In 1790, the Austrian composer Joseph Haydn was miserable. “It really is sad always to be a slave,” he wrote to a friend. Despite having composed some of the greatest orchestral works yet heard, Haydn was not a free man. His employer, Prince Paul Anton Esterhazy, could dictate how the court musician dressed (a powdered pigtail and white stockings), what he ate (Haydn was partly paid in semolina, cabbages, beef and lard) and how his music was disseminated. He was not at liberty “to communicate...new compositions to anyone, nor to allow them to be copied, but to retain them wholly for the exclusive use of his Highness”. By 1790, Haydn had been working under these restrictive conditions for nearly 30 years. “I did not know if I was a Kapell-master or a Kapell-servant,” he complained. “I'm a poor creature!”

By the time he died in 1809, all this had changed. Haydn's name was lauded in Paris and London. In Vienna in 1808, he was carried into a gala performance of his masterwork, The Creation, in an armchair, like a monarch on a throne. When he died, even Napoleon paid his respects. The power of princes was waning; that of composers was rising. As Tim Blanning writes, “At the beginning of his career, Haydn became famous because he was the Kapellmeister for the Esterhazys; by the time he died, the Esterhazys were famous because their Kapellmeister was Haydn.”

Blanning argues that Haydn's story illustrates a much larger trend in history: “the triumph of music” in modern times as the most prestigious of the arts and as a force that could ultimately trump political power. In 1781, Mozart was sacked from the service of the archbishop of Salzburg “with a kick on my arse”. Half a century later, the super-rich Rossini, an infinitely less talented composer, had the chutzpah to inform George IV that he was one of the two greatest men in Europe (the other being Wellington). Another half-century on, Wagner could expect the rulers of Europe to pay homage to him in his own little fiefdom of Bayreuth. But even Rossini and Wagner, argues Blanning, could not equal the power of “Bono of U2”, who “now behaves like the world leader he has undoubtedly become”, travelling the globe “telling presidents and prime ministers what to do”. Or Brian May, who performed God Save the Queen on the roof of Buckingham Palace at the opening of the Jubilee concert in 2002, the wild curls of his hideous mullet in total contrast to Haydn's deferential pigtail.

How did music become so powerful? Blanning divides its onward march into five thematic chapters. First there is status: the transformation of musicians from humble vassals to swaggering god-men. Next comes purpose: music stopped being a way of glorifying kings and gods and became instead a sacred and “expressive” art for communicating human emotions. Third is “places and spaces”: Haydn's sudden fame and glory came about because his works started being performed in the vast new public concert halls of Europe, rather than in the stifled privacy of some Germanic prince's sitting room. Likewise, for Beatlemania to be as huge as it was, the Beatles needed the vastness of New York's Shea Stadium. Fourth is technology - from the advent of the piano to that of MTV. Finally, Blanning argues that “liberation” played a part: the ability of music to ally itself with progressive forces in history, from 19th-century nationalism to gay rights in the 21st century.

Blanning, professor of history at Cambridge, is a superlative historian of 18th- and 19th-century Europe, as readers of his last book, The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648-1815, will know. The best passages of The Triumph of Music are those covering the same period. Blanning gives us wonderful vignettes, such as the Jacobins cementing the French revolution with their “bloodthirsty” anthem the Marseillaise. “They sang it around the guillotine as the severed heads dropped into the basket, they even sang it as they went to the guillotine.”

With its simple overarching thesis, The Triumph of Music is never less than thought-provoking. But unfortunately it is not very convincing. Blanning is not helped by his thematic structure, which forces him to retread the same historical ground five times over, and leads to some narrative jerkiness and weird anomalies. We arrive at the iPod in chapter three before we get any account of the far more significant development of radio (in chapter four). Blanning himself seems to chafe at the structure, since on several occasions he says that “space does not permit every strand to be followed”, which leaves the reader feeling short-changed.

Those strands that Blanning does choose to pursue, particularly in 20th-century history, can appear random. He more or less ignores contemporary classical music, whose story has been told so well by Alex Ross in The Rest is Noise. Whereas his narrative of 18th-century composers is always informed by the surrounding political culture, his analysis of rock and pop is less critical. Eric Clapton, we are solemnly informed, has “quasidivine status”. Hi Five, “a brash Australian programme...televised every morning in the UK”, is described as “a Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk”. Only someone with no real interest in pop music would write like this.

More serious than these erratic displays of taste is the lack of comparative perspective. Blanning admits that “other branches of the creative arts also benefited” from the technological and social changes that benefited music, but he fails to prove his case that music benefited to a unique degree. When he tells us, in clichéd terms, that from the 1820s “Paganini blazed across the musical sky like a meteor”, it would be good to hear how Byron was faring in the literary sky at roughly the same time.

The “triumph” of music has been neither as “sustained” nor as straightforward as Blanning presents it. The fact that Rossini and Wagner were freed from the tyranny of princes did not mean that other musicians in the future, even successful ones, would be free to do their own thing. Rather wishfully, Blanning presents music as one of the key forces in securing black civil rights in America. But music was also a force that enslaved black musicians. Think of the young Michael Jackson, an artist of sublime talent, whose working conditions in the Motown factory must have been just as hard to endure as those facing Haydn at the court of Prince Esterhazy.

The Triumph of Music by Tim Blanning
Allen Lane £25 pp432

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