Music Societies in the 19th Century Oporto: private spaces of amateur and professional music making

Abstract

A number of private societies and clubs flourished in Oporto in the 19th Century, whose aim was to encourage in their members "benevolence relationships and good society" offering them "an honest and civilized leisure times". Clearly elitist, these nineteenth century recreational clubs had strict membership admission policies, which generally belonged to the higher echelons of society, more specifically the bourgeois, since the titled aristocracy was scarce in Oporto. It is worth mentioning here in parenthesis that Oporto was an essentially bourgeois, commercial city, unlike the capital, Lisbon, where the court "drags with it the whole official and unofficial world which conceitedly flutters around it". Each association organised musical concerts, balls and soirées musicales – weekly, twice a week or once a month – which also offered members other amusements, like conversation, reading, playing cards or dancing. Events of a musical character were normally performed by the club members, usually amateurs – referred to as dilettanti – who would be joined by prestigious Portuguese or foreign professionals. The purpose of this article is to describe the musical activity of the five main venues for private socialising in Oporto in the 1800s, and their contribution to the development of the musical taste of the city's society, taking into account both amateur and professional practice and particularly the repertoire performed.