Salon Music

Music that flourished in Paris and Vienna in the 18th and 19th centuries. A salon is the drawing room in aristocratic mansions, and salon music therefore satisfying the need for light entertainment. Many composers and critics looked down their noses at this music designed to please the growing middle class.

FRANZ LISZT complained of the "atmosphere lourde et mephitique des salons" (dull and noxious atmosphere of the salons). During his Paris sojourn, the German poet Heinrich Heine voiced his despair at the universal proliferation of piano music "that one hears in every house, day and night," adding that "at the very moment of the writing of this report a couple of young ladies in the neighboring house are playing a morceau for two left hands."

FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN was not averse to writing piano music designed for salon performances. ROBERT SCHUMANN described Chopin as the "vornehmste Salonkomponist" (most elegant salon composer), and his famous Waltz in A-flat major as a "Salonstück der nobelsten Art, aristokratisch durch und durch" (salon piece of the noblest art, aristocratic through and through). Lesser composers frankly entitled their works Études de salon, Petites fleurs de salon, etc.

Although salon music largely disappeared with the outbreak of World War I, social salons continued to be maintained by wealthy hostesses in Paris and other music capitals. For example, Countess de Polignac, the daughter of the American sewing machine manufacturer Singer, was married to a French aristocrat and began a series of musical matinees. She commissioned works by IGOR STRAVINSKY, MANUEL DE FALLA, and others for performance. Throughout the 1980s the American patroness Betty Freeman hosted musicales at her Beverly Hills home in California, providing muchneeded exposure for her invited audiences to modern composers and trends.