The Work of Music: Labor and Creativity in Germany's Long Nineteenth Century

In The Work of Music, Celia Applegate examines the cultural history of Austro-German music through the lens of labor from the 1648 Peace of Westphalia to the Third Reich. She explores the working world of music and musicians, the various jobs they performed, the work music did in society, the observations and commentaries of contemporaries on the shape and function of musical life, and the work of organizing music making, both amateur and professional. At a time when ideas of absolute music...