Antje Pieper's book is a comparative study of the Leipzig Gewandhaus concerts and the Birmingham Triennial Festivals from the later eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries. The first two chapters present the Gewandhaus concerts and the Festivals as ‘functionally equivalent institutions’ (p. xiv) and then embed them in brief sketches of the towns and the publics that supported them. This account will be very familiar from existing literature. The Gewandhaus was thus just one of many associations founded by a relatively homogeneous bourgeoisie seeking compensations for its relative lack of political or economic power in the idealization of culture. The Festivals, by contrast, mattered to the middle class familiar from the work of R.J. Morris or Simon Gunn: dynamic but fractured along sectarian and political lines, it could unite to listen, just as it separated to worship or fight elections. Having introduced her towns, Pieper then relates attitudes to music in each to broader intellectual and cultural trends, albeit in ways that risk reproducing contemporary stereotypes. Thus the Lutheran religiosity of Leipzig encourages its citizens to retreat to a ‘private, interior world’ (p. 36) and permits authoritative critics to establish a cult of instrumental music; the Lockean (p. 37) and Bible-reading British prefer oratorio, discounting aesthetic theory in favour of obvious emotional response and in any case paying more attention to scriptural libretti than to the music itself.

The best sections of the book are chapters 3 and 5, which describe in considerable detail the formation and evolution of the repertoire both at the Gewandhaus and the Festivals. The basic contrast Pieper establishes is not particularly groundbreaking. The prestige of instrumental music was rapidly established and maintained at the Gewandhaus. In the light of contemporary British criticism that Leipzig had abandoned Mendelssohn's music for the ‘Music of the Future’ it is interesting to learn that the Gewandhaus concerts were commonly criticized for their conservatism until the 1890s, when Arthur Nikisch, a versatile Kapellmeister with connections in Vienna and Berlin, got Mahler and Bruckner past the stodgy Board of Directors (p. 171). Morning concerts at the Birmingham Festivals were long dominated as one might expect by the oratorios of Handel, Mendelssohn, the ‘foster-child of Birmingham’ (p. 93), and their epigones, while the evening concerts were more unbuttoned affairs featuring operatic solos and glees. Pieper shows, however, that Birmingham's mulish loyalty to oratorio did not just reflect an unthinking Protestantism but quickly accommodated more eclectic religious sympathies: the Festivals paid good money for works by the flagrantly Roman Catholic Gounod and Elgar. It suggests we can overstate the degree to which Protestant anti-Catholicism inhibited the cultural tastes of the Victorian middle classes: by the time the Festival paid Gounod £4,000 for The Redemption (p. 145), Rossini's Stabat Mater and Mozart's Requiem had long been favourites of the wider Victorian public.

Pieper's analysis of the spaces in which the concerts took place is also perceptive. It is hardly new to observe that the burghers of Leipzig built the Gewandhaus as a home for serious devotion to instrumental music, but Pieper usefully emphasizes that the Leipzigers were single-minded in their devotion to the civic canon laid down by their beloved Mendelssohn. They did not have much time for the Zeitgeist or its musical products and even the processes of German unification and state formation did not encourage them to merge their identity into a new cultural nationalism. When the Gewandhaus was rebuilt in the 1880s, it was as a bigger, more opulent version of the eighteenth-century original: a temple not to the newly founded Reich but to civic and Saxon pride, guarded by the statue of a toga-clad Mendelssohn (pp. 139–42). Not until World War I did the repertoire nod towards a chauvinistic celebration of Germanentum, rather than just good music. Similarly, Pieper sensitively discusses the Birmingham Town Hall, which became home to the Festivals, as at once civic in its Grecian architecture, theatre-like in its seating but faintly ecclesiastical by virtue of its impressive organ (pp. 98, 103) – the perfect place for a religious, but not a sectarian, public to hear oratorios.

Pieper's comparative approach does though have its limits. Why, for instance, choose to compare an English city with a German as opposed to French, or American, examples? It is debatable both whether the institutions she has selected exhaust middle-class interest in music even in Birmingham and Leipzig or whether those towns can stand for contrasting Anglo-German middle-class cultures. In Leipzig, other venues, such as the theatre (p. 129), were quick to embrace less conservative music, prompting the reader to question the narrow focus on the Gewandhaus. Perhaps the Festival did more faithfully encapsulate Birmingham's musical life: Pieper quotes Ernest Newman's complaint that beyond its confines it was the ‘least musical town in Europe – perhaps, we may say, in the world’ (p. 187). Yet this raises questions about why Birmingham's poverty should count for more than the relative riches of Manchester, Leeds or London. Isolating a single city's musical culture for the purposes of transnational comparison perversely lessens its interest by detaching it from regional or national culture. Birmingham's love of oratorio is harder to decipher once cut out of a broader canvas of popular urban music-making: choral societies; the growing importance of hymns for most Protestant churches; the cult of the piano and the associated demand for printed parts and solos; and the sight-singing movement. While the book's exclusions might be justified by its emphasis on the public culture of the concert-going middle classes, it is disappointingly short on the thick descriptions of ticket prices, dress and ritual that have characterized Simon Gunn's work on that subject.

Pieper is therefore not well served by her title, because her comparison of two institutions makes a less than adequate account of Music and the Making of Middle-Class Culture. To cherry-pick ‘two industrial centres’ and their premier musical venues provokes questions about how to define a middle class and its relationship with music but does not provide the answers. That would require not only a more synoptic or at least a more reflective account of class but also – some readers may feel – a more attentive ear for music. Pieper's book certainly discusses the libretti of Victorian oratorios and dutifully lists Leipzig's favourite composers, but does not really convey what it was like to listen to the music. Culture helps articulate a sense of class, but class then determines that when an individual encountered Beethoven or Mendelssohn, ‘the observance of ordinary cultural practice was paramount’ (p. 149) – leaving all too little room for pleasure.