Chapter 4 - Interlude – London and the Continent in 1825

Summary

One day, at the Viennese inn Zum Goldenen Lamm, Beethoven observed that several musicians and literary men were engaged in a very lively discussion. He asked one of them what was going on. ‘These gentlemen maintain that the English can neither produce good music, nor appreciate it’, Mayseder replied, ‘but I don't agree with them’. Beethoven said sarcastically: ‘The English have commissioned several of my works for their concerts and offered me decent payment for them, the Germans, with the exception of the Viennese, are only just beginning to perform my works, and the French consider my music impracticable: consequently it is clear that the English know nothing about music. Isn't that so? Ha, ha!’ He laughed heartily and the discussion came to an end at once.

THIS anecdote from the life of Beethoven suggests that in the early nineteenth century England was seen as a place where musical life was different, and furthermore that the English were seen as inherently unmusical. The historical concept that musical life in early nineteenth-century Britain was moribund is clearly deep-rooted, and was stated plainly in a retrospective article in Musical Times, written to coincide with the turn of the century in 1901, when F. G. Edwards wrote: ‘ Stagnation seems to have been the condition of England at the beginning of the last century. The art of music was almost dead.’ A year later, in 1902, Fuller Maitland wrote: ‘Very rarely has the art of music been at such a low ebb as in England at this point in time.’ The purpose of these commentators was to draw attention to the lack of British composers and a school of symphonic composition, but implicitly they identify a deeper malaise stemming from the lack of musical institutions. This chapter seeks to compare and contrast concert life in London with that of the continent, and the journal that George Smart wrote in 1825 provides an opportunity to challenge the accepted view of these early twentieth-century writers, using Smart's contemporary evidence.