Social Influences on Music in Paris and the Shift to Romanticism

Brendon Grabowski

The Opera in Paris France, during the mid-eighteenth century was a hotbed for social

interaction and a display case for class status and social hierarchy. The opera in 1750 was least

of all a concert venue or attentive musical experience. Rather than being a theater for art and

music alone, the Paris Opera played a much larger role in civil society in France. Etiquette grew

out of the opera, and class relied heavily on how you carried yourself and behaved at the opera.

Several boxes were reserved and bought by Aristocratic patrons and nobility at the opera to

allow themselves to demonstrate their class in front of others. The closer your box was to the

stage, if not directly on the stage, the higher class you were. You were more visible due to the

seating arrangements and the lighting of the opera house to others, so that more people knew that

you were there, thus giving you a better chance to display your class and etiquette. In exploring

the nature of the opera in Paris France at this time, you can trace how aesthetics, social roles and

class structure and the shift from an unattentive audience to an attentive audience were all

influenced by the Opera.

The Academie Royale was the opera house in Paris, which is where the Aristocracy met

to attend the opera. The opera itself was of such little importance to the attendees, that it was

uncommon and improper to show up for a performance on time. Not only did the audience show

up late, and walk in amidst performance, but they would converse and discuss things such as

politics, war, religion and gossip in their individual opera boxes. The Academie Royale was a
place to “learn social graces,” as Johnson puts it, or “to polish manners and make society more

friendly.”

The behavior of women was scrutinized to an extraordinary degree upon walking into

the opera house. Men would gaze upon these women, looking for wives for their sons. As

Johnson states in “The Rendezvous of the Rich,” from “Listening in Paris,” women were

expected to be “coquettish and controlled,” and demonstrate only friendliness and control.

Otherwise, these women were “ridiculous and damned.”

Johnson also explains where the roots of this proper etiquette stem from, before

becoming common practice and ever further refined in the aristocracy. He states that this

behavior prevailed because of the Cardinal Richelieu’s “attempt in the seventeenth century to

ensure respectful behavior toward the monarch from an unruly and irreverent aristocracy.” The

etiquette was all kept in place to ensure that this respectful behavior was extended to all that

shared the “extension” of the crown, as a way of safely presenting one’s self because of the

incredible scrutiny and evaluation that was always being conducted by aristocrats, to other

aristocrats. It was readily known, that if you were to make the mistake of not showing proper

courtesy or etiquette in any given circumstance, you could lose status. Not only was it easy to

make a mistake, but there were many circumstances, all with very specific requirements for

etiquette, such as greeting another nobleman’s wife, that left you up for evaluation.

The third to last paragraph of the first chapter of Johnson’s book explains this

phenomenon perfectly: “ Like the balls, banquets, coronations and ceremonies of absolutism,

musical experience in the old regime served the ideological function of temporarily illuminating

the invisible power structure of the system.” The entirety of the Academie Royale was built
upon power, to reaffirm power, and to refine power. However, this power didn’t only affect the

social life and class structure of society, but it affected the way people thought, heard, and felt

about music. This power decided the proper aesthetics of the time, and arbitrated “good taste.”

The role that the aristocracy played was not only a social role, but an aesthetic one. The

people who decided what was good and bad weren’t deciding so because of any musical

expertise or anything of the like. The arbiter of good taste was simply someone with high social

standing. This power over aesthetics that the rich exercised affected not only those listening to

the opera, but the performers as well. Since the rich were in control, it was in the performer's

interest to maintain favor with the aristocrats, since they were the ones to decide what was good

or bad. It was also a wise choice to sit in a place that allowed you to see clearly the arbiters of

taste. Patrons of the Opera would wait to see the reaction of these arbiters to know what was

good and how to react.

As Johnson states, Jean-Jacques Rousseau “complained that in polite society the opinions

of favored groups rode roughshod over individual taste.” The Academie Royale made it so that

musical experience wasn’t such a private matter, but more about agreeing with the public’s

opinion, based upon the taste of the aristocrats. In Johnson’s second chapter of “Listening in

Paris,” it opens with a “dismissive assessment,” of the effects of music. Saint-Preux crudely

stated that music is not much more than mechanical and physical expressions that don’t truly

move one in the same way that an array of “pleasant colors.” This declaration led to an

understanding of music that had no expressive possibilities, and “excluded profound musical
experience.” For Opera at this time, the plot was a far more expressive and was where listeners

got sentiment and emotion rather than the music itself.

However, the seemingly limited expressive nature of music began to get

challenged. Rousseau claimed that he had felt emotional effects from listening to music. To

better describe how this was possible, he resolved this problem by referring to his “anthropology

of language. This anthropology of language “sketched the roots of human speech in passionate

utterances,” according to Johnson. He further explains how even before language, sounds were

the natural language- “a sigh of love or pity, a cry of pain, an ejaculation of anger.” And lastly,

Johnson explains how the job of musicians is to imitate these natural sounds of human and move

the listeners naturally, even if the listener doesn’t understand why. This line of thinking by the

enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau led to a new principle of aesthetics. Arguing

against what was the public’s understanding of good music, Rousseau gently nudged listeners to

allow themselves to be more individual in taste.

One listener composed a poem for the ​Journal de Paris, ​that expressed his inability to

understand how people can listen so critically this music. He is quoted in Johnson’s book as

saying “whether for or against Armide (an opera by Lully), write on...I’ll simply cry.” The

Academie Royale audiences began to adopt a new way of attending the opera. Rather than

talking and remaining emotionally static throughout the performance, patrons began to cry and

weep loudly during performance. A major facilitator in this shift to attentiveness was Rousseau

for being emotional himself and being humiliated for it twenty years earlier. When Gluck’s

operas came to the Academie Royale, the new means of expression that this composer used was

far more imitative in nature, and thus relatable to the audiences. A fairly long quote from
Johnson’s third chapter explains just how audiences were now being gripped by Gluck’s music,

and how attentive they were to the music.

“I took care to close myself up within my box. I listened to this new work with profound

attention...from the first measures I was seized by such a strong feeling of awe...without knowing

it I fell to my knees in my box and stayed in this position, suppliant and with my hands clasped,

until the end of the piece.”

It wasn’t only the expressive nature of Gluck’s music that lent itself to a more profound

musical experience. His appeal came from his librettists treatment of plots. These plots differed

in that they were more intense and direct, according to Johnson. The passion in Gluck’s work is

“deadly serious.” Although the audience did seem to cry o0n cue, Johnson points out that this

still made the experience more personal, “elevating the natural over the artificial, and validating

the truth of immediate feeling over the whims of opinion.” Ultimately, this shift in the

audience's attention and their sensitivity to how music made them feel individually is a dramatic

shift from how audiences reacted 30 years prior to Gluck and Rousseau. A pamphlet released

from the “War of Gluckist’s and Puccinists,” stated “why do you not judge for yourself sir...why

submit your own judgements and sensations to the opinion of several persons who very often

have neither the knowledge nor the sentiments of the truly beautiful in Art?”

The arrival of Gluck in France and his premiere of his opera ​Iphigenie en Aulide h​ ad

profound impacts on France and the way music was thought about entirely. Not only did Gluck

display music’s emotive, imitative and expressive capacity, but he paved the way for the public

to begin experiencing music on a personal level. The taste of the powerful had no longer held as

much sway, as people were themselves moved to tears by music, with no arbiter of taste to
affirm its validity. The shift from a special group’s aesthetic taste being the only viable taste, to

a personal one also signified, even if only symbolically, the weakening of the power structure

that Aristocrats used the Opera to illuminate in the first place. It’s not a coincidence that this

shift led to a social and political reconfiguration in France. Not even 30 years after Gluck

surprised and liberated the audiences of the opera, the king was beheaded and the political

uprisings began.

The revolution in France gave way to a new kind of class system. Napoleon had

appointed roughly 3200 new titles of nobility according to Johnson, in the thirteenth chapter of

his book, “Listening in Paris.” Not only were those 3200 people bestowed titles of nobility, but

over 7000 new titles collectively were granted in the first thirty years of the new century.

This new system of classification did not come from royal families or have any

aristocratic roots. The new class of people came from work, and not at all family lineage, thus

dissipating the caste system. The idea of this new nobility was to encourage “social advancement

through merit.” Napoleon is quoted as saying “My act is popular because it consecrates equality

from the very start: talent, courage, and wealth decide the rest.

The aristocrats of the o0ld regime were painfully aware of this change in social power, as

they weren’t allowed to use titles previously bestowed upon them from the Old Regime

anymore. To better display the complete shift from aristocracy to nobility at the turn of the

century in the Napoleonic regime, Johnson provides a statistic on the taxation of the most taxed

individuals. According to Johnson, of the 1967 most taxed individuals of the social elite, only

seventy-two of these people were aristocrats of the Old Regime.

 The people who succeeded in this new liberal regime stated that “anyone could,” which

became a mantra, as Johnson states. The most important point to note for the new class of

nobility is that they adopted a new attitude as an audience. This golden rule that Johnson points

out is that the rule of decency is “not to bother others.” Goujon wrote an important manual on

this subject, called the ​Manual for the Man of Refinement. J​ ohnson quotes the following from

this manual: “it is the highest breech in politeness, to hum with the music, beat the rhythm with

one’s head, hands, or feet, or otherwise distract attention from a concert.” “Nothing is more

unbearable for your neighbors, who have gone to the spectacle to watch the performance, not to

hear ridiculous criticism.”

Although this is a seemingly kind and gentle etiquette that most people would naturally

follow in today’s society, it has deeper social roots in the new class of nobility. As Johnson

states on several occasions, it was a kind of fear that kept audiences quiet. “Audiences reasoned

on some level that if politeness was necessary to succeed, its absence signaled inferiority. It

resembles a strikingly similar root in which the aristocracy held power. Rather than fearing for

your aristocratic position of power that was held together by the Old Regime’s manners, the new

regime used politeness as a tool to measure up someone’s social situation.

A quote from Johnson’s book displays the paradox inherent in the new mannerisms of

nobility. “Bourgeois politeness gave allegiance to an abstract ideal of decency. One author hit

just the right tone of pious impartiality to damn all who had left a concert early.” “We will

permit ourselves no reflection on this conduct, which did not seem to us entirely keeping with

the rules of decency.” Johnson further points out this paradox of the virtue of individualism that
was recently so in favor, and the “breed of conformity.” “Faced with a society of equals, the

individual feels slight and insignificant.”

The last mentioned quote has very large and severe social repercussions that explain this

paradox in the New Regimes “politeness,” in audiences. If the individual is equal to all the

others in society, then they are undoubtedly confident in the opinion of the public. And since the

public can judge equally, then it makes sense to conform and agree with what the public thinks

as a majority.

Johnson describes in the final two paragraphs of the thirteenth chapter of his book how

this politeness led to “directing musical responses inward, carving out for social reasons a private

sphere of feeling that in the earlier generations had been public.” This is what he describes as

the path towards romanticism. The public no longer was allowed to outwardly express their

feelings like they were in the Old Regime. Loudness, crying, excitement and expressing yourself

aloud was no longer tolerated or accepted as the correct behavior.

In an attempt to be socially acceptable and maintain status as nobility and remain polite,

one had to “bottle up” their feelings and keep them to oneself, as Johnson states. His final

sentence in the thirteenth chapter of his book explains with great weight how the opera had

influenced the shift from classicism to Romanticism. “...Now they made you listen. Politeness

may have created a private space for inner communication, but it also had its victims.”

This private space for inner communication comes from the Old Regime, and its

acceptance of personal taste and individual subjectivity towards musical experience. However, it

required the inward “bottling” of these expressions to become what is known as Romanticism.
 Without bearing in mind what would make chronological sense, I would like to redirect

the focus of the reader back to the very early eighteen-hundreds. The final point I would like to

make has to do with the listener’s ears and what they sought after in musical experience, and

how they perceived new music, foreign to their ears.

What the listeners of 1810 were keenly listening for was the clear expression of specific

moods that the composer had chosen. At this time however, music began to become more

ambiguous harmonically, and didn’t make a clear suggestion of what is to be heard. As Johnson

points out, this is the reason that Haydn and Mozart were of such popularity. These composers

were not without critics however. Haydn was critiqued as aspiring to “describe what cannot be

described with music.” He was also “guilty of hubris,” according to Johnson’s historical account

of the criticisms. “Haydn claimed that he rarely depicted specific images (thus departing from

certain French perceptions…). This was another “departure” from what a French audience was

willing to readily accept and make sense of. However, the listeners of this time became

increasingly more aware of the musical aspects of compositions such as “orchestral forms,

modulations, stretti and the like.” As also stated by Johnson, “repeated exposure to these works,

which resisted any simple programmatic reading, likely seduced by sheer familiarity.”

This new way of composing, not programmatically, paves the way for an entirely new

way of listening to music. Not only listening, but accepting it as music. Although rejected and

difficult to understand the first couple of listenings, the music became familiar and people began

to respect music for music’s sake. Johnson states that although singers received the majority of

attention and praise from audiences, “listeners also commented on Rossini’s orchestral writing

from a purely musical perspective.” A spectator at one of the operas of Rossini commented as
follows on her experience of the opera. She says that the mental exertions needed to make sense

of the harmonies takes time, she relates, and yields only a certain amount of pleasure before the

mind grows dull, irritated and incapable of judging.” And as Johnson clearly puts it, which is an

important point that seems to take hold at this time in musical history, is “These are the words of

a reader struggling with a new expressive language, one that demanded comprehension on it’s

own terms and required a fixed, focused attention.” This point specifically, and the struggle

people had with hearing this new music was foundational and of paramount importance to the

development of music from this point on. The sheer fact that listeners were capable and willing

to sit through music they didn’t understand and “decipher” it, as Johnson says, leads to the

eventual acceptance of Beethoven, and allows music to exist for music’s sake.

In conclusion, the music scene in France, tied to social structure, specifically opera,

facilitated and paved the way for music to go from being entirely programmatic and serving a

very distinct purpose(not even a musical purpose at the beginning), to being allowed and

accepted as existing for it’s own sake. The original operas were merely social excursions to

display and illuminate a power structure. Following this, people began to experience music

personally and display this in public by weeping at operas of Gluck. The downfall of the Old

Regime allowed a new kind of power structure to exist, being the nobility of Napoleon in France.

A new code of conduct, and literally a manual of conduct became what the new nobility lived by:

silence. Not bothering the others around you. And from this forced inward expression of music,

being bottled up and being void of public display in feelings towards the music, came

Romanticism. Haydn and Rossini, with their foreign and non-programmatic music, engaged
audiences in a way that forced careful attention and shifted the goal of music as imitation and

expression of clear emotions, to music existing for it’s own sake. Unclear emotions and more

avant-garde for the time in terms of form, modulation and stretti, all made it possible for

Beethoven to become accepted after his immediate rejection. The history of the social structure

of France and it’s customs and taboos, tied into the opera audiences in Paris, all lead to what we

call music today, paving the path for creative music that can exist without direct purpose.