Even when they forego the conventional academic colon-and-subtitle format, book titles can be revealing. By choosing to call their volume Musical Salon Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century, editors Anja Bunzel and Natasha Loges accomplish the basic tasks of identifying the convivial literary and musical gatherings that are the book's focal point and indicating its chronological limits (a very long century indeed, since the last events considered took place in the decades after World War II). More than that, though, by identifying not simply salons but salon culture as their subject, they also open the door to a number of worthwhile contributions that deal at most fleetingly with the social events of salons per se, focusing instead on such topics as the material or intellectual/ideological foundations of those events, or their results, whether musical or social. In doing so, they reveal that not only was that culture remarkably diverse – encompassing music from the most serious to the most ephemeral, performances and settings from casual to polished, and participants ranging from accomplished as well as hapless amateurs to the most respected of musical artists – but also that any attempt to make a clear distinction between salon culture and those of the concert or of opera is doomed to shatter in the face of the innumerable repertorial and personal links among those varied institutions. And yet, to focus on the salon within the complex and multi-sited musical culture of the long nineteenth century forces a salutary question: how would we understand music and its place(s) differently if we stayed our reflex to place the repertoire and behaviour of the concert at the centre of our understanding? Although Musical Salon Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century never explicitly poses that question, the studies collected within it collectively suggest that it is one that is worth entertaining.

The musical salon is not a new topic of research, as the editors’ introduction acknowledges. Beyond a scattering of early studies of particular salons, two German-language studies laid the groundwork for the field decades ago, and numerous studies of individual salons and other related topics have followed (many cited in this volume's introduction and individual chapters).Footnote ¹ Still, the diversity and enormous number of salons and the variety of musical practices that figured in them mean that a great deal remains to be explored; more importantly, the multifaceted nature of salons invites an equally wide variety of investigative and interpretive methods. Indeed, this well produced and generously illustrated collection's impressive diversity of approaches to the practices and products of the salon, as well as to their resonance and representation into the present, is perhaps its distinctive overall contribution.

Organized (if somewhat loosely) into three sections, the book's 16 chapters consider ‘Concepts and Contexts’, ‘Representations of the Salon’ and ‘Case Studies’. Despite these distinctions, however, close studies of individual salons or individual participants occur in each section, albeit with slightly different emphases. Thus, Anja Bunzel's exploration of author and composer Johanna Kinkel's activity in Berlin opens the collection with a reflection on the challenges of documenting events that often went unremarked in print media. The second section opens with another case study, of the Uppsala salon of Malla Silferstolpe by Kirsten Santos Rutschman; a sensitive study of the repertoire of gatherings that favoured and promoted folksongs and their arrangements, this chapter also draws attention to the afterlife of some of those songs in print and recording, the latter of which ‘allowed the underlying song to re-enter the modern-day equivalent of a salon, in which gatherings of friends are far more likely to listen to recordings than to perform live music for each other’ (p. 88).

But some of the book's most novel contributions depart from the mould of ‘salon studies’ narrowly construed. The final three chapters of the opening section, for instance, examine specific musical products, suggesting the potential of recalling the convivial context of salon culture even (or perhaps especially) in the context of music analysis and criticism. Jennifer Ronyak's study of a fragmentary song sketch by Bettina von Arnim is perhaps the most directly challenging piece in this respect, insightfully asking how our habits of aestheticizing select works are challenged if we use them to take seriously a piece both amateur and incomplete; the practices and practitioners of salon culture, then, incite reflection on broader musicological priorities. Bettina von Arnim also figures in the following chapter, in which Katharina Uhde and R. Larry Todd take as their starting point C. J. Arnold's famous painting of a quartet performance in von Arnim's imposing music room, using that captured moment as a point of entry into the creative world of violinist Joseph Joachim. Their deft analysis of both visual art and music reveals the significance of the salon as a venue for the serious art that has often been opposed to (mere) ‘salon music’. Finally, in Natasha Loges's study of Paul Heyse's Mädchenlieder as set by Brahms, the suitability of those pieces for salon performance and the poet and composer themselves as salon participants are starting points rather than the focus; by considering the declining fortunes of the prolific and popular Heyse in the estimation of critics, Loges makes clear how salon culture co-existed with print culture, which could complement but also challenge the convivial values associated with the salon.

With the exceptions of Rutschman's chapter, discussed above, and Beatrix Darmstädter's informative study of instruments in the Viennese Biedermeier salon – a welcome foray into the material world of the salon – the second section presents salon culture as presented by others, studies of representation in the narrow sense. Space does not permit the detailed discussion these or other chapters in this section merit, but they are rich, and as varied in method as they are in subject. In three otherwise quite different chapters, satirical representations come under scrutiny. Maren Bagge's and Clemens Kreutzfeldt's discussion of English caricatures provides a largely descriptive overview of a large body of sources; Mary Anne Garnett links satirical French treatments of salon singers to contemporary physiologies, popular characterizations of social types in the July Monarchy; and Péter Bozó shows how Jacques Offenbach used the small-scale genre of the salon opera to satirize salon conventions in his Monsieur Choufleur restera chez lui le …. The section closes with another of the book's highlights: a look at a more sympathetic, even nostalgic, representation of salon culture, in Harry White's study of musical scenes in Mike Leigh's film Topsy Turvy (1999), a dramatization of the careers of W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan.

The final section returns to salons themselves. The first three offer accomplished but quite varied studies of European salons. Susan Youens's chapter on Viennese author Caroline Pichler's salon provides a concise sketch of that influential institution but focuses primarily on Franz Schubert's interaction with it, and in particular, his setting of her poem, ‘Der Unglückliche’ (D. 713), which receives a characteristically wide-ranging but subtle analysis. As Harald Krebs shows in the following chapter, the more socially reserved South German environment in which Josephine Lang moved offered far fewer and more modest musico-literary salons; nonetheless, with an ease that belies the painstaking reconstructive research that underlies his presentation, Krebs demonstrates the importance to her career of sociable events in Munich, Stuttgart and Tübingen, of the network of connections that linked and developed from them, and of the venues they provided for nuanced performances of her remarkable songs. Connections are at the heart of Michael Uhde's chapter on Jessie Taylor Laussot Hillebrand's Florentine salon in the 1870s; this examination of the organizational and networking activities through which this skilled and determined patroness supported her musical proteges effectively redefines a woman who has primarily figured in music histories as a one-time lover of Richard Wagner – another powerful demonstration of the potential of taking salon culture seriously.

This section's final two chapters move further afield, geographically and chronologically, in both cases following European immigrants who established musical salons in the United States. Katie A. Callam studies the ‘musicales’ of Clara Kathleen Rogers, the English-born, German- and Italian-trained soprano, effectively exploring both how Rogers's hosting meshed with her ongoing activities as a teacher and composer and how these upper-middle class events fit into late nineteenth-century Boston's highly stratified society. While Rogers found herself in a city that prided itself on its cultural achievements, the protagonists of the final chapter, Hungarian composer and pianist Ernst von Dohnányi and his wife Ilona, are presented by Veronika Kusz as having founded their domestic chamber music evenings in an effort to preserve some semblance of central European musical culture in a new setting that Ilona acerbically characterized as ‘not at the end of the world but at the tail end of the end of the world’ (p. 245): Tallahassee, Florida, where Ernst had been hired by Florida State University in 1949, long before the development of that university's now prominent music school. Kusz perceptively notes the nostalgia that motivated these events as well as their educational function in the setting of a developing university. The image of emigré Europeans presenting canonic chamber music while serving only ‘some coffee and Coca Cola’ (p. 246) closes the collection with a reminder of both the remarkable durability of the institution of the musical salon and the social and cultural distances it travelled during and after its heyday.