Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain Read online

  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.

  He incidentally by his success contributed substantially to the collapse of the Professional Concert: there was not yet a sufficient-sized audience for music to sustain two orchestral groups in the same rooms in the same season. Yet there were enough paying customers that, for the previous decade, the newspapers had reviewed London concerts as a matter of course. At the same time the growing number of concerts, and the consequent competition for this same small audience, had created a need to advertise. For now there was sufficient musical activity that audiences were able to pick and choose: in the season, especially in April and May, there were two subscription concerts series, two oratorio seasons, and concerts at two pleasure gardens. Even when the pleasure gardens were closed, and it was not the oratorio season, by the end of the century London concert life was still active: the Public Advertiser for 7 January 1791 listed opera performances for the coming week on the Tuesday and Saturday; the Professional Concert at the Hanover Square Rooms on Monday; the Concert of Antient Music at its own Rooms in Tottenham Street on Wednesday; the Pantheon (see below) on Thursday, and a performance by Haydn, again at the Hanover Square Rooms, on Friday. There were in addition private subscription concerts on Sundays, when public performances were forbidden.16

  Concerts in general were seasonal: the winter saw the bulk of the performances in concert halls, while in the summer the professional musicians moved from the theatres and concert halls to the pleasure gardens. Businessmen and their families, rather than the aristocracy or the court, had rapidly become the main audience for music. Via their entrepreneurial skills, businessmen were also the prime movers of concert life. In 1749 George II wanted to stage a celebration to mark the

  Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, for which Handel agreed to write what became the Music for the Royal Fireworks. The royal household lacked the technical expertise to mount a display, however, and was forced to call on Jonathan Tyers, the lessee of Vauxhall Gardens, to provide the stands, the decorations and the material for the fireworks, as well as the equipment and staff needed for the event. He agreed on the condition that he could stage a preliminary rehearsal at Vauxhall, for which he charged admission. He later claimed that 12,000 people had attended, at 2s. 6d. a head. The actual event in Green Park was literally a damp squib, when rain prevented the fireworks from igniting, although one of the stagehands did manage to set a pavilion on fire.17 That was by the by. What it showed was that public entertainment, even in the name of the King, was to be found not via the court, but by courtesy of the business world.

  The most select place for public concerts was only nominally a pleasure garden, in that it was not outdoors at all. But the Pantheon was classed by its audience as similar in kind to Vauxhall and Marylebone Gardens. The Pantheon had been built by James Wyatt in 1772, modelled on the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, with additional Adam-style flourishes unaccountably overlooked by the Byzantines. It had been planned specifically as competition to the gardens, with the same programme of balls, masques, suppers and concerts as its outdoor competition. Fanny Burney’s Evelina attended a concert there, and ‘was extremely struck with the beauty of the building, which greatly surpassed whatever I could have expected or imagined. Yet, it has more the appearance of a chapel, than of a place of diversion; and, though I was quite charmed with the magnificence of the room, I felt that I could not be as gay and thoughtless there as at Ranelagh.’18 (Fanny Burney probably felt the need to mention the Pantheon as often as she did - it appeared in Cecilia too - as her father, Charles Burney, was a shareholder.)19* The tickets were the upper-class standard price of 6 guineas for twelve concerts. The building, so ingenious and original on its opening, burned down only twenty years later, and, although it shortly reopened, it was never as fashionable again.

  Much more accessible to the public were the concerts in the pleasure gardens themselves. Vauxhall had been staging concerts from the 1730s, and was swiftly joined by Marylebone Gardens, which in 1738 advertised concerts from six to ten every evening, with ‘Eighteen of the most celebrated Concerto’s, Ouvertures, and Airs’. Soon both had concerts six evenings a week in the season. (Ranelagh, more select, limited itself to three evenings.) Vauxhall particularly enjoyed galas presented for the birthdays of various members of the royal family, with specially commissioned music. Extraordinary events got their own musical accompaniment, such as the death of Frederick, Prince of Wales, which produced a solemn dirge, George III’s marriage, which was commemorated by Arne’s ‘Beauty and Virtue’, and George III’s escape from an attempted assassination in 1786, which was marked by a song by James Hook, Vauxhall’s music director. From 1752 all places of public entertainment needed a licence for concerts and other public entertainments, and Marylebone took the opportunity of this formalization of its music to enlarge its premises. Now it covered nearly 35,000 square metres. Thomas Arne, whose opera Henry and Emma was running at Covent Garden in 1750, became closely involved. Arias from his operas were sung at Marylebone that summer, and the following year his son, aged ten, appeared to sing ‘The Highland Lassie’ and ‘The Bonny Broom’, after which Arne’s overture to The Judgement of Paris was played, as was his new organ concerto, Handel’s overture to Samson and the Coronation Anthem - ‘Tickets 3s., and purchasable at Mr Arne’s House in Beaufort Buildings, Strand’.21

  Both Vauxhall and Marylebone made a point of performing patriotic songs about military and naval battles, such as a patriotic piece at Vauxhall in 1739, said to be by Handel, celebrating Admiral Vernon’s famous taking of Portobello in the West Indies from the Spanish, Francçois- Hippolyte Bartheéleémon’s Victory, marking the acquittal of Lord Keppel after a court martial in 1779, and Carl Stamitz’s chorus to mark Rodney’s relief of Gibraltar in 1780. After the French Revolution broke out there was further subject matter: songs like Stephen Storace’s ‘Captivity’, about Marie Antoinette, and Arne’s ‘Naval Ode’ entitled ‘When Britain’ (which included what is today entitled ‘Rule, Britannia’), were performed to great acclaim i
n 1794.22

  From 1756 the lessee of Marylebone Gardens, Stephen Storace, joined with his uncle, the Revd John Trusler, to produce a series of burlettas translated from Italian. (John Trusler was the son of Marylebone Gardens’ landlord; the younger Stephen Storace and his soprano sister, Nancy, were the grandchildren.) The Storace family connection shed great lustre on the gardens: Nancy joined the Emperor Josef II’s opera buffa company in Vienna, and premiered works by Salieri and Paisiello, as well as Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, in which she created the role of Susanna. She later returned to London, where she sang in the Italian Opera company in the Haymarket, and later at Drury Lane. (She was the highest paid singer at Drury Lane, earning 10 guineas per performance.) But by the summer of 1760, the Truslers and the Storaces had fallen out, and in 1760 the Public Advertiser ran a notice that

  Whereas the Master of Marylebone Gardens has thought proper to publish the following Paragraph:…

  This is to assure the Public that the books of the several Burlettas sold at the Door are the same Books that have been performed there, and those sold at the Bar are Copies pirated from me, which (contrary to Agreement) have been re-printed in order to deprive me of the Advantage which (by Contract) I was to have, I being the Author and Inventor of all the Burlettas there performed.

  STEPHEN STORACE23

  This was not the only quarrel over publication of words and music. The pleasure-garden songs were big business at the gardens themselves - and outside. In 1741 Thomas Arne brought a suit against two booksellers who were printing his songs from Comus and As You Like It. These continued to bring him in money for decades: in the 1750s, advertisements appeared for ‘New Musick. This Day is Published, VOCAL MELODY. BOOK IV. A favourite Collection of English Sngs [sic], sung at the Publick Gardens. Composed by Mr Arne.’24 Songs from the pleasure gardens appeared in book form, as sheet music, and in more general publications, and this became one of the easiest ways to get to know new music, without even attending the gardens. Over a single year, in 1750, the Gentleman’s Magazine published a dozen songs, including a Handel aria, an aria from Boyce’s The Chaplet, and ‘The Highland Laddie Written long since by Alan Ramsay, and now sung at Ranelagh and all the other gardens; often fondly encor’d, and sometimes ridiculously hiss’d’.25 As Marylebone Gardens was sliding inexorably towards closure, a ladies’ pocket diary for 1776 contained ‘Favourite New Songs sung at the Public Gardens’, together with a ‘Poetical Address to the Ladies’ and ‘Rates of Coachmen, Chairmen, &c., &c., Compiled at the Request of several Ladies of Quality’.26 The pleasure-garden songs had become ubiquitous. Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield joked that they are ‘all cast in the same mold: Colin meets Dolly, and they hold a dialogue together; he gives her a fairing to put in her hair, and she presents him with a nosegay; and then they go to church together, where they give good advice to young nymphs and swains to get married as fast as they can.’27

  Thomas Lowe took over the running of Marylebone Gardens in 1763, and Stephen Storace continued to be allied with him, while Thomas Arne remained the principal composer. Over £2,000 was taken in 1768 for concerts, but by the 1770s the concert schedule had become erratic and music was beginning to be crowded out by fireworks, lectures, magic-lantern shows and the like.28 Orchestral concerts and musical theatre in purpose-built halls and theatres had begun to take over from the gardens in this respect, but by the 1790s they too were suffering: poor harvests, the French wars, and the consequent lack of touring virtuosi from Europe all contributed to a drop in the number of concert performances that can be seen in the advertisements in the newspapers. In 1792 thirty benefit concerts were advertised for various artists; in 1798 there were only eleven.29* Another reason for the dip can be traced to the rising evangelical beliefs of many of the middle classes. Music with no religious overtones, music in public, began to appear as an undesirable thing for more and more of the population. And, just as these beliefs were becoming prevalent among society at large, two technological changes made it possible for many to give up public music-making, without giving up music itself. The first was the development of the piano; the second innovations in the printing of sheet music.

  In the middle of the eighteenth century, musical instruments were, naturally, played, but they were also objects that showed off the prosperity of a household. Many group portraits of family members in domestic settings (known as conversation pieces) revolved around new objects of consumption: some showed the family at tea, so that their new bone china could be displayed; others had women holding guitars, or standing by a harpsichord, not because they were musical, but because the instruments were expensive. In Nollekens’ painting The Conversation Piece (1740), the harpsichord was actually moved outside, where it was set in front of the majestic facçade of the house, both equal signifiers of the wealth of the family depicted with them.30

  The first pianos were made by a harpsichord-maker named Johannes Zumpe. Zumpe’s piano was in essence a box about 1.25 metres long, with a compact action and no escapement.† It was possibly a Zumpe piano that was played in 1766 at the first public performance on a piano in Britain, when, according to the playbill of Covent Garden, ‘At the end of Act I., Miss Brickler will sing a favourite song from “Judith”, accompanied by Mr Dibdin, on a new instrument, called Piano Forte.’31 It was a Zumpe on which Johann Christian Bach played the first pianoforte solo in a concert, during one of the Bach-Abel concerts two years later. He had paid £50 for his instrument, and from now on his keyboard music was published ‘for the harpsichord or pianoforte’. In 1773 the first set of six sonatas, Op. 1, by the keyboard virtuoso Muzio Clementi were also published in the same way: ‘for the harpsichord or pianoforte’; they became one of the foundations of the later piano literature.32

  Meanwhile, the young John Broadwood, a Scottish cabinet-maker, had been apprenticed to Zumpe’s old master, Burkat Shudi (a corruption of his Swiss-German name, Burkhardt Tschudi). In 1769 Broadwood married his master’s daughter, and in 1771 he was taken into partnership. As well as producing harpsichords, he began to develop the Zumpe pianoforte: he found a way to improve the resonance of the sound, and he created pedals to raise and lower the dampers. In 1773 he hit on the idea of the sustaining pedal, and later he added the soft pedal. In 1777 he filed for a patent for a new action, applying the word ‘grand’ to a piano for the first time; the result became known as the ‘English action’. He also worked on expanding the range of the piano: the long strings needed for the bass gave a weak sound, so he made a separate bridge for them, with greater tension, which meant that shorter, thicker strings could be used; then he built the treble half an octave higher. Soon he extended the bass, until in 1794 he had a six-octave keyboard. He promoted his new piano among the fashionable musicians: he sent one to Hummel and one to Dussek, who gave the first public concert on a six-octave piano, the new concert grand.33* Beethoven received one too, and immediately began to compose music that took advantage of the new range.

  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.)34

  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 fami
lies. 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.35 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.36 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 1d., or eighteen sheets for 1s. - a third of the price most music publishers were charging.37

  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.38