BRITISH music history has long acknowledged the centrality of pianos, brass bands and choral singing to Victorian life. But the significance of a ‘perfect craze for learning the fiddle’, as the music educator and writer Frederick Corder put it (in 1922), and its intersections with the world of commerce are relatively unexplored, despite important recent work on specific aspects of the topic. It must be said straightaway that the word ‘fiddle’ has long been used in Britain as an affectionate synonym for the classical violin, and not merely to distinguish a folk instrument. So what is under discussion here – and what Corder was referring to – is the playing of the classical violin, the instrument that has taken an intrinsic role in art music's repertoires and traditions. The main facts are as follows. During the 1880s and 1890s, a new interest in the instruments of the violin family emerged among a wide slice of the British population. The surge in activity, which lasted at least into the 1920s, broke longstanding barriers of gender and class; it was underpinned by changing social and cultural values; and it was articulated and supported by a growing commercial infrastructure. In sum, violins, and to a lesser extent cellos and violas (and double basses) – instruments with notable expressive potential and great beauty as objects – became all the rage.

What seems remarkable is the speed with which this ‘violin culture’4 took off, and the change in musical life that it embodied, at both professional and amateur levels. Contemporaries commented often on the novelty and pervasiveness of the new craze, as ever more people were spotted out and about with their instruments. The writer Gerard Eliot Hodgkin had this to say in the Strad magazine in 1894:

IN 1900, a Chicago-based writer for the Music Trade Review reported that Ignacy Jan Paderewski, the Polish pianist whose virtuosity and charismatic platform personality on the touring circuit was making him something of a household name from Vienna to New York, had purchased a ‘handsome’ piano from a Connecticut manufacturer. It was to be a gift for the Paderewski Singing Society in Chicago. The writer revelled in the marketplace advantage for any firm that could boast a linkage with such a famous figure, commenting:

Clearly, Paderewski's alleged earnings were understood as astronomically high (and to gain perspective here, we might note that average annual wages at the time in the United States amounted to a mere $438). They were also a telling articulation of the pianist's artistic celebrity, which – as the writer suggests – was poised to be leveraged by others in the marketplace. In this respect, Paderewski was an integral part of music's modernizing commercial world.

That commercial world – including the relationship of art, money and performers – has become a fairly well-rehearsed topic in musicological literature, and it forms the background for the essays in this book. Yet, as the reader will discover, the essays approach the discussion from new directions to investigate (among other things) how the ideas that became attached to art music in the nineteenth century, and even the very idea of art music per se, were intertwined with the technological advances and socio-economic shifts that were then in train.

To bring those changes into focus, we might consider that, even by 1900, Paderewski (born 1860) would have witnessed some remarkable developments in the music business during the course of his career. Those developments had begun in the early nineteenth century and were catalysed by industrialization and the swathe of advances in science, manufacturing and transportation that followed on from it.

Ella commenced his swansong season in April 1880 with the intention of reprising ‘the most admired works by the great masters’ and showcasing some of the finest players who had appeared in recent years. The concerts certainly exemplified the Musical Union’s abiding essence. Quartets were led by Papini and Auer, with Wiener, Hollander and Lasserre as lower strings. Scharwenka, Joseph Wieniawski and Von Bulow were among the pianists. Repertoire included string works by Mozart (D major quintet and quartet k499), Haydn (quartets op. 71 no. 1 and op. 77 no. 2), Beethoven (the op. 29 string quintet, the third Razumovsky quartet and the newly introduced op. 95, which Ella announced as an ‘especial favourite’ of the amateurs in St Petersburg but privately admitted he found ‘incomprehensible’), Mendelssohn (the Bb quintet op. 87), and Schubert (‘Death and the Maiden’ quartet). Music with piano comprised the three great trios by Beethoven (Von Bulow playing op. 70 no. 1 and op. 97 on a specially demanded Bechstein instrument), Mendelssohn’s C minor trio (with Wieniawski), Schumann’s piano quintet (Mme Montigny-Remaury), and Hummel’s septet op. 74 (Duvernoy, who played it at the Grand Matinee; this included the by now expected Beethoven septet). Von Bulow also performed Beethoven’s solo sonata op. 31 no. 3, and Duvernoy and Auer gave two movements of the celebrated ‘Kreutzer’. All were well-worn works at the Union’s concerts, many were Ella’s choices, and as such there was little room for the contemporaneity that Ella had accepted in recent years, a few solo instrumental pieces excepted.

❧ Closure

Economically, it was time for Ella to pull out, the 1880 season seeing the smallest ever subscription list (380 published names, probably masking an actual total of significantly fewer) and diminished box-office at some performances. Just twenty-eight single tickets were sold for the first matinee and forty-two at the second one, Ella noting to himself that the ‘Circle [was] nearly empty!’ The presence of the magnificent Von Bulow at two concerts drew in 117 and 179 additional listeners respectively – a fair and profitable showing, especially since the pianist once more refused an ‘honorarium’.

Musical Union, 1845–81: Number of performances of ensemble repertoire (with piano sonatas)