Music in Oviedo Nineteenth Century’s Rooms: The Salonier World in Clarín’s Town

Abstract

During the nineteenth century a social practice takes place, very estimated in European homes, a custom that expands in Spanish towns, Oviedo among them. A heritage from the eighteenth century, it’s a way of socializing that consists of periodical parties for friends or neighbours to have a good time together. What had started as free and unpretentious social gatherings in private homes loses progressively its naturalness, giving rise to a strict ceremony, suffocated by formal ways, most of all among upper classes. The journalistic sources give evidence of an intense salonier life in Oviedo, Clarin’s Vetusta, registering an important musical activity within the main families’ dwellings. Without losing its value as artistic expression, music takes on a significant role as an energizing element in those spaces, while a new repertory with genuine features is developing, all that we’ll try to reveal here.