French Concerts in Berlin: Religious Music between the Cosmopolitan and National

People and objects can cross borders, but what happens when institutions are imitated (or adapted) in other cities? Near the end of the eighteenth century, a new concert series opened in Berlin: das Concert Spirituel. As the French name suggested, this was an adaptation of the Concert Spirituel of Paris, one of the most famous series in Europe. The concert in Berlin, founded by Frederick the Great’s last court composer, reflected the cosmopolitan musical taste of Frederick and his nephew (the future Frederick William II). In spite of its Francophile name, a significant portion of the series was dedicated to German composers, part of the trend toward constructing a new identity for German music. This paper uses the advent of a new concert series to raise broader questions about the processes that shaped the movement of cultural institutions from one context to another.

The adaptation of the Concert Spirituel for Berlin allows us to examine which institutional elements traveled and which remained resolutely local. The concerts were among a series of royal projects designed to position Berlin as a cosmopolitan city; adapting a Parisian concert series allowed the organizers to position their concerts as institutions of respectable luxury, as viewed in the German newspaper accounts of Parisian social life. Yet this cosmopolitan concert was founded paradoxically at the same time that Berlin served as a focal point for the formation of a German artistic identity. Among the initiatives central to this project was creating an informed audience; thus, the Berlin Concert Spirituel pioneered the practice of printing essays on the music of each concert ahead of time.

The concert, as with so many other institutions of Enlightenment, had different functions and meanings in different national settings, even as it partook of common exempla and participated in a global information network.