page_title: Paris under Louis-Philippe
section_title: Music
hierarchical_section_title: Paris under Louis-Philippe / Culture, Arts and Amusement / Music
context_page_description: Paris during the reign of King Louis-Philippe was the city described in the novels of Honoré de Balzac and Victor Hugo. Its population increased from 785,000 in 1831 to 1,053,000 in 1848, as the city grew to the north and west, while the poorest neighborhoods in the center became even more crowded.
  The heart of the city, around the Île de la Cité, was a maze of narrow, winding streets and crumbling buildings from earlier centuries; it was picturesque, but dark, crowded, unhealthy and dangerous. A cholera outbreak in 1832 killed 20,000 people. Claude-Philibert de Rambuteau, prefect of the Seine for fifteen years under Louis-Philippe, made tentative efforts to improve the center of the city: he paved the quays of the Seine with stone paths and planted trees along the river. He built a new street to connect the Marais district with the markets and began construction of Les Halles, the famous central food market of Paris, finished by Napoleon III.
  Louis-Philippe lived in his old family residence, the Palais-Royal, until 1832, before moving to the Tuileries Palace.
context_section_description: Paris was the home of some of the world's most renowned musicians and composers during the July Monarchy. The most famous was Frédéric Chopin, who arrived in Paris from Poland in September 1831 at the age of twenty-one and never returned to his homeland after the Polish uprising against Russian rule in October 1831 was crushed. Chopin gave his first concert in Paris at the Salle Pleyel on 26 February 1832 and remained in the city for most of the next seventeen years, until his death in October 1849. He gave just 30 public performances during those years, preferring to give recitals in private salons instead. He earned his living mainly from commissions given by wealthy patrons, including the wife of James Mayer de Rothschild, the publication of his compositions, and from private piano lessons. Chopin lived at different times at 38 Rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin and at 5 Rue Tronchet. He had a ten-year relationship with the writer George Sand between 1837 and 1847. In 1842, they moved together to the Square d'Orléans, at 80 Rue Taitbout, where the relationship ended.
  Franz Liszt also lived in Paris during this period, composing music for the piano and giving concerts and music lessons. He lived at the Hôtel de France on the Rue La Fayette, not far from Chopin. The two men were friends, but Chopin did not appreciate the manner in which Liszt played variations on his music. The violinist Niccolò Paganini was a frequent visitor and performer in Paris. In 1836, he made an unfortunate investment in a Paris casino and went bankrupt. He was forced to sell his collection of violins to pay his debts.
  The French composer Hector Berlioz had come to Paris from Grenoble in 1821 to study medicine, which he abandoned for music in 1824, attending the Paris Conservatory in 1826; he won the Prix de Rome for his compositions in 1830. He was working on his most famous work, the Symphonie Fantastique, at the time of the July 1830 revolution. It had its premiere on 4 December 1830.
  Charles Gounod, born in Paris in 1818, was studying composition during the reign of Louis-Philippe, but had not yet written the opera Faust and his other best known works.
caption: Hector Berlioz in a portrait by Émile Signol (1832)
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