Numerical Beethoven

Beethoven is, as many are aware, one of the most significant figures in traditional readings of Western music history. While it is easy in musicology to say that one composer or another is highly influential, that does not always correlate to being “popular” composers – that is to say, well-liked and recognized by the general public. So how do performances of Beethoven’s works in 1924 Paris match up to the composer’s influence? In simply looking at the raw numbers, it is plain to see that reverence of Beethoven was alive and well. Of the over 1,300 performances we have recorded, 123 contained at least one work by Beethoven – and 16 of those contain multiple. That means that at more than one in every eleven concerts, someone in 1924 Paris heard Beethoven – this includes not only concerts of classical music, but also many café-concerts, cabarets, music halls, and other venues that provided more popular music than art music.

Clocking in at an astonishing 37 performances of Beethoven’s pieces, the Concerts Touche win the gold for the pure number of programs containing Beethoven. The next-closest institution – the Concerts Colonne – only had 13 such concerts in 1924. Why such disparity? In The Harlequin Years: Music in Paris, 1917-1929, Roger Nichols classifies the Concerts Touche as one of the “lower-profile” orchestras active in Paris at the time, “which guaranteed not to offend.” Nichols points to these orchestra’s budgets, which were considerably lower than other more renowned ensembles, and implies that in order to turn a profit, they had to program differently from more established organizations. Instead of performing a mix of old and new music, these orchestras tended to give the public exactly what it wanted – old favorites, and at a reasonable price. Clearly, whoever was in charge of programming concerts for the Concerts Touche thought that Beethoven would sell tickets and fill seats, resulting in Beethoven, and particularly his works for full orchestra, flooding the musical market.

Also notable about this graph is the large number of concerts given outside the support of a large institution (or at least, without such support listed in our sources). These 29 performances consist mostly of smaller works – chamber or solo –  and represent roughly 3/4 of such concerts.

So after looking at who was playing Beethoven, where do we look next? Well, that’s exactly the question – where? This next graph displays at which venues one could most often hear pieces by Beethoven performed. It reveals a roughly similar arrangement to the graphs of institutions and genres above, because certain venues were associated with certain organizations and genres. For example, the Salle des Agriculteurs was typically host to chamber and solo music; the only full orchestras we have recorded playing there are the Orchestre de Paris and the Concerts Braïlowsky, both fairly minor ensembles. Of the twelve concerts there, they are responsible for three; the other nine are all soloists and chamber groups. On the other hand, the Salle Touche is (predictably) heavily associated with the Concerts Touche, who performed all but one of their concerts we know of there.

The final graph I have to share once again takes a look at the internal structure of concerts, but instead of digging into other pieces, it zeroes in on Beethoven’s. Here, you can see displayed the relative frequency of where within a given concert program a Beethoven symphony is likely to be placed. Having noticed a seeming trend among the programming of organizations that performed more familiar works, I decided to take a look at this particular statistic and found, just as was suspected, that the most common placement for a Beethoven symphony is at the very beginning of a concert. Second place is tied between – well, second place, and last. However, this is somewhat deceiving; in fact, in four of the six instances in which a Beethoven symphony is performed last, there are only two pieces on the entire concert (three of these are in a series by the Concerts Lamoureux where they performed Fauré’s Requiem followed by Beethoven’s 9th symphony; the fourth is the same program put on by the Concerts Colonne). So really, in 62.7% of cases, a Beethoven symphony was either performed as the first or second piece of a concert. This leads to the conclusion that his symphonies were used to gain attention and gather a crowd – they may have been the “main event” of a concert for some because they represented the bulk of familiar music for audiences not as well versed in the world of music, while for others they were something familiar to latch onto and train the ear to listen to what may have been somewhat less familiar music that followed. Of course, it could also be the case that the philosophy behind concert programming has changed since 1924, and Beethoven’s symphonies were placed first on the program for some other reason. After all, audiences change with time; perhaps the optimal program configuration to draw crowds has with them.