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The London Apollonicon Recitals, 1817–32: A Case-Study in Bach, Mozart and Haydn Reception

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Rachel Cowgill
Rachel Cowgill*
Affiliation:
University of Huddersfield
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Extract

In July 1817 Benjamin Flight and Joseph Robson, two of London's most celebrated organ-builders, unveiled their latest concept in organ design — the Apollonicon. This mammoth finger-and-barrel chamber organ, predecessor to the giant orchestrions of the Victorian era, had been five years in the making. And when it opened for performances at the firm's fashionable West End premises, 101 St Martin's Lane, it heralded a new era of evolution for the organ in British concert life.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 123 , Issue 2 , 1998 , pp. 190 - 228
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Musical Association, 1998

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References

1 See Edwards, Frederick George, ‘Bach's Music in England’, Musical Times, 37 (1896), 585–7, 652-7, 722-6, 797-800 (pp. 653-4). These recitals played an important role in the early dissemination of J. S. Bach's keyboard music in England.Google Scholar

2 Published research on the development of the secular organ recital across Europe is scarce, but Walter Salmen's observations suggest that there were few continental precursors to the initiatives discussed here. See his Das Konzert: Eine Kulturgeschichte (Munich, 1988), 147–55.Google Scholar

3 Arthur W.J. G. Ord-Hume discusses the importance of the Apollonicon in the development of the orchestrion and barrel-organ in Barrel-Organ: The Story of the Mechanical Organ and its Repair (London, 1978), 101–28 and passim. J. W. Hinton gives an account of the organ based on conversations with the late C. S. Robson, ‘who had as a boy seen the Apollonicon, or portions of it’, and ‘a great number of working diagrams, memoranda, and specifications which belonged to the late Mr John Flight’ (now lost); see his ‘The Apollonicon’, Musical Opinion and Music Trade Review, 24 (1 April 1901), 477.Google Scholar

4 'Purkis, John’, A Dictionary of Musicians, cd. John S. Sainsbury (London, 1825; repr. New York, 1966), ii, 325-6. There may have been a further prototype for the Apollonicon; see Monthly Magazine, 44 (August 1817), 60. For a detailed, illustrated discussion of Kirkwall's instrument by John Farcy, see ‘Organ’, The Cyclopaedia; or Universal Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, and Literature, ed. Abraham Rees, 39 vols. (London, 1802-20), vol. xxv (unpaginated); and vol. iv, plates iii-iv.Google Scholar

5 'Purkis’, A Dictionary of Musicians, ed. Sainsbury, ii, 326; Harmonicon, 9 (January 1831), 9; ‘Organ’, The Cyclopaedia, ed. Rees; Monthly Magazine, 38 (September 1814), 167.Google Scholar

6 Christopher Davy, ‘On the Mechanical Construction and Effect of the Apollonicon’, Repertory of Patent Inventions, 6 (March 1828), 155–67 (pp. 156-7); idem, ‘Description of the Apollonicon’, Mechanics’ Magazine, 9 (15 March 1828), 97-104 (pp. 97-8); Harmonicon, 9 (January 1831), 9.Google Scholar

7 The Times, 31 May 1813.Google Scholar

8 '[The] Apollonian Museum [is] intended to be not only a depository for the approved compositions already published, but a source also whence every man of genius, whether an author, an inventor, or a manufacturer, may exhibit his works to the world under circumstances of benefit to himself, which the present system does not afford. He may also exhibit notices of new or revived publications in the Museum, three months from the time they are printed. One course of lectures in the year [by Joseph Kemp] will comprise a review of all musical publications, new and revived; and also all newly invented musical instruments, as well as a retrospect of manuscript compositions. This mode is adapted to bring forward genius.’ Monthly Magazine, 31 (June 1811), 460. See also The Exhibition of the National Institution, for improving the Manufactures of the United Kingdom, and the Arts connected therewith (London, [1811]); Monthly Magazine, 31 (February 1811), 55.Google Scholar

9 Harmonicon, 9 (January 1831), 9. The prospectus itself does not appear to have survived, but it was paraphrased in Monthly Magazine, 38 (September 1814), 167.Google Scholar

10 See Cowgill, Rachel, ‘Mozart's Operas in London: 1786-1813’ (M.Mus. dissertation, University of London, King's College, 1990), 113–52.Google Scholar

11 Monthly Magazine, 38 (September 1814), 167. Bullock, who auctioned the Apollonicon in 1832, stated that the organ had cost £6,000 to build; The Times, 12 November 1832. No subscription list has been traced, and the Harmonicon states that the organ was built on Flight & Robson's own account: Harmonicon, 9 (January 1831), 9. Following Flight & Robson's bankruptcy in 1832, the Apollonicon was auctioned along with the firm's other capital assets and stock. There is no indication that the proceeds from this particular sale were divided up amongst shareholders: see Bullock, A Catalogue of the Stock of Messrs. Flight & Robson, Organ Builders to His Majesty (GB-Lbl SC1078), Lot 8, p. 12; reproduced in Ord-Hume, Barrel-Organ, 493-503. This catalogue lists 15 other organs and player-pianos, which were housed in the Great Room along with the Apollonicon and were therefore on display to prospective customers attending the recitals.Google Scholar

12 For details of Vogler's Orchestrion, see Schweiger, Hertha, ‘Abt Vogler’, Musical Quarterly, 25 (1939), 156–66 (pp. 160-1).Google Scholar

13 Jonas Blewitt, A Complete Treatise on the Organ, to which is added a Set of Explanatory Voluntaries, op. 4 (London, c. 1790), RISM B2953, cited in Nicholas Thistlethwaite, The Making of the Victorian Organ (Cambridge, 1990), 90.Google Scholar

14 'Organ’, The Cyclopaedia, ed. Rees.Google Scholar

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16 Sources for these specifications, including some that were not available to Ord-Hume, are as follows: Thomas Busby, Concert-Room and Orchestra Anecdotes of Music and Musicians, Ancient and Modern (London, 1825), i, 3-4; Davy, ‘On the Mechanical Construction and Effect of the Apollonicon'; idem, ‘Description of the Apollonicon'; idem, Mechanics’ Magazine, 15 (18 June 1831), 241–3; Harmonicon, 9 (January 1831), 9-10; Luke Hebert, The Engineer's and Mechanic's Encyclopaedia (London, 1836), i, 96-102; The Times, 24 July 1827. Hinton records that the compass of the pedal department was three and a half octaves, from GGGG, and the swell was four octaves; see his ‘The Apollonicon'.Google Scholar

17 Hinton, ‘The Apollonicon'. For details of the organs at York Minster and St Paul's Cathedral, see William L. Sumner, The Organ: Its Evolution, Principles of Construction and Use (4th edn, London, 1973), 227; Thistlethwaite, The Making of the Victorian Organ, 118-19.Google Scholar

18 Monthly Magazine, 44 (August 1817), 60.Google Scholar

19 The question of whether the Apollonicon had five or six consoles is a vexed one. References to six sets of keys, in for example Bullock's sale catalogue, probably included the pedals, which were an unfamiliar feature in London's organ world; a sixth console may perhaps have been added during the late 1820s, but no reference to a structural change of this nature has been found. The prospectus of 1814 listed only four consoles and did not mention a pedal organ, so clearly Flight & Robson's original plans were expanded upon in the course of construction. Nicholas Temperley's statement that the Apollonicon had no pedals ('Organ Music’, The Romantic Age 1800-1914, ed. Temperley, The Blackwell History of Music in Britain, 5, Oxford, 1988, 437) is incorrect. That the Apollonicon was fitted with German pedals is evident from the cross-sectional diagrams published by Christopher Davy in his articles on the instrument (see above, notes 6 and 16). For more discussion of pedals and the English organ, see Edwards, ‘Bach's Music in England’, passim; Thistlethwaite, The Making of the Victorian Organ, 14-23, 96-105 and passim. For Snetzler's work in England, see Alan Barnes and Martin Renshaw, The Life and Work of John Snetzler (Aldershot, 1994).Google Scholar

20 Davy, ‘Description of the Apollonicon’, 98; idem, ‘On the Mechanical Construction and Effect of the Apollonicon’, 158; Hebert, The Engineer's and Mechanic's Encyclopaedia, i, 97. The spiral pinning enabled each cylinder to revolve nine times before concluding play. The original plans for the organ featured only two barrels; the bass barrel must have been a later addition (see Monthly Magazine, 38 (September 1814), 167).Google Scholar

21 The 1814 prospectus also promised ‘bells’, but these are not mentioned in accounts of the completed instrument. Davy, ‘Description of the Apollonicon’, 102-3, and ‘On the Mechanical Construction and Effect of the Apollonicon’, 165.Google Scholar

22 See, for example, The Times, 4 June 1813. Gurk's organ boasted an impressive pedigree, having been christened the Panharmonicon by Haydn; see The Times, 28 November 1811, cited by Ord-Hume in his discussion of Gurk's instrument, Joseph Haydn and the Mechanical Organ (Cardiff, 1982), 131–42. ‘Orchestral’ barrel-organs with timpani seem to have originated with the Belloneon, constructed by the Kaufmann family in Dresden in 1805; see Ord-Hume, Barrel-Organ, 168-73.Google Scholar

23 John Farcy describes this same mechanism as it appeared on Kirkwall's organ; see ‘Organ’, The Cyclopaedia, ed. Rees.Google Scholar

24 Davy, ‘On the Mechanical Construction and Effect of the Apollonicon’, 162.Google Scholar

25 Davy, ‘Description of the Apollonicon’, 101-2; ‘On the Mechanical Construction and Effect of the Apollonicon’, 164-5; Harmonicon, 9 (January 1831), 10. Kirkwall's organ had been fitted with two compound pedals for the left foot; ‘Organ’, The Cyclopaedia, ed. Rees. The swell organ, apparently invented by Jordan around 1712, had become a priority amongst English organ-builders because it suited the English taste for expressive melody; see Thistlethwaite, The Making of the Victorian Organ, 114-17 and passim.Google Scholar

26 Harmonicon, 9 (January 1831), 9.Google Scholar

27 'A New Instrument in the Orchestra of the King's Theatre’, ibid., 6 (December 1828), 274.Google Scholar

28 On English organs and temperament see: Peter Williams, ‘Equal Temperament and the English Organ, 1675-1825’, Acta musicologica, 40 (1968), 53–65; Alexander C. N. Mackenzie of Ord, ‘The Well-Tuned Organ: An Introduction to Keyboard Temperaments in 18th and 19th Century England’, Journal of the British Institute of Organ Studies, 3 (1979), 56-72; Charles Padgham, The Well-Tempered Organ (Oxford, 1986); Christopher Kent, ‘Tuning and Temperament and the British Organ 1750-1850: A Century of Change Viewed through the Repertoire’, Journal of the British Institute of Organ Studies, 14 (1990), 21-34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

29 Flight's Practical Tuner for the Organ or Pianoforte (3rd edn, London, 1830), 4. I am grateful to Christopher Kent for making his copy available to me. Flight & Robson had tuned Kirkwall's organ to a mean-tone temperament ('Organ’, The Cyclopaedia, ed. Rees), but between 1811 and 1817 they constructed and exhibited the Rev. Henry Liston's patent euharmonic organs. Liston's euharmonic organs were designed to produce ‘perfect harmony’ in any temperament: the octave was divided into 59 pitches by virtue of 20 pipes, which could be finely tuned by a system of shaders and pedals allowing different temperaments to be produced and compared. For an annotated bibliography of the relevant literature, see Kassler, Jamie Croy, The Science of Music in Britain, 1714-1830: A Catalogue of Writings, Lectures and Inventions, 2 vols. (New York, 1979), i, 334-42, and ii, 690-5. See also Williams, ‘Equal Temperament’, 64.Google Scholar

30 Hebert, , The Engineer's and Mechanic's Encyclopaedia, i, 96.Google Scholar

31 Davy, , ‘On the Mechanical Construction and Effect of the Apollonicon’, 166-7; idem, ‘Description of the Apollonicon’, 103; Harmonicon, 9 (January 1831), 10.Google Scholar

32 Harmonicon, 9 (January 1831), 10; Hebert, The Engineer's and Mechanic's Encyclopaedia, i, 102; Bullock, A Catalogue of the Stock of Messrs. Flight & Robson, 12. For John Masey Wright, see Wood, Christopher, Dictionary of British Art, iv: Victorian Painters (3rd edn, Woodbridge, 1995), i, 590. The descriptions of these paintings and of the case in general probably do not refer to the original design of the Apollonicon: for the opening of the 1826 season. Flight & Robson had built a new ‘highly decorative case’ (The Times, 7 January 1826), necessitated by the alterations and improvements which had been made to the organ after the close of the 1825 season. No reference to these paintings has been found predating March 1828.Google Scholar

33 Monthly Magazine, 54 (August 1817), 60. Busby's authorship is assumed since he contributed signed and unsigned articles, letters and reviews to this journal (September 1796 until c.1816) and other literary ventures of Sir Richard Phillips: Jamie Croy Kassler, ‘Busby, Thomas’, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (London, 1980), iii, 497; Leanne Langley, ‘The English Musical Journal in the Early Nineteenth Century’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1983), 459–62. Furthermore, precisely the same claim is made for the Apollonicon in Busby's Concert-Room and Orchestra Anecdotes, i, 3.Google Scholar

34 Ord-Hume, Barrel-Organ, 113.Google Scholar

35 Hebert, , The Engineer's and Mechanic's Encyclopaedia, i, 97.Google Scholar

36 Davy, , Mechanics’ Magazine, 15 (18 June 1831), 242.Google Scholar

37 Hebert, , The Engineer's and Mechanic's Encyclopaedia, i, 102; Davy, ‘Description of the Apollon icon’, 98; Harmonicon, 9 (January 1831), 9. The June performances were probably test runs, since the organ was not declared complete until the following month; see Monthly Magazine, 53 (July 1817), 533.Google Scholar

38 Marsh, John, ‘Journals’, GB-Cu Add. MS 7757, f. 1650 (abridged and transcribed by Marsh's son from the holograph journals, now in US-SM, HM 54437).Google Scholar

39 See Ord-Hume, ‘Automaton Displays and Museums of Ingenuity’, Clockwork Music (London, 1973), 18–62. Ord-Hume discusses the careers and machines of the Maelzel brothers and their connections with Beethoven in Barrel-Organ, 178-83, and Joseph Haydn, 137-42. Hans-Werner Küthen has shown that the ‘Battle Symphony’ originated in a partial draft by Maelzel, which Beethoven agreed to orchestrate; see his ‘N'eue Aspekte zur Entstehung von Wellingtons Sieg’, Beethoven Jahrbuch, 8 (1975), 73-92.Google Scholar

40 Dates derived from advertisements in The Times, Morning Chronicle and the musical press; Harmonicon, 9 (January 1831), 9; Bullock, A Catalogue of the Stock of Messrs. Flight & Robson, 12; Davy, ‘Description of the Apollonicon’, 103-4; idem, ‘On the Mechanical Construction and Effect of the Apollonicon’, 166.Google Scholar

41 Ehrlich, Cyril, First Philharmonic: A History of the Royal Philharmonic Society (Oxford, 1995), 6.Google Scholar

42 Davy, , ‘On the Mechanical Construction and Effect of the Apollonicon’, 158-9; idem, ‘Description of the Apollonicon’, 103-4.Google Scholar

43 See, for example, The Times, 4 June 1813 and 26 February 1814; and handbills reproduced in Ord-Hume, Barrel-Organ, 177 (fig. 68), and Clockwork Music, 43.Google Scholar

44 'Organ’, The Cyclopaedia, ed. Rees, in reference to Flight's barrels for Lord Kirkwall's organ. Flight was able to achieve ‘an effect which the finest orchestra can hardly surpass'; Harmonicon, 9 (January 1831), 10. None of the barrels pinned for the Apollonicon are known to have survived. However, a single cylinder produced for a finger-and-barrel organ built by Flight & Robson c.1822 for the Great Hall at Leigh Court Hospital in Bristol does exist. The barrel is spiral-pinned with two pieces: Mozart's overture to La clemenza di Tito and the duct ‘Ah perdona'. See Ord-Hume, Barrel-Organ, 38 and 84, pls. 37-9.Google Scholar

45 Davy, , Mechanics’ Magazine, 15 (18 June 1831), 241–3; idem, ‘Adaptation of the Overture of Oberon to the Apollonicon’, ibid., 11 (28 March 1829), 97-9.Google Scholar

46 See advertisements on the back pages of Davy, The Architect, Engineer, & Operative Builder's Constructive Manual … Part I (London, 1839).Google Scholar

47 A Catalogue of the Books in the Library of the London Mechanics’ Institution, No. 24 Southampton Buildings, Chancery Lane (London, 1833), back wrapper. The term ‘arts’ is used in its broader sense here, to indicate any activity drawing on skill and craft. Classes in the history of art and architecture were a regular feature, and Benjamin Haydon lectured there from 1835 to 1839. For more on the London Mechanics’ Institution, see Kelly, Thomas, A History of Adult Education in Great Britain (2nd edn, Liverpool, 1970), 120–2, 129-30.Google Scholar

48 Davy, , ‘Adaptation of the Overture of Oberon’, 98.Google Scholar

49 See handbills reproduced in Ord-Hume, Barrel-Organ, 177 (fig. 68); A Dictionary of Musicians, ed. Sainsbury, 321-6; Donovan Dawe, Organists of the City of London 1666-1850 (Padstow, 1983), 136; Anonymous manuscript note, n.d., Westminster City Archives (hereafter WCA), F138/St Martin's Lane (22).Google Scholar

50 Davy, , ‘Description of the Apollonicon’, 98; idem, ‘On the Mechanical Construction and Effect of the Apollonicon’, 157; Harmonicon, 9 (January 1831), 9.Google Scholar

51 The Times, 13 January 1818; ‘Instrumental Oratorio’, a review from an unidentified newspaper, dated (MS) 5 February 1818, WCA, F138/St Martin's Lane (22). In 1825, Sainsbury stated that Purkis's recitals drew a crowd of ‘two to three hundred people’ (A Dictionary of Musicians, 326).Google Scholar

52 Mechanics’ Magazine, 11 (28 March 1829), 98.Google Scholar

53 Harmonicon, 9 (January 1831), 9.Google Scholar

54 Ibid., 10.Google Scholar

55 The Times, 9-10 July 1819.Google Scholar

56 Ibid., 2 and 30-31 July 1819.Google Scholar

57 Like Adams, Purkis seems initially to have preferred operatic arias and ducts to ensembles, perhaps because they represented the best medium in which to relish the Apollonicon's superb vox humana stop; see The Times, 24 July 1827.Google Scholar

58 18 December 1819, 25 March and 9 June 1820 respectively; see The Times, 17 December 1819, 24 March and 9 June 1820. Movements from K.606 had been published by Purkis as ‘Mozart's celebrated Waltz with variations’ in 1816.Google Scholar

59 Athenaeum, 73 (18 March 1829), 168.Google Scholar

60 'Such a title would have warranted a greater proportion of digressive and connecting ideas, than Mr. P has introduced.’ Repository of Arts, Literature, Fashions, Manufactures, &c, 9 (February 1820), 105. Leanne Langley states that Engelbach consistently promoted the music of J. S. Bach, Mozart and Beethoven in the pages of this journal as models of fine composition, whilst satirizing fashionable genres such as the theme and variations and the fantasia; see ‘The English Musical Journal’, 473-6. Review of Fantasia no. 2 on themes from Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro, Monthly Magazine, 55 (March 1823), 163.Google Scholar

61 Dates of publication are based on examination of watermarks, published reviews and Stationers’ Hall records.Google Scholar

62 The Times, 26 January 1821.Google Scholar

63 Ibid., 17 February 1820. For discussion of repertory associated with George III, see Weber, William, The Rise of Musical Classics in Eighteenth-Century England: A Study in Canon, Ritual and Ideology (Oxford, 1992), 233–41.Google Scholar

64 Sources: Apollonicon advertisements in the London press; subscription list for Samuel Wesley's Service in F (1824); review of a Te deum on the anniversary of the Portuguese constitution at the embassy chapel, The Times, 30 April 1827; Joseph Doane, A Musical Directory for the Year 1794 (London, 1794; repr. London, 1993), 28; Dawe, Organists, 89, 123; Thistlethwaite, The Making of the Victorian Organ, 102-3; obituary of Moxley, Musical Times, 5 (January 1853), 124–5; programmes of the Concerts of Ancient Music. Flight had at least two other sons, James and William, who were involved in the firm; see Ord-Hume, Barrel-Organ, 107, and GB-Mp, Henry-Watson Music Library, MS F 789.72 WM74, ff. 11-12. A ‘Guichard’ also purchased a number of Masses and motets at the auction of Burney's library; see Catalogue of the Music Library of Charles Burney, sold in London, 8 August 1814 (Amsterdam, 1973), lots 228-87.Google Scholar

65 The Times, 24 January 1818.Google Scholar

66 Morning Post, 17 March 1823.Google Scholar

67 An Alphabetical List of the Subscribers to Messrs. Bartleman, C. Knyvett, W. Knyvett & Greatorex's Vocal Concerts 1819, GB-Lgc, GMus 148; programmes for the Concerts of Ancient Music, GMus 143-7. The earl was one of a group of noblemen who expressed an interest in taking over the management of the King's Theatre on 7 June 1816; The Times, 8 June 1816. An album of English ‘Songs and Duetts’ from the countess's library is now in private possession.Google Scholar

68 Dawe, , Organists, 74; ‘Extract from a lecture delivered at the Collegiate Institution, Liverpool, by Mr. E. J. Hopkins, Organist of the Temple Church’, GB-Lbl, Music Library, Temporary Deposit no. 9529; William Henry Hadow, ‘Adams, Thomas’, Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians (London, 1878-89), i, 40; Thistlethwaite, The Making of the Victorian Organ, 60-1.Google Scholar

69 Annotation on Adams's Introduction and Variations for Organ on ‘Barney! leave the girls alone’ in the hand of Vincent Novello, GB-Lbl Add. MS 65457, f. 4.Google Scholar

70 Musical Standard, 39 (6 December 1890), 473. This was one of a series of letters debating whether Adams was the equal of J. S. Bach as a contrapuntist. Other correspondents included Charles W. Pearce, William Spark, T. L. Southgate and Eliza Wesley.Google Scholar

71 A Dictionary of Musicians, ed. Sainsbury, i, 5.Google Scholar

72 The Times, 24 January 1818.Google Scholar

73 Ibid., 5 and 11 February 1818. Without a performance tradition for Bach's music until the early nineteenth century, English organists had nothing on which to base their interpretations. Adams is reputed to have played all Bach's fugues ‘fast'; see Edwards, ‘Bach's Music’, 724.Google Scholar

74 Dawe, , Organists, 74; A Dictionary of Musicians, ed. Sainsbury, i, 5; The Royal Society of Musicians of Great Britain: List of Members 1738-1984, ed. Betty Matthews (London, 1985), 13.Google Scholar

75 The Times, 2 April 1818.Google Scholar

76 See ibid., 20 May and 9 July 1818. Adams also introduced new secular repertory to London audiences through his recitals on the Apollonicon: on 14 May 1818 he scooped the London première of ‘selections from Cherubini's grand tragic opera of Medee (sic)’ (The Times, 14 May 1818). Médée was not produced at the King's Theatre (Her Majesty's) until 6 June 1865, Cherubini having obstructed a planned performance in 1815; see Loewenberg, Alfred, Annals of Opera: 1597-1940 (3rd edn, London, 1978), 532.Google Scholar

77 Review of the second of Adams's evening performances, given on 5 February 1818: ‘Instrumental Oratorios’, clipping from an unidentified newspaper, WCA, F138/St Martin's Lane (22).Google Scholar

78 The Times, 15 December 1818.Google Scholar

79 English Musical Gazette, 1 (1 January 1819), 16. The fugue from Davidde penitente was later also billed as a ‘Grand Motet’ or ‘Cantata'; see, for example, programmes published in The Times for Adams's evening recitals in 1825.Google Scholar

80 The Times, 11, 13 and 16 March 1807. In 1807 the Cianchettini family had just returned from the continent, probably bringing with them copies of the edition published as an Easter cantata by Kühnel in Leipzig in 1805.Google Scholar

81 English Musical Gazette, 1 (1 January 1819), 16.Google Scholar

82 For the dissemination and reception of J. S. Bach's music in England, see: Edwards, ‘Bach's Music'; Nicholas Temperley, ‘Bach Revival’, The New Grove Dictionary, i, 883-6; The Wesley Bach Letters: A Facsimile Reprint of the First Printed Edition (London, 1988); Thistlethwaite, The Making of the Victorian Organ, 163-80 and passim; Robert Pascali, ‘Ein Überblick der frühen Bach-Rezeption in England bis zirka 1860’, Johann Sebastian Bach: Beiträge zur Wirkungsgeschichte (Vienna, 1992), 147–65. The dissemination and reception of Mozart's music in England 1764-1829 is discussed in detail in the author's doctoral thesis, in preparation. See also: Simon McVeigh, Concert Life in London from Mozart to Haydn (Cambridge, 1993), 127-8; David Wyn Jones, ‘From Artaria to Longman & Broderip: Mozart's Music on Sale in London’, Studies in Music History presented to H. C. Robbins London on his Seventieth Birthday, ed. Otto Biba and David Wyn Jones (London, 1996), 105-14.Google Scholar

83 English Musical Gazette, 1 (1 January 1819), 16.Google Scholar

84 For a detailed discussion of attitudes towards originality and plagiarism in early nineteenth-century England, see Irving, Howard, ‘William Crotch on Borrowing’, Music Review, 53 (1992), 237–54.Google Scholar

85 Augustus Frederic Christopher Kollmann, ‘Of Johann Sebastian Bach and his Works’, Quarterly Musical Register, 1 (January 1812), 36, 39. For Callcott's views, see ‘Bach, Johann Sebastian’, ‘Dictionary of Music’, GB-Lbl Add. MS 27691, f. 13. Callcott and Kollmann corresponded on theoretical matters, 1799-1806; see GB-Lbl Add. MSS 27687-9, 30022.Google Scholar

86 Letter from Thomas Adams to Vincent Novello, 22 August 1828, GB-Lbl Add. MS 11730, ff. 3-4.Google Scholar

87 Reviewed in Quarterly Musical Magazine and Review, 10 (1828), 129–31.Google Scholar

88 The Times, 16 June 1819. The selection from the first Mass was not included in The Times's notice on the day of the concert, so it may have been withdrawn. Novello's edition of this Mass, based on Breitkopf & Härtel's full score of 1802, had been reviewed by the end of June 1819: English Musical Gazette, 7 (1 July 1819), 120.Google Scholar

89 The Times, 14 July 1819.Google Scholar

90 See: Temperley, ‘Bach Revival’, 884-5; John Butt, Bach: Mass in B Minor (Cambridge, 1991), 27–8. Following C. P. E. Bach's concert performances in Hamburg, 1786, the Mass seems to have temporarily fallen into obscurity even in Germany. Mendelssohn's teacher Carl Friedrich Zelter, founder of the Berlin Singakademie, began to rehearse it on 25 October 1811, but considered a performance impractical. The Singakademie worked on all the movements over the next few years, however, and a truncated version was eventually given in 1835. Johann Nepomuk Schelble revived the Credo at Frankfurt, as did Spontini in Berlin: both performances took place in 1828, nine years after the possible performance at the Apollonicon by Adams and his team.Google Scholar

91 English Musical Gazette, 1 (January 1819), 14; letter from Samuel Wesley to William Shield, 12 September 1815, GB-Lbl Eg. MS 2159, f. 70. I am grateful to Philip Olleson for information from Wesley's letters concerning his edition of Bach's Credo. Nägeli intended his edition to be ready by Easter 1819 and, although unable to gather enough subscribers, apparently went ahead with the engraving; see Butt, Bach: Mass in B minor, 29-31, and Johann Sebastian Bach: Neue Ausgabe sämtlicher Werke, ii/1, ed. Friedrich Smend (Kassel and Basle, 1956), Kritischer Bericht, 55-77. The source for Wesley's copy may have come from Burney's library; see Catalogue of the Music Library of Charles Burney, lot 232, ‘Symbolum Nicerium Credo, in score, ms’, bought by ‘T. Jones'. But at least three other copies of Bach's Credo are known to have been in England at this time. GB-Cu houses a manuscript with pencil annotations by ‘SW’ (not in Wesley's hand) and ‘WC’ (possibly William Crotch or William Chappell); on the final page is inscribed ‘J. Barber, music amanuensis to her Royal Highness the Princess Charlotte of Wales & Duke of Sussex, William Street, Tottenham Court Road, June 1811'; see GB-Cu Add. MS 9484. Queen Charlotte also owned a copy of the Credo, dating from 1788, which was probably copied for her by C. F. Horn or A. F. C. Kollmann, now GB-Lbl RM 21.a.9. A full score in the hand of John Christopher Smith has also survived; see GB-Ob MS Tenbury 1230.Google Scholar

92 Letter from Samuel Wesley to Benjamin Jacob, 17 September 1809, The Wesley Bach Letters, 1-5. Wesley had ‘prepared’ a selection of music, including some of Bach's motets, for the barrels of an organ commissioned from Flight & Kobson by John Fuller of Devonshire Place in 1815; letter to William Shield, GB-Lbl Eg. MS 2159, f. 70. Samuel's brother Charles had acted in a similar capacity during the construction of an organ for White Gate Church (see Figure 1). That Adams and Wesley held each other in mutual esteem is clear from the correspondence between Eliza Wesley and Thomas Adams, 1836-50, GB-Lbl, Music Library, Temporary Deposit 9529.Google Scholar

93 Letter from Thomas Adams to Eliza Wesley, 21 October 1836, GB-Lbl, Music Library, Temporary Deposit 9529. Wesley may in fact have loaned Adams his score of the Credo a year earlier, in 1818: a mysterious item was included by Adams in his performance on 19 February – a ‘composition of J. S. Bach, Wesley'; The Times, 18 February 1818. It seems unlikely that this was taken from Wesley and Horn's edition of the ‘48’, because Adams was careful to refer to such selections as ‘Fugue’, or ‘Prelude and Fugue’, and generally gave the key. A press advertisement quoted by Hinton and dated 12 August 1818 lists ‘choruses from a grand mass by Sebastian Bach’ which may have included the Credo. This could also have been the ‘Grand Fugue, S. Batch [sic]’ performed on 11 February and 11 March 1819; see The Times, 10-11 February, 10-11 March 1819.Google Scholar

94 This may also have been the identity of the Bach ‘Grand chorus’ performed on 18 February 1819; see The Times, 17 and 18 February 1819. An unidentified ‘Motett’ by J. S. Bach was also performed this season, on 17 Dccember 1818 and 29 April 1819; The Times, 17 December 1818, 28 and 29 April 1819. For London perfomances of ‘Jesu, meine Freude’ instigated by Samuel Wesley in 1809-10, see Pascali, ‘Ein Überblick”, 151; Temperley, ‘Bach Revival’, 885.Google Scholar

95 The Times, 7 and 8 April 1819.Google Scholar

96 Letter from Adams to Novello, 1 April 1840, GB-Lbl Add. MS 11730, ff. 5-6.Google Scholar

97 Haydn's ‘Sixth’ Mass was the Harmoniemesse, Hob. XXII/14, which Adams had introduced to the Apollonicon on 25 June 1818. Movements from Haydn's ‘Last Words of our Saviour’ had been featured in Adams's programmes as early as 19 February 1818, and the Stabat mater was added to his repertory on 8 March 1819; The Times, 18 February 1818, 7 March 1819. Haydn's Te deum was performed at the Apollonicon on 28 January 1819; see The Times, 28 January 1819.Google Scholar

98 See A Collection of Sacred Music, as Performed at the Royal Portuguese Chapel in London, Composed, Selected and Arranged … by Vincent Novello (London, 1811), which included: Panis omnipotentia, from K.125; Quoniam tu solus, altered from the Confitebor of K.321; Et resurrexit, altered from the Dona nobis of the Agnus dei, K.194; an unidentified Salve regina, ‘alter'd and curtailed from Haydn’, and a Qui sedes from a Mozart source as yet unidentified. See also Latrobe's Selection of Sacred Music, 6 vols. (London, 1806-26); the Mozart items included in this collection are listed in Chronologisch thematisches Verzeichnis sämtlicher Tonwerke Wolfgang Amadé Mozarts … von Dr. Ludwig Ritter von Köchel, 8th edn, ed. Franz Gicgling et al. (Wiesbaden, 1983), 803; Haydn items are listed in Anthony van Hoboken, Joseph Haydn: Thematisch-bibliographisches Werkverzeichnis, iii: Register: Addenda und Corrigenda (Mainz, 1978), 76–7.Google Scholar

99 For contemporary theories of the musical sublime, see the opening chapters of William Crotch, Substance of Several Courses of Lectures on Music, read in the University of Oxford and in the Metropolis (London, 1831). Crotch's aesthetic division of music into the sublime, the beautiful and the ornamental was derived from an application of the theories of Sir Joshua Reynolds, Uvedale Price and Edmund Burke to music See: Reynolds, Discourses (London, 1797); Price, An Essay on the Picturesque, as Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful (London, 1794); Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (London, 1757). For other British writings on the sublime, see Hippie, Walter John, The Beautiful, the Sublime, and the Picturesque in Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetic Theory (Carbondale, 1957). For further discussion of the impact of ideas of the sublime on music in England, including Haydn's The Creation, see McVeigh, Concert Life, 116-18, 149-66.Google Scholar

100 See McVeigh, , Concert Life, 116-17. Steibelt himself gave the first performance of this concerto at Salomon's concert on 19 March 1798, and arranged for a second piano, hidden in the orchestra, to double his solo part and increase the impact of this movement.

101 Ballot, 27 February 1831.Google Scholar

102 The Times, 24 May 1790; programme for recital by Crotch and Jacob at the Surrey Chapel, 21 May 1812, GB-Lcm, Sacred Harmonic Society Library; David Hughson, Walks through London, including Westminster and the Borough of Southwark (London, 1817), 294. Vogler's sublime organ extemporizations were later celebrated by Robert Browning in his poem ‘Abt Vogler'.Google Scholar

103 See Crotch, , Substance of Several Courses of Lectures, passim.Google Scholar

104 The Times, 13 February 1821.Google Scholar

105 Thistlethwaite, The Making of the Victorian Organ, 91-3, 127-35 and passim.Google Scholar

106 'Tu che accendi’ and a quartet from Tancredi were performed on 29 February 1821; The Times, 28 February 1821.Google Scholar

107 See, for example, comments printed by Atlas, 16 December 1822 (quoted below).Google Scholar

108 See The Times, 7 February 1823.Google Scholar

109 Ballot, 27 February 1831. The critic is recalling Apollonicon performances of ‘about four years ago'.Google Scholar

110 Nicholas Temperley, ‘Adams, Thomas (ii)’, The New Grove Dictionary, i, 101.Google Scholar

111 The post-war prosperity which reached its climax in 1825 is often regarded as the first truly modern cyclical boom in British economic history. For analysis of this cycle, the fluctuations within it and the crash of 1825, see: Arthur D. Gayer, W. W. Rostow and Anna Jacobson Schwartz, The Growth and Fluctuation of the British Economy, 1790-1850 (2nd edn, Hassocks, 1975), i, 111-241; John Clapham, The Bank of England: A History (Cambridge, 1970), ii, 75-130.Google Scholar

112 Ballot, 27 February 1831.Google Scholar

113 The Times, 25 March and 16 June 1826; ibid., 14, 18 and 25 February 1828.Google Scholar

114 John Marsh, ‘Journals’, GB-Cu Add. MS 7757, ff. 1650 and 1716; Harmonicon, 7 (October 1829), 253; Mechanics’ Magazine, 12 (1830), 59; letter from Charles Wesley to Miss Essex Cholmondley, 27 July 1827, GB-Mp MS F 789.72 WM74, f. 21. Another barrel-and-finger organ built by Flight & Robson during this period was donated to Christ's Hospital in 1954, having previously stood in Withyham vicarage in Sussex; see Nicholas M. Plumley, The Organs and Music Masters of Christ's Hospital, The Christ's Hospital Papers, 1 (Horsham, 1981), 72–8.Google Scholar

115 London Gazette, 28 September 1832.Google Scholar

116 The Times, 12 November 1832.Google Scholar

117 Ord-Hume traces the fate of the Apollonicon after 1832 (Barrel-Organ, 121-7). For Flight & Robson's subsequent business activities, see also Thistlethwaite, The Making of the Victorian Organ, 58-9.Google Scholar

118 The Times, 15 June 1825.Google Scholar

119 Adams gave a course of four evening lectures in music at the City of London Literary and Scientific Institution in 1829; The Times, 26 June and 25 July 1829. On 7 July he was scheduled to give a lecture on Weber's Der Freischütz; The Times, 7 July 1829. The scripts of these lectures, which doubtless would shed further light on his reception of Bach, Haydn and Mozart, do not appear to have survived.Google Scholar

120 Letter from Thomas Adams to Vincent Novello, 22 August 1828, GB-Lbl Add. MS 11730.Google Scholar

121 Marcia Citron's definition of canon formation as a process of ‘super-reception’ is useful here: see her Gender and the Musical Canon (Cambridge, 1993), 11 and passim.Google Scholar

122 Review of concert on 5 February 1818, news clipping from unidentified source, WCA F138/St Martin's Lane (22).Google Scholar

123 Weber, , The Rise of Musical Classics, 1.Google Scholar

124 See programmes for the Concerts of Ancient Müsic preserved in GB-Lbl.Google Scholar

125 Weber, , The Rise of Musical Classics, 196.Google Scholar

126 The ‘Ancient’ composers were also represented in Adams's recitals by Corelli, Boyce, Purcell, Jommelli and Pergolesi. For example, a selection from Pergolesi's Miserere was performed on 29 April 1819; see The Times, 28 April.Google Scholar

127 'The lovers of the ancient madrigals, anthems, and choruses, could not but appreciate the vocal full pieces in the operas of this great composer. Science could no longer be held in ridicule; if admired in one author, it must be equally so in another. That which Mozart praised and imitated, could not be dispised [sic] by his own devotees [and] of Handel he always spoke with reverence.’ Crotch, Substance of Several Courses of Lectures, 149.Google Scholar

128 See Weber, , ‘The Ideology of Ancient Music’, The Rise of Musical Classics, 198-222.Google Scholar

129 The Times, 24 July 1827.Google Scholar