It is somewhat surprising that music has only recently become a serious subject for urban historians. Musicologists and music historians, urban geographers, planners and all others who deal with diverse aspects of local development, cultural industry and the built environment have fared much better in tackling the fundamental social implications of music in a particular locality. It is not an accident that, for example, the recent volume of Built Environment, ‘Music and the city’, edited by an economic geographer, Robert C. Kloosterman, deals with urban spaces of creativity and the role of black music today, some of which have by now an ascribed ‘urban’ adjective in North America.Footnote ¹ It is also only natural, however, that Kloosterman's enquiry should concentrate on music in the city of the present and rarely venture into the time periods before World War II.

This is not to say that urban historians have avoided the topic altogether. It is rather that, as Vanessa Harding put it in her insightful introduction to the volume ‘Music and urban history’ of this journal a decade ago, musicologists and music historians were the ones to seek contact and forge connections.Footnote ² That said, a rather disproportionate presence of works on medieval and early modern timesFootnote ³ led to a situation where the fundamental change in musical taste that followed nineteenth-century urbanization and cultural embourgeoisement was until recently largely beyond the interest of urban historians. By contrast, a number of pioneering works linking musicology and cultural history in modern times have tended to overlook the obvious urban dimension of their respective studies.Footnote ⁴ It is ironic that a fascinating discussion on ‘operatic modernism’ in the 2005 special issue of the Journal of Interdisciplinary History involving, among others, Carl E. Schorske, whose contribution to the ‘cultural turn’ in urban history would be difficult to overestimate,Footnote ⁵ did not consider linking opera and urbanity in a systematic manner.Footnote ⁶ Within music and cultural history, interesting work has emerged in research on the British music hall, the European operetta, cabaret and nineteenth-century theatre in the Iberian, Arab and Ottoman world during the last decades.Footnote ⁷ Nonetheless, even among this vast and growing new scholarship, it is, by and large, musicologist Anselm Gerhard's work on Paris and social historian Christophe Charle's attempt at a comprehensive comparative study of Paris, Berlin, London and Vienna that have approached urban transformation as the main factor influencing the change in theatre audiences’ composition and behaviour during the performance.Footnote ⁸ Both authors, however, made the theatre, and not the city, the subject of their research; furthermore, Charle's focus on theatre left the musical dimension altogether beyond the scope of his study.

This thematic volume contributes to this diverse yet growing body of scholarship with the study of music and the city in the ‘long’ nineteenth century, when urbanization and cultural embourgeoisement went hand in hand and profoundly influenced cultural practices throughout the modernizing world. Several authors included here, and myself, have in one way or another been affiliated with a large music and theatre history project led by Philipp Ther and Heinz-Gerhard Haupt from Frankfurt an der Oder, then Florence and, finally, Vienna.Footnote ⁹ The volume, however, grew from two separate conference sessions I have organized and chaired – and a number of social encounters that surrounded them informally. One of the sessions took place at the 10th conference of the European Association for Urban History in Ghent in early September 2010, and another at the Urban History Group Conference in Cambridge, March 2011.Footnote ¹⁰ The ambition of this volume is to fill the obvious gaps in the current scholarship in an attempt better to comprehend the history of music in European cities, and thereby to contribute to the rethinking of urban history of this Continent in the time of modernity.

While music has traditionally been part of the urban spectacle, several significant changes took place in the ways it was practised that reflected on the greater transformation that modernity brought to the urban context during the nineteenth century. First, public space became increasingly differentiated. Whereas earlier music was performed in a variety of improvised and informal venues with highly restricted audiences such as royal theatres and aristocratic palaces, the arrival of modernity produced highly specialized venues, open to a larger public, where music was performed professionally, and often for a fee. Later on, further calls were voiced for more specialization into theatres, opera houses, dance halls, music halls, variety theatres and cabarets, which further stratified the public – and the entire city districts – along the lines of class, social status and wealth. However, while the formation of these larger, yet highly stratified modern audiences and their favourite venues was a consequence of urbanization, those calls did not always meet the public demand and were often motivated by other considerations, such as nationalism, local patriotism, the desire to improve the standing of their respective cities in the eyes of an honourable visitor and, quite simply, to have your favourite venue in a desired city quarter. What stood behind these calls in each particular city across Europe throughout the nineteenth century and how did they relate to the establishment of new, modern civic identities and aspirations within their respective populations? Did new theatres and dance halls become major urban foci of institutionalized cultural practice? How stratified was the new public in each particular locality and did this have a bearing on where exactly in the city they went to enjoy their distinct music experiences? Answers to these questions have a bearing on both urban and music history.

Opera house, operetta theatre, music hall and dance hall became modern urban institutions that contributed to – and even catalysed – the change in musical taste among the city's population.Footnote ¹¹ This change is routinely attributed to the cultural embourgeoisement of society and hence the arrival of modernity, even if its agents, as this volume demonstrates, did not necessarily come from what we would call the middle class. To pinpoint this change in a particular city at a particular point of time therefore means to observe the fundamental transformation of urban social hierarchies as it happened at a local level. Such enquiry can not only enrich our understanding of how modernity constituted itself in situ, but also provide new insights into just how diverse – and changing – nineteenth-century urban cultural practices actually were.

Furthermore, modern theatres were places where otherwise impossible social encounters could be made, and where official city representatives competed with others in their aim to represent a particular vision of the city's past, present and future – and yet they were also places where social hierarchies became visible like nowhere else. The power of new music venues to attract, mobilize or even unsettle the local public increased greatly. They turned into local sites of contestation and often even revolutionary events, in which music acquired additional, or entirely new connotations. For example, in 1828, Auber's La muette de Portici produced a furore in Paris, when instead of legitimizing the Restoration, it acquired extremely subversive connotations of the 1789 Revolution; two years later, in 1830, it provoked the nationalist uprising in Brussels that eventually led the lands that were to become Belgium towards independence. However, music was also played on the street and in diverse semi-public spaces such as restaurants, cafés, parks and at a variety of celebrations and other spectacles that we associate with the modern city in one way or another. It therefore provided the modern metropolis with its new audible markers that helped its inhabitants to orient themselves in its seemingly chaotic and noisy environment. As the great majority of larger European cities were ‘Haussmannized’ following the example of Paris, and as consumption of music became increasingly commercialized, exclusive music and other leisure institutions often tended to concentrate in one particular district or boulevard, thus creating what we might call today an entertainment district, thereby excluding large chunks of urban populations unable to afford it.Footnote ¹² On other occasions, turbulent urban crowds, who were denied entry into the auditorium, flocked to the entrances to the opera house, disrupted the public order and became a matter of police concern. How and where exactly did the ‘high’ meet the ‘low’ in the musical life of the city, and what can we deduce from this about the emergence of a particular urban identity and the functioning of the modern metropolis? Were the hitherto restricted layers of the urban society given access to the emerging new music culture and did the crowd, despite police coercion, turn into an even more disruptive urban phenomenon at such occasions? This volume provides answers to this question by bringing the ‘urban variable’ into the study of music history.

What follows is a set of research articles, some of them case-studies and some comparative approaches, that chronologically cover most of the ‘long’ nineteenth century in cities of what we might call the cultural map of Europe of the time – a territory significantly larger than contemporary geographers imagined it. Diverse aspects of music history in Vienna, Paris, Rome, The Hague, Cairo and Istanbul are treated in a number of innovative ways, often incorporating previously unknown archival material, and focusing on aspects and periods formerly overlooked in scholarship. They seek answers to some of the questions outlined above. Joonas Korhonen maps early public ballroom culture in Vienna, a city associated with music in so many diverse ways, but researched much less extensively before the emergence of Wiener Moderne. Between 1780 and 1814, however, interesting developments were taking place there that might explain not only how Vienna came to be known as the city of the waltz, but also how its rigid social hierarchies managed to survive unaffected by modernity. Korhonen demonstrates convincingly that, far from producing a common urban dancing culture where the rich would dance with the poor in the swirl of the waltz, Vienna was characterized by strict yet changing hierarchies of places in which location determined the composition of the public, the entry price, the public behaviour and even the music choices; this, in turn, produced new ways of showing social distinctions between the elite, the wealthy Bürgertum and the suburban artisans and the poor that did not loosen even during the carnival season. Further research is needed to determine whether the roots of Vienna's ‘special path’ to modernity – which, as this volume should make fairly clear, was far from unique in nineteenth-century Europe and elsewhere – had been laid down as early as the first two decades of the nineteenth century.

This points to the rich diversity among European urban cultures in the early nineteenth century. The commercialization of Viennese music consumption did not follow the contours of urbanization. Nor did it particularly reflect the attitudes of the growing middle classes. A decade after the Congress of Vienna, by contrast, Paris was swept off its feet by a new passion for masked balls whose music and sociability were closely tied to urbanization and middle-class tastes. Their riotous and at times violent features took on a political cast as well. James H. Johnson links this money-making enterprise to profound changes in the urban landscape of Paris, where major theatres offered masked balls along the new boulevards and in close proximity to the impoverished neighbourhoods of the city's working-class population. This, as Johnson argues, created one of the most socially charged corridors of the city. In the context of nineteenth-century Paris, where the poor were coded as criminal, unruly and diseased, the carnivalesque disruptions of the balls were a more concentrated version of the tensions of the street.

Major transformations changed the face of Paris and other European cities in the second half of the nineteenth century. What effect, if any, did Haussmannization have on musical life? Could parallel processes that fundamentally changed music practices point us to greater transformations that, together with urbanization and the new planning projects, shaped modern urban societies the way we imagine them today? Gesa zur Nieden compares re-planned Paris and Rome and the parallel changes in their music life in the late nineteenth century, and finds an interesting correlation. The boulevard and the opera house are two iconic images we tend to associate with the fin de siècle, and the municipalities usually constructed them in tandem. However, while the Europe-wide music market and the exchange of famous music works did emerge at this time, it was curiously not linked to the iconic stages such as the Parisian Palais Garnier, the Roman Teatro Argentina or the Teatro Apollo, but rather to popular theatres such as the Théâtre du Châtelet or the Teatro Costanzi (originally a politeama, later renamed as Teatro dell'Opera di Roma). Designed architecturally to seat greater audiences and larger touring ensembles, these theatres, at the same time, provided the local elites with a chance to ‘see and be seen’. It is also interesting to see that even in a city of such profound cultural importance and aspirations as Rome municipal funding that could be spent on the refashioning of theatres and streets was miserably small. This sheds light on just how unique and untypical the case of Haussmann's Paris, which we tend to see as the epitome of fin-de-siècle modernity, had in fact been.

What is an opera house, magnificent as it may be, without grand opéra on stage? Audiences throughout the Continent and elsewhere were stunned almost beyond comprehension by the sensation of Guillaume Tell, La Juive, Les Huguenots or Le Prophète throughout the nineteenth century, yet if one looks closer at the composition of the audience in one particular setting, surprises emerge. Jan Hein Furnée examines the governance and the audiences of the Théâtre Français in The Hague between 1820 and 1890 through subscription and admission records and discovers that although grand opéra in general attracted on average about twice as many visitors as opéra comique and other genres, this was partly due to the increasing interest and representation of the cheaper third ranks of the audience, while the city's elite increasingly preferred opéra comique and vaudevilles, which they considered much more refined. While the king and the municipal government imported the troupe and even the directors from France, and heavily subsidized and controlled the theatre to satisfy the local elite's needs of representation and leisure, modelling their activity on the example of Paris, they were increasingly driven by the need to accommodate other layers of urban society into an environment of carefully orchestrated and hierarchical co-existence and cohesion – even including some social intermingling in some sections of the auditorium. Changes were taking place within The Hague society, reflected both in the changing composition of the audience and the actions of the local government to influence and manage the theatre. At the same time, the almost astronomical, at least for the standards of the time, sums of money invested into the French theatre first by the king and then by the municipality – sometimes almost as much as the public money spent on education or health care – turned it at one point into one of the best opera houses on the Continent. Nonetheless, as an episode from the early 1850s demonstrates, an opera house was bound to failure when faced with the modern commercial challenge, given the excessive demands on luxury in design, representation and performance that no troupe or director, no matter how successful, could meet unless heavily subsidized by the local authorities.

Cairo may have been ‘across the pond’ on the nineteenth-century mental map of the European Continent for some, but not for Ismail Pasha, the khedive of Egypt. It was largely due to his efforts that parallel processes to those that were taking place in Paris, Rome or, for that matter, The Hague, transformed the Egyptian capital in the second half of the nineteenth century. Adam Mestyan demonstrates how, between 1868 and 1871, an entirely new complex of five modern theatres was constructed in Cairo's Azbakiyya district, a traditional recreation spot for the city's inhabitants for centuries, producing something that in fact resembled our contemporary idea of an entertainment district much more closely than the Paris theatres aligned along the new boulevards. The khedive's project provided the Egyptian capital with several major stages that came to be central to the reception of European music as well as to the development of local music and theatre traditions. Challenging the common belief that Cairo's Opera House was constructed exclusively for the purposes of the 1869 Suez Canal opening ceremony, Mestyan argues that other factors were more decisive: competition and rivalry with the Ottoman capital, the khedive's fascination with Haussmannized Paris and the Palais Garnier in particular, and the change of the directorship. Constructed within months, the Comédie, the Cirque, the Opera House, the Hippodrome and the Garden Theatre bore French and Arabic names and embodied a radically new aesthetics of modern Cairo, which emerged as an active centre of architecture, music and theatre production rather than merely a passive recipient of European ideas, and whose status was not only due to European colonial culture but also to the competition with the Ottoman capital.

Istanbul, like Cairo, was also a place of bustling activity and a number of modernizing projects that attempted to incorporate or even facilitated new theatre practices in the Ottoman capital at least since the Tanzimat reforms – a process that continued through the turn of the century. Here, too, this process produced new urban spaces and what we might call the modern urban crowd to which this space became accessible to an unprecedented degree, both in terms of numbers and the times of the day. Clearly, new ways of policing were in order. The performance of music, as Merih Erol reminds us in her closing study of this special issue, was not limited to theatre buildings, and this fact did not escape the notice of the authorities. Whether played in the street, a theatre, a coffee house, a park or a private venue, music was increasingly scrupulously monitored by the police, the municipal authorities and the extensive spy network created under the regime of Abdülhamid II, as the empire attempted to reposition itself vis-à-vis its increasingly disruptive nationalist movements. Using the police and ministerial files reporting on the Greek community in Istanbul, one of the most culturally dominant ethnic-religious groups in transferring European trends and fashions, but also suspect in the eyes of the Ottoman state authorities due to the redemptive claims of the Greek nation-state, Erol discovers how music became one of the main foci of imperial surveillance. Greek and other charity and cultural societies, very much the product of the Tanzimat reforms, suddenly became venues for entertainment and social gathering not only for their members but also for the wider public. Hence, the increasing suspicion of their activities, especially if these events took place in public space – a process that did not spare the Muslim population, either. In a parallel process aimed at improving the empire's legitimacy in the eyes of its broad and diverse population, modernized imperial ceremonies with all their symbolic apparatus of anthems, flags, uniforms, parades and fireworks were given an increasingly dominant place in the public space of the Ottoman capital and the empire's other large cities. In the end, the way music was performed and spied on during Abdülhamid's reign requires us to rethink the concepts of public space and how it connected to the emergence of what we like to think of as liberal civil society, in the Ottoman realm and elsewhere.

Music is much more central to our understanding of urban modernity than is habitually thought. By studying music in particular localities, this volume not only contributes to the refinement of concepts such as urbanization, embourgeoisement and public space and their application to the European ‘long’ nineteenth century, but through its acute attention to the liaison between music and locality, place, event, agency and the public, it adds to the vast body of scholarship in social, cultural and especially new cultural history that has taken the city, and the meaning of urbanity as the subject of its study.