Customer Reviews

The Musician as Entrepreneur, 1700-1914: Managers, Charlatans, and Idealists

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I bought this book hoping to learn something about the everyday life of such Victorian orchestra musicians as would, for instance, have played in the pit of London's Savoy Theatre. I learned precious little about that, except perhaps from Simon McVeigh's "Audience for High-Class Music"; there's also an illustration on p. 50 that seems to show a woman instrumentalist among the violins(?) in 1922 - I would surely have appreciated some commentary in the text about her! By "Musician," this volume seems to understand almost exclusively concert-hall virtuosos of the Beethoven-Liszt caliber. I did learn quite a bit about Lisztomania and had my old suspicions confirmed that in his own day Beethoven was something of a wild-eyed radical. In fact, this book gave me a lot of tolerant perspective on the musical world of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and for that I am grateful.
It appears to be a compilation of academic essays (cf. "Publish or Perish"?) by various authors of greater or lesser ability when it comes to putting words around their research. I'm also ready to guess that it was "proofread" by some word-processing program of questionable acuity in the matter of spotting sentences that just simply don't make sense. Nevertheless, with all faults, it could be a valuable addition to the research shelf of specialists.