Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain

by Judith Flanders

  The amount of sheet music published kept rising: in 1766 the Scottish music publisher Bremner listed 120 works in his catalogue; in 1773 Weicker had 500; Longman and Broderip’s music catalogue of 1789 had 1,664 separate pieces of music for sale; and in 1824 Boosey’s had 280 pages listing 10,000 foreign publications alone; D’Almaine and Co. claimed in 1838 to have 200,000 engraved plates in stock. To return to the end of the century, at that time Longman and Broderip’s catalogue had 565 pieces for the piano, 333 for the voice with harpsichord, and 90 pieces of dance music to be played on any keyboard instrument. Of the complete listing, 60 per cent were for the keyboard, and 300 of these pieces were listed as ‘sonatas or lessons’. The range was tremendous. There were works by (among others) J. C. Bach, Boccherini, Cherubini, Clementi, Corelli, Giordani, Haydn, Kozeluch, Mozart, Pergolesi, Pleyel, Scarlatti, Schroeter and more. These were sold in sets at 7s. 6d. the set or 10s. 6d. for a bound volume. They could also be purchased as single sonatas or lessons for 1 or 2s. each. Then ‘Single Italian Songs’, that is, arias, were available: extracts from Iffigenia, Alessandro nel Indie, Alceste and Armida, or from light operas like La Cosa Rara or Il Contadino in Corte. Overtures could also be bought on their own, and while some were from Italian opera, for the most part it was musical comedies in English that were listed: Dibdin’s The Blackamoor, Samuel Arnold’s Inkle and Yarico, William Shield’s The Choleric Fathers and The Farmer. These mostly cost 6d. or 1s., while complete piano and vocal scores for the shows from which these pieces had been extracted were available at between 3s. to 10s. 6d. The catalogue then listed ‘favourite airs with variations’, which had titles like ‘Black Joke’ (with variations by Clementi), ‘Jack’s Return from Dover’, ‘Sow’s Tail to Geordie’ and ‘Twiggle and a Friz’. These were very likely pleasure-garden songs. Then there were traditional airs: ‘Allan a Roon’, ‘Auld Robin Gray’, ‘Highland Laddie’ and ‘Over the Muir among the Heather’, many of which were also performed in the pleasure gardens.39 These could be bought in a variety of formats: as vocal scores for male or female voices, or arranged for different instruments or different combinations of instruments.

  As in all new markets, many schemes were advertised and promoted. James Harrison, a music publisher, saw, as Wedgwood had seen, that the middle classes, if they were charged less, would actually return a larger profit to the entrepreneur. Handel’s works had previously been published by subscription, at 2 guineas. Harrison produced a vocal score of the Messiah for just 7s. - a sixth of the price. He also began to publish the New Musical Magazine, which provided sheet music for oratorios, operas and other vocal music adapted to be sung at home. His new Piano-Forte Magazine began to appear in 1797, at 2s. 6d. weekly. It survived only until 1802, and perhaps some of Harrison’s marketing schemes were to blame. An advertisement in The Times promoted the Piano-Forte Magazine by saying that each issue would contain a promissory note signed by Harrison. When 250 notes had been collected, they could be exchanged for ‘a Brilliant and elegant Pianoforte, far superior to many instruments sold for 25 guineas each’.40 The magazine went under before anyone could have saved up for a piano, but the scheme made no sense anyway. To get a piano, readers needed to purchase nearly five years’ worth of sheet music first. If they already had a piano, they didn’t need a second one, and if they didn’t have a piano, what were they going to do with five years’ worth of sheet music in the meantime? Finally, over the period of the offer, £31 5s. would have to be spent buying the magazine - £5 more than the value of the ‘free’ piano.

  Other music publishers were more pragmatic. With increasing numbers of amateur performers, publishers saw a market for popular music such as traditional folk songs, especially if they were arranged by famous composers, like the Scottish songs on p. 220. Music commemorating battles or marking public events had long been popular at the pleasure gardens. With the advent of the French wars, similar songs as well as piano solos and duets also became available as sheet music: compositions marking the battles of Jemappes, Neewinden, Marengo, Austerlitz, Jena, Leipzig and Waterloo were all published. Stephen Francis Rimbault, the organist of St Giles-in-the-Fields, wrote a fantasia entitled The Battle of Navarino, which gave guidance to the pianist (and audience): one section was a depiction of ‘Turkish and Egyptian ships blown up’, another ‘The Asia loses her Mizzen Mast’. Dussek composed The Naval Battle and Total Destruction of the Dutch Fleet by Admiral Duncan, Oct. 11, 1797, to mark the British victory at Camperdown; he also wrote Le Combat naval, which had no direct references to a specific fleet or country, and could therefore have a wide appeal, for the supporters of any side in any naval battle. Other pieces were opportune in different ways: The Battle of Copenhagen…Dedicated to Lord Cathcart was in fact a piece that had earlier been published as La Bataille d’Austerlitz.41

  By 1805 the music market was booming. Such was the call for sheet music that the composer and pianist Josef Wolfl wrote from London to his music publisher in Leipzig:

  Since I have been here, my works have had astonishing sales and I already get sixty guineas for three sonatas; but along with all this I must write in a very easy, and sometimes a very vulgar style…in case it should occur to one of your critics to make fun of me on account of any of my things that have appeared here. You won’t believe how backward music still is here, and how one has to hold oneself back in order to bring forth such shallow compositions, which do a terrific business here.

  The business was terrific. In 1750 there had been about a dozen music shops in London; in 1794 one directory alone listed thirty; by 1824 there were at least fifty.42

  This amount of music publishing depended entirely on a large number of people who could play the piano in the first place, and thus it was that, as well as sheet music for the already proficient, from 1800 the range of books of piano tuition and exercises was growing rapidly. In 1798 the piano virtuoso Clementi took over the firm of Longman and Broderip, and three years later his Introduction to the Art of Piano Playing appeared, which contained a selection of ‘lessons’ by a variety of composers. This was followed in 1804 by J. B. Cramer’s book of forty-two études. If Clementi’s publication was the culmination of one style of tuition book, Cramer’s was the introduction of the next. Earlier manuals had been compilations of pieces of more or less the same level of difficulty. Cramer’s études set out, for the first time, pieces that each contained a technical difficulty, or a series of technical difficulties, which had to be mastered and which then incorporated into the next étude in the series, on an ascending scale of difficulty. These études were so successful that in 1805 another publisher produced a similar Study for the Piano-Forte, Containing 500 Exercises, and in 1810 Cramer published a second set of forty-two. In 1817 Clementi returned with the first part of his great masterwork, the Gradus ad Parnassum, which, as well as distilling the many years of his own teaching, was also heavily influenced by his discussions with perhaps the best-known of all piano-exercise composers, Karl Czerny (a pupil of Beethoven and the teacher of Liszt).

  The audience for these books, a market of amateur piano-players, was now more than large enough to support an industry: the development of the piano had made home performance a possibility for many. In the middle of the eighteenth century a harpsichord had cost between 35 and 50 guineas at the lower end of the price spectrum; a decorated, ornate instrument cost much more. Zumpe, in 1768, had charged J. C. Bach £50 for his primitive piano. By the end of the eighteenth century a grand piano was priced at 70 guineas, while an inexpensive, space-saving upright might cost only 20 guineas. The prices had continued to fall: in 1815 a large, decorated grand from Broadwood’s was £46, while the company’s square piano, with the new action, cost £18 3s.43 It was large-scale production that enabled manufacturers to lower their prices. Burkat Shudi and his son had, in their sixty-four joint years of harpsichord-making, produced somewhat under 1,200 harpsichords, or fewer than nineteen a year, which appears to have been more or less the norm. In Vienna at the beginning of th
e nineteenth century one of the premier piano manufacturers was making about fifty pianos a year using the English innovations - the pedals, the extended keyboards and (later) the metal bracing. By contrast, John Broadwood had, by 1802, made 8,000 pianos in his twenty years of piano-production - or 400 a year, eight times the number of his Viennese rival. In the next twenty-two years, his company produced another 45,000, an average production of 2,045 a year, or over five a day: every four days, Broadwood replicated Shudi’s entire annual output.44

  One of the greatest motivators to get pianos into the middle-class home was the arrival of the upright. Many had wanted a piano; many could even afford a piano; but they simply had no space for one. Then, in 1795, William Stodart, the younger brother of Robert Stodart, who had developed the English action and pedals together with Broadwood, took a grand piano, set it upright on a stand, and put it inside what was effectively a cupboard. Although Stodart’s upright saved space, it was not yet an item for the average home - his instruments measured about 2.6 metres high. But even at this size, when Broadwood’s began to produce them it sold more of these than it did grand pianos: the market for a smaller piano was already making itself felt. Gradually these vast uprights, or ‘cabinet’ pianos, were reduced to a height of ‘only’ 1.8 metres. The hammers of a grand fall back through gravity, so, once they were set side-on in an upright, a mechanism was needed to replicate what had previously occurred naturally. In 1802 experiments were made with the strings, and it was found possible to stretch them obliquely, which further reduced the height of the entire structure.* This smaller instrument became known as a cottage piano, and it was one of the most popular domestic pianos throughout the century.45 Further improvements were mostly made for sound rather than space reasons - by the 1820s Broadwood’s was using iron resistance bars against the soundboard, which allowed the hammer heads to strike the strings more heavily, giving a better sound, and one that made possible the development of the new, Romantic style of playing.

  It was not until the middle of the century that any form of mass production entered the manufacturing process, and for this reason, until instruments at substantially lower prices created a new bottom end of the market, pianos had remained firmly in the luxury class, even if they were now an affordable luxury for the prosperous middle classes. In 1850 about 83,000 families had an annual income of between £150 and £400, while a lower-middle-class family’s average income was £90.46 Broadwood’s sold its grand pianos for £135, while its uprights ranged from 80 guineas down to 45 guineas. Even manufacturers with lesser reputations charged high prices: a six-octave ‘piccolo’ (that is, a small upright) cost from 60 to 40 guineas, and cottage pianos were about the same. In 1851 the manufacturer Collard showed two small ‘semi-cottages’ in plain deal wood, undecorated, at what was described as the very low price of 30 guineas. These prices limited good new pianos to the homes of the prosperous. However, there was already a strong secondary market, with substantially less expensive pianos available outside London or from second-rate manufacturers. An ‘artisan’ piano could be bought for as little as £10, a quarter of the generally accepted price for a good piano.47 Furthermore, there was also a brisk trade in secondhand pianos, as this new luxury began to seem more like a necessity. This, combined with a rise in wages that began in 1857, brought pianos, whose prices were falling, ever closer to the reach of the majority of the middle-class population.48

  Many of the manufacturers who produced pianos at the lower end of the market were not in fact manufacturers at all: they bought instruments from more established firms, who didn’t want to sully their names with cheap pianos, and stencilled their names above the keyboards. In 1851 200 manufacturers were listed in the trade directories, of whom some were stencillers and about 50 only made parts (they were fretcutters, or they manufactured the hammer rails, or the felt for the hammers and dampers; some even simply produced the shirred silk for the front of uprights, yet they still called themselves piano manufacturers). Of the factories who did manufacture pianos, nearly 90 per cent were companies employing fewer than ten men. In 1854 T. & H. Brooks became the first company to often complete actions for sale, making it possible for smaller companies to buy partly processed goods and lower their overheads. And the overheads for piano manufacturing were enormous. For a start, the wood needed to be seasoned for at least two years before it could be used, and a grand piano then took a minimum of six months to produce: thirty months’ investment before any return was possible. The better the piano, too, the heavier the investment of time and resources. A Broadwood piano did not have a readypurchased action; Broadwood actions each had 3,800 separate pieces: ivory, several different types of wood and metal, cloth, felt, leather and vellum, all of which were assembled by a minimum of forty different workmen - key-makers, hammer-makers, damper-makers, damper-liftermakers, notch-makers, hammer-leatherers, beam-makers, brass-studmakers, brass-bridge-makers, and so on.49 It was not perhaps surprising that at the Great Exhibition, Broadwood’s, confident in the supremacy of its instruments, disdained the gimmickry of fellow manufacturers (see p. 20), and simply showed its four best grand pianos. William Rolfe and Sons, from Cheapside, at the opposite end of the scale, also showed just its best: a cottage piano, ‘in which stability, economy, and excellence are the objects aimed at’.50

  Broadwood had revolutionized piano manufacture in the eighteenth century, but by the middle of the nineteenth it was the American manufacturers who were ushering in the next big changes. America had long had a shortage of skilled manpower, and therefore labour was costly and industry as a whole worked hard towards mechanization; Britain had a plentiful, thus cheap, labour force, and saw much less need to mechanize. By the 1800s American manufacturers were exploring the use of machinery for preparing wood for a variety of uses - sawing, planing and other basics. Half a century later Broadwood’s and its competitors were using almost no machinery at all, not even to prepare the wood. As late as 1857 a paper on ‘The Conversion of Wood by Machinery’ read to the Institution of Civil Engineers was considered an astonishing innovation.51

  But it was more than production methods that were being overhauled in America: it was the entire construction of the pianos. Beneath the traditional grand piano (or at the back of an upright) was a wooden bracing, which held a plank that in turn held the tuning pins for the strings. As the range expanded higher and higher, the pitch was raised, and with it the string tension had to be increased, exerting more and more pressure on the wooden frame, which was just not strong enough to bear it. With a metal frame, the force on a concert grand could be increased, and it went from about 16 tons in 1860 to 30 tons in the next three-quarters of a century. Even before the force increased, the wooden frames had been annoyingly susceptible to climate changes, which made the wood expand and contract, destroying the tuning of the instrument. The overall cast-iron frame from America produced a better sound, and it guaranteed that that improved sound would not fluctuate seasonally. The first iron-framed piano to be shown in Britain, at the Great Exhibition, was a Chickering, a grand piano with ‘the whole framing consisting of string plate, longitudinal bars, wrest block and drilled bridge…of iron cast in one piece’.52

  The next innovation was also American, and it was particularly relevant to the domestic instrument. In 1863 an upright with bass strings that crossed the treble was built, producing the first upright to have a sound that even remotely matched that of a grand. As well as improved sound, it had a one-piece iron frame, which made possible greater tension of the strings, and, following on from that, heavier hammers, thicker felt and a better action.53 Almost all uprights from now on were built on this model.

  For some time, the fact that the British were dropping behind in both technology and price went unnoticed, for pianos were increasingly available to the general public. The new ‘three-year system’, or hire purchase as it later became known, made it possible to obtain a new piano for as little as £6 a year. In 1864 an advertisement offered a piano ‘Let on Hi
re for 3 Years, after which the instrument becomes the hirer’s property’. A 28-guinea ‘pianette’ could be acquired for 10 guineas a year; a 40-guinea cottage piano for 15 guineas, and a ‘60 guineas semi-oblique’ for only 20 guineas a year. The Bethnal Green Times, a local paper in respectable suburbia, in 1867 advertised, ‘Let or hire. 3 years system. Pianettes 21/2 guineas per quarter. Piccolos 3 guineas. Cottage pianos £3.10.0. Drawing-room model cottage £3.18.0.’54 Even this quarterly payment could be further broken down into manageable monthly payments: Molsom and Son’s Piano-Forte Saloon in Bath advertised pianos for 10s. a month in 1866 - a stretch, but no longer impossible for that respectable family on £150 a year.55

  Even as this new accessibility arrived, the British pre-eminence was over. In 1861 there had been fewer than 8,000 workers producing musical instruments in Germany; by 1875 that number had doubled; and by 1882 there were at least 25,000 working in the piano trade, and they were producing up to 70,000 pianos a year, of which nearly 25 per cent were shipped to England. This was a victory of modern mass production over hand craftsmanship, because the German manufacturers were not producing better pianos, they were producing cheaper pianos. By the 1880s their mass-produced uprights were being sold at half the price of English pianos. This was done by economizing on materials that did not affect the quality of the sound, and by leaving unfinished those parts that could not be seen without taking the piano apart. By 1914 one out of every five pianos bought in England was of German manufacture.56 The English piano-manufacturing industry was not dead - far from it. But it was facing extraordinary competition at the cheap end of the market from Germany, and at the concert grand end from America. For the moment, however, the market was large enough for everyone. By the early twentieth century, 1 person in every 360 people in the country bought a new piano, compared to the 1 in approximately 1,100 that had bought one in 1851. By 1910 there were perhaps between 2 and 4 million pianos in Britain - one for every 10 to 20 people.57