Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain (56 page)

It was not until the middle of the century that any form of mass production entered the manufacturing process, and for this reason, until instruments at substantially lower prices created a new bottom end of the market, pianos had remained firmly in the luxury class, even if they were now an affordable luxury for the prosperous middle classes. In 1850 about 83,000 families had an annual income of between £150 and £400, while a lower-middle-class family’s average income was £90.
⁴⁶
Broadwood’s sold its grand pianos for £135, while its uprights ranged from 80 guineas down to 45 guineas. Even manufacturers with lesser reputations charged high prices: a six-octave ‘piccolo’ (that is, a small upright) cost from 60 to 40 guineas, and cottage pianos were about the same. In 1851 the manufacturer Collard showed two small ‘semi-cottages’ in plain
deal wood, undecorated, at what was described as the very low price of 30 guineas. These prices limited good new pianos to the homes of the prosperous. However, there was already a strong secondary market, with substantially less expensive pianos available outside London or from second-rate manufacturers. An ‘artisan’ piano could be bought for as little as £10, a quarter of the generally accepted price for a good piano.
⁴⁷
Furthermore, there was also a brisk trade in secondhand pianos, as this new luxury began to seem more like a necessity. This, combined with a rise in wages that began in 1857, brought pianos, whose prices were falling, ever closer to the reach of the majority of the middle-class population.
⁴⁸

Many of the manufacturers who produced pianos at the lower end of the market were not in fact manufacturers at all: they bought instruments from more established firms, who didn’t want to sully their names with cheap pianos, and stencilled their names above the keyboards. In 1851 200 manufacturers were listed in the trade directories, of whom some were stencillers and about 50 only made parts (they were fretcutters, or they manufactured the hammer rails, or the felt for the hammers and dampers; some even simply produced the shirred silk for the front of uprights, yet they still called themselves piano manufacturers). Of the factories who did manufacture pianos, nearly 90 per cent were companies employing fewer than ten men. In 1854 T. & H. Brooks became the first company to often complete actions for sale, making it possible for smaller companies to buy partly processed goods and lower their overheads. And the overheads for piano manufacturing were enormous. For a start, the wood needed to be seasoned for at least two years before it could be used, and a grand piano then took a minimum of six months to produce: thirty months’ investment before any return was possible. The better the piano, too, the heavier the investment of time and resources. A Broadwood piano did not have a readypurchased action; Broadwood actions each had 3,800 separate pieces: ivory, several different types of wood and metal, cloth, felt, leather and vellum, all of which were assembled by a minimum of forty different workmen - key-makers, hammer-makers, damper-makers, damper-liftermakers, notch-makers, hammer-leatherers, beam-makers, brass-studmakers, brass-bridge-makers, and so on.
⁴⁹
It was not perhaps surprising that at the Great Exhibition, Broadwood’s, confident in the supremacy of its instruments, disdained the gimmickry of fellow manufacturers (see
p. 20), and simply showed its four best grand pianos. William Rolfe and Sons, from Cheapside, at the opposite end of the scale, also showed just its best: a cottage piano, ‘in which stability, economy, and excellence are the objects aimed at’.
⁵⁰

Broadwood had revolutionized piano manufacture in the eighteenth century, but by the middle of the nineteenth it was the American manufacturers who were ushering in the next big changes. America had long had a shortage of skilled manpower, and therefore labour was costly and industry as a whole worked hard towards mechanization; Britain had a plentiful, thus cheap, labour force, and saw much less need to mechanize. By the 1800s American manufacturers were exploring the use of machinery for preparing wood for a variety of uses - sawing, planing and other basics. Half a century later Broadwood’s and its competitors were using almost no machinery at all, not even to prepare the wood. As late as 1857 a paper on ‘The Conversion of Wood by Machinery’ read to the Institution of Civil Engineers was considered an astonishing innovation.
⁵¹

But it was more than production methods that were being overhauled in America: it was the entire construction of the pianos. Beneath the traditional grand piano (or at the back of an upright) was a wooden bracing, which held a plank that in turn held the tuning pins for the strings. As the range expanded higher and higher, the pitch was raised, and with it the string tension had to be increased, exerting more and more pressure on the wooden frame, which was just not strong enough to bear it. With a metal frame, the force on a concert grand could be increased, and it went from about 16 tons in 1860 to 30 tons in the next three-quarters of a century. Even before the force increased, the wooden frames had been annoyingly susceptible to climate changes, which made the wood expand and contract, destroying the tuning of the instrument. The overall cast-iron frame from America produced a better sound, and it guaranteed that that improved sound would not fluctuate seasonally. The first iron-framed piano to be shown in Britain, at the Great Exhibition, was a Chickering, a grand piano with ‘the whole framing consisting of string plate, longitudinal bars, wrest block and drilled bridge…of iron cast in one piece’.
⁵²

The next innovation was also American, and it was particularly relevant to the domestic instrument. In 1863 an upright with bass strings that crossed the treble was built, producing the first upright to have a
sound that even remotely matched that of a grand. As well as improved sound, it had a one-piece iron frame, which made possible greater tension of the strings, and, following on from that, heavier hammers, thicker felt and a better action.
⁵³
Almost all uprights from now on were built on this model.

For some time, the fact that the British were dropping behind in both technology and price went unnoticed, for pianos were increasingly available to the general public. The new ‘three-year system’, or hire purchase as it later became known, made it possible to obtain a new piano for as little as £6 a year. In 1864 an advertisement offered a piano ‘Let on Hire for 3 Years, after which the instrument becomes the hirer’s property’. A 28-guinea ‘pianette’ could be acquired for 10 guineas a year; a 40-guinea cottage piano for 15 guineas, and a ‘60 guineas semi-oblique’ for only 20 guineas a year. The
Bethnal Green Times
, a local paper in respectable suburbia, in 1867 advertised, ‘Let or hire. 3 years system. Pianettes 2
¹
/
₂
guineas per quarter. Piccolos 3 guineas. Cottage pianos £3.10.0. Drawing-room model cottage £3.18.0.’
⁵⁴
Even this quarterly payment could be further broken down into manageable monthly payments: Molsom and Son’s Piano-Forte Saloon in Bath advertised pianos for 10
s.
a month in 1866 - a stretch, but no longer impossible for that respectable family on £150 a year.
⁵⁵

Even as this new accessibility arrived, the British pre-eminence was over. In 1861 there had been fewer than 8,000 workers producing musical instruments in Germany; by 1875 that number had doubled; and by 1882 there were at least 25,000 working in the piano trade, and they were producing up to 70,000 pianos a year, of which nearly 25 per cent were shipped to England. This was a victory of modern mass production over hand craftsmanship, because the German manufacturers were not producing better pianos, they were producing cheaper pianos. By the 1880s their mass-produced uprights were being sold at half the price of English pianos. This was done by economizing on materials that did not affect the quality of the sound, and by leaving unfinished those parts that could not be seen without taking the piano apart. By 1914 one out of every five pianos bought in England was of German manufacture.
⁵⁶
The English piano-manufacturing industry was not dead - far from it. But it was facing extraordinary competition at the cheap end of the market from Germany, and at the concert grand end from America. For the moment, however, the market was large enough for everyone. By the
early twentieth century, 1 person in every 360 people in the country bought a new piano, compared to the 1 in approximately 1,100 that had bought one in 1851. By 1910 there were perhaps between 2 and 4 million pianos in Britain - one for every 10 to 20 people.
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So once more there was a surge in sheet music, and a subsequent drop in price. In 1837 that score of the
Messiah
that had cost 2 guineas in the 1760s now sold for 1 guinea; by 1887 it was just 1
s.
, and could be found in stationers’ shops as well as in specialist music stores. Alfred Novello, a music publisher and the producer of the shilling edition, pushed through another technological change, moving from engraved sheet music to new mechanized typesetting, which did not have the built-in obsolescence of engravings, the plates of which could make only a limited number of impressions. This new technology became essential for a sheet-music industry that was seeing enormous growth. Arthur Sullivan’s drawing-room ballad ‘The Lost Chord’ (1877) sold half a million copies in twenty-five years; singer and composer Michael Maybrick’s sea song ‘Nancy Lee’ sold over 100,000 copies in two years, and his ‘Holy City’ was still selling 50,000 copies a year in the 1890s.
⁵⁸

Novello saw that new printing methods were cheaper and thus increased his profits. More than that, though, he saw that if new technology could be combined with the amateur music market there were fortunes to be made. In 1842 he published
Singing for the Million
, a tuition manual for amateur choirs. He then began to publish
Mainzer’s Musical Times and Singing-Class Circular
, a weekly music magazine (it later changed its name to the
Musical Times
) that reached out to the amateur rather than the professional. To teach the many millions of piano-owners and singers to play and sing their new songs, there were so many music teachers that, for the first time, they were separated out from the professional musicians. By 1900, in London, a directory listed 2,533 ‘orchestral instrumentalists’, but 4,823 ‘professors of the pianoforte, organ, singing, etc.’.
⁵⁹

Professional musicians had been the beneficiaries, and also the driving force, of the piano mania that had overtaken Britain. No longer a mere adjunct to the amateur, the professional was now an autonomous performer in his (it tended, apart from singers, to be ‘his’) own right. Amateurs were relegated to their own homes, and rarely played in public as they had in the past. At the turn of the nineteenth century, an astonishing range of keyboard virtuosi had displayed their talents in London -
Clementi, Dussek, Field, Hummel, Steibelt and Wölfl among them. But concert halls outside London also had an active concert life and visiting virtuosi: when Paganini toured in the 1830s, he performed in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Perth, Cheltenham, Chester, Leeds, Sheffield, Southampton, Yarmouth and York.
⁶⁰
This was part of a revival of concert life, after the trough of the 1790s and through to the end of the French wars. By the mid-1820s there was already a rise in the number of concerts performed: to over 100 in the 1826-7 season in London alone.

There were more concerts, and the concerts were also more accessible to more of the population. The Philharmonia Society had been founded in 1813 as a counter to the ideas of the Concert of Antient Music and its like. It was established by a group of middle-class patrons - upper middle class, it is true, and prosperous, but no longer aristocracy, or even the gentry. Instead the founders, and the audiences, were solicitors, doctors, journalists, architects and the like, who wanted to take their families to concerts of contemporary music, performed by professionals.
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Even so, in the early part of the century concerts were still essentially a class-based activity, and tickets were limited both by price and by subscriptions. The upper-class subscription concerts, well into the 1830s, cost between 10
s.
6
d.
and 1 guinea per ticket, if tickets were available on the open market at all; concerts for the middle classes cost between 5
s.
and 10
s.
, while working-class concerts were between 1
s.
and 5
s.
This segregation by price was clear to those attending, and was seen by many as a desirable situation. A journalist from the magazine
Musical World
said that tickets for less than 10
s.
6
d.
were to be recommended, to increase the numbers attending, but that tickets priced at less than 5
s.
were unthinkable: ‘The art must not be degraded…To play the finest music to an audience which has been admitted for a shilling apiece, is what I can never give my consent to.’
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By the mid-1840s there had been an increase of over 300 per cent in the number of concerts given in London - a growth that far outstripped the growth of theatre and opera or musical theatre.
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Yet this surge came from exactly the same developments that changed so much else in the leisure world: increased leisure time; improved public transport with an equivalent decrease in its cost, which made it possible for audiences to travel from further afield; improved lighting and safer streets, which made an evening out seem less daunting; and increase in the number of magazines and newspapers that carried advertisements and reviews, and
an equivalent reduction in their cover price. As with theatre, the extension of transport links worked in both directions. Audiences found it easier to travel to concerts, and musicians could travel more easily to towns that did not yet have the population to sustain their own orchestra or musical life. In the 1830s a sextet had had to hire two carriages to transport itself and its instruments; after the railways had arrived an entire opera company could perform in London, complete with sets and costumes, get on a train, and perform the next day in Manchester, or Bolton, or Glasgow. Not merely the trains, but Bradshaw’s timetable, the telegraph, ticket agents who arranged advance publicity - all these things made touring possible, and profitable.