Fifteen Eighty Four

During the nineteenth century Western art music advanced towards a peak of sonorous magnificence, perhaps reached in 1848 at Paris when Hector Berlioz conducted an ensemble of 1,022 performers. The guitar, however, continued to sound at the level of a small continuo group for an Italian opera of the 1640s. In exile from the orchestra for faults that aficionados presented as virtues – such as the intimacy and softness of its voice – the guitar elicited a wide range of conflicting responses from ardent admiration to frosty disdain. This was especially true in relation to the belief, still dear to the hearts of the instrument’s devotees, that the guitar in the hands of an expert player can be an effective concert and indeed recital instrument. This belief was never widely endorsed by concert goers in the nineteenth century, and it was often vociferously challenged in Britain by journalists sent out to review concerts for the metropolitan and provincial press. Some fundamental questions about the scale of sonority, the density of texture and the extent of compass associated with true musical value were involved. A dossier of conflicting opinions can therefore be assembled from nineteenth-century sources notably (and perhaps particularly) from Britain which come close to raising the existential question of whether it is worth having guitars at all for any imaginable musical purpose. One critic may claim that the days of the guitar are numbered, for example, while another sees it being ‘more taken up’, just as one may describe the performances of Giulio Regondi (d. 1872) with breathless admiration while another thinks his solo playing perverts the instrument’s true nature as a vehicle for accompanying an untrained voice.

In recent years, the determination to show that Britain was not ‘a land without music’ in the nineteenth century has resulted in much fresh attention to the period which it is still convenient to call ‘Victorian’ in at least a purely chronological sense. The guitar actually enjoyed its heyday in England during the late-Georgian period, when short stories written for magazines of fashion and chit chat often featured many nocturnal episodes involving a guitar. In such stories the player, generally a man (the sense of a serenade is rarely far away) and an accomplished amateur, plays soft and beguiling sounds in the open air and usually sings. The beginning of Victoria’s reign in 1837, however, marked a gradual recession of interest, though the guitar was still to be used in the streets by the itinerant and impoverished players who have left such a vivid trace in the newspaper record of the court proceedings against them for drunkenness or affray. We also find the guitar in use among artistes who sang at various stages during their act as ventriloquists, impressionists or comedians. Moreover, the British public never lost a taste for the very best solo guitar playing at a top professional level; Giulio Regondi, briefly mentioned above and one of the finest guitarists of the nineteenth century, was resident in England for much of his career.

A gradual revival of interest in the guitar began in the 1860s among amateurs, both men and (especially) young women who gained new opportunities to perform in public during the second half of the century. The guitar was the only instrument which provided full harmony for the voice but could also be carried out the front door without difficulty to any venue. It might be a corn exchange, a lecture room, a church hall, a village schoolroom, a Town-hall, a reading room, a working-men’s club or indeed any public place that was large enough to accommodate an audience of reasonable size but was not purpose-built for music. A woman could mount the platform and sing without loss of caste because such events were organised for political, charitable or philanthropic purposes. This was a country-wide development, indeed Empire-wide in a manner that embraces the global emphasis that Victorian studies in many fields have now acquired. Manuscripts of guitar-accompanied song from the beginning of the Victorian period, compiled by amateurs for their own use, include an example made in Trincomalee (Sri Lanka) as well as in Dover, while one of the most voluminous was compiled in Jabalpur (in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh) as well as Kempsey in Worcestershire. At home, amateur singers with guitars at the predominantly amateur entertainments called “Penny Readings,” for example, which combined recitations with music and song, can be found in the southern counties of England, in Leicestershire, Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire and Staffordshire, to look no further. By collating the evidence of census records, newspaper reports, trade directories, wills and other documents it is possible to show that the performers at such amateur events included military men, language teachers, greengrocers, the daughters of plumbers, gas fitters, master blacksmiths, to look no further into the Victorian beehive. Social clubs and political societies such as the Primrose League, gave amateurs a chance to sing and play, and so did new sports clubs for tennis, cycling, golf and cricket repeatedly mentioned in the newspaper record. Most of these mounted at least an annual, fund-raising entertainment which provided amateur singer-guitarists with something to play for in every sense of the expression. Their instrument seemed agreeably novel for it was now being revived; in 1872 a writer for the Norwood News noted that the “comparative novelties” of a local amateur concert had included several songs with guitar accompaniment. Other reviews make similar comments.

In the richness and exoticism of its associations, the late-Victorian guitar resembled a scrapbook with cuttings from popular histories of the middle ages, old romances and accounts of foreign places – a literature of imagination and escape. The pianoforte was of much greater musical capacity, but for many women, taking lessons at the request or command of their parents, it must sometimes have seemed an immoveable monument to conformity and domestic obligation. For the female amateur singer with a guitar, however, as for the female cyclist, a freedom beckoned for a “New Woman” like the otherwise unknown Daisy Orde, here described many years later by a man who remembered the impression she made on him, on the verge of the Edwardian period, as he approached puberty:

‘Daisy Orde…arrived from the station, to my mother’s outspoken dismay, riding one of those most unwomanly machines [a safety bicycle]…Her skirts were so audaciously short that you could see her gaitered ankles…Daisy was the most beautiful creature we knew, with a warm, thrilling voice, and an exuberant gaiety. She sang ‘Clementine’ to a guitar and made pastoral portraits of all the family…’

By the end of the century, even the authors of romantic novels had noticed the revival of the guitar in Britain. J. H. Riddell’s Fair Abbotsmead serialised in 1899 tells of a concert planned to include Cockles and Mussels sung to a guitar; when it becomes clear that the lady who offered to do so cannot be present on the night after all, a volunteer offers to sing it instead, presumably to a pianoforte. One of the concert organisers immediately asks: ‘[What] about the guitar? That was one of the attractions.’