Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain

by Judith Flanders

  So once more there was a surge in sheet music, and a subsequent drop in price. In 1837 that score of the Messiah that had cost 2 guineas in the 1760s now sold for 1 guinea; by 1887 it was just 1s., and could be found in stationers’ shops as well as in specialist music stores. Alfred Novello, a music publisher and the producer of the shilling edition, pushed through another technological change, moving from engraved sheet music to new mechanized typesetting, which did not have the built-in obsolescence of engravings, the plates of which could make only a limited number of impressions. This new technology became essential for a sheet-music industry that was seeing enormous growth. Arthur Sullivan’s drawing-room ballad ‘The Lost Chord’ (1877) sold half a million copies in twenty-five years; singer and composer Michael Maybrick’s sea song ‘Nancy Lee’ sold over 100,000 copies in two years, and his ‘Holy City’ was still selling 50,000 copies a year in the 1890s.58

  Novello saw that new printing methods were cheaper and thus increased his profits. More than that, though, he saw that if new technology could be combined with the amateur music market there were fortunes to be made. In 1842 he published Singing for the Million, a tuition manual for amateur choirs. He then began to publish Mainzer’s Musical Times and Singing-Class Circular, a weekly music magazine (it later changed its name to the Musical Times) that reached out to the amateur rather than the professional. To teach the many millions of piano-owners and singers to play and sing their new songs, there were so many music teachers that, for the first time, they were separated out from the professional musicians. By 1900, in London, a directory listed 2,533 ‘orchestral instrumentalists’, but 4,823 ‘professors of the pianoforte, organ, singing, etc.’.59

  Professional musicians had been the beneficiaries, and also the driving force, of the piano mania that had overtaken Britain. No longer a mere adjunct to the amateur, the professional was now an autonomous performer in his (it tended, apart from singers, to be ‘his’) own right. Amateurs were relegated to their own homes, and rarely played in public as they had in the past. At the turn of the nineteenth century, an astonishing range of keyboard virtuosi had displayed their talents in London - Clementi, Dussek, Field, Hummel, Steibelt and Wölfl among them. But concert halls outside London also had an active concert life and visiting virtuosi: when Paganini toured in the 1830s, he performed in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Perth, Cheltenham, Chester, Leeds, Sheffield, Southampton, Yarmouth and York.60 This was part of a revival of concert life, after the trough of the 1790s and through to the end of the French wars. By the mid-1820s there was already a rise in the number of concerts performed: to over 100 in the 1826-7 season in London alone.

  There were more concerts, and the concerts were also more accessible to more of the population. The Philharmonia Society had been founded in 1813 as a counter to the ideas of the Concert of Antient Music and its like. It was established by a group of middle-class patrons - upper middle class, it is true, and prosperous, but no longer aristocracy, or even the gentry. Instead the founders, and the audiences, were solicitors, doctors, journalists, architects and the like, who wanted to take their families to concerts of contemporary music, performed by professionals.61 Even so, in the early part of the century concerts were still essentially a class-based activity, and tickets were limited both by price and by subscriptions. The upper-class subscription concerts, well into the 1830s, cost between 10s. 6d. and 1 guinea per ticket, if tickets were available on the open market at all; concerts for the middle classes cost between 5s. and 10s., while working-class concerts were between 1s. and 5s. This segregation by price was clear to those attending, and was seen by many as a desirable situation. A journalist from the magazine Musical World said that tickets for less than 10s. 6d. were to be recommended, to increase the numbers attending, but that tickets priced at less than 5s. were unthinkable: ‘The art must not be degraded…To play the finest music to an audience which has been admitted for a shilling apiece, is what I can never give my consent to.’62

  By the mid-1840s there had been an increase of over 300 per cent in the number of concerts given in London - a growth that far outstripped the growth of theatre and opera or musical theatre.63 Yet this surge came from exactly the same developments that changed so much else in the leisure world: increased leisure time; improved public transport with an equivalent decrease in its cost, which made it possible for audiences to travel from further afield; improved lighting and safer streets, which made an evening out seem less daunting; and increase in the number of magazines and newspapers that carried advertisements and reviews, and an equivalent reduction in their cover price. As with theatre, the extension of transport links worked in both directions. Audiences found it easier to travel to concerts, and musicians could travel more easily to towns that did not yet have the population to sustain their own orchestra or musical life. In the 1830s a sextet had had to hire two carriages to transport itself and its instruments; after the railways had arrived an entire opera company could perform in London, complete with sets and costumes, get on a train, and perform the next day in Manchester, or Bolton, or Glasgow. Not merely the trains, but Bradshaw’s timetable, the telegraph, ticket agents who arranged advance publicity - all these things made touring possible, and profitable.

  In 1865 J. H. Mapleson set up a series of touring companies for opera. In his first full year of business two of his companies toured a circuit of 70 towns in 60 days, performing 120 concerts, with, as a finale, joint performances of the two companies in Edinburgh and Glasgow. Mapleson was a pioneer, and others soon rushed in. By 1893 the field was so well established that the newly created Dramatic and Musical Directory listed four set rail itineraries that it recommended as suitable for touring theatre, concert and opera companies, taking in thirty towns that could be booked all together, in sequence, at a cost of less than £8 for the whole tour. Eighty-nine towns were listed that had at least one theatre, and the directory ranked them by size: Hull and Glasgow led the fourteen ‘first-class towns’; while Bournemouth and Torquay were fourth class. By 1900 there were 142 special Sunday trains in England and Wales that were scheduled specifically for the convenience of theatrical and musical touring companies: a company could now do a week in a town, finish on a Saturday night, travel on the Sunday, and be ready to open on Monday night in the next town.64

  The audiences for music were ready and waiting for them, increasing throughout the nineteenth century. Mme Tussaud had in 1833 imported the French custom of promenade concerts, where, as in the pleasure gardens, the audience listened to music while walking and taking refreshment. But it was with Louis Jullien that these promenade concerts became overwhelmingly popular, expanding ever further the audience for concert-going. The son of a French bandmaster, Jullien by 1845 was conducting at the Surrey Zoological Gardens, which had many of the features of the pleasure garden - fireworks, garden walks, music - together with the animals and conservatories. Jullien rapidly became known for his 1s. ‘monster’ concerts. At the first one an audience of 12,000 listened to extracts from Bellini’s I Puritani played on 20 cornets, 20 trumpets, 20 trombones, 20 ophicleides and 20 serpents,* with ‘God Save the Queen’ punctuated by cannonfire as a finale. In 1849 another concert had an orchestra made up of 400 musicians, supplemented by 3 military bands, 3 choirs and soloists. Despite his love of gigantism, it was not size alone that motivated Jullien. He was passionate about bringing the best of classical music to the masses. He scheduled all the Beethoven symphonies (with sound effects, it must be admitted: during the Pastoral Symphony peas were rattled in a tin to imitate hailstones), and Mozart and Mendelssohn could be heard regularly, between feeding time at the zoo at 5.30 and the fireworks display which began every evening at 9.30.65

  Other large concert halls were also supplying the demand for popular classical music: the St James’s Hall, which seated 2,000, opened in London in 1858, financed by two music publishers. Their series of Monday and Saturday Pops were held regularly over the next forty years. Other music publishers also saw concerts as a
shrewd investment: Boosey and Co. established a series of ballad concerts in 1867, while Novello, which had a large back-catalogue of ecclesiastical music, promoted oratorios, including the famous 1854 performance of the St Matthew Passion, which introduced Bach to many for the first time, perhaps even more than Mendelssohn’s celebrated championing of him had done in 1829.66 The Crystal Palace, newly relocated to the suburb of Sydenham, staged orchestral concerts from 1855 for nearly half a century. The original band of the Crystal Palace consisted almost entirely of brass and wind instruments, and played mostly popular tunes. August Manns, a German ex-military bandleader, took over and transformed it into a symphony orchestra, although for some time he had to hire better string players for the Saturday-afternoon classical concerts.

  Outside London, Liverpool’s Philharmonic Hall opened in 1849, and Manchester’s Free Trade Hall was not far behind, in 1856. Both these towns had large populations of German immigrants who were regular concert-goers.67 Manchester was a model of what could be achieved by a professional middle class eager to take part in a cultivated leisure industry. In 1848 Carl Halle, a German conductor and pianist who had fled the revolution in Paris, was performing as a soloist in London. A German calico-printer in Manchester wrote to him to suggest that, should he chose to come to Manchester, there was an audience ready and waiting. Halle (by now Frenchified for the English to Charles Hallé) arrived and conducted a single performance of the Gentlemen’s Concert Society orchestra. The Gentlemen’s Concert Society was a music club that had been running since the eighteenth century on the old model of amateurs bolstered by professionals for the tricky passages. The experience so appalled him that ‘I seriously thought of packing up and leaving…so that I might not have to endure a second of these wretched performances,’ he later wrote.68 He was, however, persuaded to stay by the music-hungry bourgeoisie, who told him they had invited him to Manchester specifically to improve standards. He agreed to stay on condition that he might weed out the poor players at will, and that the concerts would be opened to the general public. The burghers of Manchester were happy to accept his terms: they knew the audiences were there. In Hallé’s first year he also began a chamber music series, which had 67 subscribers; two years later there were more than 200.

  The orchestra’s - and Hallé’s - big opportunity came with the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857 (see pp. 407-9). It had been decided by the exhibition committee that daily concerts would add to the public’s appreciation of the pictures, and Hallé tendered for, and won, the job. Over the period of the exhibition, 1.5 million people listened to Hallé and his orchestra, many hearing symphonic music for the first time. Hallé used this success as a basis for enlarging his orchestra, and in 1858 he launched the Hallé Orchestral Concerts (making, in his first year, 2s. 6d. profit). He hired his musicians for four or five months of the year on permanent contracts, forbidding them to take work elsewhere during those months. It was the first symphony orchestra in Britain that did not have a constantly changing roster of musicians. In addition, Hallé encouraged local talent. Until now, although there had been many concerts in Manchester, the city had relied on London for many of its performers: in 1836 a music festival had hired forty-six musicians, including virtually all the soloists, from London, using just nineteen local musicians. By 1881, 70 per cent of Hallé’s musicians were resident, and only four came from London. Soon ‘Hallé trains’ were running every

  Thursday, to and from the suburbs, and from as far as Cheshire, to bring the orchestra’s regular audiences to weekly concerts.69 In 1891, in one month alone, there were eighteen concerts in Manchester, in five fortnightly series. Most involved popular classics, choral works and drawingroom songs, but the pianist Ignacy Paderewski and the violinist Eugeène Ysaÿe had both appeared onstage in the city that month.70 In 1896 the leader of the Hallé, Adolph Brodsky, and three other members of the orchestra founded the Brodsky Quartet.

  Liverpool was in a similar situation, although for lack of a Hallé it developed somewhat more slowly. It too had a semi-amateur group left over from the days of amateur music clubs: the Philharmonic Society. The Society gave public performances, with the gallery seats alone available for the general public - the rest belonged to the members of the clubs and their friends. Until 1909 the rules in force included:

  No Gentleman above twenty-one years of age residing or carrying on business in Liverpool or within ten miles thereof, and not being an Officer of the Army or Navy, or Minister of Religion, is admissible to the Boxes or Stalls at the Philharmonic Society’s concerts unless he be a Proprietor, or member of the family residing at the house of a Proprietor, or has his name upon the list of Gentlemen having the Entrée exhibited in the Corridors.71

  When Hallé first brought his chamber group to Liverpool, in the 1848-9 season, the audience numbered eleven - including the four reporters sent to cover the event.72 But Liverpool’s concert scene soon caught up with Manchester’s. Leeds too was developing quickly, staging nine concerts in one month in 1891.73

  In fact throughout Britain the number of professional musicians increased by a factor of seven between 1840 and 1930, from 7,000 to 50,000, while the population itself only doubled, from 27 million to 50 million.74 There were jobs for more than orchestral musicians, more than theatrical or even seaside musicians. Professional musicians were now needed by taverns and music halls, in ever-larger numbers. Before wholesale urbanization had taken place, pubs had simply been the front rooms or kitchens of private houses, but from the 1830s purpose-built pubs began to appear - as did the ‘gin palace’, the highly decorated serious drinking den. Within these pubs, new forms of musical entertainment quickly developed. Free and easies were communal amateur sing-songs involving all the regular customers. In the 1830s and 1840s these began

  to develop into ‘singing saloon’ concerts or ‘open harmonic meetings’, which were held at a specific time and in a space specially cleared by the publican. The old core group of the free and easy, which may originally have been a formal club, was still present, but now strangers could join in too. The token nod towards professionalism was that there was often a piano to aid the singing. Gradually, however, a shift could be perceived. The same people continued to attend, but the singing was supplemented by professional ‘room singers’. They were still mixed with the amateur singers who had always performed, and there were still group renditions of glees and catches, but the notion of a private entertainment organized around a group of people who knew each other was beginning to fade away.

  Some of the saloons even referred to themselves at this early stage as music halls: the Star Music Hall, in Bolton, had nightly musical shows from 1840. Thomas Youdan owned Youdan’s Royal Casino, which had nightly musical performances, as well as ‘Sacred Music on Sunday Evenings, with an Efficient Band’, and which ultimately became the Surrey Music Hall.75 But before that there were a number of saloon theatres which did not yet use the term music hall but were nonetheless music halls in prototype, like the Rodney in Birmingham. There were also many saloon theatres in the East End of London: the Eagle or Grecian Saloon in the City Road; the Union Saloon and the Albert Saloon both in Shoreditch; the Britannia Saloon, in Hoxton; the Bower Saloon in Lambeth; the Effingham Saloon, in Whitechapel. A few, like the Apollo Saloon in Marylebone, were geographically separate, but catered to similar working-class or lower-middle-class customers. The programmes at these saloons were a mixture of opera, drama, farce, songs, music and dance. From 1831 the Royal Albert Saloon and Standard Tavern and Tea Gardens, to give it its full title, had two small stages in an extension built beside the original pub building. An evening at the Royal Albert might include a concert of popular songs, a melodrama, a fire-eater, a ballet and a pantomime, complete with harlequinade, and all for 6d. - or 1s. to have a good seat and a drink included.76 The Eagle or Grecian Saloon, in the City Road, had developed out of the London tradition of working-class pleasure gardens. From 1832 it advertised a garden, an orchestra and dancing; inside th
e saloon there were concerts and vaudevilles every evening (with sacred music during Lent). By 1837 the Eagle had been remodelled, with a pit and boxes, and performed mixed programmes of concerts which in one evening might include a Weber overture, a Rossini aria and ‘It’s all very well, Mr Ferguson’, a comic song. This range, from opera to pantomime, continued, with productions of both The Barber of Seville and a burlesque called Nobody in Town.77*

  The Theatres Act of 1843 loosened the restrictions on spoken drama outside legitimate theatre, but in exchange set down that theatres could no longer serve alcohol. Many saloons had to decide what they were. A few, like the Britannia, chose to become theatres, but the bulk moved to what would shortly be known as music hall. Now many concert rooms were erected in what had previously been gardens, with professional singers engaged for ‘parlour concerts’, and sometimes a speciality act or two. Admission tickets were required, and a ‘chairman’, a vestige of the old club days, introduced the acts. In 1851 Charles Morton opened the Canterbury Arms tavern in Lambeth, staging these parlour concerts. In the following year he built out into the tavern’s skittle alley, and renamed the building the Canterbury Music Hall. This is generally accepted as the first purpose-built music hall. It seated 700, with an admission charge of 6d. and a refreshment stall inside; for a further 6d. seats could be obtained in the balcony, and for 1d. a pamphlet with the lyrics to the songs could be purchased.78 In 1860 Morton leased the Boar and Castle tavern in Oxford Street, and on its site built the Oxford Music Hall, ushering in the era of the grand music hall, with vast purpose-built spaces. In most cases, although the concert areas were far larger than the pubs to which they were nominally extensions, access was still through the pub, as though in homage to their origins. But once through the small opening the customers found themselves in a room of up to twenty-five metres long, with chandeliers, gilt decorations, mahogany bars, and a host of supper tables spread across the floor. Wilton’s, built in 1856, was a prime example of this type of hall.