1863 onwards – the Crystal Palace Years

The Fair at Wroxham drew large crowds every year, and 1863 was no exception. Consequently, I felt ‘used’ again!  I was handled, picked up, and fiddled with, by a vast array of people, including an eleven-year-old Frank Schuster, a boy of German Jewish ancestry, who with his mother Mary Schuster was visiting his grandmother in Fakenham. In later years Frank became highly influential in the world of music, inspiring and encouraging many English composers, most notably Edward Elgar.

I could tell that young Frank was not a natural violinist, though he did show a modicum of respect when he urged his mother to offer a price for me!

(Frank Schuster in later life)

Mary Schuster’s husband, Frank’s father, was Leo Schuster, a highly successful businessman and cotton trader, Chairman of the London and Brighton Railway, and part of the consortium which had moved The Crystal Palace from Hyde Park to Sydenham in South London.  ‘I suppose your father might find someone in the Crystal Palace Orchestra who would be interested in that fiddle’, said Mrs Schuster to her agitated son Frank.

So, off to London again!

(The Crystal Palace at Sydenham)

My new owner was another German-born musician, August Manns – the conductor of the Saturday Concerts at the Crystal Palace, with its his hugely popular ‘Handel Festivals’.   And now began another time of great adventure bringing together Theology and Musicology.

(August Manns at a Handel Festival in the Crystal Palace 1897)

How many cycles per second?

August Manns was a fine musician, acutely sensitive in performance (a person after my own heart), and aware of the ‘spirituality’ of the musicians under his care. An example was the way Manns dealt with the question of a ‘uniform standard of pitch’.

For many years the traditional pitch level for the Crystal Palace Orchestra had been a whole semitone higher than in Germany, where, in Stuttgart in 1834, a consensus had been reached for the standard pitch for the note A (above Middle C) to be set at 440 cycles per second, but the Philharmonic leader would not agree!  It had to be 445 cycles per second! Inevitably, many musicians found the higher pitch strenuous, and August Manns was aware that, recently, some famous vocalists from the Continent had refused to sing at the Crystal Palace.

(Cartoon of Sir August Manns by ‘Spy’)

As a member of the string family, I am acutely aware of the strain put on my body if my strings have to be adjusted up or down, alternately stretched or slackened. Do the more ‘highly strung’ English prefer to be slightly ‘superior’ to (‘higher’ than) their continental neighbours? Is this why the great movements in theological and biblical studies in Germany are sometimes viewed with suspicion here?  Is this why we have been so precious about Germany’s taunt – ‘England? – Das Land ohne musik’? 

How far do such matters shed light on the fundamental difficulties Britain appears to have in truly valuing things German? Were they genuinely unable to listen and to hear one another, or was the resolute deafness in this matter of ‘pitch’ symptomatic of a deeper alienation of these two great nations and their cultures?  Did Britain and Germany really have to clash in that preventable, appalling and horrific Great War?  After all, there were so many ties between the ruling families and so many common understandings which surely should have produced a harmonious background (soundscape) to their common life.  How different the tragic 20^th century might have been without that terrible cacophonous wound at its beginning!   And then there was the struggle with the European Union in the early 21st century.  Was Britain sounding a residual higher pitch than her European neighbours?  Could there be a lingering parochialism in England, a secret longing to be more ‘highly strung’ than our neighbours?  Is that why she often feels ‘out of tune’ with the EU? – I’m just asking!

Next, I want to write more about ‘being in tune’.