The Ideal World of Mrs. Widder's Soirée Musicale: Social Identity and Musical Life in Nineteenth-Century Ontario

The printed program of Mrs. Widder's 1844 Soiree Musicale, a formal concert at her lavish Toronto home, lists eleven musicians performing opera, parlour ballads, and glees. This information helped trace the networks which drew a working tenor and leisured Lady and Gentlemen Amatueurs into a brilliant program balancing aesthetics with social politics. The Widder program reveals how conventions linking class and gender with musical genre and local issues shaped the meaning of musical life both …