Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain (53 page)

I
N
1904
A
G
ERMAN JOURNALIST
produced a polemic entitled ‘Das Land ohne Musik’ - ‘The Country without Music’, the country being Britain. While he was actually discussing the lack of indigenous composers, had he been discussing concert life in Britain for much of its history he might very well have had a point, because until the late seventeenth century there were simply no public concerts at all as we understand them, and little court-based music-making such as could be found in the palaces of many of Europe’s rulers and aristocracy. Instead, music was a side effect of theatre, or of sociability, of clubs and taverns.

In Britain, the earliest concert that charged for admission probably dates to 1672, when a man named John Banister ‘opened an obscure room in a publick house in White fryars; filled it with tables and seats, and made a side box with curtaines for the musick, 1 shilling a piece…Here came…much company to hear; and divers musicall curiositys were presented.’
¹
Soon after that Tom Britton, the ‘Musical Small Coal Man’, began to hold popular and successful concerts in a room above his coal store.
*
Not much is known of Britton’s concerts, although Handel may once have played there, and the harpsichordist J. C. Pepusch probably did: the British Library holds a copy of a ‘Sonata by Mr Pepusch, called Small coal’.
²
It is likely that the concerts were staged as part of a club gathering. The only other venues in which to hear music were at concerts performed by groups such as the Musical Society, who from 1683 had given an annual public concert at Stationers’ Hall, for which
an ode in praise of music was commissioned; these concerts ended in 1703, but not before Purcell had written St Cecilia’s Day pieces in 1683 and 1692, and Dryden had written two odes, ‘An Ode for St Cecilia’s Day’ in 1687, and ‘Alexander’s Feast’ in 1697. (Handel set both to music, in 1739 and 1687 respectively.)
*
There was also the Corporation of the Sons of the Clergy, which had since 1655 annually staged a St Cecilia’s Day concert (and continues to do so today), and the Foundling Hospital, which staged an annual performance of the
Messiah
from 1750. There were St Cecilia’s Day concerts in Norwich, Oxford, Salisbury, Winchester and Wells in the first part of the century; the Three Choirs Festival was set up in 1718 to raise money for the clergy, alternating (as it still does) between the cathedrals cities of Gloucester, Worcester and Hereford. Towns began to hold annual music festivals as well, and concerts were scheduled during assize and race weeks. By the second half of the century there were festivals of different sorts in Birmingham, Bristol, Norwich, and Winchester.
³

A music festival occurred once a year for two or three days. For those who wanted more, a club was the obvious answer, for men at least. As was usual, clubs met on fixed nights, in a tavern, an inn or some other place where refreshments could be served; the members played, then ate and drank, and then often sang as well, especially glees and catches. (Glees are for three or more unaccompanied voices, in two or more contrasted movements; catches, or rounds, are for three or more singers, all singing the same melody and words, with the second singer joining in with the first line as the first singer is beginning the second.) The Castle Society, at the Castle tavern, in Paternoster Row, ran what it considered to be a very exclusive music club, banning as it did ‘vintners, victuallers, keepers of coffee-houses, tailors, peruke makers, barbers, journeymen and apprentices’.
⁴

The more exclusive clubs were made up of groups of friends who played for their own pleasure either in their own houses or in a room taken in a tavern and closed to the general public. Advertisements inviting new members to apply for these groups appeared regularly in the newspapers in the 1750s and 1760s. One of the prime functions of any music club was to share the costs of sheet music, for in the 1760s a
Handel oratorio could cost as much as 2 guineas. For upper-class amateurs, sheet music could be obtained from London; for those with less money, a single copy was copied by hand as many times as necessary. Clubs grouped together to fund their purchase, just as they did for reading matter. Other purchases could similarly be subsidized in this way. From the beginning of the century there had been a sudden increase in primers and other instruction books for different instruments, to match the increase in the number of instrument-makers.
⁵
Dance music and songs were also published in general-interest magazines, which groups subscribed to.

Whatever the level of ability or social status, the members of all these clubs wanted to perform, wanted an audience. One of the earliest music clubs, the Society of Lovers of Music, in Salisbury, was giving St Cecilia Day concerts by 1700. The Anacreontic Society, founded in 1766 as a dining club, with singing afterwards, by the 1780s was giving fortnightly concerts ‘during the season’, and soon had audiences of 400 or more.
⁶
The grandest of the music clubs, the Concert of Antient Music, was set up in 1776, with the Earl of Sandwich at its head, and from the 1780s it had George III as a supporter. The club played only music that was at least a quarter of a century old, and it had the backing of clerics who appreciated its desire to promote music as something more than an evening’s entertainment: ‘Music is not an amusement of the careless or idle vulgar; the musician is somewhat more than a Mountebank or Rope-Dancer; he should preserve his dignity, he must not trifle and play tricks, he must not be gay, he must be serious.’
⁷
The seriousness of the club’s members, and their irreproachable social status, meant that the fact that they played at the Crown and Anchor tavern was immaterial. (By the 1790s they were ensconced in their own club rooms behind Oxford Street.)

The Concert of Antient Music gave very select public concerts - tickets were available to those who had personal acquaintance with a club member, and up to half the audience consisted of the aristocracy and gentry. But the audience for music was much wider than this. In 1784 the Concert of Antient Music outlined a celebration to mark the centenary of Handel’s birth, planning to give three concerts: two at Westminster Abbey - one a selection of sacred works, the second a complete performance of the
Messiah
- and a third at the Pantheon, of operatic highlights. Even the rehearsals were oversubscribed, and the Abbey concerts had to
be repeated by popular demand. The Royal Society of Musicians’ fund for ‘decayed musicians’, a charity Handel had been involved with from its inception, was the recipient of all the revenue raised during the centenary, amounting to more than £7,500.

Before this popular celebration, music had for the most part been something that was played either ceremoniously at a set time of year - odes to St Cecilia on St Cecilia’s Day, oratorios on the relevant religious festivals - or by the composer and his students in private groups, to be overtaken by new composers and new compositions as the old ones died or became unfashionable. One of the unexpected side effects of the Handel celebration was the acceleration of the creation of a formal canon: music was becoming a commodity, a package of culture to be acquired through sheet music, and concert-going.
⁸
Until the 1770s, concerts advertised in the newspapers usually stated only the name of the performer; from the 1770s an outline of the programme was given, with perhaps the name of the ‘director’ (conductor), or the patron of the evening. By the 1790s a complete programme was the norm, with songs given individually by title, instrumental pieces carefully described (‘the New Overture, as performed last Friday’), and the director and the performers named.
⁹
Audiences were no longer purchasing an evening of general musical entertainment, but an evening of
this
specific music, played by
that
particular group of performers.

This new market for music in all forms created a niche for the professional musician. Many clubs played as amateur groups among themselves, but needed support from professionals for their concerts. The growing number of professional musicians was startling: between 1675 and 1750 there were more Italian composers in London than in any other city in Europe apart from Vienna.
¹⁰
William Herschel, whom we met in Bath (p. 233), was one of the many German and Italian musicians who had made their way from the courts of Europe to the musical ‘free market’ of Britain. By the 1760s, over twenty towns in England alone had public concert series. Generally a church organist was the prime mover of the town’s concert life, and in many places the local military band filled in on those instruments that amateurs did not play, or did not play well enough.

For the difficulty of contemporary music was one of the reasons for the slow development of orchestral music. Composers were catering for the amateur market - in 1782 and 1783 Mozart produced piano quintets
of his piano concertos nos. 6, 12 and 13 for home music-making - but for the most part they were thinking of upper-class amateurs, with copious time for daily practice and money for instructors. In Britain the members of the middle classes did not have the time, even if they had the money, and therefore lacked the requisite skill. In 1799 one club had bought the music for six Mozart quartets, ‘but we found them so very difficult, that (except for [the one professional musician in the group]) none of us could do them anything like justice’.
¹¹
In the 1780s there was an amateur group that met on Fridays to play concerti grossi by Corelli, Geminiani and Handel among themselves, but when they gave monthly public concerts in the winter season they hired a leader from Portsmouth, and two horn-players from Sussex. In 1785 in Leicester a series of subscription concerts was set up for an orchestra consisting of a vicar, his son, seven amateurs, and ‘five professors of music’ who were paid 2
s.
6
d.
per performance.
¹²
When festivals increased in size after the success of the Handel Centennial, they also increased in professionalism. By 1799 the festival in Salisbury was hiring professional singers and musicians from London: Johann Christian Bach and the sopranos Nancy Storace (see below, p. 352) and Sarah Harrop all appeared. Harrop was paid £100 to sing in a performance of the
Messiah
and join in some glee-singing.
¹³
*

In London, opera had been established at the beginning of the century. Unlike in most of the European states, there was no court culture to support this very expensive art form. Many capitals in Europe were small, and when they were not, the court had deliberately been moved away - to Versailles in the case of Paris - in order to ensure that court life dominated everything. In London, however, court life was one of many possibilities for the upper classes. It did not even dominate the lives of the members of the aristocracy. The households of George I and his son never consisted of more than 1,500 people, who came and went from their estates in the country; Versailles in 1740 had 10,000 courtiers permanently based in the palace.
¹⁴
The first British performance of an Italian opera was not court-sponsored, but was a commercial venture, at the King’s Theatre, the Haymarket, in 1711. Only in 1719 was the Royal Academy of Music set up, under royal charter, to produce opera - the
closest the House of Hanover ever got to subsidizing the art. But, while it was a commercial undertaking, opera was still very much an upper-class concern, both in the management of the Academy and in the audience of the King’s Theatre (although not in the theatre management itself ). By 1728 there was already an English-language backlash among some audiences. Gay’s
The Beggar’s Opera
, which rejected the notion that ‘art’ had to be performed in a foreign language, and therefore remain inaccessible to the bulk of the population, was wildly popular. But it added to the possibilities for the viewing audience, it didn’t replace other forms. Nevertheless, opera remained largely the province of the aristocracy. A seat in the gallery at the King’s Theatre cost 10
s.
6
d.
, compared to Drury Lane’s 1 or 2
s.
For the first fifty nights of the season, boxes went solely to subscribers; for the next set of nights a second subscription was in operation, for those of a slightly lower social eminence. And even then only a few boxes were available for a single performance.
¹⁵

Orchestral concerts were becoming somewhat more accessible, if slowly. From the 1760s they were scheduled more regularly when Teresa Cornelys, a singer and professional society hostess, produced evenings of subscription concerts as well as assemblies at her house in Soho Square. (She also tried to produce semi-staged opera performances, but was charged with breaching the 1737 Licensing Act.) However, just as with the Concert of Antient Music, these concerts were limited to the aristocracy, with no tickets sold openly. In 1763-4 the concerts in Soho Square were supervised by Johann Christian Bach and Carl Friedrich Abel, from Dresden. From 1775 these two set up on their own, building, together with a partner, the Hanover Square Concert Rooms, which seated 900, and from which they ran subscription concerts open to any of the general public who could afford to buy tickets to a series which cost from 5 or 6 guineas for twelve concerts. After Bach’s death in 1782, Wilhelm Cramer created an orchestra known as the Professional Concert, which charged 6 guineas for twelve concerts and was run as a cooperative by the musicians, who hired their own soloists - a sort of professional club.

London was a magnet for musicians from Europe who at home were constrained to perform as servants in the household of the court, or of a great nobleman. Johann Peter Salomon (
c.
1745-1815), the son of a violinist at the court of the Elector of Cologne, fitted this profile exactly.
He had joined the Cologne court orchestra at thirteen (his fellow musicians had included Beethoven’s father and grandfather), before moving to Prussia to become music director to the court of Prince Heinrich. In 1780 he moved to London, where he became a popular concertmaster, performing also in Dublin, Oxford and Winchester. In the 1790s he twice enticed Haydn to London. Over fifty concerts of Haydn’s music, including twelve new symphonies written for the occasion (nos. 93- 104, the ‘London’ or ‘Salomon’ symphonies), were given in the Hanover Square Rooms, with the composer directing from the pianoforte. On his 1794 visit Haydn made £800 from his concerts alone, not including any income from the sale of his sheet music.