Introduction - The Case for Ella

Summary

Eminent in his own day, neglected by posterity: that has been the lot of John Ella, a man who by the middle decades of the nineteenth century had risen from provincial, artisan-class obscurity to become a figure of power and influence in London musical life and high society, a successful concert manager and entrepreneur, and a relentless and successful proselytizer for the highest of musical art. He was important as an organizer and ‘enabler’ (the behind-the-scenes fixer who made things happen) rather than as a performer or composer, the traditional subjects for music biography. And, paradoxically for a nation cursed with the label ‘Das Land ohne Musik’, he operated in times when music mattered to people to a degree that can barely be overstated today, and in London, the city that claimed the largest concentration of public music-making and musicians than any other in Britain or Europe. His Musical Union (1845–81), a concert society devoted to the promotion of chamber music in general, and the heartland of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven string quartets in particular, was his most celebrated achievement: a quasi-temple for the contemplation of high culture, through what was deemed the best in Western classical music. It brought many of the finest instrumentalists in Europe before a well-heeled audience of serious-minded metropolitan musiclovers, and it endured for more than three and a half decades, combining a lustre of excellence and solemnity with an economic buoyancy that many a Victorian concert- organizer must have envied. In spite of this, the unusual tale of Ella, shaper of musical taste and culture, and of his celebrated concert institution, has never been told in depth, less still has the Musical Union’s history been adequately attempted. For Ella is a largely unknown figure, and to some he will seem an obscure subject for a biography.

Admittedly, we have been slow to recognize the importance of the role of the enabler or fixer in sustaining musical activity in nineteenth-century Britain. In part this has been tied to a more general failure to appreciate what it was that made the music and musicians of Britain so different from what was to be found in the rest of Europe: notably, Britain’s lack of established musical infrastructures and its commercially driven concert life.