In 1767 Messrs. Bohrer, Morgan and Comp started weekly concerts at their Charleston Vauxhall. They did not include tea and coffee in the price of the tickets, but on one extraordinary occasion when 'four or five pieces' were exhibited between the parts of the concert 'by a person who is confident very few in town ever saw, or can equal, his performance,'—on that extraordinary occasion tea and coffee were included in the expense 'till the person above mentioned begins.' Unfortunately we do not know the nature of the person's performance. He was, it seems, a very exclusive person and refused to appear more than once in Charleston, 'unless by the particular desire of a genteel company.' Nevertheless the enterprise of Messrs. Bohrer, Morgan and Comp does not seem to have succeeded. Peter Valton gave a benefit concert in 1768 and a subscription concert in 1769. In the meantime the St. Cæcilia Society, which was founded in 1762, had been giving regular subscription seasons since 1766 or perhaps earlier. That these St. Cæcilia Concerts were important affairs is evident from an advertisement inserted by the society in the New York, Philadelphia, and Boston papers in 1771, calling for a first and second violin, two hautboys, and a bassoon, and offering to such, if 'properly qualified,' a one-, two-, or three-year contract. The society continued to give regular concerts all during the century, but we have no information as to their nature.
Outside the St. Cæcilia concerts we find in 1772 only one, 'the vocal part by a gentleman, who does it merely to oblige on this occasion,' and, in 1773, two at which a Mr. Saunders exhibited 'his highest dexterity and grand deception.' In 1774 a Mr. Francheschini, who seems to have been a violinist of the St. Cæcilia Society, announced a concert for his benefit by express permission of that organization. Mr. Van Hagen, of Rotterdam, who afterward appeared in New York and Boston, gave a concert in the same year, at which Signora Castella performed on the musical glasses. Then the war intervened, putting practically a complete quietus on music for the time being.
So far, the concert-life of Charleston, from what we know of it, does not at all compare with that of contemporary New York, Philadelphia, or Boston. After the war it improved somewhat, but the intrusion of theatrical people into the concert field immediately following the war was very unfortunate from a musical point of view. With the exception of a subscription series started in 1786 by Joseph Lafar, and concerning which we have no particulars, there do not appear to have been any concerts worthy of the name until after 1790. They were simply scrappy theatrical entertainments, disguised sufficiently to evade the law which seems to have existed in restraint of such. The following advertisement shows the modus operandi, which is very suggestive of the 'Sacred Concerts' given on Sundays in many of our present-day vaudeville houses. 'On Saturday evening at the Lecture Room, late Harmony Hall, will be a Concert, between the parts will be rehearsed (gratis) the musical piece of Thomas and Sally. To which will be added, a pantomime, called Columbia, or Harlequin Shipwreck'd.'
Even acrobatic performances were introduced into the concerts of this period. Several concerts for charity were given in 1791, and may have been real concerts, though we have no particulars concerning them. George Washington attended one in that year, at which, he says, 'there were at least 400 ladies the number and appearance of which exceeded anything of the kind I had ever seen.' Excusably enough, perhaps, he was not sufficiently interested in the music to say anything about it.
From 1793 on, however, the concert-life of Charleston was very rich. Resides the subscription concerts of the St. Cecilia[33] Society, there were regular series by the Harmonic Society, which appeared in 1794, as well as frequent concerts given by individual musicians. Much of this activity was due to the influx of French musicians following the revolutions in France and St. Domingo. We find most of the benefit concerts from 1793 to the end of the century given by people with French names, and there is a decided leaning toward French composers, such as Grétry, Gossec, Davaux, Michel, La Motte, Guenin, and Gluck. However, the concerts on the whole were sufficiently eclectic, featuring also the compositions of Haydn, Pleyel, Stamitz, Gyrowetz, Corelli, Giornovichi, Hoffmeister, Viotti, Martini, dementi, Sacchini, Jarnovick, Krumpholtz. Handel, Cimarosa, and even Mozart.[34] Certainly the music lovers of Charleston did not suffer from lack of variety.
Mrs. Pownall, whom we have already met, gave a concert in 1796 which was somewhat out of the ordinary. It was advertised as a Grand Concert Spiritualé[!], and was devoted almost exclusively to 'overtures, songs and duets, selected from the most celebrated of Handel's oratorios: the "Messiah," "Judas Maccabæus," "Esther," etc., etc.' In the same year there was advertised a 'Grand Musical Festival,' which is interesting for many reasons. Probably it was the first musical affair in America to which the term 'Festival' was applied; it employed an orchestra of over thirty performers, which was an unusually large ensemble for that time, and it included among the numbers on its program the overture to Gluck's Iphigénie en Aulide and Haydn's Stabat Mater—'the celebrated Stabat Mater of Doctor Haydn,' as the announcement puts it. Apart from these, there were no further concerts in the last decade of the century which call for special mention. Two attempts were made to revive the Vaux Hall, one by 'Citizen' Cornet in 1795 and one by Mons. Placide in 1799, but they do not seem to have added much of value to the musical life of the city. On the whole, in Charleston, as elsewhere in America, the beginning of the nineteenth century saw a perceptible decline in the public demand for music of the best kind.
Our information on early concert-life in other Southern cities does not enable us to say much about it. In Maryland, Annapolis probably took the lead musically until after the middle of the century, but no sources have been disclosed which would supply us with any details of its musical life. We are a little better informed on musical affairs in Baltimore subsequent to the year 1780 and it would seem that toward the end of the century that city resembled Charleston very closely in the number and quality of its concerts. Also to Baltimore as to Charleston there was a large influx of French musicians after 1790, and with similar results. We know nothing about concerts in Baltimore prior to the year 1784, when William Brown demonstrated his 'superior talents on the German flute.' A couple of concerts, one of instrumental music only, are advertised for 1786, and in the same year we find the first notice of a subscription season. As far as we can discover subscription concerts were a regular feature of the musical life of the city until the end of the century. In 1790 Ishmail Spicer, who conducted a singing school for the improvement of church music, exhibited his pupils in a concert of sacred music. Then came the French musicians with their overtures of Grétry and their ariettes of Dalayrac. Like their compatriots in Charleston, they proved commendably catholic in their tastes, and, in addition to French compositions, gave frequent examples of Haydn, Pleyel, Stamitz, Bach, and Gyrowetz (whose name they never succeeded in spelling correctly). Though they practically monopolized musical affairs in Baltimore for many years, they collaborated freely with English, German, and Italian musicians, all of which made for the musical good of the city. It may be mentioned that Alexander Reinagle gave some concerts in Baltimore in 1791 and 1792, with programs of a quality which might be expected from an artist of his superior attainments, and he seems to have been the only non-French musician who counted much in the concert life of Baltimore in the last decade of the century. As elsewhere in America, there were open-air concerts in summer at such resorts of the Baltimore fashionables as Gray's Gardens and Chatsworth Gardens, and, as elsewhere in America, the musical life of the people degenerated sadly with the opening of the nineteenth century.
Williamsburg, Fredericksburg, Petersburg, Norfolk, Richmond, Alexandria, Savannah and other Southern cities apparently had a musical life as rich as could reasonably be expected in communities of their size. We possess little information concerning them, but there have been unearthed by Mr. Sonneck a number of references to concerts in these cities, sometimes with programs quoted in full, which show that they heard the best contemporary music occasionally, and perhaps even frequently. Many of the concerts were given by visiting musicians, such as Mrs. Pick, Mrs. Sully, Mrs. D. Hemard, Mr. Graupner, Mr. Shaw, and others whose names appear on the concert programs of Charleston, Philadelphia, and Roston. Rut it is certain that there was also in most of these cities a musical life which functioned quite independently of such visitors. Fredericksburg, we know, had a Harmonic Society in 1784, which gave concerts 'the third Wednesday evening in each month,' and it is not improbable that similar societies existed in other towns where there was much social intercourse between people of culture, refinement and exceeding leisure. Among the music-loving, pleasure-loving, gregarious gentlefolk of the old South, unhampered by the fetters of occupation and confronted merely with the task of making life pass as pleasantly as possible, the formation of such societies must have been inevitable. Perhaps among the families of their descendants scattered all over the country there may be preserved many old documents that would throw a welcome light on their musical life, but until such documents do appear we must rest content with the surmise, based upon the little information we possess, that musical culture in the South, if it did not quite reach the standard attained in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, was at least more widely diffused than elsewhere in America.
A comparison between the eighteenth-century concert life of America and of Europe will easily show that this country, even considering its many disadvantages, was not very far behind the older continent. Paris, London, Vienna, Berlin, and perhaps a few other German cities like Mannheim and Hamburg, were ahead of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Charleston in the quality of their concerts, but not so very far ahead as to make the American cities look provincial in comparison. When we consider the wealth of tradition behind the musical life of Europe and the many difficulties which confronted early concert givers in America the difference appears still less. But, as we pointed out in the last chapter, there was one very profound and important difference—the European cities were productive, the American cities were not. And, after all, the artistic stature of a country must finally be measured not by what it appreciates, but by what it creates. Thus measured, America of the eighteenth century was still a musical infant.