Moving on after 1815 – Changing Hands

I was played very little during the next few years – left in my velvet-lined case and feeling distinctly redundant!  Lady Priscilla was heavily engaged in social parties, gala dances, soirees and the like, and when the Vienna Congress was finally over in 1815, we moved to Florence, Italy where Lord Burghersh was now a Minister for the British Government.

(John Fane, Lord Burghersch in later years)

Lord Burghersch, musician & politician

In 1817, during one of Lord Burghersh’s regular visits back to London, I accompanied him, without Lady Priscilla.  There was one very special event during this time – a performance of a newly composed Symphony by Lord Burghersh himself, at the Philharmonic Society’s concert on 26 May in the Argyll Rooms (near Thomas Kennedy’s workshop and birth-place).  To my surprise, I was drafted in to play in the orchestra, and perform with my beloved, but by now ailing, Johann Peter Salomon.

German influences

During this concert, I was aware of a familiar ‘resonance’ in old Salomon’s playing which took me back into Professor Schleiermacher’s hands – it was uncanny.  Was this a ‘German thing’, I wondered?  After all, the German Ambassador to London, Christian von Bunsen and Ludwig Spohr (the German violinist of great distinction, present at the Congress Hofburg concert) were there, along with many other musicians with German sympathies listening to music composed by an English aristocrat who had attended the Vienna Congress!  After all, Johann Salomon himself was German by birth, and along with Lord Burghersh’s Symphony No 1 in G, we gave the first English performance of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony which has since taken on such an iconic status!

(Original 19th Century Royal Philharmonic Society Members’ tokens – Sir George Smart, centre)

Christian von Bunsen was a noted advocate and supporter of Schleiermacher, and highly influential in the world of modern German history, philosophy and theology.  Such ideas, touched on earlier, were not universally popular, of course (neither was the music of Beethoven yet), but Salomon – in his old age – seemed unusually free in this new way of playing, which was to me both exhilarating and a bit frightening.  It felt as though I was being plunged into forbidden emotional territory – adventurous, but a little reckless, something I had perceived in Beethoven’s mind. Perhaps the new modern world of (German) ‘imaginative listening’ instead of (English) analytical precision was coming to birth in my body!  All things French were still suspect in England at this time, but the exciting ‘’fantastique’ music of the Frenchman Hector Belioz’s was yet to be appreciated and enjoyed in London.

(Sir George Thomas Smart)

Changing hands – from Burghersch to Smart

Around this time there was an unexpected, but welcome change for me. I now became the prized possession of Sir George Smart, a friend of both Lord Burghersh and Ludwig van Beethoven.  It was after a musical soiree at Lord Burghersh’s London residence a couple of days after the Philharmonic Society concert.  During a break in the evening Sir George and Lord Burghersh got chatting (as you do!).  I overheard the gist of their conversation, and their way of talking spilled over into their (our) playing. Again I detected a distinct Germanic accent and emphasis in their approach, so reminiscent of my transforming Schleiermacher experience.  It felt as though there was a profound longing for my English pedigree ‘nature’ to be significantly and permanently influenced by the emerging Germanic mood – I think they call it Stimmung. Sir George Smart agreed to purchase me for £20.

I have come to hear through the years echoes of this German Stimmung in much of our culture, in theological thinking as well as in our music-making.  There’s more of it to come in my next diary entry……….