Publisher's Synopsis
This third volume of seven in the series covers the evolution of British music and the music industry over the first eighty years of the nineteenth century. At the end of the previous century musical life in London consisted of concerts (often funded by subscribers who paid a certain amount per season for a seat), vernacular and Italian opera, and, in summer, the pleasure gardens. Other major cities in the islands, such as Dublin and Edinburgh, offered a similar range of entertainments. Popular ballads and airs were sold as broadsheets, and could increasingly be heard in urban streets blaring out from barrel organs, a relatively new invention. Employment prospects for a musician were largely confined to the theatre, the church and, possibly, as a musician/tutor in a private household. Home music making was largely a pursuit of the wealthy.
Fast-forward eighty years and the musical landscape of the British Isles had changed completely. In 1880 concerts were still largely the preserve of the moneyed elites, but the emerging middle classes and the new generations of factory workers now had the music halls and the new kind of musical theatre provided by the likes of Gilbert and Sullivan. Performers could become household names, and musicians and jobbing composers could make a decent living. Music education had been restricted to private lessons and on-the-job-training in 1800, but in 1880 there were internationally known schools such as the Royal Academy of Music and the Royal College of Music in London. Music in the home, too, had changed radically. The new Victorian middle classes in their suburban villas inevitably owned a piano, and a piano required sheet music to play. Undemanding instrumental music, and sentimental and moralistic ballads were the order of the day. Many of the great European composers spent time in Britain in the eighteenth century, and this is something that continued during the nineteenth. Mendelssohn, Weber, Berlioz, Liszt and others all spent very profitable periods in the country. There had been no one at home of a comparable stature, if one discounts foreign-born, but adopted sons like Handel and Johann Christian Bach, since the days of Purcell. William Sterndale Bennett was the most important figure furing the first half of the century, not so much for his compositions, but for the high standards he brought to music teaching, and for the invigorating influence he had on concert life. His pupils included Sullivan and Hubert Parry, and these two, along with Charles Villiers Stanford and Alexander Mackenzie, were responsible to a large degree for the renaissance of musical life that began in the last quarter of the century.
