4 - Consolidation and Expansion, 1849–57

Summary

In 1849 changes were coming to the fore that were to affect both Ella’s concert society and the London music scene. This was not just a matter of the influx of performers seeking temporary asylum from the rash of Continental uprisings (1848) and their aftermaths, significant though this was, inasmuch as it brought more glistening quality and a sharper competitive edge to the musical marketplace. Portents of new practices and values were emerging as well. Michael Costa was instituting a new order of orchestral discipline at the Philharmonic and at Covent Garden, where the recently instituted Royal Italian Opera was bedding in; the effects were audible. The Antient Concerts, legacy of a former, patriarchal era, had quietly expired, the last concert taking place in June 1848, while the death of Mendelssohn (November 1847), much of whose classically sculpted music was still relatively new to London, continued to be mourned as a national tragedy. Add to this the extraordinary Jenny Lind, the ‘Swedish Nightingale’, who had first sung in London during 1847. In summer 1848 she had returned, making big money and once more accompanied by a commercial hype that foreshadowed things to come. For a moment, too, some of the country’s elite and probably many a foreign musician had wobbled at the prospect of revolution in Britain, as some 85,000 Chartists prepared to meet at Kennington Common on 10 April 1848. But the expected discontent came to nothing, just as government seems privately to have predicted. Ella, presumably reflecting the views of some of his friends in high places, had written in his diary: ‘Chartists’ meeting – Shops closed – London alarmed at the National Convention Meeting on Kennington Common – visited Tamburini[,] R. St – & quieted their fears [?]for a revolution’.

What the arrival of refugee musicians in 1848 had demonstrated to Ella was just what benefits could be obtained by hiring a distinguished chamber music player. Sales of visitor tickets, an important tool for increasing subscribers in the longer term, leapt with the billing of great players: so whereas the concert involving the relatively undistinguished Edward Roeckel (piano) and Prosper Sainton (leader) had brought in a meagre £4 14s 6d of additional revenue, that featuring Charles Halle and Sainton had raised £25 14s 6d.