Classics Off-Centre: Performing and Listening to the Music of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven during the Long Nineteenth Century

Abstract

Writing about the history of music in Spain involves a peculiar exercise that some more radical anthropologists might term acculturation. This concept, which broadly refers to the substitution of one culture for another, could be used to characterize the process of arrival and initial diffusion in Spain of what we now call ‘ classical music ’ . Proof that it was felt as a threat to Spanish culture is the journalistic polemic within which, at the end of the eighteenth century, the expression ‘ national music ’ was used for the first time. The controversial repertories were Italian opera and the music of Haydn, both of which delighted some of the country ’ s elite groups (see Teresa Cascudo, ‘ Territory is the Key: A Look at the Birth of “ National Music ” in Spain (1799 – 1803) ’ , in Confronting the National in the Musical Past , ed. Elaine Kelly, Markus Mantere and Derek Scott (London: Routledge, 2018), 196 – 207). The adoption by the elite of the musical practices associated with these repertories, and particularly in the case of the string quartet, has been considered as part of a much more comprehensive ‘ civilizing ’ process, to use the expression of Norbert Elias (see Carolina Queipo, ‘ Prácticas musicales y procesos de civilización de la élite financiera y comercial en la España de Fernando VII: el caso de A Coruña ’ , in Procesos de civilización: culturas de élites, culturas populares. Una historia de contrastes y tensiones (siglos XVII – XIX) , ed. José María Imizcoz Beunza, Máximo García Fernández and Javier Esteban Ochoa de Eribe (Bilbao: Universidad del País Vasco, 2019), 191 – 212). The debate that the ‘ Classics Off-Centre ’ conference attempted to stimulate was situated at the intersection