RECITAL NARRATIVE AS SEEN IN THE AUDIO CD LINER NOTES
WITH SUPPLEMENTAL FOOTNOTES

On a Wednesday evening in February 1816, several hundred people seated themselves in Bath’s Upper Rooms for what promised to be one of the most unique concerts in recent memory.

The venue was supposed to have been the Tea Room, but the prospect of three famous pianists exhibiting their prowess in a single evening—in what many hoped would be the spirit of a duel—had resulted in the ticket-sales equivalent of a run on the banks, so the Ball Room had been set up instead and was now packed with three distinct, albeit intermingling, constituencies: lovers of self display, lovers of sport, and lovers of music—alas, in decreasing order of size. Among them were several individuals with whom the reader may be familiar: Captain Wentworth and his wife, Anne (née Elliot)—both now prepared to give the music their undivided attention, having failed to do so on a similar occasion a year ago for reasons not presently germane; Anne’s still-retrenching but ever-fashionable father and sister, Sir Walter and Miss Elliot; Admiral and Mrs. Croft—still residents of Kellynch Hall, and therefore facilitators of the continued retrenchment of the aforementioned retrenchers; Mr. Darcy and his wife, Elizabeth (née Bennet), and now-married sister, Lady Georgiana Bytheseashore; Elizabeth’s sister Mary and her husband, Mr. Collins (whose first wife, Charlotte, had died in childbirth several years earlier); {See Note 1} Colonel Brandon and his wife, Marianne (née Dashwood)—happily on a fortnight’s vacation from their five children; Mr. Churchill and his wife, Jane (née Fairfax), who, motherhood notwithstanding, was still remarkably (some said irresponsibly) proficient on the pianoforte; Mr. Tilney and his wife, Catherine (née Morland), who had grown to love music—listening to it, that is—owing to her husband’s influence; {See Note 2} and, finally, Mr. Willoughby, perhaps the only attendee who had been motivated by love of music, sport, and self display in equal measure, and who (oh joy!) was still on vacation from his wife. {See Note 3}

Waiting with forced conviviality in the Card Room were the three performers. What the guests knew about them was limited but enticing. Thirty-year-old Friedrich Kalkbrenner was as famous for his ego as his virtuosity. His fellow German, thirty-one-year-old Ferdinand Ries, was a current friend, associate, and former student of Beethoven. But it was the local prodigy, Henry Ibbot Field, who had generated most of the evening’s feverish anticipation: he was only eighteen, son of the organist at Bath Abbey, and currently in a position to benefit from what American sports fans, more than a century later, would come to call home court advantage.

At long last, Ries marched into the Ball Room, sat down with aplomb at the Broadwood grand, {See Note 4} and opened the concert with Sonata in C (Hob. XVI/35) by F. J. Haydn, who had been the toast of London while living and working there in the 1790s. Ever inclined to show off his chops, Kalkbrenner followed Ries with Cramer’s Sonata in A minor (Op. 6, No. 4), the gratuitous technical demands of which were mostly lost on the audience but plain enough to Kalkbrenner’s colleagues. Field then played Sonata in C (K. 330) by W. A. Mozart—who never stooped to technical wizardry for its own sake—and enjoyed the most rapturous applause to that point in the proceedings. Following the interval, the pianists each played another sonata, one by Clementi (Op. 26) and two by Schobert, during which performances the guests conversed unrestrainedly—not without justification. Ries then concluded the concert with Beethoven’s “Rondo a capriccio” (Op. 129). {See Note 5}

Patrons and pianists afterwards repaired to the Octagon Room, where they enjoyed fresher air, a lavish display of edibles, and two roaring fires. The performers responded to countless questions ranging from insightful to clueless—those closest to the latter end of the spectrum naturally being the most pretentiously articulated. (Field was delighted with the Wentworths, Brandons, and Churchills—less so with the Collinses.) Everyone lingered or departed as their inclinations to converse, show off, or escape demanded; but the vast majority appeared to leave with satisfaction. Headlines on the front page of the Bath Chronicle the next day were glowing.

A visual depiction of the evening’s events was captured by Georgian cartoonist Thomas Rowlandson, who observed the entire affair firsthand and afterwards created a set of three commemorative etchings titled Pianoforte Warfare and individually subtitled “Prelude,” “Heat of the Battle,” and “Aftermath”—the outer pieces emphasizing the patrons and the central one the pianists. Unfortunately, these etchings seem to have vanished. What little we know—or think we know—comes from Mrs. Croft, wife of the Admiral, who purchased a complete set and subsequently described it in a letter to a distant relative in Canada. {See Notes 6abc} We may reasonably assume, however, that the etchings were stylistically in line with Rowlandson’s Comforts of Bath series, of which dozens of contemporary copies, many of them hand-colored, survive.

F O O T N O T E S

 
 

1.

Fear not! Mr. and the new Mrs. Collins loved Charlotte’s daughter and never failed to show it—though in a style unique to them—and little Charlotte’s relationship with four of her relations was such that, from an early age, she had called them Uncle Fitz and Auntie Lizzie, and Uncle Binger and Mama Jane. {Return to Referring Paragraph}

2.

And let’s be fair: Catherine’s influence on Henry had been just as profound. She had passed her childhood sequestered from the advantages of culture, but his childhood had been short on the fun-and-games that had characterized hers. Poor Henry had been so elated when he first beheld his beloved playing base-ball with her kid brothers, that he immediately set about luring (or drafting) his sister Eleanor, Catherine’s parents, all her siblings, many of her cousins, and, ultimately, the next generation of Morlands and Tilneys into the business—age, class, and gender norms be damned. At some point, somebody coined the term Morland Family Base-Ball. It held for decades.*

3.

Several weeks earlier, the former Miss Morton had been dragooned by a demanding aunt into joining her on a trip to the Continent, the termination of which was still TBD at the time of this concert. {Return to Referring Paragraph}

4.

John Broadwood & Sons pianos—as finely crafted and beautiful in tone as any pianos in Europe for close to half a century—were a pride of England during the Regency.** Two or three years earlier, Frank Churchill had purchased one for his then-secret fiancée, Jane Fairfax—a gift more inflicted than bestowed in her view, but for complex reasons too irrelevant to elucidate at present. {Return to Referring Paragraph}

5.

One concert guest, whose identity is lost forever, had kept a journal of his cultural escapades. Several months after the concert (and the writer’s assumed death), this very journal was purchased at a London flea market by none other than Mrs. (Lydia) Wickham, who had, as a consequence of finding marriage less than thrilling, made a hobby of buying, stealing, and otherwise procuring other peoples’ personal papers. While perusing the contents of this particular document, Mrs. Wickham discovered recollections of a concert in Bath she was sure she had overheard her sister Elizabeth describe. Such proved to be the case, and Lydia, to her credit, gifted the journal to the Darcys, assuming they would be more entertained by it than she; and, indeed, they reacted to several observations and reflections contained therein with unbridled mirth. Paraphrased here are a few that may be of interest to the reader, to whom the narrator presents the challenge of making the proper attributions:

    1. A studious-looking woman had said, “I’m convinced that these men are as vain as they are proud, and the effect is unbecoming. Perhaps they would have avoided both flaws of character had they directed their talents toward nobler ends from the beginning.” Her husband, clearly unburdened by any doubt regarding his own nobility, had vehemently agreed.

    2. A middle-aged but still robust gentleman, whose outrageous attire had elicited the very opposite of the effect intended, had loudly whispered—presumably in reference to the performers—“Who the devil gives those prancing peacocks fashion advice?”

    3. Another man, still young, quite dashing, had tapped his thighs with all ten fingers during the whole of Haydn’s Sonata in C, apparently hoping to convey both his knowledge of the piece and the ability to play it. Whether or not he was actually a pianist was anyone’s guess.

    4. During the interval, one of two elegant ladies in company with a tall, aristocratic-looking gentleman had said, “I fear my enjoyment of this concert isn’t altogether admirable,” to which the tall gentleman had responded, “My dear sister! Save your needless guilt for a matter of consequence.”

    5. Ferdinand Ries had brought the house down with the concert’s finale—Beethoven’s “Rondo a capriccio” (“Rage over a Lost Penny”), immediately after which Field had bowed to him deferentially, and Kalkbrenner had left the room in what appeared to be a funk.

    6. An aristocratic woman had tripped and fallen while attempting to climb into her carriage after the concert—her obsequious (and, in this instance, incompetent) escort being the middle-aged fop mentioned in observation #2.

This journal was carefully preserved by the Darcys and eventually donated by one of their grandchildren to the British Museum where it disappeared sometime near the end of the nineteenth century. {Return to Referring Paragraph}

6a.

Mrs. Croft also reported the Admiral’s delight with the triptych and his ill-judged decision to display it in the Billiard Room at Kellynch, where—at the end of an otherwise congenial dinner party hosted by the Crofts several months after the concert—Sir Walter Elliot had spotted the artwork, taken a closer look, noticed the specificity with which he had been rendered, recoiled in horror at his porcine appearance, and left the premises in a rage.***

6b.

The Canadian recipient of this letter died c.1850, having bequeathed his sizable collection of Regency curiosities—Mrs. Croft’s letter included—to an American, one Anthony Clutterbuck, who made a trip to Washington sometime in the 1850s for the express purpose of donating the collection’s letters and miscellaneous other papers to the recently founded Smithsonian—a benefaction he failed to complete. Even more unfortunately, he died of a fever within days after returning home to Philadelphia, never having mentioned the letter, let alone copied its contents, in his own journal. While in Washington (according to his wife, who hadn’t made the trip herself), Clutterbuck had taken a solitary walk—his satchel containing the above-mentioned documents hanging from one shoulder—and slipped on a steep, muddy patch off the main trail. While recovering himself, he instinctively let go of the satchel and watched it tumble into the raging Potomac—or so claims the only known Clutterbuck descendant, now in his late nineties.

6c.

But what, you ask, happened to those Rowlandson engravings at Kellynch? The answer to that question is worthy of inclusion in a gothic thriller by Mrs. (Ann) Radcliffe. In 1818, while still in Bath languishing in style and dreaming of his glorious return to the ancestral home, Sir Walter died unexpectedly. The Crofts retired to Brighton shortly thereafter, and the new baronet and his mistress-turned-wife, Sir William and Lady Elliot (Anne Wentworth’s distant cousin and the former Mrs. Clay), took possession of Kellynch Hall—their exultation concealed, when necessary, by a long-cultivated veneer of charm and warm politeness on his part, and lofty indifference on hers. The sumptuous evening party they soon threw for themselves, however, did not unfold according to plan. At around 1:30 AM, an altercation took place between Miss (Elizabeth) Elliot’s betrothed (a wealthy Turk, more blessed in looks than brains) and another alcohol-compromised competitor at the billiard table, in the midst of which two glasses of whiskey had been knocked into the fire, triggering a sequence of events culminating in an inferno that thankfully did not take down the whole house, but left the Billiard Room in ruins. From the other side of the grave, Sir Walter Elliot may have sustained paroxysms of ecstasy while watching Sir Thomas Rowlandson’s Pianoforte Warfare go up in flames. {Return to Referring Paragraph}

 
 

*

The term “base-ball” appears in chapter one of Northanger Abbey. At least as recently at 1989, the Oxford English Dictionary credited Austen’s use of the word as the earliest to appear in print—reason #7,453 to love her work. The truth, however, is now known to be otherwise. And the game Austen knew was very different from the roughly-two-hundred-year-old American National Pastime, though indisputably one of its direct ancestors—unlike rounders or cricket, which have histories parallel to, rather than part of, that of baseball. (Reference a brief timeout on this subject.) {Return to Referring Note}

**

It would be irresponsible not to mention that what you hear on the CD A Recital from the World of Jane Austen emanates from a modern Steinway B—a radically different instrument from an early nineteenth-century Broadwood grand. A Steinway’s richer sounds, greater variety of tone colors, and wider dynamic range are due to different materials and a much more complex construction than those of a Broadwood. Had the gods replaced the latter with the former before that 1816 concert, the pianists would have been dumbfounded—possibly giddy—from the moment they started playing, and a few of the patrons might have fled in terror during the coda of Beethoven’s “Rage over a Lost Penny.” {Return to Referring Note}

***

For a sampling of Thomas Rowlandson’s style, see the following:

 
 
 

 

Baseball Timeout

The history of baseball is long and enormously complex—possibly including non-English influences, maybe even non-English progenitors. This should not be surprising. How could one of the greatest game concepts of all time—attempting to clobber a thrown object (not always a ball) with a striking tool (not always a bat), and, when successful, proceeding to leg it around a series of marked locations (not always bases) on a flat surface (not always a field)—not go back centuries? Had Adam and Eve manufactured a critical number of players before being tossed from The Garden, the game might have developed into something like its current form then and there—without the temptation to cheat; without insufferable cockiness being passed off as exuberance; and without the ever-threatening susceptibility to blown-up heads, shoulders, backs, elbows, hands, feet, hips, hamstrings, knees, calves, ankles, groins, and (where applicable) family jewels.

David Block’s Baseball Before We Knew It (University of Nebraska Press, 2005) is a scholarly and entertaining work on the origins of baseball. Rest assured, all recalcitrant (or merely uninformed) proponents of the Abner Doubleday myth: the truth, happily still intertwined with mystery, is more interesting anyway.

 
 

Now Available for Purchase

The newly re-released audio CD features all 72 minutes of solo piano music from this mostly plausible, if not entirely likely, concert. It can be purchased through my beloved local bookstore, The King’s English Bookshop.