This article was written to accompany IT&T’s web series, “Musical Culture and Empire in Eighteenth-Century London” by Lizzy Buckle, RHUL.

In 1792, an orange thrown during a student scuffle broke John Malchair’s violin mid-performance and brought his career as leader of the Oxford Music Room (now Holywell Music Room) band to a sticky end. Fortunately Malchair had many strings to his bow and his work as a folk song collector and composer sustained him, despite his blindness, until his death in 1812. Nevertheless, to be a musician in eighteenth-century Britain was to take on a precarious profession; illness, injury, old age or damage to an instrument could quickly leave them destitute.

Portfolio Careers

The unstable finances of opera and theatre companies meant positions held by singers and instrumentalists were frequently subject to wage variation or simply vanished. Italian opera was a particularly hazardous enterprise as the exorbitant cost of the lead singers, extravagant costumes and spectacular scenery frequently exceeded the income obtained from ticket sales. The Royal Academy of Music, a joint stock company founded in 1719 to establish Italian opera in London, only lasted until 1729. Soon after its collapse, Handel set about forming the Second Academy but that too failed in 1734 as did its rival, the Opera of the Nobility, in 1737. Hence many musicians maintained multiple positions, diversified their skills by learning several instruments and took on other non-musical professions in order to make ends meet. Joseph Woodham, for instance, claimed to play not only the trombone but also the violin, viola, double bass, horn and trumpet and he even sang the role of Orlando in The Cabinet when the tenor John Braham suddenly came down with an attack of gout on 15 October 1802. The singer Luffman Atterbury was also a carpenter, builder and surveyor, while the oboist Redmond Simpson played at Covent Garden, Vauxhall Gardens, Haymarket Theatre, in the Queen’s band, the Horseguards, the Coldstream Guards, and also worked as a musician and clerk for the Duke of Cumberland. Some wealthier and perhaps more entrepreneurial musicians, most famously J. C. Bach and C. F. Abel, made use of their contacts and renown to organise subscription concert series.

John Braham as 'Lord Aimworth', steel line engraving by Thomson/Foster, 1818

Although some musicians with roles in the military, the church, or the court received a pension, this was not always enough to sustain them and their families through hard times. Even Handel, who received a generous annual pension of £600 from the royal family from the mid-1720s, experienced wildly fluctuating finances in the 1720s and 30s due to his involvement in Italian opera. Similarly, musicians who had managed to establish successful careers experienced hard times if public opinion turned against them. After a fruitful career leading orchestras, organising concerts, teaching, composing and performing violin concerti, Giardini returned to his native Italy in 1784. He returned to London by 1789 to find his competitors had taken advantage of his absence and replaced him as London’s premier violinist. Perhaps his age was also getting the better of him as Haydn noted in 1792 that he had heard Giardini play at Ranelagh Gardens and that ‘[h]e played like a pig’. So, not long after his return, Giardini left London once more to travel to Russia with a theatrical company, where he died in poverty.

Felice Giardini, 1745 representation, after Giovanni Battista Cipriani.

Benefit Concerts

A musician’s income often varied according to the time of year, as concerts and operas generally took place during the ‘season’, when the elite travelled to their London residences. One way for musicians to boost their finances and weather quieter periods was to organise a benefit concert. In return for hiring a room, enlisting the help of other players, placing advertisements and selling the tickets, a musician received all the profits from the concert. Benefits also provided musicians with opportunities to create and manage their celebrity status, collaborate with other musicians, attract students, promote newly published or composed works, and construct an appealing personal narrative. For example, a soprano organising a benefit for herself might commission and then perform a brand-new aria and hire other star musicians to perform alongside her, in order to demonstrate her respected position to both the audience and her colleagues. She may also situate the benefit within a narrative by advertising it as her final performance before leaving town or by designing a programme with a specific theme. Such strategies were vital for foreign musicians who had just arrived in London and wanted to establish a name for themselves. However, by the 1720s, the London concert scene had become so crowded with benefit events that similar strategies became essential for native performers to distinguish themselves from other competition.

Yet ironically musicians did not always benefit from their own benefits. While famous singers or instrumental virtuosi may have raised substantial sums and boosted their profile, less successful performers risked financial ruin by putting on a benefit concert: if they did not attract a large enough audience, they could lose the money they invested in hiring the venue, performers, and music. Organisers could suffer reputational as well as financial losses as a poorly attended benefit suggested a lack of popular support, which could cause them to lose out on future employment. It may also have been necessary for musicians to turn down other work to allow for the considerable amount of time and energy required to organise a benefit, which included arranging the refreshments, advertisements, tickets, staging, candles, and the hire and tuning of keyboard instruments. Therefore, such benefits were really only feasible for successful musicians who had already established their reputation, and were, for the time being at least, relatively financially solvent.

Nevertheless, a charitable benefit concert could be used as a way of raising money for a destitute musician or the family of a recently deceased musician. For example, on 28 September 1784, a benefit concert was held in aid of the pregnant widow and children of the musician Charles Linton who had been robbed and murdered by highwaymen in St Martin-in-the-Fields two months previously. The oratorio Zara was performed at Covent Garden Theatre with all members of the band ‘dressed in mourning, suited to the occasion’. However, the preparation of such an event relied on sourcing a venue, performers and music, which once again required access to money and useful contacts.

Royal Society of Musicians

Another option for a musician in need was to appeal to the ‘Fund for the support of Decay’d Musicians and their Families’, which still exists today as the Royal Society of Musicians of Great Britain. Three London musicians were inspired to set up the fund in 1738 after seeing the impoverished children of their recently deceased colleague, bassoonist and oboist Jean Christian Kytch, driving asses down the Haymarket. A year later, two hundred members of the music profession, including William Boyce and Handel signed the Declaration of Trust which aimed to care for their members in need, to apprentice their children and to look after their widows. Felice Giardini, as well as many of the musicians featured earlier in this series (including Johann Christoph Fischer, J. C. Bach and Joseph Woodham) subsequently became subscribers, while other notable personages from outside the music profession also showed their support by donating to the fund. The Society also organised annual concerts to raise additional funds for their cause.

William Boyce, attributed to Mason Chamberlin 1727-1787

For the price of the subscription fee, the charity reassured musicians that their families would be provided for in the event of their death, illness, old age, a damaged instrument or other trying circumstances. For example, since Linton had been a member, the Society offered his wife, Mary, a monthly allowance of 10 shillings for the child born after her husband’s death and gave her half a guinea towards her lying-in expenses. Ten years later, the Society helped to apprentice her other daughter, and when Mary died in 1805, it provided £5 to cover her funeral expenses.

However, membership to the society did not always guarantee assistance. Claimants (or their family) were required to have been subscribing members and practising musicians for at least one year. This meant musicians had to be able to afford the subscription fee, which started at half-a-crown per quarter but increased to a guinea by 1794 (an increase of over 800%). Perhaps Giardini could have ended his days more comfortably had he not withdrawn his membership from the society not long after he first subscribed in 1755. Claimants also had to present a certificate signed by ten ordinary members (i.e. not Governors) stating that they were ‘a proper object’ for relief, which required applicants to have built up a considerable network of contacts within the music industry. Therefore, as with the benefit concerts, the musicians most likely to receive assistance from the Society were those who had previously gained recognition and financial success in their field.

Conclusion

The success experienced by many of the musicians featured in this series placed them in a position of relative security compared to the majority of their colleagues. Although some developments in the eighteenth century helped to support the nation’s musicians, access to this assistance often required them to have achieved a moderate level of success in the first place. For instrumentalists, singers and composers in the eighteenth century, the music profession remained a perilous line of business...