The Public Concert
Tickets, rented halls and subscriptions turn music from court service into a market.
Related
Time and place
London, 1672: the violinist John Banister held a ticketed concert at his home in Whitefriars, admission one shilling. In the eighteenth century the Paris Concert Spirituel, the Leipzig Gewandhaus and Vienna's public academies spread the model.
What happened
Before this, music mostly happened in church, court or a salon, and the audience came by invitation. Banister's experiment opened the door: strangers bought tickets, and players lived on the takings. As the middle class grew, halls grew larger, and subscription series, programmes and star soloists appeared. Mozart ran ticket-selling academies in Vienna; Haydn wrote symphonies for Salomon's London concerts.
What changed
Composers and performers could face a market directly, instead of relying only on a court post or a church salary. Public taste began to choose the repertory; symphony, concerto and oratorio became the staples of the hall, and length, volume and endings had to consider strangers in the seats. Criticism, agents and box office grew along the same line.
Listen to the turn
Handel's Hallelujah was written for a Dublin charity concert, sacred music turning into a public event in a ticketed room. Mozart's Symphony No. 39 was aimed at a ticket-buying Viennese public in 1788. Haydn's Symphony No. 100 was premiered at Salomon's London concerts, its drums and triangle turning court instruments into public sound.
Related
This turn spans Baroque and Classical; see Oratorio and Symphony.
Listen in the library
All tracks from midicn-lib — inline badge is the license tier (C1 commercial / C2 non-commercial / C3 study only).
Sources
- Weber, The Great Transformation of Musical Taste（Cambridge, 2008），用于核对公共音乐会与曲目变迁
- Grove Music Online 的 Concert 与 London 条目，用于交叉核对班尼斯特、所罗门音乐会
Used for fact-checking only; all prose is original.