solvency, was at first an assistant conductor. The following year, he had
taken over and soon began to vary the repertoire, even holding Bee-
thoven nights. His promenade concerts at Covent Garden Theatre in
1844 were made up of a first half of classical music succeeded by a sec-
ond half of popular dance music. It is evidence of contested taste, since,
as the Musical Examiner pointed out, people could, if they so wished, at-
tend the half of their choice.
15
Jullien was alert to the value of familiar-
ity in appealing to a British audience, and began to include vocal music
in English (songs and Handel oratorio excerpts). He was most acclaimed,
however, for playing French overtures and quadrilles. He gave concerts
monstres in the Surrey Gardens from 1845, and these contained sensa-
tional showpieces such as The Fall of Sebastopol of 1855, which came
complete with musketry, rockets, and mortar. On these occasions he
augmented his orchestra with an array of brass instruments. He was
giving concerts in New York in 1853. Favorite places for mixed instru-
mental and vocal programs in that city were Castle Garden in the Bat-
tery, where Jenny Lind’s New York debut took place in 1850, and
Niblo’s Garden at Broadway and Prince Street. Theodore Thomas gave
orchestral concerts, 1868–75, in Central Park Garden, where there was
a restaurant and seating for several hundred.
The pleasure gardens began to suffer from the competition from
other places of entertainment. Vauxhall Gardens were at their zenith in
the late eighteenth century; in the nineteenth, they fell steadily into
decline, despite efforts to lure people in with spectacles and such. Rane-
lagh barely made it into the nineteenth century, but the admission
price there was a hefty half-crown (2 shillings and sixpence). From
1837 on, Surrey Zoological Gardens were used for public entertain-
ments. Vienna’s Augarten, in Leopoldstadt, had concerts from 1775 on,
but preference was given to a high-art repertoire, and they were held
in a concert room. On the other hand, Frances Trollope, visiting Vienna
in 1836, comments on a “deficiency of haut-ton” at a Volksgarten con-
cert directed by Joseph Lanner, though she puts this down to the no-
bility being out of town, since it was September.
16
The Champs-Elysées
were going strong until late in the nineteenth century, and not just for
outdoor café music; Musard conducted military band music in which
new virtuosos could be heard on new instruments (for instance, Louis
Dufresne on cornet). Popular music, from the beginning, marched
hand in hand with technological innovation, both being energized by
the new industrial age.
An overarching theme and the presence of a celebrity conductor
acted as unifying principles for promenade concerts. The programs
mixed popular and classical items and, in so doing, laid some of the
foundations for the rise of commercial popular styles and genres. They
retained a heterogeneity that gradually disappeared from other con-
certs in which classical music was heard. A key feature of popular
music is the interest in and emphasis on the new, and promenade con-
42 Sounds of the Metropolis