The Crystal Palace Saturday Concerts, 1865–1879: a Case Study of the Nineteenth-Century Programme Note
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The Crystal Palace Saturday Concerts, 1865–1879: A Case Study of the Nineteenth-Century Programme Note Bruno Benjamin Bower Awarding Institution: Royal College of Music PhD January 2016 Abstract In recent decades, historical concert programmes have emerged as a fascinating resource for cultural study. As yet, however, little detailed work has been done on the programme notes that these booklets contained. This thesis concentrates on the notes written for the Crystal Palace Saturday Concerts between 1865 and 1879. The series held an important place in London concert life during this period, and featured a number of influential authors in the programmes, such as George Grove, August Manns, James William Davison, Edward Dannreuther, and Ebenezer Prout. Grove in particular made use of his notes as part of entries in the first edition of the Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Close critical readings of the Saturday Concert booklets illustrate the complex combination of context, content, and function that the programme notes represented. These readings are supported by short histories of the series, the programme note, and the various authors, along with a study of the audience through booklet construction and advertising. A database covering the repertoire performed and programme note provision during the case-study period is included on the attached CD. Programme notes that outlined pre-existing or newly-invented plots make it clear that one of their functions was to give music a narrative. Even notes that did not contain stories per se were filled with material that served a very similar purpose. The most obvious examples were explanations of how the work was created, and it’s place in history. However, all of the language used to describe a piece could signal wider meanings, which then became part of the story being told. References to gender, families, education, morality, religion, politics, or race imbued the works with a wide variety of pre-existing ‘texts’ (in the broadest sense of the word), and formed social and cultural narratives for music. Contents Acknowledgements 4 Lists of Illustrations and Tables 5 Referencing System for Programme Note Citations 6 Chapter 1: Introduction and Narrative 7 Chapter 2: Contexts 23 Chapter 3: Audience and Advertising 55 Chapter 4: Gender and Families 80 Chapter 5: Education, Morality and Religion 106 Chapter 6: Biography, Literature and History 151 Chapter 7: Politics, Nation, Race and Identity 181 Conclusion 227 Bibliography 234 Digital Appendix CD 4 Acknowledgements This project was made possible by the Royal College of Music’s provision of Lucy Ann Jones and Douglas and Hilda Simmons Scholarships, as well as an AHRC Doctoral Studentship. I am very grateful for the huge amount of input and guidance given by my four supervisors: Dr. Paul Banks, Dr. Christina Bashford, Dr. Katy Hamilton, and Dr. Natasha Loges. Family and friends provided much-needed moral support, and special thanks go to my team of proof-readers: Marion Bower, Isobel Clarke, Sam Cook, Becky Dowson, Tim Driscoll, Rhian Holvey, Adam Hotson, Nicole Oppler, Ellie Reed, Jack Ridley, Vera Segal, Alexei Stephenson, Rachel Sweet, and Frances Weightman. 5 Lists of Illustrations and Tables Fig. 1: 1884 ground plan of the Crystal Palace 25 Fig. 2: Three banner images for the front covers of the Saturday Concert and 62 Summer Concert booklets Fig. 3: 1879 advertisement for corsets 67 Fig. 4: 1876 advertisement for Balm of Columbia 77 Fig. 5: 1876 advertisement for Waukenphast Boots 78 Table 1: Concerts devoted in whole or part to a single composer 33 Table 2: Frequency of opera excerpt performances 34 Table 3: Programme note provision for smaller vocal works, 1865–1875 40 Table 4: Contributions from other authors 52 Table 5: Ticket price changes 57 Table 6: Season ticket prices 57 Table 7: Performances of works with liturgical texts 131 Table 8: Concerts consisting of a single, complete oratorio 138 Unless otherwise specified, all the tables cover the years 1865–1879. 6 Referencing System for Programme Note Citations Citations from the programme notes are referenced as follows: Location, date, position of the concert in the season (1, 2, 3, etc.): page number. The location is indicated using RISM sigla (http://www.rism.info/en/sigla.html#c2487), with the addition of -B and -L suffixes to indicate loose or bound copies. The four locations of source material have therefore been referenced as follows: GB-Lcm-B = Royal College of Music, bound volumes. GB-Lcm-L = Royal College of Music, loose programmes. GB-Lbl-B = British Library, bound volumes. Catalogue reference: Music Collections c.370. GB-BROcl-B = Bromley Central Library, bound volumes. Catalogue reference: 780.73 (LCP). The vast majority of citations come from GB-Lcm-B and GB-Lbl-B. GB-Lcm-L was used primarily for advertising information, and for references to Grove’s annotations, which do not appear in any of the bound volumes. GB-BROcl-B is used for a single bound volume of booklets from 1867–1869 with annotations by an audience member. Of these four collections, only GB-Lcm-B and GB-Lcm-L contain programmes from before 1867, and the coverage for those years is particularly incomplete (omissions are rare after 1868). The conclusions drawn for the earliest years of the case study period must therefore be treated with caution. For a more complete outline of the level of coverage, see the Digital Appendix (on attached CD). 7 Chapter 1: Introduction and Narrative The aim of this doctoral project is to investigate nineteenth-century British programme notes for orchestral concerts through looking at the Crystal Palace Saturday Concerts between 1865 and 1879. These serve as a case study for investigating the place of music in Victorian culture and society and the function of programme notes as texts for text-less music. In the last twenty years, programme booklets have emerged as a fascinating resource for cultural study. Jann Pasler provided an overview of their ideological meanings in a chapter focussing on booklets produced in late nineteenth-century Paris, examining repertoire choices and ordering, advertising, iconography, and providing a brief section on the analytical notes.1 William Weber explored repertoire and ordering in programme booklets in his book The Great Transformation in Musical Taste, drawing very broad conclusions about the changes in concert practice during the nineteenth century.2 Catherine Dale used programme notes to inform her study of musical analysis in nineteenth-century Britain.3 Issues of nationalism and gender have been explored by Laurence Poston in an article on the programming choices and the content of the programme notes in the early years of the Proms.4 Nonetheless, Christina Bashford’s observation in 2008 is still true now: programme notes are an under-used resource.5 One feature that most of the existing studies have in common is that they tend not to systematically examine the texts of programme notes for cultural information. Pasler mentions them, but provides only limited discussion of their 1 Jann Pasler, ‘Concert Programs and Their Narratives as Emblems of Ideology’, in Writing Through Music: Essays on Music, Culture, and Politics (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 365– 416. The chapter was first published as an article in the International Journal of Musicology 2 (1993), 249-308. 2 William Weber, The Great Transformation of Musical Taste: Concert Programming from Haydn to Brahms (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008). For a preparatory study for the book, see also William Weber, ‘Miscellany vs. Homogeneity: Concert Programmes at the Royal Academy of Music and the Royal College of Music in the 1880s’, in Music and British Culture, 1785- 1914: Essays in Honour of Cyril Ehrlich, ed. Christina Bashford and Leanne Langley (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 299–320. 3 Chapter 4, ‘The Analytical Concert Programme Note: its Growth and Influence in Nineteenth-Century Britain’ in Dale’s book represents a culmination of her work in this area: Music Analysis in Britain in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 35–70. This was preceded by two preparatory studies: Catherine Dale, ‘Towards a Tradition of Music Analysis in Britain in the Nineteenth Century’, in Nineteenth-Century British Music Studies. Vol. 1, ed. Bennett Zon, Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), 269–302; and Catherine Dale, ‘The “Analytical” Content of the Concert Programme Note Re-Examined: Its Growth and Influence in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, in Nineteenth-Century British Music Studies, Vol. 2, ed. Jeremy Dibble and Bennett Zon (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 199–222. 4 Lawrence Poston, ‘Henry Wood, the “Proms,” and National Identity in Music, 1895-1904’, Victorian Studies 47, no. 3 (Spring 2005): 397–426. 5 Christina Bashford, ‘Writing (British) Concert History: The Blessing and Curse of Ephemera’, Notes, 2, 64, no. 3 (March 2008): 469–470. 8 content with no examples. Weber’s study did not take them into account at all, and both Dale and Poston used them as a means to support specific points, and were therefore very selective in the passages they considered. The time seems right for an overarching study that takes the content of programme notes as a central object of critical interest, and Bashford herself has laid some key foundations for such work in a number of writings. As well as researching several important authors of early