Introduction

While in the United Kingdom, the government was initially slow to recognize the profound dangers of the COVID-19 pandemic, soon after Prime Minister Boris Johnson's initial plea to the public to ‘stay at home’, in March 2021, emergency legislation was rushed through parliament. On 25 March, the 350-page Coronavirus Act 2020 received royal assent, bringing the biggest restrictions on civil liberties in a generation into law the following day. Overnight, the Coronavirus Act, along with the broader raft of legal restrictions under The Health Protection (Coronavirus) Regulations 2020, made it unlawful to undertake a wide range of hitherto economically essential, prosocial and noncriminal activities. Even as the Act was rushed through parliament, civil liberties organizations were alerting parliamentarians to its dangers (Gidda, 2020).

As antiracist commentators and academics forewarned (Frazer-Carroll, 2020; Khan, 2020), racial disproportionality in policing has endured and often increased through the pandemic. As the first ‘lockdown’ came into effect, stop and search practices ‘surged’ despite the steep drop in crime rates (Grierson, 2020). Limited and prone to undercounting as they may be, Home Office data show that in the year ending March 2021, stop and search practices (under Section 1 of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984) increased significantly to reach their highest level in seven years, impacting most on racially minoritized men (Home Office, 2022). Home Office data (2021) also show an increase in use of force for the year ending March 2021. This was racially disproportionate too, with Black people accounting for 16 per cent of those affected (though they make up just 3 per cent of the population according to the 2011 Census), and Asian people accounting for 8 per cent (7 per cent of the population according to the 2011 Census). In the summer of 2020, these patterns coalesced with mass global protests against racist police violence. The police murder of George Floyd in the United States catalyzed millions to march under the banner of Black Lives Matter (BLM) and spoke to the ongoing police brutality faced by racially minoritized people in Britain (Joseph-Salisbury et al, 2020).

Women and Music in Ireland is the inaugural volume of the new series of Irish Musical Studies, published by Boydell & Brewer. The original series, published initially by Irish Academic Press (from 1990 until 1995) and subsequently by Four Courts Press (from 1996 until 2019) comprised twelve volumes, making this new volume the thirteenth in all to appear. Each volume of the original series was designed to explore specific themes within the general domain of Irish musical scholarship, including the development of musicology as an Irish discipline, music and Irish cultural history, documents and sources of Irish musical history, the growth of theory and analysis in Ireland, as well as period-based collections devoted to Irish art music in the seventeenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Two volumes of conference proceedings also appeared, one to mark the first international musicological conference in the history of the state in 1995 and the other to publish selected papers in Bach scholarship originally presented at the Ninth Biennial Conference on Baroque Music held at Trinity College Dublin in 2000. The series also featured an anthology of Irish church music, preceded by a companion volume of essays on the same subject.

The distinguishing feature of these volumes was that all of them, with the exception of the Bach volume, addressed topics that had hitherto received little or no previous scholarly attention, and certainly not to the extent of a collected volume of essays exclusively concerned with the topic in question. In this specific regard, Women and Music in Ireland is likewise a pioneering collection, and it thereby reflects the pervasive ambition of the series as a whole to open out and indeed to deepen our scholarly comprehension of Irish musical life. As the chapters in this new volume individually and collectively attest, the general discourse of women and music here attains not only to an Irish inflection of purpose and scholarly enquiry, but a decisive retrieval of the role of women in shaping the complexion of Irish musical life from the eighteenth century to the present day.

In this enterprise, many of the essays published here skilfully interrogate or deconstruct historical, social and cultural assumptions that have either eclipsed or distorted – often through the agency of gender politics – the originality and significance of women to the profession and practice of music in Ireland.

As a musical agent of domestic social discourse, the piano has few rivals in the nineteenth century. George Bernard Shaw’s remark in 1894 that ‘the pianoforte is the most important of all musical instruments; its invention was to music what the invention of printing was to poetry’ echoes a more general remembrance which is constantly affirmed in bourgeois culture throughout the 1800s and for long afterwards. Nevertheless, the mediating influence of the piano as a conduit of social meaning in cinema and literature has received considerably less attention than it warrants. Moreover, the representation of salon culture in nineteenth-century fiction, as well as in twentieth-century cinema, deepens the contextual and communicative significance of the piano intimated by Shaw’s observation.

In this chapter, I would like to show how the piano scenes in Mike Leigh’s film Topsy-Turvy (1999) inflect our understanding of salon culture as a mode of representation in which the medium of film affords new meaning to the musical transactions it portrays. The film is a brilliant dramatisation of the lives of W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan in the period leading up to and during the first production of their masterpiece, The Mikado (1885). But Topsy-Turvy is also a richly textured and intricate portrayal of Victorian society in which the piano variously and compellingly features as a nexus of social, sexual and emotional exchange. Several scenes in the film represent the piano at the heart of a salon culture in which music functions as an essential (rather than merely decorative or aesthetic) mode of social communication. These scenes represent the piano in a host of different settings (a private drawing-room, a brothel, a formal musical soirée and a bedroom); collectively, they explore the connection between music and social discourse in the late nineteenth century.

My reading of these scenes is informed by two preliminary considerations which, taken together, indicate a more general context in which this reading might be situated. Even if we allow for recent research on the piano in nineteenth-century musical culture (some of which stems from Cyril Ehrlich’s classic study which originally appeared in 1976), literary and cinematic representations of the piano remain to be investigated more thoroughly than has been the case to date.

As a music critic, Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) was nothing if not honest in his appraisals. He was also scathing, cantankerous and wilfully given to a hectoring and didactic strain of pronouncement which made him the bete noir of Victorian musical culture and – in some respects – its most implacable adversary. Between 1876 and 1898 (when he published The Perfect Wagnerite) he produced numerous columns for the London press (especially The Star, where he wrote from February 1885 under the pseudonym Corno di Bassetto, and The World, where he wrote from May 1890 as ‘GBS’), columns which now amount to an invaluable (if idiosyncratic) record of English musical life at the close of the nineteenth century. Thereafter, as his career as a dramatist took hold and made him famous, Shaw wrote much less frequently on musical matters, but he continued to publish essays and correspondence on music (including two notable exchanges with Ernest Newman) throughout his long lifetime. His last such publication appeared nine days after his death in November 1950.

The three stout volumes of Shaw's collected music criticism published in 1981 as Shaw's Music (and edited by his indefatigable bibliographer and scholarly advocate, Dan H. Laurence) give due notice of the formative role and abiding presence of music in Shaw's development as a writer. They also attest a striking and pervasive relationship between Shaw's perhaps unrivalled experience of British public musical life and his own convictions about musical meaning. Shaw's journalism extends from reviews of Clara Schumann's performances in London and Wagner's visits there in the 1870s to appraisals of Richard Strauss and Arnold Schoenberg shortly before and after the First World War. As late as 1923 (in his preface to the fourth edition of The Perfect Wagnerite) he was still chiding the British public because of its failure to recognize the sea-change that had occurred in English music over the course of his career.