The Concert Spirituel was one of the first public concert series in existence. The concerts began in Paris in 1725 and ended in 1790; later, concerts or series of concerts of the same name occurred in Paris, Vienna, London and elsewhere. The series was founded to provide entertainment during the Easter fortnight and on religious holidays when the other spectacles (the Paris Opera, Comédie-Française, and Comédie-Italienne) were closed. The programs featured a mixture of sacred choral works and virtuosic instrumental pieces, and for many years took place in a magnificently-decorated Salle des Cent Suisses (Hall of the Hundred Swiss Guards) in the Tuileries Palace. They started at six o’clock in the evening and were primarily attended by well-to-do bourgeois, the lower aristocracy, and foreign visitors. In 1784 the concerts were moved to the stage area of the Salle des Machines (an enormous former opera house in the Tuileries), and in 1790, when the royal family was confined in the Tuileries, they took place in a Paris theater.
Read more about Concert Spirituel: Original Series (1725-1790), The 19th Century, The 20th Century, Source, French Bibliography
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“... in the cities there are thousands of rolling stones like me. We are all alike; we have no ties, we know nobody, we own nothing. When one of us dies, they scarcely know where to bury him.... We have no house, no place, no people of our own. We live in the streets, in the parks, in the theatres. We sit in restaurants and concert halls and look about at the hundreds of our own kind and shudder.”
—Willa Cather (1873–1947)