Music in 1859

This is one of a series of entries are drawn from chapter 7 of my book, Mr Darwin's Incredible Shrinking World, and they all deal with life in that era. For background on the book, see the first entry in the series, Life in 1859, but if you just want to see the others, use the tag 1859, which appears at the end of each entry.

In Manchester, ‘The Halle Orchestra’ had been created in 1857, and some said it was quite as good as that of the London Philharmonic Society. In an age before modern entertainment media, music held a central place, and in an age when all music had to be “live”, many more people took part, not always a good thing.

The tastes of the masses applied. Mendelssohn’s ‘Wedding March’ had been arranged by a Devon organist in 1847, though it only became fashionable after the wedding of the Princess Royal in 1858. Then there was La Prière d’une Vierge, known to the English as A Maiden’s Prayer. This piano solo was let loose in Paris in 1858, and introduced into England in 1859. Percy Scholes said of Thekla Badarzewska, its composer who died aged 23:

In this brief lifetime she accomplished, perhaps, more than any composer who ever lived, for she provided the piano of absolutely every tasteless sentimental person in the so-called civilized world with a piece of music which that person, however unaccomplished in a dull technical sense, could play.

Muscular musical criticism was all the go in 19th century Britain. Bach had died in 1750, Beethoven in 1827 and Louis Spohr in 1859. In The Mikado, Gilbert offered a list of punishments which included being forced to listen to “Bach, interwoven/With Spohr and Beethoven/At classical Monday Pops”. The Popular Concerts, or Monday and Saturday Pops, began in 1858, and offered mainly chamber music. At the time, Bach was regarded as suitable fare only for the strong-willed, strong-boned, teeth-gritted musicologist, and Beethoven and Spohr were somewhat out of fashion as well.

Beethoven was still heard, if rarely. The Bradford music festival in August was attended by the Queen, her Consort, the Prince of Wales, seven earls, a duke, an archbishop, a bishop, nine assorted mayors and lord mayors as well as other dignitaries. Handel, Mozart, Rossini, Donizetti, Meyerbeer, Beethoven, Verdi, Mendelssohn, Weber, Bellini and Cimerosa were all played, as well as Léopold de Mayer and Hullah. Mostly names we still know: no Brahms, no Bach, no Vivaldi, no Haydn. The first large-scale performances of Bach’s entire Mass in B minor took place in 1859 in Leipzig, but that would have been too Catholic for Bradford.

The morning program featured The Messiah, the evening had Mozart’s Jupiter symphony and a new cantata called The Year by W. Jackson. This was “William Jackson of Masham”, a Bradford organist who was held in high esteem, but who has now faded into oblivion as Bach had then. Let us hope that in a hundred years, Spohr and Jackson will be back in the catalogues and play-lists. 

Leopold de Mayer (or de Meyer), a virtuoso pianist, seems to have been largely lost from view, as has John Pyke Hullah who combined with Charles Dickens in a now-forgotten comic opera called The Village Coquettes, which ran from 1836–1837. He later appeared in the controversy over standard pitch that began around 1859.

In a time before cathode ray oscilloscopes, the A above middle C could, and did, vary from 420 Hz to as high as 457.2 Hz (on New York Steinway pianos– in London, Steinways used A=454.7), though A=440 was more common. The high figure can be determined from a tuning fork, still in existence, some of the lower figures come from looking at the tensions that can be withstood by early keyboard instruments. (A side issue: how could scientists or musicians measure frequencies before the CRO? 

Answer: they mainly relied on a variety of mechanical stroboscopes, which returned highly accurate measures for standard tuning forks.)

Scientific American reported that a meeting in London had decided a uniform pitch would be desirable. The French C above middle C was 522 vibrations a second, Hullah used 512, others used a lower tone. Jenny Lind (famed as ‘the Swedish Nightingale’) argued that the high pitch then in vogue was harming singers’ voices.

Still, 1859 was a good year for opera. Verdi’s A Masked Ball was produced, Gounod’s Faust and Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld and Genevieve de Brabant were all premiered in Paris. Wagner completed Tristan und Isolde.

In Madrid, a hired crowd booed Madame Grisi until she fainted during a performance of Norma. Berlioz revived Gluck’s Orfeo ed Eurydice the same year.

The hymn Nearer My God To Thee became popular, recycling an older tune, but opera became involved with politics. A scheduled Naples performance of A Masked Ball had to be moved: it depicted the assassination of a Swedish king and any mention of assassinating royalty was unacceptable to the authorities. 

An 1859 La Scala performance of Bellini’s Norma somehow included a reference to the enemy eagles, meaning the Roman eagles. The Austrian censors had banned this, because the Hapsburg crest also featured an eagle. The phrase ‘Viva Verdi’ was heard, but VERDI here meant Vittorio Emanuele Re D’Italia, Italian for ‘Victor Emmanuel, king of the Italians’. The booing of Madame Grisi was nothing in comparison to the cheers of the Italian mob, enflamed by opera and patriotism.

In other areas, Daniel Decatur Emmett, a northerner and the son of abolitionist parents, had his Dixie first performed on April 4 in the Mechanics’ Hall, New York City. In January, Louis Moreau Gottschalk completed La Nuit des Tropiques subtitled Symphonie Romantique and composed his Columbia, caprice américaine for piano, Op. 34, D. 38 (RO 61) in 1859. This has distinct hints of both Schubert and ragtime about this piece which features a familiar tune, My Old Kentucky Home.

Brahms completed his Concerto No. 1 for piano and orchestra during the year. It may have been originally devised as a sonata for two pianos, and then as a symphony before becoming a piano concerto.

Camille Saint-Saëns gave the world his Symphony number 2, but it would be another 27 years before his third or ‘Organ symphony’. Louise Farrenc was part of a large and well-connected artistic family, but after her daughter died of tuberculosis in 1859, she stopped composing.

Connections were everything, even in music. The Times reported that Meyerbeer had been less than happy at the ‘thunder’ produced for his Pardon de Ploermel, but then he heard stones and mortar falling to the ground through a long wooden trough on a building site. This thundered much better, so he hurried to the theatre and had a trough made, and found that stones gave too hard a sound. 

He decided grape shot would be ideal but the manager found that these were munitions which could only be procured with the permission of the government. Unfazed, Meyerbeer wrote to Marshall Vaillant, Minister of War, who made the army’s stores at Vincennes available to the composer, giving him the thunder he desired.

Musical instruments were changing. The now-forgotten harmoni-cor was invented by Louis Julien Jaulin, while on December 20, Henry Steinway Jr. took out US patent 26532 which covered the over-stringing of grand pianos. This was a turning point for Steinway, and their pianos won many awards around the world thanks to this innovation. Ignaz Bösendorfer died during the year, and his son Ludwig took over that family’s piano-making business.

In early January, Howard Glover announced a chamber concert featuring a number of vocalists and two solo instrumentalists: Miss Emma Green and Mr Henry Blagrove, “first violon of the Philharmonic”. The ‘violon’ is just a French ‘violin’. Using the word in English was a little pretentious, even then. Henry was another of those concerned with standard pitch, and his brother Richard was an eminent concertina player.

A Wheatstone concertina and harmonium price list of the time shows prices ranging from £1/16/- to 12 guineas for “ . . . a full-compass instrument as used by Signor Regondi and Mr Richard Blagrove.”

If the English public might enjoy the concertina, they loved Handel. Born Georg Friedrich Händel, he lived for most of his adult life in England, and became a British subject in 1727. He had died in 1759, but where Bach, Spohr and Beethoven fell from favour after their deaths, Handel stayed in the public’s eye, and ear — and in the repertoires.

The first Handel Festival at the Crystal Palace in 1857, was just a warm-up for the centenary. In one issue of The Times on January 3, the public were alerted to the Green-Blagrove concert and also informed that celebrations of Burns and Handel that would take place during the year. London would be the main centre, but most cities and towns would offer something. In 1859, the British public would be Handel hogs. We'll come back to that, next time.