ABSTRACT
NOTHING more important could happen in a young composer’s life than to have such links forged with the country’s major festivals. Most of these festivals depended on that new type of public building, the large concert hall, as distinctive in the Victorian city landscape as the railway station. Usually but not always a town hall with civic functions, it was required to accommodate chorus and orchestra and to have an organ at which an eminent local musician would often (in newspaper language) ‘preside’. Though Birmingham’s festival had older roots, it was the new Town Hall (1834) that reinvigorated it: here Mendelssohn came to conduct his St Paul in 1837 and his new Elijah nine years later. Norwich, where Sullivan’s new overture was commissioned, had one of the older, cathedral-type festivals – providing an East Anglian counterpart to the celebrated Three Choirs Festival, rotating annually between Worcester, Hereford and Gloucester.
