This second mapping takes a chronological view, offering a perspective on changing patterns of musical organisation, repertoire and – by implication – taste. We’ll examine snapshots of four equally spaced seasons, not only to provide some orientation, but also to create a sense of ‘lived experience’ across the extraordinary variety of music on offer.

❧ Looking back and looking forward: the 1897–98 season

Let's first consider a season at the tail-end of the century, by which time the broad outline of the London theatre and concert calendar was well established.

This season saw a massive celebration of the life and reign of Queen Victoria, an unmistakeable assertion of both national heritage and imperial power. Her diamond jubilee on 22 June 1897 was an occasion for all manner of music – most memorably a Te Deum on the steps of St Paul’s, after which a vast crowd joined in the Old Hundredth. Many commentators described the emotion overwhelming the assembly, including the queen herself, at this ‘simple but beautiful thank-offering of song and prayer’.1 But this was only the formal highpoint of an outpouring of national sentiment. At the Alhambra, Sullivan's ballet Victoria and Merrie England ran for six months from 25 May: on opening night, the coronation scene received three curtain calls – something not normally permitted – while a film of the jubilee procession was later tagged on as a bonus.

WAGNER AND MUSICAL COMEDY

Yet musical life was simultaneously evolving in very different directions, during a period of upheaval anticipating the new spirit of the 1900s. If Shaw in 1893 had disgustedly asserted that London music was dying, driven only by force of habit, four years later London's movers and shakers were avidly seeking novel sensations, eyeing continental Europe and mining untapped audiences.

Three elements stand out, the first being the towering figure of Wagner. The British relationship with Wagner had got off to a rocky start in 1855, an impression only slightly ameliorated by the 1877 Albert Hall concerts in aid of his shaky finances. But as performances escalated during the 1880s, and as the aesthetic movement joined forces with a wave of popular enthusiasm, the floodgates opened.

SO FAR, I’VE CONCENTRATED largely on music at the centre of the metropolis, especially at those iconic venues just north of the river. Yet it would be a mistake to underestimate the astonishing amount of music-making beyond the West End. A glimpse at those districts immediately south of the river, concentrating on Battersea, Brixton and Bermondsey, should illuminate not only suburban music but also music's role within the political debate.

Much south of the river remained undeveloped until the nineteenth century, when its former marshlands housed many of London's least well-off. Bermondsey's tenement housing resembled that of the East End, just across the river: it was here where philanthropic musical ventures were mostly directed.

As London's population expanded, and as working patterns changed, new railway lines extended commuting to a ring of suburbs bordering the capital. Large swathes of south and south-east London missed out on the Underground, for social and geological reasons, contributing to a sense of separation persisting to this day. Still, Brixton and Battersea were perfectly convenient, with trains into Victoria and Waterloo: and in 1900 Clapham Common station opened, giving direct access to the City.

Brixton typified the modestly comfortable south London suburb: a classic mix with wide avenues of affluent townhouses flanked by serried rows of undistinguished terraces. Battersea was more diverse. Some streets around the park displayed serious wealth, but areas bordering the river fell into what Charles Booth in his London Poverty Maps listed as ‘very poor’, and even ‘semi-criminal’.

❧ Life in the suburbs

It's impossible to miss the snide mockery that the suburbs attracted. T.W.H. Crosland set the tone in 1905 in The Suburbans: ‘penny buses, gramophones, bamboo furniture, pleasant Sunday afternoons, Glory Songs, modern language teas, golf, tennis, high school education.’1 For liberal politician Charles Masterman, in his searching analysis of The Condition of England (1909), unobtrusive middle-class suburbanites may have been ‘liberated from the devils of poverty’, but ‘the soul is still empty, swept and garnished; waiting for other occupants’. He described the ‘miles and miles of little red houses in little silent streets’, the tiny gardens of Acacia Villa or Camperdown Lodge – the men sucked into City offices at daybreak, the women occasionally treating themselves to West End shops and theatres.

SO FAR, THIS BOOK has concentrated on when, where and which music was to be heard in London, and its relationship with the wider world. But who initiated these trends – and what made them happen? Who was leading cultural change under the banner of improving English music?

❧ Power and money

Church and state were still influential in London’s music, whether through liturgical worship and organ recitals, or through royal events and military bands in public spaces. Musicians occasionally voiced exasperated opinions about establishment influence – such as Stanford chastising a church congress for their neglect of Tudor composers, or Mackenzie-Rogan lobbying for all-British music for state ceremonials. But neither church nor state were the prime movers.

Who were, then? Of course some charismatic individuals undoubtedly wielded power, whether through interpretative genius, innovative programming or entrepreneurial flair. London’s orchestras might have languished without Richter, Wood and Beecham, not to mention the self-managing London Symphony Orchestra. A second sphere of influence lay in the conservatoires, something dominating modern accounts, especially the role of RCM professors in the English Musical Renaissance. There is no mistaking their impact on orchestral training, nor that of the Royal Military School of Music at Kneller Hall on wind-playing. Indeed, conservatoire values were absorbed at every level, from their grade exam syllabuses to the programming of myriad choral and orchestral societies, across London and beyond.

But behind the scenes many others played a part in the complex web of disparate forces involved in the nascent ‘music industry’. These were often hard-nosed and seemingly in thrall to theatre runs and audience figures – but a few possessed sufficient authority and motivation to exert influence over public taste. Only through these ‘hidden’ voices can we analyse two critical levers of London’s musical life: power and money.

❧ Musical mediators

CRITICS

Shaw’s barb that ‘the English do not know what to think’ without laborious coaching was quoted in Chapter 1: and Londoners were influenced by a powerful set of men writing across a wide range of newspapers and magazines, who enjoyed telling people exactly ‘what to think’.

IN HIS BIOGRAPHY OF Havergal Brian, tellingly entitled Ordeal by Music, Reginald Nettel rehearses the frustrations of a working-class hopeful moving to London from rural Staffordshire. First he wrote sunnily to Bantock: ‘I am asking “B. and H.” to send copies of the songs and scores to all the critics of the London Press. After they have been out three days I intend to make appointments with the lot.’ He tried Parry, Vaughan Williams, Elgar and others: but only three of the critics replied, and not a single review – let alone a performance – resulted. Humiliated, furious, and convinced that London publishers were only interested in ‘church pot-boilers’, he abandoned the quest after a few months and headed back north.

It's an affecting tale, though not quite the whole story. Despite lacking London connections, Brian had previously enjoyed some success, with performances by Wood and Beecham – he had even been generously bankrolled by a wealthy Staffordshire businessman. A series of personal crises precipitated his renewed assault on London, but he also failed miserably to capitalise on his early breaks.

Brian's career encapsulates many of the themes of this chapter: the vicissitudes experienced by the aspiring composer, particularly a working-class provincial with no London base; and the crucial roles played by forward-looking conductors, rich sponsors – and grasping publishers. Above all, it raises the question of the capital. Was London the solution – or part of the problem?

❧ A national musical culture

Current views of British music of the period tend to lean towards one of two opposing poles. From one perspective, it was a triumphant celebration of victory over adversity (the English Musical Renaissance, the Royal College of Music, Elgar and Edwardian imperialism, Wood and the Proms, the rise of Beecham). Alternatively, it represents a sorry rollcall of social oppression and dismal philistinism, as reflected in the railings of the disaffected and in the bitter and forlorn campaigns for government funding, in response to years of neglect.

Reality, as usual, was more nuanced. New British voices were never truly restricted to those few prominent venues – such as the Proms – which partial histories tend to overemphasise.

EDWARDIAN MUSIC. WHAT IMMEDIATELY springs to mind? Perhaps a stiff-collared Elgar and the confident swagger of Pomp and Circumstance, the splendour and authority of British tradition? Or perhaps a saucy music hall turn, a vanished world of idealised working-class culture, recalled through a nostalgic lens? Or – yet another rosy image – perhaps the folksongs and May dances of rural Merrie England?

It's all too easy to map music onto pre-conceptions of a glitteringly opulent age: the sunlit hedonism of society balls and country house weekends, that orderly society so soon to be shattered by the cataclysm of World War 1. Osbert Sitwell painted just such a picture of the role of music in the lives of pleasure-seeking Londoners in ‘the sweet and carefree atmosphere’ before the war: ‘An air of gaiety, unusual in northern climates, prevailed. Music flowed with the lightness and flash of water under the striped awnings and from the balconies… Night by night, during the summers of 1913 and ‘14, the entertainments grew in number and magnificence. One band in a house was no longer enough, there must be two, three even.’

But as historians have increasingly emphasised, the Edwardian was also a period of tumultuous social upheaval. The birth pangs of the labour movement and the marches of women suffragists were only the most visible signs of a country hurtling into modernity, sometimes painfully. At home, a constitutional crisis around 1910 clipped the wings of the landed aristocracy. Abroad, Britain's precarious empire was equally humiliated by the Second Boer War (1899–1902) and threatened by German technology and expansionism.

Music was also in transition. Far-reaching changes in British society were reflected in an ever-widening availability across social classes – while London's pivotal position internationally led to its becoming one of the centres of the new musical world. Reflecting ‘a ramshackle and amorphous society, characterised by a myriad contradictory trends and opinions’, Edwardian music often seems uncertain in direction, as well as extraordinarily diverse. It's partly this kaleidoscope that gives the period its fascination. And, if modern Britain was born in the early years of the twentieth century, this was certainly the case with regard to music as well.

THE PREVIOUS CHAPTER BEGAN to raise uncomfortable questions about London's role in the world and about the part played by music in consequence. It's time to face some of these questions head-on.

As the very core of empire, as epitomised by its wealth, its buildings and its symbols of imperial power, Edwardian London appeared unashamedly unapologetic about its colonialist agenda. It is possible that the swagger of British officialdom and the overstated pomp of state occasions were compensating for deep insecurities. Yet still, belief in empire did much to unify the nation, across four countries and every level of society, at a time of great political strain.

The ceremonial aspects of Edwardian music have come to symbolise the whole period. When T.S. Eliot compiled a list of cultural markers, he was obliged to include – alongside the Henley Regatta, the dartboard and Wensleydale cheese – ‘the music of Elgar’. Certainly music's unifying power lay in a common heritage of song and military ceremonial. It's no coincidence that Baden-Powell's method of ‘Hooligan Taming’ (in Scouting for Boys) was ‘to get a large crowd of wild lads together, and to start shouting a chorus to piano accompaniment – say, “Hearts of Oak”’, Boyce's eighteenth-century tribute to naval supremacy and to empire.

Images of a beneficent Britain generously shining the light of civilisation into the stygian corners of the world were everywhere – at theatres, minstrel shows, music halls, popular concerts, and a whole succession of exhibitions and pageants at Earl's Court and Crystal Palace. The patriotic songs of Empire Day, initiated in 1904, were still more explicit. But it was Boer War charity concerts that confirmed Edwardian music's political centrality.

The Albert Hall concert held in January 1900 in aid of the Daily Mail Kipling Poem Fund was only one example.1 Organised by the brass-band enthusiast John Henry Iles, the concert played on every heartstring. All four countries of the union were celebrated in song and chorus, the navy in ‘Hearts of Oak’. The massed bands united in the National Anthem and in ‘Rule, Britannia!’, in a march version of Sullivan's ‘The Absent-Minded Beggar’ (conducted by the composer), and in his ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’, which was first sung by Clara Butt, before being seconded by the audience.

IT's TIME TO EXAMINE my claim that many of the musical structures and attitudes of the later twentieth century were already embedded by the start of the First World War. And it's time for some final conclusions about the achievements of the ‘long Edwardian’ era.

❧ The status of music

One striking change was the new status that music attained across the period.

Despite bitter complaints against the upper echelons, music was clearly significant in the lives of many – especially among the much-derided nouveaux riches. Whether through influence, active involvement or financial support, the ‘upper ten’ played a much more significant role than is generally recognised – not only men, including the Speyers and Howard de Walden, but women such as Lady de Grey and the Princesse de Polignac. Nor should we underestimate the part that music played in the lives of London's most distinguished artists, from the Pre-Raphaelites to Sargent, himself an accomplished pianist. Fuller Maitland observed that in all such circles, ‘music as a topic of conversation’ had grown beyond recognition by 1914, joining contemporary art as worthy of serious discussion among the elevated classes.

Musicians were also increasingly accepted in society. In part this was a direct result of the social class of those entering the profession, especially those appointed to prominent institutional roles. Head of the Royal College of Music was the independently wealthy Hubert Parry, Oxford graduate and Professor, habitué of the Gladstone and Balfour circles, and one who (according to a confidential memo) would have been a candidate for the House of Lords, had the Liberals chosen to slant the house in their favour. At the RCM, Parry was matched by Stanford – also from a wealthy family, and educated at Cambridge, where he became Professor of Music.

Several other prominent composers, including Vaughan Williams, were of the gentleman class, as were some illuminati of musical theatre: Lionel Monckton's father, for example, was Town Clerk of the City of London. Music was already becoming respectable outside the well-trodden church route.

Urban landscapes

LONDON's POSITION IN THE late Victorian and Edwardian world was marked most spectacularly by its buildings. The city was never subjected to the remodelling that Paris enjoyed in the 1860s – closest, perhaps, was the construction of the Mall leading to Buckingham Palace, followed by the link between Aldwych and Holborn known as Kingsway. But a distinctive style of architecture, the ‘Edwardian Baroque’, gave public buildings not only a grandeur reflecting the imperial metropolis but also new layers of spectacle, opulence and comfort. The same spirit was reflected in a spate of new halls and theatres in the West End, the beating heart of the city's cultural life.

Since the eighteenth century, music had been centred on the London mansions of the upper classes, those affluent Georgian squares extending westwards towards fashionable Mayfair. But after restrictions on theatre building were lifted in 1843 the area became increasingly associated with leisure, as entertainment and shopping infiltrated middle-class lifestyles. In short, music had joined the consumerist revolution.

Central to this model were those modern transport links cutting through London's notorious congestion – the chaotic mix of horse-drawn carriages and omnibuses increasingly exacerbated by early motor vehicles. By 1900 there was already an extensive network of trains from the suburbs into termini around the inner Circle line; while the expanding underground system encouraged relatively inexpensive excursions ‘up West’.

Nothing could compete with the sheer pulling power of London's pleasure district. By comparison, the original City of London boasted no major concert hall or theatre until the Barbican Centre opened in 1982; nor was the exclusive shopping district in Knightsbridge accompanied by new venues, beyond the Royal Albert Hall. It was the West End that set the agenda.

To explore the shape of the musical city more closely, we’ll take a walking tour around London. But before entering the pleasure district, we first need to acknowledge that symbolic centre of musical tradition and power represented by Westminster Abbey.

The English musical tradition was built on choral singing; and for many, the Anglican church still offered not only education but also a large part of their living.

THE STUDY OF MUSIC in its social and cultural contexts has come a long way since I began to study eighteenth-century London concert life many years ago. Urban musicology was at that time no more than a shadow on the horizon. But it was already becoming apparent to many from other disciplines that music could be studied in all manner of new ways.

One of those was the late Cyril Ehrlich, who united the skills of an economic historian with a passion for nineteenth- and early twentieth-century music. It was on a joint plane trip, while returning from a European conference, that this book was born, during which my own interest in London music leapt forward a whole century.

Together with Leanne Langley, we devised a research project, ‘The Transformation of London Concert Life, 1880–1914’, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. This book would never have come to fruition without long and stimulating conversations with both Cyril and Leanne, over many years. I am immensely grateful to Leanne for her continuing support and invaluable advice.

It was always my intention to write a book that would reach beyond music historians to anyone fascinated by British culture in the years around 1900. I have avoided technical analyses in the hope that the significance of music – its centrality in London lives – will emerge in a far broader perspective. And while we can never hear with Edwardian ears, perhaps we might at least start to understand the varied music of this challenging era in quite different ways.

The book builds on a fast-growing body of research across many fields, and I am grateful to scholars and archivists too numerous to mention by name for their generous assistance and input. Some of the ideas in the book arose from seminars with students of Goldsmiths, University of London.

David Wright selflessly gave of his time and expertise in reading a late draft. Eva Mantzourani did sterling work on data collection relating to London concert life: a complementary set of data is available at www. music-in-edwardian-london.com.

I am extremely grateful to Michael Middeke at Boydell Press for so generously supporting the project over many years.

BRITAIN's PLACE IN THE world, and London's in particular, underpins much of this book. Of course, it was a tense period in British history, with rising militarism in Germany, social upheavals in Russia, unease in Ireland, and the relentless pressures of a seemingly ever-expanding empire – while the very concept of internationalism had become tainted with the supposed disloyalty of the liberal ‘pro-Boer’ faction.

And yet, to quote Grace Brockington on the arts more broadly: ‘The prospect of European fragmentation stimulated a counter-movement toward international cooperation before the First World War.’1 One aspect of cosmopolitanism was simply the confluence of different nationalities in London's musical life. Certainly, the ‘ultra-modern’ label was routinely attached to a hugely divergent group – from Richard Strauss, Debussy and Ravel to Stravinsky and Schoenberg, not forgetting the native-born Holbrooke and Scott. In terms of public perception, this ultra-modern connection often trumped nationality. It can even be argued that the very concept of national schools had effectively run its course.

But not everyone bought into this agenda. Cosmopolitanism itself was subject to deeply-held British suspicion, not least because of its centuries-old links with a social elite. While foreign music certainly possessed an exotic allure, it could also seem vaguely threatening, especially if it transgressed sexual, religious or psychological boundaries. Such entrenched reservations were inevitably reinforced by the nationalist agenda permeating popular culture.

These competing attitudes reinforce a paradox in Edwardian music reception. Island Britain seemed intent upon maintaining its separate, even isolationist, musical culture, securely rooted in its Victorian past. Yet British consumers simultaneously relished a share in the scintillating cross-currents emerging from Paris, Vienna and beyond. How these contrasting perspectives collided and came together will be the subject of the next two chapters.

❧ Free Trade

Questions of musical identity were closely related to Britain's identity as a trading nation – and with British liberals’ enduring belief in the moral rightness of free trade. For those in their camp, it was unthinkable to erect barriers against the finest music and musicians from abroad purely to protect the interests of British challengers.