Postscript: The Wider Picture

It would be inappropriate to conclude this study of the English provincial festival without discussing its wider influence on cultural events in other parts of the British Isles and beyond. Some mention has already been made of the fact that, at the height of the festival movement, London itself relied on a steady supply of new works from the provinces – the Birmingham and Leeds festivals being a particularly rich source of ‘novelties’. Most of these festival works were written for chorus and orchestra and were in the form of cantatas and large-scale oratorios – the latter a genre which, at this stage in its history, was kept alive virtually single-handedly by the provincial festivals. London had, of course, been swift to adopt the festival model, most notably in the Handel Commemoration concerts of 1784. These celebrations were followed by the Royal Musical Festival of 1834 ¹ (held in Westminster Abbey) and the triennial Handel festivals which took place at the Crystal Palace from 1859 to 1926. ² The capital cities of other parts of the British Isles also took up the festival model at differing stages in the nineteenth or early twentieth century. After London, Scotland’s capital city was the first to institute music festivals: the earliest recorded Edinburgh festival dates from 1813 and subsequent events were held in the city during the years 1815, ³ 1819, 1824 and 1843. In Ireland, Dublin also embraced the festival at an early stage – the first such event dating from 1831 when William and Henry Hudson organized a large-scale festival conducted by George Smart and Ferdinand Ries, with Paganini as the violin soloist. By contrast, Cardiff was slow to emulate the English festival movement, holding its first music festival in 1892. ⁴ (Of course, Wales already had a version of the music festival in its eisteddfods which dated back to the medieval period, but these gatherings, being essentially competitive events, belonged to a different tradition and produced their own progeny in the shape of the later competitive festivals.)