Salon Music in Nineteenth-Century Greece

This paper aims to give an overview of musical salons in Greece overthe course of the 19th century. Musical salons formed part of the gen-eral Westernizing and Europeanizing trend of Greek culture after thefoundation of the Greek state ‒ a trend that reflected the Greeks’ wish to dis-tantiate their identity from their Ottoman past. Most Greek salons of the19th century followed the fashion of the European salons of the period: theywere held by cosmopolitan elites; Italian opera excerpts and light dance musicwere the key repertoire; the piano functioned as a bourgeois status symbol;women enjoyed a certain prominence in them. However here we focus on the particularities of the Greek 19th century as well as on the aspects ofmusical hybridization that reflect the cultural amalgamation between Greeceand Europe that was taking place in salons.