2 - Wilhelm Cramer, the Professional Concert, and the Foundation of the Modern Symphony Orchestra

Summary

London's role in the development of the public concert has long been recognized, and the critical contribution of the Bach–Abel concerts (1765–81) prior to Haydn's arrival ten years later needs no retelling. But the remarkable achievement of the intervening decade – the establishment of what might be regarded as the first modern symphony orchestra – has yet to be fully appreciated. It is symptomatic of this neglect that the Professional Concert's principal instigator (Wilhelm or William Cramer, 1746–99) has been relegated to the footnotes of musical history.

This is not to make facile or exaggerated claims about international precedence or equivalence with such as the London Symphony Orchestra, founded in a very different Britain some 120 years later. Yet the Professional Concert established many of the underlying parameters of the modern symphony orchestra. It is true that J.C. Bach and C.F. Abel had already positioned the weekly subscription concert at the centre of the fashionable calendar; and that Teresa Cornelys had first identified the gap in the market, on a night when the Italian Opera House was dark. But after Abel's lacklustre season in 1782, a completely new tone was set in two ambitious seasons under the Earl of Abingdon, with Cramer's assistance. Only weeks after Abingdon bowed out, the new Professional Concert was founded by ‘the most eminent professors of music, many years resident in London’, with two violinists – the German Wilhelm Cramer, the Italian Luigi Borghi –at its head. By November subscribers were attracted by a list of the thirty members, and a committee had been formed.

It was a wholly novel mode of organization, one in which professional musicians assumed artistic control under a cooperative financial and management model – and if any single person can be credited with bringing the musician-led symphony concert centre-stage, it must be Cramer. As one of the most powerful men in the music profession in the 1780s, he was able to conjure an outstandingly unified orchestra within the international concert environment that Haydn later so spectacularly exploited. Cramer energetically united the patronage of the highest classes with the business world of the upper bourgeoisie, while creatively manipulating the press. Cosmopolitan, modern, and innovative, the symphony concert in the 1780s achieved high cultural status, irrevocably – for good or ill – confirming the canonical position of the symphony itself.