Okay, I've only read I think 2 books on historic sheet music sales, it's a bit outside my zone, but we'll see how well I can do on this. The answer is probably not a lot of people at the start of the 19th century had access to sheet music from hot contemporary composers, but towards the end, maybe a fair amount more. This first part is based on my notes from a book called Quarter Notes and Bank Notes: The Economics of Music Composition in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries which was written by an economist and which I thought was bad in a lot of parts and his overall argument a bit shit (unabashed Whig history, and relying on a rather rough "feudalism" vs. "enlightenment" angle), but I thought ONE chapter, his analysis of the accounting books for one 19th c. German sheet music printing company, was really very good, so I will use it for here.

Art music (just a term of art in musicology for fancy music) generally gets more democratic in a country after Industrialization, when a larger proportion of the population has disposable income. Industrialization and its relationship to class mobilization and income distribution and standards of living is historically controversial of course, so this is rough, but the party line on Industrialization is good enough for our purposes today. So take a look at your European country of choice, find when it went through the Industrial Revolution, and after that period start looking for a decent amount of people (so more than 1-5% of the population, which was what it was before in the 17th - early 19th c.) to be able to maybe afford to consume fancy music.

So, sheet music. Gutenburg's movable type had a very modest effect on sheet music production, because music was so complicated with little thin lines and quarter notes and grace notes etc etc, compared to ABCDE. Only very simple music could be set with movable type. There was also a method of printing sheet music in multiple print runs, so say do each part of the music in one pass, 3-4 passes on the press for one sheet of music, big PITA. The primary manner of reproducing sheet music, prior to the 19th century, was copying it out by hand, by a copyist who would specialize in doing music. Often a musician supplementing his income. For many large works there was often only one complete score ever made, the composer's which he would play harpsichord off of at the performance, and then a single-instrument part for each of the musicians, all of them made by a copyist. For operas the score was usually the property of the opera house that commissioned it. This is also why so many operas are lost except for "favorite arias" which sometimes got printed, often squirreled away by singers, or made it into private collectors' hands while the opera score itself did not.

The other method was engraving plates, which had a high investment cost, but you could really crank out some sheet music after that. One standard plate did 2 sheets. So you had to anticipate selling a LOT of copies to consider making a plate for it. A cheap pewter plate could make around 2,000 prints before it wore out, a copper one could make more. The invention of lithography, which could be set up cheaper but make a smaller run of prints, around the turn of the century was a big thing for getting printing cheaper for smaller runs. Bigger runs still used engraving, which was more durable.

From the German printing house used in the analysis of the book I mentioned above (Gottfried Haertel), they used lithography for runs of 300-400 in 1814. So that gives you an idea of how many prints you needed to sell to make a profit at a small run in the early 19th century. Which is not a lot, music is not really mass-market yet.

Second book I've read is On the Publishing and Dissemination of Music, 1500-1850, which is a lovely book, and gives us one set of hard prices on sheet music. From a discount publisher in France in 1834, a "classic" work such as Mozart, Hayden, etc, i.e. something they could print and sell in bulk, cost 1 franc for 20 plates, or 1 sous per page. This is pretty affordable. But as this is a Hot Discount Music price, you might mark that up 50%-60% for everyday pricing. The book also mentions not to take the list price on sheet music too seriously because people would negotiate in the shops over that!

Around the end of the 19th c. something called "reduced" versions of classics would come out, which would be simplified versions of opera arias and such for the home musician. Now we're getting into some real access to art music, but if "reduced" is the same sort of access, I'll leave that up to you. These home reductions actually had a decently long life and only went out of fashion in the 1940s. That's getting more into Tin Pan Alley era though, out of your time zone.

Not my most satisfactory answer I'm afraid, but it's a tricky question! /u/erus I believe knows a lot about the history of home piano playing and sheet music, so I'll tag him.

This is not a simple question. First, many if not most of the 18th century composers that are still famous today- Handel, Haydn, Couperin, Rameau, Scarlatti- worked for the rich or the noble/rich. Some others would write for the theatre- like Thomas Arne- and some would teach and publish and sometimes do public concerts, like Vivaldi. But it was the 19th century that saw the burgeoning of big concert pieces and grand operas, attended by many- notably the expanding urban bourgeois, to the extent that not only did orchestras become bigger, but the instruments within them changed to become wider-range and louder, or were dropped if they couldn't, and composers would write for bigger and bigger ensembles. So, yes, you could say that, compared to the 18th century, the 19th century would certainly bring big public concerts and a broader variety of people going to them.

But there was still an enormous market for sheet music, because people would still often be making most music for themselves . As you seem to notice, something big like Beethoven's 5th Symphony could not be performed in a place that couldn't support a full-sized Romantic orchestra. But his piano sonatas could, and were. The harder question to answer is how much of each would you expect- were there more villagers listening to local players do his string quartets than there were urbanites listening to his symphonies? That I do not know. There's also the matter of fame, and accessibility: Clementi piano sonatas would have been quite common, as he really created the first good piano method, but he's almost unknown to most listeners now- his stuff gets little airplay (which is a damn shame, as lots of it is worth hearing: you'd think that classical stations would give poor Muzio a bit of time now and then, instead of handing us the daily dose of Emperor Concerto). Liszt is much more famous now, but his work was considered quite daring, and individual, so it's not likely nearly as many village pianists would be playing his works as Clementi's.

This is out of my comfort zone, I am not into the social aspects of music.

Was the music by the famous 19th century composers enjoyed by all classes of society during their time, or just by the rich elites?

Poor people had some form of contact with this music. I mean, there would have been no way to have SO MANY PEOPLE at the funerals of Beethoven and Chopin without people having some sort of contact with their music. However, that doesn't mean they would listen to this music all the time.

Brass bands would play in public events, they some times arranged fancy music and played it.

did people buy the sheet music and play it at home in the family, in the local pub, or at village fairs?

Sheet music production and sales increased during the 19th century, but that doesn't mean people were playing this kind of music OR that it was mostly poor people buying said sheet music.

Pianos were not exactly common for poor people. They were not produced in huge numbers until the late 19th century (the peak was a few years before WWI), they were not cheap and they required maintenance. They were not an option for the lower classes, and the piano was very important for musical life in the 19th century.

Sheet music is useless if you don't know what to do with it. There were plenty of books that try to teach people how to read music (from before, during, and after the 19th century), but being able to figure out the general idea of what notes are in a score doesn't mean you can actually play it.

Some works by the famous 19th century composers are pretty damn difficult to play, and in general, their music is tricky. You need to work A LOT to be able to play that, it takes a lot of time (without competent instruction it would take a hell of a lot more, in most cases). If you are working soooo much on something, it's something you will probably want to use frequently. Poor people didn't have the means to allocate resources for a lot of that kind of thing. That doesn't mean they would not have musical instruments at all, or that poor people just wouldn't be capable of playing.

For the middle and upper classes, music was very important. Well doing people paid good money to have their children taught how to play or sing. I understand the daughters of well doing families pretty much HAD to learn how to play the piano and sing. So, would most middle class people be able to tackle this repertoire? I think they would be in a way better position to try, and some were pretty good musicians, but there are accounts of how terribly bad was the musical instruction in some cases, and how poor the results were considered in general. It's not the same thing to kind of play something close to a Chopin waltz, and play Chopin properly (that's why people used to pay to listen to concert musicians).

Player pianos became VERY VERY popular in the early 20th century for a reason, it REALLY made things much easier for most people.

A lot of "parlour music" was sold. What's that? Music that was common in the "parlours" of middle-class homes. Lots of songs, waltzes, polkas... Lots and lots of sheet music was sold for this kind of music. It is in general much more manageable to play/sing that music than the works of the famous composers.

Some examples of parlour music:

• Kathleen Mavourneen

• Star of love

• Sobre las olas

The classical composers were some times "pretty out there" in terms of musical taste, not all people were into that. Many famous composers from that time went for "absolute music." That is, music that is not meant to be danced, music that has no lyrics, music that is not meant for a special occasion, music that is not about anything.

You would probably be interested in checking at least the first chapter of Richard Middleton's Studying Popular Music.