Music lovers of the mid-nineteenth century were young, middle class, white men and women, often newly arrived in American cities, who, for the first time in history, focused more on hearing public concerts than on making music themselves at home. For many Americans in antebellum cities, the chance to hear professionally performed music simply for the price of a ticket was astonishing, wiping away the necessity of having to learn an instrument, find sheet music, and practice. Indulging in its convenience was the mark of someone fully participating in the sophisticated culture of the city. But music lovers imbued their participation in this enterprise with unexpected enthusiasm. They did not just attend concerts; they depleted their savings to do so every night; they described their feelings about what they heard in diaries, and they waited, longingly, for their favorite performers to return so that listeners could hear those performers again and again.
Take Walt Whitman, who, as one of the earliest music lovers, developed a fascination with concerts while a journalist in New York City in the mid-1840s: on the “free list” for concerts, he was able to hear most of the major virtuoso performers who passed through the city in the late 1840s and early 1850s and would frequently rhapsodize about his favorite opera singers. Although Whitman never had any formal musical training and never learned to play an instrument, music affected him with such force that he described his listening experiences in poems, journal entries, and reminiscences throughout his entire life.
[...] As the concert business grew in the 1850s, spectacle became one means of competition between promoters, especially in the form of the “monster” concert format that, at its extreme, put literally thousands of performers onstage at the same time and necessitated the building of huge, temporary performance halls, the size of several contemporary football fields to accommodate such ambitions. The novelty of these performances for most people was the overwhelming physical experience—a kind of sonic rush of instruments, crowds, and applause.
For music lovers, though, sensation was not a novelty but rather a desired ideal for all performance experiences, whether in a temporary coliseum or a “lecture room” at a dime museum. Music lovers were attuned to the power and quality of performed sound at a visceral, almost intuitive level. Voices had to “strike” or “move” them to be important. In response to opera, especially, music lovers often expressed an overwhelming visceral ecstasy, with music “filling their souls” to the point of losing composure, something that was excitingly dangerous and quite cathartic within the behavioral strictures of middle-class Victorian culture.
—Daniel Cavicchi, “Fandom Before 'Fan': Shaping the History of Enthusiastic Audiences,” Reception: Texts, Readers, Audiences, History, Vol. 6 (2014)
