Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain (55 page)

Other firms began to move in on the territory Broadwood looked to be conquering. Longman and Broderip were music publishers who by the 1780s were making both harpsichords and technologically advanced pianos. In 1789 they advertised a new action, which ‘can never fail in the operation…Soon as the Hammer strikes the String it immediately falls back; whereas in other Instruments, the Hammer dances on the jack, and occasions jarring noise in the Tone.’ They also produced

‘portable’ grands, and small pianos that ‘could be conveyed, and even played on in a coach’. (This was not an advertising fantasy. When in 1784 Dr Johnson’s friend Mrs Thrale married the music-master Gabriel Piozzi and went abroad, they travelled in a coach which had a fitted portable pianoforte, and Mrs Thrale reported that Piozzi played it regularly.)
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Home music was becoming more popular than ever before. No longer was it just the man at his club, or the enthusiastic amateur, who played: now women were also learning, as it was seen as a new domestic skill - they could accompany others and amuse their families. Sheet music was now also aimed at the growing army of amateurs, and many publishers began to produce music to sell in monthly instalments, by subscription. This was particularly successful for music from current shows, or for the newest dance tunes.
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Much of the expansion in the market came from a decrease in the price of the music, which had been made possible by a technological development in the way music was printed. Until this time, music had been printed by punching pewter plates, rather than using movable type. The plates produced only about 2,000 impressions before they had to be renewed.
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In 1768 Henry Fougt filed to patent a system for printing music from type. Now sheets of
music could be set as easily as a book, and Fougt began to sell singlesheet ballads for 1
d.
, or eighteen sheets for 1
s.
- a third of the price most music publishers were charging.
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Then came another innovation: lithography was first invented in 1798, and, although it did not become popular immediately for books, the possibilities for music printing were grasped at once. To produce a lithographic image, a drawing was made on a stone with ‘fat ink’, which adhered to the stone. Water was then poured over the stone; it was absorbed by the blank areas, but rejected by those that had been inked. A roller with printing ink was run over the stone, and the dry area - the drawing - trapped the ink. A sheet of paper was then placed on the stone and both were put in a press; the printer’s ink transferred itself to the paper, while the ‘fat ink’ remained behind. Music printing, even with Fougt’s improvements, had been a slow and expensive business. Now music could be quickly and cheaply reproduced as a lithograph, which was either sold in this form or used as a basis for an engraving, which was then sold as a more elegant (and expensive) version.
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The amount of sheet music published kept rising: in 1766 the Scottish music publisher Bremner listed 120 works in his catalogue; in 1773 Weicker had 500; Longman and Broderip’s music catalogue of 1789 had 1,664 separate pieces of music for sale; and in 1824 Boosey’s had 280 pages listing 10,000 foreign publications alone; D’Almaine and Co. claimed in 1838 to have 200,000 engraved plates in stock. To return to the end of the century, at that time Longman and Broderip’s catalogue had 565 pieces for the piano, 333 for the voice with harpsichord, and 90 pieces of dance music to be played on any keyboard instrument. Of the complete listing, 60 per cent were for the keyboard, and 300 of these pieces were listed as ‘sonatas or lessons’. The range was tremendous. There were works by (among others) J. C. Bach, Boccherini, Cherubini, Clementi, Corelli, Giordani, Haydn, Kozeluch, Mozart, Pergolesi, Pleyel, Scarlatti, Schroeter and more. These were sold in sets at 7
s.
6
d.
the set or 10
s.
6
d.
for a bound volume. They could also be purchased as single sonatas or lessons for 1 or 2
s.
each. Then ‘Single Italian Songs’, that is, arias, were available: extracts from
Iffigenia
,
Alessandro nel Indie
,
Alceste
and
Armida
, or from light operas like
La Cosa Rara
or
Il Contadino in Corte.
Overtures could also be bought on their own, and while some were from Italian opera, for the most part it was musical comedies in English that were listed: Dibdin’s
The Blackamoor
, Samuel Arnold’s
Inkle
and Yarico
, William Shield’s
The Choleric Fathers
and
The Farmer.
These mostly cost 6
d.
or 1
s.
, while complete piano and vocal scores for the shows from which these pieces had been extracted were available at between 3
s.
to 10
s.
6
d.
The catalogue then listed ‘favourite airs with variations’, which had titles like ‘Black Joke’ (with variations by Clementi), ‘Jack’s Return from Dover’, ‘Sow’s Tail to Geordie’ and ‘Twiggle and a Friz’. These were very likely pleasure-garden songs. Then there were traditional airs: ‘Allan a Roon’, ‘Auld Robin Gray’, ‘Highland Laddie’ and ‘Over the Muir among the Heather’, many of which were also performed in the pleasure gardens.
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These could be bought in a variety of formats: as vocal scores for male or female voices, or arranged for different instruments or different combinations of instruments.

As in all new markets, many schemes were advertised and promoted. James Harrison, a music publisher, saw, as Wedgwood had seen, that the middle classes, if they were charged less, would actually return a larger profit to the entrepreneur. Handel’s works had previously been published by subscription, at 2 guineas. Harrison produced a vocal score of the
Messiah
for just 7
s.
- a sixth of the price. He also began to publish the
New Musical Magazine
, which provided sheet music for oratorios, operas and other vocal music adapted to be sung at home. His new
Piano-Forte Magazine
began to appear in 1797, at 2
s.
6
d.
weekly. It survived only until 1802, and perhaps some of Harrison’s marketing schemes were to blame. An advertisement in
The Times
promoted the
Piano-Forte Magazine
by saying that each issue would contain a promissory note signed by Harrison. When 250 notes had been collected, they could be exchanged for ‘a Brilliant and elegant Pianoforte, far superior to many instruments sold for 25 guineas each’.
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The magazine went under before anyone could have saved up for a piano, but the scheme made no sense anyway. To get a piano, readers needed to purchase nearly five years’ worth of sheet music first. If they already had a piano, they didn’t need a second one, and if they didn’t have a piano, what were they going to do with five years’ worth of sheet music in the meantime? Finally, over the period of the offer, £31 5
s.
would have to be spent buying the magazine - £5 more than the value of the ‘free’ piano.

Other music publishers were more pragmatic. With increasing numbers of amateur performers, publishers saw a market for popular music such as traditional folk songs, especially if they were arranged by famous composers, like the Scottish songs on p. 220. Music commemor
ating battles or marking public events had long been popular at the pleasure gardens. With the advent of the French wars, similar songs as well as piano solos and duets also became available as sheet music: compositions marking the battles of Jemappes, Neewinden, Marengo, Austerlitz, Jena, Leipzig and Waterloo were all published. Stephen Francis Rimbault, the organist of St Giles-in-the-Fields, wrote a fantasia entitled
The Battle of Navarino
, which gave guidance to the pianist (and audience): one section was a depiction of ‘Turkish and Egyptian ships blown up’, another ‘The Asia loses her Mizzen Mast’. Dussek composed
The Naval Battle and Total Destruction of the Dutch Fleet by Admiral Duncan, Oct. 11, 1797
, to mark the British victory at Camperdown; he also wrote
Le Combat naval
, which had no direct references to a specific fleet or country, and could therefore have a wide appeal, for the supporters of any side in any naval battle. Other pieces were opportune in different ways:
The Battle of Copenhagen…Dedicated to Lord Cathcart
was in fact a piece that had earlier been published as
La Bataille d’Austerlitz.
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By 1805 the music market was booming. Such was the call for sheet music that the composer and pianist Josef Wolfl wrote from London to his music publisher in Leipzig:

Since I have been here, my works have had astonishing sales and I already get sixty guineas for three sonatas; but along with all this I must write in a very easy, and sometimes a very vulgar style…in case it should occur to one of your critics to make fun of me on account of any of my things that have appeared here. You won’t believe how backward music still is here, and how one has to hold oneself back in order to bring forth such shallow compositions, which do a terrific business here.

The business
was
terrific. In 1750 there had been about a dozen music shops in London; in 1794 one directory alone listed thirty; by 1824 there were at least fifty.
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This amount of music publishing depended entirely on a large number of people who could play the piano in the first place, and thus it was that, as well as sheet music for the already proficient, from 1800 the range of books of piano tuition and exercises was growing rapidly. In 1798 the piano virtuoso Clementi took over the firm of Longman and Broderip, and three years later his
Introduction to the Art of Piano Playing
appeared, which contained a selection of ‘lessons’ by a variety of composers. This was followed in 1804 by J. B. Cramer’s book of forty-two
études. If Clementi’s publication was the culmination of one style of tuition book, Cramer’s was the introduction of the next. Earlier manuals had been compilations of pieces of more or less the same level of difficulty. Cramer’s études set out, for the first time, pieces that each contained a technical difficulty, or a series of technical difficulties, which had to be mastered and which then incorporated into the next étude in the series, on an ascending scale of difficulty. These études were so successful that in 1805 another publisher produced a similar
Study for the Piano-Forte, Containing 500 Exercises
, and in 1810 Cramer published a second set of forty-two. In 1817 Clementi returned with the first part of his great masterwork, the
Gradus ad Parnassum
, which, as well as distilling the many years of his own teaching, was also heavily influenced by his discussions with perhaps the best-known of all piano-exercise composers, Karl Czerny (a pupil of Beethoven and the teacher of Liszt).

The audience for these books, a market of amateur piano-players, was now more than large enough to support an industry: the development of the piano had made home performance a possibility for many. In the middle of the eighteenth century a harpsichord had cost between 35 and 50 guineas at the lower end of the price spectrum; a decorated, ornate instrument cost much more. Zumpe, in 1768, had charged J. C. Bach £50 for his primitive piano. By the end of the eighteenth century a grand piano was priced at 70 guineas, while an inexpensive, space-saving upright might cost only 20 guineas. The prices had continued to fall: in 1815 a large, decorated grand from Broadwood’s was £46, while the company’s square piano, with the new action, cost £18 3
s.
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It was large-scale production that enabled manufacturers to lower their prices. Burkat Shudi and his son had, in their sixty-four joint years of harpsichord-making, produced somewhat under 1,200 harpsichords, or fewer than nineteen a year, which appears to have been more or less the norm. In Vienna at the beginning of the nineteenth century one of the premier piano manufacturers was making about fifty pianos a year using the English innovations - the pedals, the extended keyboards and (later) the metal bracing. By contrast, John Broadwood had, by 1802, made 8,000 pianos in his twenty years of piano-production - or 400 a year, eight times the number of his Viennese rival. In the next twenty-two years, his company produced another 45,000, an average production of 2,045 a year, or over five a day: every four days, Broadwood replicated Shudi’s entire annual output.
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One of the greatest motivators to get pianos into the middle-class home was the arrival of the upright. Many had wanted a piano; many could even afford a piano; but they simply had no space for one. Then, in 1795, William Stodart, the younger brother of Robert Stodart, who had developed the English action and pedals together with Broadwood, took a grand piano, set it upright on a stand, and put it inside what was effectively a cupboard. Although Stodart’s upright saved space, it was not yet an item for the average home - his instruments measured about 2.6 metres high. But even at this size, when Broadwood’s began to produce them it sold more of these than it did grand pianos: the market for a smaller piano was already making itself felt. Gradually these vast uprights, or ‘cabinet’ pianos, were reduced to a height of ‘only’ 1.8 metres. The hammers of a grand fall back through gravity, so, once they were set side-on in an upright, a mechanism was needed to replicate what had previously occurred naturally. In 1802 experiments were made with the strings, and it was found possible to stretch them obliquely, which further reduced the height of the entire structure.
*
This smaller instrument became known as a cottage piano, and it was one of the most popular domestic pianos throughout the century.
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Further improvements were mostly made for sound rather than space reasons - by the 1820s Broadwood’s was using iron resistance bars against the soundboard, which allowed the hammer heads to strike the strings more heavily, giving a better sound, and one that made possible the development of the new, Romantic style of playing.