NEWCASTLE'S MUSICAL HERITAGE AN INTRODUCTION By ...

CHAPTER FIVE
THE GRAND MUSIC FESTIVALS
One of the prominent features of musical life across the country during 18 th
and 19 th centuries was the Grand Music Festival. The occasional event when the
big choral works of Handel were presented by augmented choirs with orchestra
in the church and lighter instrumental and vocal entertainments were laid on in
the evenings with perhaps a ball or some other social event to round off the
festival. The most famous of these festivals was the ‘Three Choirs’ at Worcester,
Gloucester and Hereford in turn from around 1715. Birmingham started their
festivals in 1768, Norwich in 1770 and Sheffield in 1786. Newcastle’s first Music
Festival took place in 1778 and they continued at irregular intervals until 1842.
After a lapse of thirty-five years, following the 1842 Festival, an article appeared
in the local press which began as follows; -
‘It has been a surprise to some who are in the habit of lamenting the inferiority
of Newcastle to such towns as Leeds and Birmingham in the matter of triennial
Musical Festivals, to find that more than a century ago the capital of Tyneside set
the example to many towns that have since wrested the palm of musical preeminence
from her. It may be interesting, in view of the proposed resumption of
our local Musical Festivals, to recount, so far as existing chronicles permit, the
cardinal incidents in regard to those great occasions when, according to current
criticisms, “an immense concourse” of the nobility and gentry came together from
the “neighbouring counties” and “a crowd of beauty and fashion thronged the
streets”: when special steam-packets were run on the river, and inns and
lodging-houses were so hard pushed to provide accommodation that a single
night’s rest could not be obtained for less than four guineas.’
To some extent the above introduction to the 1877 newspaper article captures
the essence of what these festivals were all about. Grand music spectacles, laid
on to impress; employing large forces of mainly imported talent at great expense
and attended by the upper crust of local society. Initially, they appear to have
been largely self sponsored by those organizing and performing in the festival,
but later it was thought that local businesses and tradesmen, who together with
local landlords had welcomed the influx of people into the town for obvious
reasons, should contribute part of the profits they made from the festival to the
cost of the festival. Some of these Grand Music Festivals held in Newcastle
made a profit and where they did part of it went to charitable causes. Why the
Grand Music Festivals ceased to be held in Newcastle is not recorded (the
festival referred to in the above newspaper article would have been a lower key
29