CHAPTER I - INTRODUCTORY—GENERAL MUSIC DURING THE QUEEN'S REIGN IN ENGLAND

Summary

It is no exaggeration to say that with the exception perhaps of natural science, both in the applied and the philosophic sense, there is no branch of human knowledge, or of human art, in which the change that the half-century of the Queen's reign has wrought, is so marked as it is in the spirit of music. I advisedly say the spirit of music, for with the practice and the productiveness of the art I shall have to deal later on. By the spirit of music is here understood the spirit in which music is regarded both by the artists who practise it, and by the amateurs who enjoy it in a more or less active manner. Fifty years ago, music in the higher sense was, to the majority of the people, an all but unknown quantity. The existing concert societies in London were few in number, and appealed almost exclusively to their own members, drawn from what then would have been called “the nobility and gentry,” and what in modern parlance we may describe as “the classes;” the masses being left out in the cold. Still more was this true of the Italian Opera, from the aristocratic precincts of which rigorous restrictions of dress and prohibitive prices excluded the vulgar. The general attitude of society towards the art was essentially that of Lord Chesterfield when he warned his son against a tendency towards being a “fiddler,” even in the amateur sense, as wholly unworthy of an English gentleman; or of the poet Byron when he declined to acknowledge the difference “twixt Tweedledum and Tweedledee” in the famous epigram generally but erroneously attributed to Swift.