Never mind the width, feel the quality, lamented the artists, as they watched the grubby hands of the masses soiling their sacred culture: "The musical fever which has gripped our age will be the ruin of art, for popularity is very close to vulgarity" was a characteristic complaint from a French periodical in 1846. Nor does this élitism seem so unreasonable when one discovers that at just this time at popular concerts the movements of a Beethoven symphony had to be sandwiched between sessions of dance-music; or that Beethoven's Septet was arranged by an Italian music-publisher for accordion and piano; or that sacred music was rewritten for the dance hall (the "Stabat Mater Quadrilles", for example); or that, at the Promenade Concerts at the Royal Adelaide Gallery in the Strand, selections from the latest Meyerbeer opera were accompanied by "the real Scotch Quadrilles, introducing the Highland pipes ... followed by performances of the Infant Thalia, Experiments with the Colossal Burning Lens and the new Oxyhydrogen Microscope, Popular Lectures, and The Laughing Gas ever Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday evenings".

---T. C. W. Blanning, "The Commercialization and Sacralization of European Culture in the Nineteenth Century", in The Oxford Illustrated History of Modern Europe