ABSTRACT
Musical festivals proliferated throughout England in the nineteenth century, particularly in centres of industrial expansion such as Leeds, Birmingham, Norwich, Newcastle, Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield, and York, where they became coupled with middle-class concerns about social conditions and embraced the philanthropic, educational ideals of the age. Choral festivals originated, in part, from the mid-seventeenth century celebrations of St Cecilia’s Day, 2 and similar events organized for other occasions, not least under the aegis of the Church of England, to raise funds for charitable purposes. Stimulated by these, an annual ‘meeting’ of the cathedral choirs of Gloucester, Worcester, and Hereford began around 1715, and developed through the nineteenth century into the major musical event known as the Three Choirs Festival. By 1750 the reverence for St Cecilia was beginning to be overshadowed by that for Handel, and the 1784 Handel Commemorations at Westminster Abbey and the Pantheon established a model for grand performances of Handel’s oratorios in towns across Britain, including Salisbury, Bristol, Bath, Coventry, Oxford, and Cambridge. Many provincial towns sought to emulate the 1784 celebrations immediately after them, by staging a repeat of the Westminster Abbey programme, sometimes with some of the original performers from the Chapel Royal and Ancient Concerts imported from the capital. These occurred most notably in Birmingham and Liverpool (1784), Derby (1788), and Newcastle (1791). 3
