Chapter 2 - The Audience: Partner and Problem

Summary

CLASS, gender, and religion are blunt tools with which to define or characterize the audience. The only certain way to determine who attended Handel's performances is to examine the surviving archival evidence of correspondence, diaries, journals, and, most particularly, account books. This study, which I began in 1999, is the first to engage in depth with ego-documents as a means to understanding the behaviour of the historical audience for music. Identification of individuals is necessary in order to judge the claims that contemporaries and subsequent commentators have made about audiences. Data is readily recoverable on gender, age, marital status, faith, frequency of attendance, accompanying persons, and social status. We can compare the appeal of opera or oratorio with other entertainments, and sometimes we can find comments on the works and/or their realization in performance that help us understand the place of those works in people's lives. Having looked at individuals, the second half of the chapter will focus on an event, the rehearsal of the Music for the Royal Fireworks, which took place at Spring Gardens, Vauxhall, on the morning of Friday 21 April 1749. There is an irony to be had from the fact that this purportedly hugely popular event has left little by way of first-hand accounts. More significant is the existence of an impossible fact, one that has provoked biographers and other commentators into flights of fancy not unlike those to be found in a novel of magical realism, where place, time, and action bear an initial relationship to our own but the author, in manipulating them, takes us somewhere entirely fantastical.

Account Books

THE accounts of the North family, Barons Guilford, Barons North, and Earls of Guilford, will serve as an example. The Bodleian Library in Oxford holds the accounts of Francis, who succeeded as 3rd Baron Guilford in 1729 and 7th Baron North in 1734, and Lucy, his first wife, while the Kent History and Library Centre at Maidstone holds those of Katherine, his third wife, and Lady Arabella Furnese, her mother (their estate was at Waldershare, between Dover and Canterbury). Lucy’s accounts show regular attendance chiefly at plays but with occasional visits to operas and other events.