Arrangements for string instruments were highly popular in the first part of the nineteenth century, but they had served a purpose and market different to that for the piano transcriptions that now took centre stage. The former were played by men, the latter by women; the focus during string quartet parties was on developing the performer, the latter on displaying the performer to best advantage. Piano performances, whether solo or in ensemble combinations, tended to be demonstrations to the audience of feeling, taste, and a moderate level of technical accomplishment—suitable attributes for a woman. Public performance and publication now took over the main role in canon formation, while chamber music’s meaning and function was redefined and split off from the dazzling Salonmusik and the still performance-based but decorous Hausmusik. The public quartet concerts of the 1820s and ’30s (especially those of Schuppanzigh’s quartet), along with reviewers’ endorsements of silent listening, and Beethoven’s increasingly difficult conceptions, changed the status of that genre.

This chapter further explores the ontological status of Beethoven’s symphonies in the early-mid nineteenth century, with particular attention to commentators’ ideas about arrangements of these symphonies, which both supported and undermined the development of the concept of musical works. Reading further in journals and newspapers of this time, one develops a fresh understanding of how symphonies were—and were not—understood as musical works in the early nineteenth century. The arrangers considered here are Ries and especially Hummel, two contemporaries of Beethoven who made numerous well-received arrangements of Beethoven’s music. Their musical arrangements, and others of the time, contributed to the development of the concept of the musical work concept around 1800 by promoting a certain kind of engaged ‘Romantic listening’. Such listening celebrated the creativity and genius of the composer and the unity of the work; by establishing the fixity and untouchability of the composer’s text, so that arrangements were considered ‘derivatives’; and by encouraging the perseverance of works, providing an aide-mémoire for listeners wishing to recall concert performances.