the composer’s popularity was never in question.

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 the long nineteenth century, the design of most musical instruments changed considerably. While the late nineteenth-century orchestra may be familiar in terms of size, configuration and instrumental design, musicians of Mozart and Haydn’s era would be forgiven for not immediately recognising the descendants of the instruments that they themselves played. The industrial revolution generated new technologies and ways of manufacturing which impacted upon the musical world. Woodwind instruments gained more keys, brass instruments acquired new valve technology, strings would eventually transition from gut to metal strings, and metal-framed pianos allowed for more stable instruments with a larger pitch and dynamic range. Within individual histories of these instruments, it is difficult to pinpoint when changes were accepted and adopted. Communities (e.g. soloists, orchestral musicians, amateurs) and countries varied enormously.

The reception of Brahms’s music beyond his home city of Hamburg began in 1853, when the young composer made his first extended journey and presented his compositions to some of the leading figures of German contemporary music: Robert Schumann, Robert Franz and Franz Liszt. Each reacted to these unpublished works in distinctive ways.

Robert Schumann, with whom Brahms spent the whole month of October in Düsseldorf,was instantly enthralled.

Typically for many musicians of his day, Brahms was artistically active in multiple ways, not only as a composer but also as a performer, mainly as a pianist and conductor, piano teacher and director of musical societies. He never perceived himself as primarily a pianist; however, playing the piano – in private and public – was inseparable from his artistic and compositional identity. Schumann remarked on this as early as 9 November 1853 in a letter to the Leipzig publishers Breitkopf & Härtel, to whom he had recommended the young man: ‘his playing is truly a part of his music; I cannot recall hearing such unique sound effects’. Brahms received his initial piano training in Hamburg from Otto Friedrich Willibald Cossel and then from Cossel’s teacher Eduard Marxsen, who had trained in Vienna and who also advised Brahms in composition (Brahms never attended a conservatory) [see Ch. 1 ‘Childhood in Hamburg’].

The earliest evidence of Brahms’s activity as a conductor comes from 1847, when as a fourteen-year-old he led a chorus of school children in the small town of Winsen near his native Hamburg. His last reported appearance on a podium was with the Berlin Philharmonic in January 1896, aged sixty-two. Over a span of almost fifty years between these two moments, Brahms conducted a wide range of amateur and professional ensembles in many different locations across the Austrian Empire, Germany and Switzerland.

Brahms’s activities on the podium coincide with the steady rise of the professional conductor during the nineteenth century, embodied in the Austro-German sphere at first by Weber, Mendelssohn, Wagner, Spohr and Spontini, and later by Richard Strauss, Mahler, Richter and Bülow.

Although Brahms was a fine pianist and the composer of major repertory for the instrument, he is not normally regarded as having established a ‘school’ of performance as such; certainly not like his pianist-composer contemporaries Liszt and Anton Rubinstein whose numerous students promoted their teaching through technical features of performance. Although Brahms wrote an extensive set of exercises – the 51 Exercises WoO 6 (published in 1893, but apparently dating from the 1850s and 1860s) – which clearly address the technical requirements of his own works, he often showed little interest in public performance and did not especially promote his piano works apart from the concertos (at least on the inconsistent evidence of documented first performances). By comparison, he premiered virtually all his piano chamber music: only one work, the First Piano Quartet Op. 25 was definitely not given by him [see Ch. 9 ‘As Pianist’].

The claim that the nineteenth century was the century of the bourgeoisie or middle class (Bürgertum) is undeniably a hot topic in research. This claim provokes questions not only about the wider definition of ‘bourgeoisie’ but also about the accuracy of this claim specifically for music history. Brahms rarely travelled outside German-speaking territories, apart from eight trips to Italy and concerts in the Netherlands. Within this region, the bourgeoisie did not consist of a single, homogenous group but could be described variously in social, political or behavioural terms, with overlaps between these. In terms of social class, the term primarily describes those who practised an established ‘craft’ in the broadest sense, as Brahms’s father did [see Ch. 1 ‘Childhood in Hamburg’]. In political terms, the middle class (Bürger) bore a degree of responsibility; however, even after the revolutions of 1848, their real power was still very restricted within a society which was still largely dominated by the aristocracy.