The Pursuit of High Culture: John Ella and Chamber Music in Victorian London, and: The Piano in Nineteenth-Century British Culture: Instruments, Performances, and Repertoire (review)

From 1845 to 1881, one of the defining institutions of Victorian musical culture was the Musical Union, the creation of its proprietor John Ella, the Leicester-born violinist turned entrepreneur and musical critic and educator. In The Pursuit of High Culture, Christina Bashford, the author of several substantial articles on Victorian chamber music performance and the entry on Ella in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, has brought together the definitive history of an institution and the biography of a career. At the time of his death, Ella was something of an institution himself, although changes in audience make-up and taste as well as a more competitive London market for music led to the partial eclipse of the Union in its last years. But his long life uniquely qualified him as the observer of a changing musical scene.

Though Ella composed a few pieces and seems to have been an adequate if not virtuosic performer, what he brought to the Victorian scene made him a far more significant feature of London musical life than would have been possible had he pursued a conventional (and economically precarious) career as a working musician. The son of a Leicester confectioner who achieved middle-class status, Ella's early initiation into commercial practices and his shrewd business sense stood him in good stead as a concert manager, where he had to hire performers from England and the Continent, find venues for concerts, write his own program notes, and attend to all the details of the care and feeding of subscribers. His acuity in the face of changing economic conditions gave him the ability for many years to veer and tack with the shifting winds of fortune, and by the time of his death, he had amassed an estate valued at over £6600, no mean feat for a Victorian musician of his origins.

Ella's other strengths included high performance standards and a sense, if a rather conservative one, of compositional quality. He also understood how musical training in London, especially in the earlier years of the century, lagged behind what was available in its Continental neighbors. His first trip to Paris, where he took violin lessons from Francois-Joseph Fétis, was an eye-opener, and thereafter he often extended his trips to include Vienna and other cities, numbering Gioachino Rossini, Hector Berlioz, and the then eminent Giacomo Meyerbeer among his friends. He had some fluency in French, and his repeated trips to the Continent made him an effective host for foreign musicians who, especially after the revolutions of 1848, came to concertize in London.

Ella's first love was chamber music, and for a number of years his Musical Union was the site of some of the best music-making by small ensembles. The administrative complexities were enormous. In the days before artists gave their schedules over to paid agents, performers had to be contracted with directly, and in an era before the formation of touring chamber groups with established personnel, Ella had to assemble a trio or quartet through his own efforts. He built up a stable of reliable ensemblists over time, but in the earlier years he faced problems deriving from the lack of adequate rehearsal time for players who did not always know each other and who, depending on where they trained, sometimes brought a diversity of national styles that must not have always meshed well in performance.

Bashford's title tells the most important part of the story. Ella's was a thoroughly elitist venture. Its success depended on his ability to do what we now call networking, and to do it among the...