Mendelssohn and Victorian England

ColinTimothy Eatock, Colin Timothy Eatock

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351558488
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

This valuable book considers the reception of the composer, pianist, organist and conductor Felix Mendelssohn in nineteenth-century England, and his influence on English musical culture. Despite the composer's immense popularity in the nation during his lifetime and in the decades following his death, this is the first book to deal exclusively with the subject of Mendelssohn in England. Mendelssohn's highly successful ten trips to Britain, between 1829 and 1847, are documented and discussed in detail, as are his relationships with English musicians and a variety of prominent figures. An introductory chapter describes the musical life of England (especially London) at the time of Mendelssohn's arrival and the last two chapters deal with the composer's posthumous reception, to the end of the Victorian era. Eatock reveals Mendelssohn as a catalyst for the expansion of English musical culture in the nineteenth century. In taking this position, the author challenges much of the extant literature on the subject and provides an engaging story that brings Mendelssohn and his English experiences to life.

Chapter 1

Music in the Metropolis, 1829

But in one respect we Germans have an advantage here: everybody thinks that all of us were born smoking a pipe and owning a piano, and every German is a priori musical.

– Carl Klingemann, writing to the Mendelssohn family from London, 7 December 1827¹

On 21 April 1829, a seasick Felix Mendelssohn arrived at London’s docks after a difficult crossing from Hamburg. No doubt the young musician was pleased to be greeted by his childhood friend Carl Klingemann, a diplomat posted to England, and by his former piano teacher Ignaz Moscheles, who had relocated to London four years earlier. At the age of 20 Mendelssohn had embarked upon a European tour: a series of voyages intended for his general education, for the cultivation of his musical taste and, at his father’s urging, to help him decide upon a suitable location to establish his career. Mindful of his father’s advice, the young composer-pianist set about learning all he could about life in England, and seven months passed before he embarked upon his journey homeward.

What did he find? Simply put, he found a musical culture unlike anything in continental Europe: a complex mixture of novelty and tradition, extravagance and frugality, pride and humility, cosmopolitanism and provincialism, openness and exclusion. However, to offer a more thorough answer to this question – to explore the musical life of London in 1829 as Mendelssohn did – will require more than a few words.

In 1829, the Duke of Wellington was prime minister, the last in a line of Tory politicians who had governed almost without interruption for nearly half a century. Yet despite the conservative stance of the governing party, throughout the 1820s there was a halting movement towards liberalization: the number of capital offences was greatly reduced; restrictions on trade unions were loosened; and Roman Catholics were granted civil rights, after much debate, just eight days before Mendelssohn’s arrival. Abolitionists were gaining strength in their battle against slavery; and demands for the modernization of Britain’s antiquated electoral system were voiced by Whig legislators. These demands would culminate in the Great Reform Act of 1832.

Economically, England had emerged from a difficult adjustment to a peacetime economy immediately following the Napoleonic Wars, and was enjoying a period of growth and prosperity. Decades of industrialization had left their mark on the nation: factories spewed forth manufactured goods of all kinds, and the country was crisscrossed with canals. Railroads were in their infancy: in 1829, Robert Stephenson’s Rocket reached the dizzying speed of 29 miles per hour at the Rainhill Trials.

On the throne, the House of Hanover had reigned for 115 years: George IV, king at the time of Mendelssohn’s visit, had been named Prince Regent in 1811 and was crowned in 1820. He cared little for politics, and in the Indian summer of Georgian England, his luxurious, hedonistic lifestyle set the tone for London’s high society. Nevertheless, he left a distinctive and lasting mark on the culture of his kingdom. In 1823, he donated his father’s vast collection of books to the British Museum Library, substantially increasing the museum’s collection. He lent his name and influence to the establishment of new cultural institutions: the Royal Academy of Music in 1822, the National Gallery in 1824 and King’s College London in 1829. And with George IV’s support, the architect John Nash undertook such grand projects as Regent Street and Regent’s Park in London, and also the Royal Pavilion in Brighton. However, when the king commissioned Nash to remodel Buckingham Palace in 1826, the renovation bogged down with rising costs, and was incomplete at the king’s death in 1830.

During the reign of George IV, the arts enjoyed a period of expansion. By the 1820s the romantic literary movement was in full bloom: literate English people (about half of the population) read Byron, Shelley, Lake District poets and especially Scott. And although it was not an age that produced enduring playwrights, the theatre was enormously popular. In London, the Drury Lane, Covent Garden and Haymarket theatres held royal patents for the staging of plays; and following the opening of the Royal Coburg (now the Old Vic) in 1818, numerous small, unpatented theatres sprang up. Another theatrical art form, ballet – viewed in England as exotically foreign – attracted public interest in 1829, when the Italian–Swedish ballerina Marie Taglioni danced in London.

The capital of Great Britain and the British Empire had grown to become the largest city in Europe, with a population of about 1.5 million. (By comparison, Mendelssohn’s Berlin had about 240,000 inhabitants.) London was a cosmopolitan city, with a substantial Irish population, a variety of European émigrés, small enclaves of Africans, Indians and Chinese, and also a thriving Jewish community. In the 1820s, the city’s infrastructures were expanded to meet the demands of commerce and the growing population: Regent’s Canal was completed in 1820; St Katherine’s Docks, capable of servicing 1400 ships per year, opened in 1828; the construction of a new London Bridge was begun in 1824 and finished in 1831; and in 1825, the first excavations were made for the ambitious Thames Tunnel, which took 18 years to build. Yet London’s citizens did not share equally in the benefits of the era, and off the bright, gas-lit thoroughfares were some of the most squalid slums in the world. The close proximity of wealth and poverty led to crime, and to address this problem the Metropolitan Police Force was created in June 1829.

The complexity, intensity and sheer size of London were described by Mendelssohn in a letter to his family from England, dated 25 April 1829:

It is fearful! It is mad! I am quite giddy and confused. London is the grandest and most complicated monster on the face of the earth. How can you compress into one letter what I have experienced in the last three days! I hardly remember the chief events, and yet I dare not keep a diary, for then I should have to see less of life, and that I do not wish. On the contrary, I wish to take everything that offers itself. Things toss and whirl about me as if I were in a vortex, and I am whirled along with them.²

Despite Mendelssohn’s dismissal of the idea of keeping a diary, it was not long before he needed one to keep track of his many appointments. As well, in subsequent letters home he recorded picturesque accounts of his experiences.

In documenting his visit, Mendelssohn was by no means alone. England had a long tradition of attracting Europe’s finest musicians, and in the 1820s many foreign composers and performers travelled to London, some of whom wrote letters, articles and memoirs about their experiences. In 1820, Louis Spohr brought his violin and his newfangled conductor’s baton to London, dazzling the public as both a performer and an orchestra leader, and later documenting his visit in his autobiography. The following year Moscheles first appeared in London; in 1825, he settled in the city, and his letters offer much insight into the times. When Gioachino Rossini arrived in 1823, he sang duets with the king and charged £50 to appear at private soirées.³ Two years later, he satirized the un-musicality of the English aristocracy in his Il viaggio a Reims. (The opera’s English character, Lord Sydney, proudly states he only knows one song: ‘God Save the King’.) And in 1826, despite ill health, Carl Maria von Weber conducted the premiere of his Oberon at Covent Garden. In letters he wrote of the progress of his opera, while in his diary he documented the progress of the tuberculosis that ended his life two months after Oberon opened.

Of particular value are the writings of François Fétis. Belgian by birth, Fétis moved to Paris in 1818, where he pursued a career as a teacher, critic, theorist and music historian. In 1829, he visited England and wrote a series of eight letters about the state of music in London, publishing them in his own periodical, La Revue musicale. Subsequently, they also appeared in translation in the London music journal The Harmonicon, along with editorial annotations that often challenge Fétis’s statements. In these letters Fétis commented on many aspects of music in England, including opera, instrumental music, choral music, church music and music education; and he also addressed the status of English composers. As well, in his letters ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Note on the Text
• Acknowledgements
• General Editor’s Series Preface
• 1 Music in the Metropolis, 1829
• 2 The First Visit
• 3 Consolidation in the 1830s
• 4 Mendelssohn Mania in the 1840s
• 5 Elijah and the End
• 6 Apotheosis
• 7 Fragmentation and Legacy
• Appendix A Glossary of Names
• Appendix B Mendelssohn’s Participation in Public and Semi-public Performances in England
• Select Bibliography
• Index