In the early decades of the nineteenth century, there arose a division between lovers of classical music and what William Weber has called high-status popular music. The former specifically meant the masterpieces of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and a few others. The latter included popular operas by Rossini, Meyerbeer, and others, and traveling virtuosos who performed largely in salons, that is, musical events that took place before invited guests in the homes of aristocratic or upper-middle-class hosts.
Robert Schumann began his career as a critic specifically to protest against the emptiness of most of the piano virtuosos, who specialized in dazzling arrangements of operatic tunes or variations on popular melodies with little musical substance. He recognized greater musical substance in some of them, including Franz Liszt. In his early career, then, Liszt represented high-status popular music, but without the musical emptiness and technical gimmicks that Schumann so despised.
Weber points out that the old aristocracy and upper middle class essentially merged around mid-century and that classical music and high-status popular music likewise grew together. Previously popular operas, including most of Rossini’s, eventually disappeared from the repertoire, but their overtures became acceptable fare on symphonic concerts. The virtuosos who did not make some move towards classical music likewise lost public favor.
In 1846 one of Liszt’s admirers, who also loved classical music, challenged him to play Beethoven’s music on his programs, which he did. As a composer, he had always concentrated on solo piano music, occasionally with orchestral accompaniment. Beginning about the time he started playing classical music in concert, he began to compose purely orchestral music, choral music (both sacred and secular) and songs. He made the transition from high-status popular music to the newly defined classical music world so easily and naturally that only in retrospect can scholars discern a transition at all.
Not all remained unified in classical music, however. Some composers (Brahms, for example) continued to write in classical forms, using harmonies, techniques of orchestration, and so on, that built on Beethoven’s legacy gradually and incrementally.
Liszt, among others, experimented with new harmonies and based their music on literary programs, which led to the development of non-standard forms for each new piece. At least one of Liszt’s late piano pieces is almost atonal. The group represented by Brahms and the group represented by Liszt argued as intensely as formerly groups that preferred “classical” music or “popular” music had argued.
About the time Liszt began to write most of the kinds of music that the great Viennese masters had, the idea of classical music becomes problematic. No longer did one group of music lovers hold onto artistic ideals and music that required repeated hearings to understand while another preferred novelty and a constant stream of new music that could be fully appreciated on first hearing. The latter remained, of course, but the former could no longer agree on what it meant by “artistic ideals.”
