Episode 2 Rule Britannia! Music, Mischief and Morals in the 18th Century

From Glastonbury to Glyndebourne,

from the glitter of London's West End shows

to our thriving regional choirs and amateur orchestras, Britain today

is alive with music.

But while we think of the 21st century as the era

of impresarios and celebrities, gossip magazines and social networking,

pop stars and groupies,

all these were first forged

in the energy and inventiveness of 18th century Britain.

I've been playing, studying

and loving 18th century music for as long as I can remember.

In this series, I'll be discovering what it must have felt like to

be at the very centre of that cultural explosion, exploring its

refined salons and playing on its newfangled, cutting-edge instruments.

In the mid-18th century,

with a flourishing international trade empire,

the British for the first time became consumers.

Fashion, luxury, good taste and pleasure were

the watchwords of the age and with them came new spa towns,

assembly rooms and concert halls, places to spend all that money.

Music became a kind of conspicuous consumption

A driving force in a cultural boom.

More than anything else - books or newspapers,

paintings or poetry, I think it was music that truly touched

the lives of everyone in 18th century Britain.

This is its story.

When the Italian adventurer

and legendary seducer Giacomo Casanova visited England in 1763,

he went immediately to London's smartest address, Carlisle House

in Soho, the home of his childhood sweetheart, Teresa Cornelys.

Teresa had arrived in the capital just five years earlier

without a penny to her name.

Born in Venice, she had been a child prostitute, pimped out by her own mother.

It was her vivacious soprano singing voice that was to be Teresa's ticket out of poverty,

taking her to the greatest opera houses in Europe

and making her a star.

She seduced audiences

and a string of lovers in Holland, Austria and Germany.

Now she set out to conquer London.

Music was Teresa's ticket to fortune and fame, not as an opera singer,

but as a cultural innovator.

She became known as the Empress of Pleasure,

her masked balls were the hottest ticket in town,

a heady cocktail of sex, sensation and style.

And music was the glue that held it all together.

Carlisle House was soon London's most exclusive hot spot

with the soundtrack provided

by the hottest international performers and composers of the day.

Fearsome society ladies would vet the subscribers,

barring anyone who might be middle class, dreary or unfashionable.

The financial model was to charge sky-high prices that would

put off all but the very richest.

It worked. Teresa even had to widen the entrance to Carlisle House

to get all the guests in.

It was the place to go

and people were queuing up to get in through the doors,

they even closed Parliament early so people could get there,

it was the fashionable centre of town.

She hired the best musicians of the day

and they would put on concerts on a weekly subscription basis.

Put simply, she put the whole idea

of the weekly symphony concert on the map.

Teresa Cornelys's soirees, with their impossible glamour

and decadence, were at one end of the social spectrum.

At the other was the depravity and despair of life for the many,

captured so sharply by artists like Hogarth.

Between the two were "the middling orders",

whose prosperity, authority and power was on the rise.

With their money came an obsession with novelty and innovation.

Everything was possible.

Britain is becoming the most active and dynamic society

in the world and that encourages

people to feel that they are taking

part in a world in which the key

point of reference is no longer that

of the world that their parents were part of.

So in a way, Britain in

the second half of the 18th century prefigures 20th century America.

Music led the charge in this new, modern world,

with one radical British innovation in particular changing

the way the public could experience music.

Today, we take it for granted that we've got access to music whenever we want it.

But if you lived in the early 18th century in a city

like Paris or Vienna or Rome, you had to be one of a tiny, very privileged

number of people to every hear a note of new music.

Concert halls, the idea of a gig simply didn't exist.

The idea of paying to hear the music you wanted, when you wanted it

came from Britain, inspired by its growing middle class.

These were people with time and money to spend on concerts.

The public concert was a British invention from the previous century.

A cash-strapped musician called John Bannister

held the first concert where people could pay to come in,

at his house near Fleet Street in 1672.

The concert as we know it today would

develop from the pioneers who followed his lead.

There was Thomas Britton, a remarkable man,

he was a coal merchant who had a passion for music and he started

a series of commercial concerts in his coal shed in Clerkenwell.

What you would do is scuttle up a ladder into the coal shed

where you would sit and enjoy the evening's entertainment,

you could also chip in as an amateur musician if you wanted to,

where you'd be in the company of some top musicians like Handel.

Must have been an absolutely fantastic place for a night out.

Thomas Britton's concerts ran from 1678 until his death in 1714.

These early musical events could be raucous affairs.

People wouldn't be sitting in rows

in the way that we would at

a modern concert,

and you wouldn't have a programme or anything like that.

The chairs would be scattered around and people would be chatting to

each other, certainly there would be people who would be trying to listen

to the music, but it was considered to be the mark of a good performer

if you could shut the audience up, and get them to just go quiet.

These concerts weren't just for a social elite, they could be enjoyed

by anyone who could afford the price of a ticket - about the same as a day's wages for the average worker.

The pursuit of enjoyment was becoming more fashionable and more commercial than it had ever been.

Pleasure certainly wasn't a new discovery in the 18th century.

But from the aristocracy and the gentry to the legions of property speculators,

bankers, tavern-owners, farmers, labourers, everyone in Britain, it seemed,

was indulging in pleasure more lustily than ever before.

This passion for all things novel

and exciting drove the popularity of a new breed of outdoor

entertainment venues, where music was an essential ingredient.

The prototype was to be found in one of the capital's least

salubrious districts.

By the banks of the River Thames.

This rather unprepossessing park

was once London's most glamorous entertainment venue.

Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens.

From 1729, under the management of a brilliant entrepreneur

called Jonathan Tyers,

it entertained a stream of hedonistic Londoners.

This was an oasis away from the filthy, malodorous stench of the city.

Vauxhall Gardens became one of the most profitable businesses

of the whole of the 18th century, with pioneering theatrical effects,

hot-air balloon rides, tightrope walkers and fireworks.

It was a pioneer of advertising and mass catering.

That said, the meat was notoriously cut so thinly you could hold

it up to a candle and see through it like a cobweb.

The wine was neither good nor cheap and still people flocked here.

Part of the evening at Vauxhall was the journey, and part of

the journey was crossing the River Thames, of course, because most of

Vauxhall's customers came from the city of London, from Westminster.

This was part of what Vauxhall Gardens was about,

it separated you from reality and you went to what

they called at the time, a dream world,

it was almost like crossing the River Styx to get to Paradise.

Pleasure gardens were essentially parks with musical entertainment,

they became the ultimate meeting places of 18th-century London.

Men, women, children, servants. Anyone could go,

there was no guest list, there was no vetting process.

If you paid your shilling you were in.

When you arrived at Vauxhall, you would be plunged

into a fantastical world of formal gardens and fragrant walkways.

12 of you would dine together in a huge wooden box,

richly decorated with the most exquisite paintings,

an orchestra nearby would serenade you.

It was, by all accounts, a truly magical place.

Vauxhall's democracy was thrilling, listening to the songs and

orchestral pieces, everyone could believe he or she was an equal.

Music made distinctions of money, class, and age irrelevant.

During the instrumental music people would

promenade around the gardens, around the avenues, they would meet their

friends, they'd gossip. During the songs they would all cluster around

the central orchestra stand and listen to the songs and watch the

singers, who, many of whom became celebrities in their own right.

With the public hungry for new music, the pleasure gardens

became the bread and butter of many a British composer.

Most popular of all were songs, charming ditties

on popular themes of innocence and experience, loss and love.

# On Richmond Hill there is a lass More bright than May-day morn

# Whose charms all others maids' surpass, a rose without a thorn

# This lass so neat, with smiles so sweet, has won my right good will

# I'd crowns resign to call her mine

# Sweet lass of Richmond Hill

# Sweet lass of Richmond Hill

# Sweet lass of Richmond Hill

# I'd crowns resign to call thee mine

# Sweet lass of Richmond Hill. #

A thousand people a night coming to the gardens,

they would hear the same songs again and again and again and they

would become hugely popular just by dint of repetition to this audience.

And of course they produced published song sheets, which were bought not only by visitors to Vauxhall gardens

but they were circulated almost all around the world.

People also came to enjoy

the seedier side of what Vauxhall offered.

It was well known that the gardens were a

"Convenient place for courtship of every kind" and

Vauxhall had a famous "Dark Alley", where you could go for a romantic

assignation. It was teeming with prostitutes, waiting for a punter.

Round Vauxhall there was always a slight frisson of risk

which I am sure was part of the appeal,

but it's also somewhere where you could meet and there a certain

level of informality,

where you could see people and be seen and that

was so much part of the social scene of the 18th century that you had

to be seen in order to be recognised as being part of polite society.

The gardens had such a winning formula that they were copied across

the world, there were Vauxhalls in Paris, Copenhagen and Nashville, Tennessee.

Meanwhile, in Britain, the fixation with music and leisure

led to entire towns springing up, catering for swarms of cultural tourists.

The most popular of them all was Bath.

Bath had long had a reputation as a centre of medicine,

the town's famous thermal waters drunk and bathed in since Roman times.

What happened here in Bath was that the medicinal cure started to take a

back seat as entertainment

and pleasure came to the fore.

You weren't really in Bath to "take the waters" so much as to have a

bit of fun, and music and dancing were a central part in all that.

The band here at the Pump Room in Bath is the oldest

professional instrumental ensemble in Europe.

They first played in the early 1700s and have been resident here ever since.

APPLAUSE

Bath was radically redeveloped in the 18th century with

fashionable neoclassical avenues, hotels and lodging houses.

This was the original Georgian party town and this was how you got around.

Taxi!

What had been a bit of a sleepy backwater

was now a fully-fledged holiday resort,

with all mod cons.

The jewel in the crown was here at the Assembly Rooms in Bath -

the most magnificent rooms anywhere in Britain.

It was here that you'd come to take tea, to gamble,

and most importantly, to dance -

and where you'd hope to be introduced

to the cream of Bath society.

Everyone, from a London lord to a country lass, came to Bath

knowing that it was a pleasure-seeker's paradise for all.

It was also a fantastic opportunity to move up the social ladder.

It was the best marriage market there was.

How much were the tourist towns like Bath a real leveller,

a place where lots of different kinds of people could meet?

Bath was deliberately non-hierarchical.

It wasn't based on maintaining position of privilege.

Everybody who paid their fee could go to the Assembly

and then you were all in there together.

It wasn't like court society,

and it was a society where this commercialised leisure

was absolutely central, because people come to Bath,

they need to be entertained,

so this is where you find some of the early cultural impresarios,

opening of the walks and the gardens,

where people can go and promenade for their health,

and meet other people.

Increasingly, you could become a member of polite society

by your own efforts.

You are in a world in which your inherited status

is much less significant, but the tastes you follow,

showing that you are an educated, cultured person,

and therefore, you deserve status,

so the idea is that you deserve status, not that you inherit it.

You are displaying, through your musical taste

and your musical attainment,

that you both deserve where you wish to be socially,

but also that you are comfortable where you are socially.

But woe betide you if you put a foot wrong.

The set piece of a ball here at the Assembly Rooms

was a terrifying dance - the minuet -

performed, couple by couple, in front of the whole room.

Not for the faint-hearted.

I asked dance historian Moira Gough to put me through my paces.

Wow. OK.

So, this is the Assembly Room where you would come to dance?

Yes, a good big space for dancing.

Now, minuet...I have heard tell,

are a particularly tricky kind of dance,

and you would be doing them, what, in front of a room

full of hundreds of people, and they would be watching you?

Absolutely.

This is the Strictly Come Dancing of the 18th century.

One, two, three, four, five, six.

One, two, three, four, five, six.

-One, two, three, four, five, six.

-We'll have to do it again!

One, two, three, four, five, six.

-One, two, three, four, five, six.

-Moira...

-Miss, could you come back?

-That's actually not very easy!

Let me be the man.

You come together.

That's it.

And we actually dance forward.

Another thing that happens...

But that's incredibly risky, physical closeness.

If I'm a young woman who's come to Bath, and my parents are nearby,

-but I don't know you from Adam.

-Miss!

We're quite physically close.

Yes, but that's the closest you're going to get.

This is nothing like modern ballroom hold, where you really are close.

So, let's imagine I'm a young heiress,

come to Bath to find a husband...

What I need now is a dance partner

and preferably one with a title...

May I introduce Lord Yarmouth.

Hello, Lord Yarmouth.

Lovely to meet you.

Now we're going to take right hands. You dance sideways.

Right...left, right, left. Right...

'Dancing the minuet isn't as easy

'as those Jane Austen heroines make it look.'

He's going to offer you his hand.

Take it with your right hand.

Dance in a circle.

Now come towards me.

'Concentrate. You're here to find a husband.'

Miss, that wasn't really quite right.

-Shall we have another go?

-I'm so sorry, Lord Yarmouth!

We nearly got there.

Well, I think we are improving here.

I think you may make a minuet dancer in time.

Lord Yarmouth doesn't look quite so convinced.

I think your money might outweigh your lack of practise.

If mastering the minuet was step one in getting a husband,

next on the list of feminine charms was your musical ability.

How much was music used as a tool for improving one's standing,

particularly as a lady in society?

Music was always something that was

a desirable accomplishment in a young lady,

partly because it is something that you could do inside,

it didn't require intensive academic application,

and it was a social facilitator.

The role of women was very much that of being

a social facilitator

and easing company and conversation, if you like.

Men made sure this was the case,

and took a close interest in keeping women in their place.

Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles Darwin,

chose as his subject not evolution, but good breeding.

In his book -

Plan for the Conduct of Female Education in Boarding School -

he wrote that the following subjects should be taught

in order of priority.

After the study of the female character

should come music and dancing,

only then to be followed by the teaching

of reading, writing and grammar.

Not that this meant girls had a free hand

in what music they played or what they played it on.

There were only certain instruments a female would be allowed to play,

a young woman would be allowed to play,

but in terms of self display,

the keyboard was ideal because she was sitting at a keyboard,

you could tell her posture,

it was one in which she was involved in a supportive role, often,

if there was a solo singer or a solo violinist,

so there were all kinds of enactments of femininity

that made the playing of a keyboard

an attractive way of displaying the female.

Any socially ambitious young lady

would have her keyboard lessons with a fashionable Italian music master

and you can imagine these must have been fraught with tension.

It was so rare that unmarried men and women

got to be so physically close to one another

and it wasn't unheard of

for the young girl to run off with the teacher.

BRIGHT HARPSICHORD MUSIC

So, what kind of music should a young lady be taught?

It should be decorative, light, and not too challenging.

You should never look like you're showing off,

or, worse still, overshadowing a man.

The keyboard was so strongly associated with women

that any upstanding British gentlemen thought it effeminate,

and they refused to play it.

But despite the possibility of hands entwining

with the exotic music teacher,

and where that might lead,

the keyboard was at least ladylike.

Other instruments weren't.

So, what were the rules of musical engagement for girls?

SHE PUFFS / NO MUSICAL SOUND

Don't put anything in your mouth...

TUNELESS LOW NOTE

..and keep your legs closed.

SCREECHING DISCORD

The social penalties for women who strayed outside

these strict rules about music and gender could be severe.

This is Anne Ford - a talented musician,

she played a whole host of different instruments,

and she was really committed to a public career.

So, she tries to stage a concert.

Her father had other ideas and he had her arrested...twice.

Anne eventually manages to escape.

She marries a man called Philip Thicknesse, an army officer,

and they set off and travel around Europe,

where they end up in France in 1792.

Philip has a seizure and dies.

Anne is arrested as an aristocrat,

and the only thing that saves her from the guillotine

is the fact that she has a trade - she is a musician.

Gainsborough painted her

in this absolutely delicious portrait

as a really tough, uncompromising figure.

And, most importantly, she's sitting there with her legs crossed -

a really masculine gesture of defiance.

While the musical activities of women

were hemmed in to maintain their feminine decorum,

the chaps were under somewhat less pressure

to mind their Ps and Qs - at least in private.

In singing clubs up and down the country,

men could let rip with unbuttoned abandon.

How much would sex, or bawdiness, lasciviousness,

have been a part of what was widely sung?

In the clubs, which, of course, were almost exclusively for men,

they sang the most disgusting rounds and catches

and songs and glees, and that is the kind of place

where those really obscene songs would have been sung.

They are really lurid and really quite unpleasant, actually,

some of the song sheets.

A song like "Chloe at Cock's Auction",

inspired by a real-life auctioneer called Christopher Cock,

wasn't difficult to decode.

With the hammer going up and down, the twin 18th century delights

of sex and shopping merge together.

# The hammer, the hammer was up

-# Each bid

-The hammer, the hammer was up

# The hammer, the hammer was up... #

We shouldn't think that catches and glees

were, as it were, just bawdy tavern songs.

They were in parts and they had to be learnt,

and you had to know what you were doing.

Often, in these clubs, if you made a mistake,

then you got fined.

Typically, you were invited to drink an enormous beaker of wine

if you made a mistake,

the effect of which must surely have been to make it even worse.

THEY CONTINUE SINGING

Singing clubs like this

were formed for the love of male companionship

and making music together.

Performing for money was a no-no.

Professional musicians were, to many,

no better than tradesmen or street pedlars.

A case in point was that of Thomas Arne,

best known today for writing "Rule, Britannia!"

Born into the upper crust, he horrified his parents

when he was bitten by the music bug.

SHE PLAYS "RULE, BRITANNIA!"

When Arne told his family he wanted to be a musician,

he was forbidden - too shameful, too lowly.

He had to dress up as a liveryman to get into the opera,

where he took copious notes in the dark

hoping that nobody would recognise him.

He even smuggled a spinet up to the attic of his family's home,

covered it in a blanket and practised in the dead of night.

SHE PLAYS "RULE, BRITANNIA!"

But the snobbery of a few toffs was no match

for a mass tidal wave of public adulation.

Professional musicians were increasingly respectable

and becoming household names.

Fans across Britain were desperate to hear them.

There is a lingering sense, even today,

that exciting things,

big important cultural things,

only really happen in London.

It's not true now and it certainly wasn't true in the 18th century,

because as communications between major cities

got better and faster,

music and musicians began to travel across the entire country.

The cities they went to play music in weren't sleepy backwaters,

but thriving musical centres in their own right -

like Newcastle, which, in the 18th century,

was a bustling, international port,

thanks to Britain's global trade empire.

When the London season finished,

musicians didn't just hang around in the capital,

they went on tour.

Newcastle was one of the main stopping-off points

between London and Edinburgh,

and here, the latest musical fashions were heard.

This was a town humming with modernity.

It had a real thirst for the latest songs

and novelties, plays and circuses,

all of which needed music and musicians.

In Newcastle, you are constantly getting

advertisements for things like a new clarinet concerto,

music entirely new,

the latest sensational singer from London,

this sort of thing.

And I think it's because you have a very thriving merchant class

and middle class, and these are people who are trading with

not only London but the Baltic and areas like that as well.

And these do tend to be people who are more go-ahead,

they are more interested in what's going on now

and the latest fashions and the latest novelties and so on.

What set the music scene in provincial cities apart was

the sheer variety of performers you could hear.

There were professionals from cathedrals and military bands,

town singers and pipers, but not enough of them to sustain the

voracious appetite for music.

So a host of talented amateurs joined in.

Music becomes the dynamic part, the active part,

the participatory part.

You yourself are not going to make a Wedgwood-style pot

but you are going to be able, on your spinet or your piano forte

or your harpsichord, to play music,

you are going to be able to take part in a small woodwind group,

that's what makes it so exciting.

The shining star in Newcastle's music scene was Charles Avison,

a composer and writer who believed passionately in the power

of music to transform lives.

He was a great champion of music in the North East.

Charles Avison started out as a domestic servant,

but showed such a natural talent for music that he was sent to

London to study with an Italian master.

He returned home to Newcastle

where he composed music for local concerts,

pieces designed to capitalise on the fashion for amateur

music-making of the highest standard.

I think Avison is wonderful.

And I think it's basically because as a person,

he was most concerned, almost obsessed

that music should be something for everyone.

His concertos, his sonatas were principally written,

if not actually written, for amateurs to play.

In Avison's band, as with many orchestras of the time,

professional musicians, called "stiffeners",

played the trickier music, and kept the whole thing together.

The amateurs played the simpler parts.

It's only recently that Charles Avison's rich contribution

to British music has begun to be recognised.

What made him special was more than just the notes he wrote on the page,

Avison thought about music in an entirely new way.

Avison wanted to persuade the hordes of well-heeled Geordies

who poured through the doors of these Assembly Rooms that music

wasn't just the soundtrack to a great night out,

it was there to make you a better person.

In 1752, he published his Essay on Musical Expression, the first thing

ever written in English about how to listen to

and really appreciate music.

His idea is that music appeals to the emotions.

Music should be beautiful, music shouldn't be ugly,

it shouldn't reflect the bad side of life, it should reflect

the wonderful emotions and the marvellous things of life.

And that will then improve society basically.

Improvement, another 18th century buzzword,

was seen as one of the key functions of music and art.

It wasn't enough that it should be enjoyable, it had to make you

more modern, more moral, noble and sophisticated.

There were even new buildings

designed to showcase music's transformative power.

This is the Holywell Music Room.

It's England's,

in fact, it's the world's oldest purpose-built concert venue.

It opened in Oxford in 1748,

inspired by the need, the desire for a new public space for music.

The Holywell was designed with acoustics in mind.

It's got this beautiful U-shape at the back for the sound to flow round,

there's no pillars to get in the way to deaden the sound.

And it's amazing that given this is the first ever proper concert hall,

they got it right first time.

It's the perfect blend of 18th century technology, architecture,

acoustics and engineering,

all coming together in the service of music.

It's a democratising space this.

If you made music at home

it would tend to be with people of similar means and backgrounds.

If you were the kind of person who went to the opera,

it would be with people of a similar class.

Here at Holywell, everybody literally rubbed shoulders.

It's an incredibly intimate venue.

So much so that when a famous performer is onstage

you feel you can almost touch them in here.

And this venue drew some of the leading performers of the day.

This was a place they could go on tour and make money,

a new public concert hall, and it drew people like Handel and Haydn,

some of the most famous musicians in the whole country.

The idea caught on.

Specially built concert halls opened across the land,

part of what was called at the time a "rage for music."

Such was the money and kudos on offer, that musicians

and composers from across Europe flocked to Britain.

Musicians like Johann Christian Bach.

He arrived in London in 1762, where, with his business partners,

he acquired his own splendid concert hall, the Hanover Square Rooms.

Not only was music now being listened to

in new ways and in new venues,

musical style was changing radically too.

And JC Bach was leading the way.

What Londoners loved about JC Bach was his freshness, his immediacy.

His father, the great Johann Sebastian Bach, had written brilliant, complex,

very dense music full of different lines all interweaving.

Johann Christian championed a different style altogether.

Known as Galante, it was full of singing melody.

It was all about pleasure and charm.

You didn't need to be a great thinker to enjoy JC Bach's music,

you just had to love a great tune.

JC Bach, he was actually written about at the time,

he was the person who brought the big orchestral sound,

the different colours of the orchestra, catchy tunes,

punchy, big, orchestral loud passages,

so that the audience would sit up at these moments of drama if you like.

Bach wrote a host of music for London subscription concerts,

from symphonies and concertos to dances and popular songs.

But what the audience really went crazy for was his slow music.

Elite Londoners prided themselves on their connoisseurship,

on their depth of feeling and good taste.

Enjoying JC Bach was a kind of social shortcut.

A way of saying that you were in with the highly cultured "in crowd".

Nowhere was more "in" than Teresa Cornelys' masked balls,

and JC Bach was one of her house composers.

It's the same fairy dust of cultural kudos that exists today.

The wealthy buy art, they go the theatre, they go to concerts

to show their superiority through their cultivation.

In the fashion-obsessed, interior designed 18th century

world of Chippendale furniture, and Wedgwood porcelain,

music was an essential ingredient in polite, cultivated society.

The other side of the obsession with novelty

was the 18th century fascination for the weird, the outlandish

and the freakishly different.

In music this meant child prodigies.

There was Thomas Linley, from Bath,

who delighted crowds by playing concertos aged just seven.

William Crotch, from Norwich,

who from three was giving public organ recitals.

But none of the British infant prodigies could match the talent

of a young Austrian who arrived in London one day in April of 1764.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

was just eight when he arrived in the capital.

He was accompanied by his brilliant sister, Nannerl,

and their father, Leopold,

a court musician from Salzburg who realised he could earn more money

from his children's musical talents than his own.

They lived frugally in a bid to make some serious money.

Mozart's lodgings were at the home of a corset-maker,

called Thomas Williamson, here on Frith Street in Soho,

one of London's dingiest areas at the time,

it was crammed full of workshops,

living quarters with bodies piled in on top of one another.

But the Mozarts did experience the opulent side of London life too,

shunted between some of the capital's smartest addresses.

The boy became a sensation in London, as audiences were captivated

by his seemingly effortless, God-given talents.

What Mozart could do was absolutely astonishing.

There were lots and lots of child prodigies,

but even the best child prodigies could not do what Mozart did.

How much do we know

about the kind of tests that he underwent in public,

the kind of tricks he was expected to perform

when he was onstage here in London?

What you find is a series of concerts in which Mozart is asked to improvise

on a theme that someone gives him from the audience.

Sometimes he's given a violin part and he has to improvise a piano part,

he has to play the keyboard with the keyboard covered by a handkerchief

so he can't actually see the keys.

So there are lots of tricks of that sort,

but there are also tests of genuine and serious musical skills.

People recognised Mozart's uniqueness and his specialness at the time,

and almost immediately he became the model

for what a child prodigy could or ought to be.

Mozart was examined by a leading scientist

and member of the Royal Society,

and became the subject of a learned paper on the nature of genius.

Then, just as his son was becoming the talk of the town,

Leopold fell ill, catching a severe throat infection.

The family moved to Chelsea, then in the countryside,

for a good dose of fresh air.

The children were under strict instructions,

there was to be no noise, no music.

Mozart wasn't allowed to play his violin or practice the piano.

And so the eight-year-old began writing symphonies.

Even in his first symphony Mozart's musical fingerprints are there.

The dynamic feeling of forward motion, the joy, risk and adventure.

I think you can hear that this is the composer who goes on to write

operas like The Marriage Of Figaro,

masterpieces like the Jupiter Symphony.

And yet, some people have questioned

whether he actually wrote this at all!

There is a lot of speculation that the early symphonies are co-written,

slightly edited, slightly "improved" by his father.

I don't think that Leopold had much to do with it.

If you look at that piece, it's very simple.

He was eight at this time. Five years later her wrote Mitridate,

-this extraordinary piece.

-Fabulous opera!

Yeah. There's no reason why he couldn't have written this piece.

Mozart, at the age of eight,

was shining a light on what the future would sound like.

But not all the musical experiments of the time were so successful.

Take the highly-intriguing music

of one of 18th century Britain's most tantalising figures.

He was a workaholic German who came to England and settled in Bath

in 1766, where he played the organ at a fashionable chapel.

But that was only one of his talents.

William Herschel is one of the great names in astronomy.

He discovered Uranus and two of its moons,

and infra-red radiation among other things.

But astronomy was just a hobby.

What brought him to Bath was music making,

composing, teaching and performing.

Here there was money to be made.

In one week, one notorious week,

Herschel manages to fit in 46 pupils,

so you have to imagine a man with fantastic energy.

He's up and down the town visiting his pupils,

teaching all of these instruments.

They're also coming to him, and that's alongside the concert work

and being an organist, but teaching is a very large part of it.

Amazing in a way that he found time to do the astronomy.

Well, that's the strange thing, when did he find it?

Clearly they did it at night, but if you've taken the day for your music

and the night for your astronomy, when do you sleep?

Herschel brought his workaholism and rigour to his music.

It was scientific rationality and experiment cast in sound.

We tend to think of some of the lesser music of the 18th century

as being very conventional,

Herschel wasn't like that. He was experimenting all the time

from the very beginning and it's a fascinating route that he took.

I think you can feel the gears changing in a Herschel symphony.

You look at it and, as you say, you get a block of stuff

and then another block of stuff.

"This is my rigorous scientific mind!"

It's a really interesting clash of reason and ingenuity.

It's very scientific. You can imagine him writing with his score

and listing his equipment over the top,

of which chords he's going to use!

But basically, it doesn't quite work, but that's what makes it work.

The desire for pushing the boundaries of what was possible

wasn't just confined to the concert hall.

In this era of ingenuity and enterprise,

music was at the front line of economic innovation.

Publishers realised that there was a growing market for people playing music

in their homes, and using the latest printing technology,

they created vast quantities of domestic sheet music.

Shopkeepers filled their shelves with musical bric-a-brac.

Tuneful clocks, automata and music boxes.

PIERCING SOUND

Instrument-makers jumped on the bandwagon too,

creating a series of novelties to delight and amuse their patrons.

And this is one of them, it's my favourite instrument

of the whole of the 18th century, and it's called a glass harmonica.

It was designed by Benjamin Franklin,

one of the Founding Fathers of America,

while he was living in London in 1761.

A gifted inventor,

Franklin decided he could improve on a party trick he'd seen performed.

What he did was he took the principle of dipping your finger

into a bowl of water and running it around the rim of a wine glass,

and he turned it into this, this is what it sounds like.

PIERCING SOUNDS OF VARIOUS PITCH

SHE PLAYS "TWINKLE TWINKLE LITTLE STAR"

It's such a whacky, odd, ethereal kind of sound,

I absolutely adore it.

It was so fashionable, this instrument, for a while,

Marie Antoinette had one,

Mozart, Gluck and a whole load of other composers wrote for it.

But its heyday was very short-lived.

It was an immensely fragile instrument.

But, more than that, it was said to drive the delicate young ladies

who would play it to go insane!

GLASS HARMONICA PLAYS

The glass harmonica enjoyed only a brief heyday.

Other new-fangled designs became a firm fixture

in British drawing rooms and concert halls.

This is Finchcocks in Kent,

a Georgian mansion with a fantastic collection of early instruments.

If you played the keyboard at home in the early 18th century,

you would've play one of these - a harpsichord -

where the strings are plucked by quills,

there's no sustain, there's no way of playing it louder or softer,

and the kind of music you would have played

would've been contrapuntal music, so musical lines all unfolding together,

all equally important. It would've sounded something like this.

SHE PLAYS AN EVEN MELODY

'It was beautifully clear and precise,

'but what the harpsichord didn't give you

'were subtle nuances of sound, the light and shade.'

So, the canny instrument-makers of London began to design and sell

a revolutionary new instrument.

Based on an Italian prototype,

it took its name from "piano e forte", soft and loud.

This piano was made in 1769 and it was a huge hit in British homes.

It was called a square piano, never mind that it's rectangular.

It cost about a quarter of what a harpsichord would have cost

and, most importantly, it was really compact

so it would fit into middle-class drawing rooms.

It was Johannes Zumpe, a German maker who'd come to London

and spotted an opportunity.

His pianos were an overnight success

and he's gone done in history as the father of the commercial piano.

The only problem was that they were cheap but they weren't terribly good.

TINNY OFF-KEY MELODY

'And the loud and soft bit wasn't up to much either.'

Just listen to this.

If you try and play this piano softly or expressively,

this is what happens.

I would say about 50% of the notes I just hit actually made a sound.

You have to sort of hammer this to get it to do very much.

So while it works, it's not the most deeply musical instrument.

It's pretty primitive.

It was an enterprising Scot called John Broadwood

who came up with an altogether better solution.

This piano was made in 1795 by John Broadwood,

and it is a radical redesign of what the square piano can do.

It's got brass under-dampers, it's got tuning pins here

and a whole host of other innovations that take this instrument

to a new level of sonority, power and expressiveness.

You could just do so much more with this instrument.

It's so much more subtle and controllable.

This family business has supplied keyboards to every British monarch

since George II

and they're the world's oldest surviving piano company,

based today in the grounds of Finchcocks.

As an 18th-century lady,

if I bought myself a Broadwood, what was it that I was getting?

Well, you'd be getting... I suppose the expression, what we'd say these days,

good value for money.

You'd be getting quite a simple instrument, a basic instrument,

with no frills,

but very well made, very well engineered and very dependable.

Because one of the problems with the very earliest squares is that they never stayed in tune.

You had to have the tuner round every week,

which was of course very expensive and tedious.

So by developing a square piano that was much more robust and dependable,

then Broadwood ultimately made his fortune from that.

In the 1770s,

Broadwood starts to see the future and he starts making pianos in harpsichord cases.

What was it that he saw that he sensed was in the air?

There were German craftsmen who worked with him in Soho.

And there were the English harpsichord makers,

mainly in the City of London.

And what Broadwood did, by bringing them together,

he turned the harpsichord into the grand piano

simply by changing the interior.

In other words, the earliest piano was a harpsichord case

with a piano inside it.

By the end of the century, John Broadwood is making pianos that

look like this, so pretty similar to the kind of pianos we might recognise today.

And I think what's interesting about this is that at exactly the same

time as the piano is gaining ground, there is the rise of melody

in music - tunes, the kind of music you can sing along to.

Because both of them are about the same thing.

The piano is this newly expressive instrument.

Melody is about the expression of the person playing it.

Both of them are about the emerging individuality

of what music can express.

'With instruments like the piano being eagerly snapped up,

'with the rise of public concerts, fashionable venues,

'advertisers and star performers,

'Britain had become the epicentre of the musical world.'

But not everyone got a share of the glory.

Back in the mirrored ballroom of Carlisle House,

fashion had made a victim of Teresa Cornelys.

For the last 16 years, she had been London's empress of pleasure,

its leading society hostess, her parties, masquerades and balls

dominating the social life of London's aristocracy.

She'd entertained dukes, kings, princes, politicians,

artists and writers.

Now, it seemed, it had all been an illusion.

Cornelys wasn't even Teresa's real surname,

borrowed from a lover in Rotterdam.

Borrowed, too, was all that splendid furniture,

everything bought on credit.

And now the debts were piling up.

In 1771, Teresa was declared bankrupt

and she spent her final years in and out of debtors' prisons,

and her glittering home, Carlisle House, was pulled down

and replaced by this church.

This was the flip side of the rage for music,

the obsession with pleasure, the dedication to luxury.

Because 18th-century Britain was a cruel and uncompromising place.

If you made it, you were the toast of society.

But if you failed, you faced complete ruin.

GOSPEL CHOIR SINGS

As a new era of industry, radicalism and revolution dawned,

the British passion for music would reach new heights.

It became the voice of morality and virtue

and it acquired a newly divine spirit all of its own.

THEY SING