The rage for music – concert life in eighteenth century London
Around 1790 London was in the grip of an unprecedented fervour for musical entertainment, ritually described as the current ‘rage for music’. The number and variety of musical entertainments, the publicity they attracted and the extent of public enthusiasm were prodigious. Although music continued to play a major role in the theatre (at the Italian Opera and the two main playhouses), the phrase was primarily applied to concert life. Often it was used defensively against imaginary foreign taunts: ‘The present rage is music. The Professional Concert, the [Concert of] Ancient Music, the Oratorios in Tottenham Court Road, and Salomon’s Concerts – Four such meetings cannot be paralleled in any part of Europe.’ The fashionable vogue was frequently satirised. For Vauxhall Gardens in 1788 James Hook set the following verse in his comic dialogue The Musical Courtship:
All the Modish World appear
Fond of nothing Else my dear.
Folks of Fashion eager seek
Sixteen Concerts in a Week.
In reality the craze was not limited to the upper reaches of society. As one journalist put it, ‘the present encreasing rage for Musick, is a contradiction of the character given by Foreigners of John Bull ... There are concerts in every part of the town, and the lower sort of people have their musical clubs, to which they nightly resort.’ A letter sent to a German magazine mocked London’s universal ‘epidemic of Melomania’, noting that concerts were so popular at all levels of society that the nation itself was in danger of collapse. Newspapers before each season contain endless speculation about new performers and forthcoming repertoire. Often they published a scheme of regular musical events for the new season, and even weekly updates.
Even if the press coverage was partly whipped up by concert managers, London concert life was undoubtedly going through one of its most brilliant and vital phases. Foreign visitors, perhaps expecting a ‘Land ohne Musik’, were constantly surprised by the important role played by music in London’s social life. Memoirs and letters bear witness to the intense interest that concerts attracted, as in the graphic reaction of Miss Iremonger to Salomon’s concerts of 1791:
The Reviewers remark that ‘At the Concerts in Hanover Square, where [Haydn] has presided, his presence seems to have awakened such a degree of enthusiasm in the audience as almost amounts to frenzy!’ You have my thanks for procuring me the opportunity, which I did not lose, of being one of the Infected.
London now supported a well-established season of public concerts, organised on more-or-less commercial lines with fully professional performers. Such events occupied a central place in the social calendar. Yet both the widespread enthusiasm and the modes of concert Organisation were comparatively new phenomena, as a glimpse at London music in 1690 and in 1740 will illustrate.
London played a pioneering role in the development of the concert. Indeed Europe’s first major public concerts were those organised in 1672 by John Banister at his Whitefriars music-school, an initiative quickly followed up by others at the York Buildings room and at the Vendu in Charles Street. From 1678 to 1714 Thomas Britton, the ‘musical small-coal man’, put on his celebrated concerts in a loft above his Clerkenwell shop; despite the eccentric venue and low price (rising to only 10/- a year), Britton’s concerts were patronised by a surprisingly high-class clientele. Nevertheless a glance at the London newspapers for 1690 reveals as yet only a handful of public-concert advertisements. Though attended by the quality, concerts at the York Buildings room had an informal, even haphazard nature, reminiscent more of a house music-party:
Here was consorts, fuges, solos, lutes, Hautbois, trumpets, kettledrums, and what Not but all disjoynted and incoherent for while ye masters were shuffling out & in of places to take their parts there was a totall cessation, and None knew what would come next; all this was utterly against the true Model of an entertainment, which [for] want of unity is allway spoiled.
Fifty years later music played a much greater role in the life of the town. Italian opera had achieved a certain security, and musical productions were heard at the English playhouses of Covent Garden and Drury Lane. London’s concert life had also grown in extent and organisation. A major subscription series was offered at Hickford’s Room in Brewer Street, London’s foremost concert venue: twenty concerts took place from January to May for a subscription of 6 guineas (single tickets at 5/-). The individually advertised programmes featured large-scale vocal works by John Christopher Smith and included solos by London’s premier violinist, Michael Christian Festing. Meanwhile, at Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre, Handel promoted an oratorio season, as he had done in most years since 1733; he himself contributed an organ concerto each night. The performance on 28 March was devoted to the ‘Fund established for the Support of Decayed Musicians and their Families’, administered by the Society of Musicians. Some half-dozen other benefit concerts were also advertised, either oratorios or concerts ‘of Vocal and Instrumental Musick’. During the summer high-quality instrumental music was on offer nightly at Vauxhall, Marylebone and Cuper’s Gardens.
In addition to these fully publicised concerts, mostly in the West End, the City supported three well-established musical societies, whose meetings were not advertised. The Academy of Ancient Music met fortnightly at the Crown and Anchor Tavern. Founded in 1726 as the Academy of Vocal Musick, the society’s original purpose was for members of the choral foundations to sing older polyphonic music, but it soon expanded in membership and repertoire, with Handel oratorios taking their place alongside motets and madrigals. The two other societies, also founded in the 1720s, met at the Swan Tavern in Cornhill and at the Castle Tavern in Paternoster Row. But like the Academy of Ancient Music, these were essentially gentlemen’s clubs, designed for the wealthier bourgeois of the City (according to Hawkins, the Swan concerts were set up by ‘a great number of merchants and opulent citizens’).’ Regulations published by the Castle Society in 1751 reveal that it was run as a non-profit-making exercise by an elected committee; strict rules were applied and fines levied for infringements. Membership was available to both performers and auditors, but the performers retained clear control over the proceedings, with the right to fix the repertoire and nominate new members. Hawkins mentions that aspiring ‘young persons of professions and trades’ attended, but certain categories were statutorily excluded: vintners, victuallers, keepers of coffee-houses, tailors, peruke-makers and barbers, as well as journeymen and apprentices. Two important features of such organisations set them apart from public concerts in the modern sense. First, the performers were drawn from the membership, apart from some professional stiffening (in the 1740s John Stanley ‘despotically reigned’ at both the Castle and the Swan).’ And, second, ladies were not allowed to subscribe, though ladies’ tickets might be made available to members on a limited basis.
Looking back later, Charles Burney summed up London’s concert life in the 1740s as follows:
The only subscription concert at the west end of the town at this time, was at Hickford’s room or dancing-school, in Brewers-street; and in the city, the Swan and Castle concerts, at which the best performers of the Italian opera were generally employed, as well as the favourite English singers.
Concerts had begun to be promoted on a more regular basis and with a clearer sense of programme-planning. The foundations had been laid for later expansion. But several of the principal institutions were City mens’ clubs designed for amateur performance. The series at Hickford’s Room in the Wes t End was a foretaste of what was to come, but after a similar venture the following year the idea was abandoned, indicating that the subscription series was far from an essential feature of the season. It is also noteworthy that concert programmes of 1740 were typically based around larger vocal works, with only the briefest mention of any instrumental items.
By 1790 London’s musical life had been transformed. The ‘rage for music’ was at its height, and both the number and the variety of musical entertainments far outstrip those of 1740. Out of all this varied musical activity, public interest in music outside the theatre was largely focussed on the fashionable West End subscription concerts: ‘THE PANTHEON, it is said, means to have a vigorous conflict with the PROFESSIONAL CONCERT, and to try which will be most successful in gaining the patronage of the higher circles.’ These organisations were quite different from the men’s clubs that Burney identified as at the centre of London’s concert life in the 1740s. Both were run as essentially commercial exercises, designed to make profits for the organisers – the Pantheon share-holders on the one hand, the orchestral musicians themselves on the other.
Fully professional orchestras put on programmes based around major symphonic works, and a high public profile was maintained by regular advertisements and copious reviews in the daily press. Attendance was open to any who could afford the 5 guinea subscription, including ladies; the Professional Concert attracted its maximum of 500 subscribers, enabling them to hire singers of international reputation. Thus over the previous half century London musicians had succeeded in creating a market for expensive and high-budget concerts, to which they attempted to lure the public with ever-changing repertoire and personalities. Only two features prevent such major subscription concerts from being regarded as pure unfettered enterprise. First, there were several ways of engineering a suitably select audience; and second, influential patrons such as the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Cumberland played a more-or-less direct part in the formation of artistic policy.
It should not be thought, therefore, that commercial modes of organisation (concerts open to a ticket-buying public, the advertising of enticing novelties) implied a bourgeois cultural leadership. Indeed, the extent of middle-class attendance at West End concerts remains a matter for debate, as will be seen. Furthermore, the City itself maintained a certain artistic independence. Only later did it begin to adapt its institutions in emulation of the West End. The Academy of Ancient Music, for example, had changed by 1790 from a gentlemen’s performing club with a missionary zeal for old music into a major subscription series; audiences were now in the hundreds, with ladies allowed to subscribe and entirely professional performers. But this was imitation, not innovation. Modern musical taste was undoubtedly formed by aristocratic patrons in the fashionable end of town. It is therefore dangerous to attempt to explain changes of style in terms of bourgeois taste, citing sensationalist effects, colourful orchestration, catchy folk-tunes and the like. Even elite audiences varied widely in their degree of musical sophistication, and the nobility was quite susceptible to so-called ‘bourgeois props’, as their reception of Haydn symphonies clearly showed.
A critical factor in the rise of public concerts during this period was not the ability to attract large bourgeois audiences but the establishment of subscription concerts within the fashionable week. The subscription was much more than a convenient method of financial planning, for the expense defined prestige and effected social screening. It was a concept that accorded closely with the ostentatious extravagance of the 1760s and 1770s. Already by 1774 the foremost concert series were well on the way towards a position of social pre-eminence as a high-society schedule published by The Public Advertiser on 4 February makes clear: ‘On Monday the Pantheon [Concert], Tuesday the Opera [Italian Opera at the King’s Theatre], Wednesday Bach and Abel’s Concert, Thursday Almack’s [Assembly], and Saturday the Opera again.’ In both Evelina (1778) and Cecilia (1782) Fanny Burney put subscription concerts high on the social agenda of her young heroines. Cecilia’s zealously fashionable hostess gave a clear idea of her own priorities in the 1782 season:
Lord, I have done nothing for you yet, and you never put me in mind. There’s the ancient music, and Abel’s concert; – as to the opera, we may have a box between us; but there’s the ladies concert we must try for; and there’s – O Lord, fifty other places we must think of!
Even Bach and Abel could scarcely rival the Italian Opera, but certainly by the 1780s the Professional and Pantheon Concerts ran the Opera a very close second (a position strengthened by legal disputes and by the burning down of the King’s Theatre in 1789). The early 1780s represents something of a watershed in this study. Interest in modern symphonic music was strongly fuelled by the arrival of Haydn’s symphonies, scarcely known in London until 1782. The public showed a voracious appetite for new works during the later 1780s, an enthusiasm fanned by Haydn’s arrival himself in 1791. It is no coincidence that the ‘rage for music’ coincided with the very decade up to his departure in 1795. Music came to unprecedented public prominence through widespread reporting in the daily press. The modern orchestral repertoire undoubtedly began to reach a much wider clientele, and the social range of audiences at subscription concerts may even have begun to broaden. The aristocracy responded to these developments in two quite different ways. The first was, paradoxically, to withdraw from the public concert life they had helped to create, in favour of their own select private soirees. Some of these were organised on the grandest scale, with full professional orchestras and top soloists. The second departure was still more radical, involving the creation of a new aristocratic musical culture, as William Weber has shown.
In 1776 the Concert of Ancient Music was founded as a serious-minded alternative to modern concerts, with the declared aim of perpetuating musical ‘classics’ of earlier eras. The resurrection of older music was not in itself new: its study led to the well-known histories of Hawkins and Burney, while the Academy of Ancient Music, the Madrigal Society and the Catch Club were already reviving Renaissance vocal music. But the Concert of Ancient Music had a new function. It contributed to the current redefinition of the aristocracy as responsible guardians of the nation, in a potent statement of artistic leadership. The favoured composer was Handel, and his supposed centenary in 1784 provided an excuse for an elaborate Commemoration on a massive scale, which gave public expression to this leadership. The support of the King, an enthusiast for Handel’s music and a consistent opponent of the modern repertoire, added a special cachet. Indeed in the mid 1780s the ancient movement represented a kind of artistic stability, comparable to the establishment of Pitt’s government after years of political turmoil; it also accorded with a general social trend towards simplicity of manners and away from the frivolous extravagance widely associated with the upper classes. Thus it was by no means a disadvantage to the instigators that the Commemoration sparked off a popular bout of Handel-mania which contributed as much to the ‘rage for music’ as Haydn’s symphonies over the next decade.
For the musician, London’s musical life was dominated by two focal points: the theatres on the one hand, modern and ancient concert organisations on the other. In many ways concerts were not so much an end in themselves as a key to further advancement. The series was only the public face of a complex commercial web in which many interests interlocked. The leading performers usually took an annual benefit concert, at which profits could be so considerable that benefit terms often formed part of a contract. The same performers were in constant demand for the private concerts of the elite, and less prestigious artists sometimes advertised their availability to play at private houses on demand. There was also a strong relationship between concerts and teaching. Some musicians even regarded attracting students as the prime function of public concerts, while conversely scholars themselves formed audiences: the appeal to well-born singing pupils was said to account for the unexpected success of the Vocal Concert in the 1790s. At a lesser level, music-teachers occasionally advertised a subscription concert as part of a combined package. Thus in 1780 the proprietor of a music-school in High Holborn, with several ‘Eminent Professors, Foreigners’, offered lessons at 1 guinea per month, with (for an extra half a guinea) a private concert every week for pupils and friends. Another major commercial connection involved music-publishing. Typically manuscript music obtained by an impresario would be sold at the end of the season to a publisher who could then advertise it ‘as performed at Mr. Salomon’s Concert’ or the like. Finally, concert promoters sometimes advertised new instruments: Charles Clagget’s benefit was unashamedly directed at showing off his inventions.
One consequence of these developments was a sharpening of the distinction between professional and amateur music-making. It is difficult to imagine Viotti in the 1790s leading the largely amateur orchestra of a music club City tavern, as Giardini did in the early 1750s. London’s concert life became more clearly polarised between professional concerts of the highest quality and purely amateur gentlemen’s clubs meeting ‘for their own practical amusement’. It is significant that this period also saw a proliferation of glee clubs, allowing gentlemen of some musical ability the opportunity to join in convivial musical ensembles, perhaps with some professional assistance. One of the most popular societies of the period, the bourgeois Anacreontic Society, actually juxtaposed the two modes – a first-class professional concert to begin the evening, with (after dinner) songs and glees in which members of the society joined. Thus the orchestral concert series, developed by the amateur City club and taken over by professionals for West End society, returned to the City in a new guise emulating aristocratic practice. At both ends of town an essentially passive concert culture had been created, based around professional performance of a new orchestral repertoire and of ancient vocal music. In the latter area a canon of unassailable masterworks was beginning to be recognised. The pattern of London’s concert life, if not the detail, was looking increasingly towards future developments.
This extract was taken from Concert Life in London from Mozart to Haydn (CUP, 1993, ISBN 0521 413532) by Simon McVeigh, and reproduced by kind permission of the author and Cambridge University Press.