So much for ideals. What about the marketplace?

Public concerts, first introduced in the Baroque era during the age of aristocratic patronage of the arts, grew more important in the days of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. As the nineteenth century progressed, the concert hall together with the opera house came to dominate the presentation of music. Every town of any size had its symphony association, organized by merchants, government officials, lawyers, and other members of the middle class. Halls built to accommodate symphony concerts were expressions of civic pride, as they still are today. In 1891 the New York Symphony, that city’s second orchestra (the New York Philharmonic was founded in 1842), proudly presented a five-concert music festival led by Tchaikovsky in brand-new Carnegie Hall.

By the end of the century even intimate, domestic musical genres, designed for the drawing room or the studio, were presented on the concert stage. Concerts of Lieder (German songs) and string quartet concerts became established, though they were never as important as orchestral concerts. In an age before technologies for sound recording, concerts made more music available to more and more people.

Improved transportation, meanwhile, brought musicians on tour to remote areas, such as the American West. Italian Romantic opera in particular spread far and wide — to New York and Philadelphia, to San Francisco (where Italian immigrant dockworkers were drafted to sing the choruses), to Buenos Aires, and even up the Amazon River.