Handel and Brass

The story of the famed original Crystal Palace, first erected for the 1851 Great Exhibition in Hyde Park and later moved to Sydenham (and significantly enlarged) in 1854, is one that scarcely needs retelling.
Until it’s spectacular destruction by fire in 1936, the cast iron and plate glass mega-structure was undoubtedly the greatest architectural and engineering legacy of the Victorian age, a national symbol of extraordinary cultural confidence.
Perhaps less well appreciated, is how it quickly established itself as “the most important single location for music making in the United Kingdom” [Musgrave]. For almost fifty years it’s weekly orchestral concerts and the tri-annual Handel choral festivals set new musical standards and introduced a unparalleled range of repertory to a vast new audience.

While never designed to host musical performances, the potential of the Palace became swiftly apparent after the popularity of the open ceremonies. Its barrel-vaulted central transept was at the time the largest enclosed space in the world (108ft high and 408ft in length), offering the scope to accommodate previously unimaginable audiences sized - records show up to 3,500 choristers, 500 instruments and 30,000 seated spectators.

A festival centered on the works of George Fredric Handel was first staged in 1857, a precursor to the large scale events that would mark the centenary of the composers death two years later; the 1859 festivities were on a truly gargantuan scale, with 81,000 spectators attending over the course of the event. The acoustics proved a particular challenge for both performers and audience, though these were refined and much improved over subsequent years, with significant alterations made to enclose the auditorium.

The successful Triennial Festival format became well established over the next 60 years, with Israel in Egypt and Messiah ever-popular staples right until the curtain finally fell in 1926. Since the turn of the century Handel had somewhat fallen out of fashion and interest in the events had waned from the earlier years, but it was the legacy of the festivals that helped the composer become so entwined with notions of British national pride and identity.

In addition to the great Handel Festivals, from 1860 to 1863 the first ever ‘Grand National’ Brass Band contests were held at Crystal Palace. The inaugural edition was won by the Black Dyke Mills Band of West Yorkshire, an outfit remarkably still going strong to this day and revered as one of the worlds greatest brass ensembles.
From 1900 the Palace became the permanent home of the National Brass Band Championships where it grew enormously in status and popularity, at the peak welcoming over 20,000 spectators and 5,000 bandsmen from all corners of the country. The Championships ran annually until 1936, whereupon the destruction of the Palace brought an abrupt end to this first illustrious chapter in its musical history.

An English Garden Landscape

In the parkland grounds of Palace, the leafy and picturesque North West corner was known as the ‘English Garden Landscape’; ringed by mature trees and rhododendron bushes, its lawns sloping gently down to a small ornamental lake, described in the official guidebook as follows:

 ‘On a beautiful slope bordered by trees is the archery ground, where targets are fixed at various distances. Nearby is [a] small piece of water...and beside it a beautiful grove of trees forming a pleasant summer shade’.

This area was variously used for archery, early balloon ascents and from 1884 was the centrepiece of spectacular Venetian Fetes: 2,000 richly coloured Chinese lanterns suspended tree to tree and 15,000 Venetian glass lanterns dotted the grounds, while mirror image half-circle lamps floated on the lake, created an enchanting and fairy like scene.

For the 1911 Festival of Empire held at Crystal Palace, the central attraction was a ‘Pageant of London’, sited in the natural amphitheatre of the English Garden Landscape. Masterminded by Frank Lascelles, this was a hugely ambitious theatrical spectacle of historical re-enactments in several acts, with a cast of 15,000 performers telling the story of London, Britain and the Empire. It was sound-tracked by an original and patriotic score written by 17 native composers, amongst them Edward Elgar and Gustav Holst.

A temporary grandstand accommodating up to 10,000 spectators was constructed and 120 performances were given between June and September 1911, with over 1 million visitors traveling from across the country to see the Pageant. A contemporary review of the Pageant by The Times concluded ‘It would be difficult to conceive of a finer effect than was given by the mingling of theatrical art with the natural beauty of the arena'.

The event was the first use of this area of the grounds as a large scale public performance venue, predating the Concert Bowl that would appear on the very same site some 50 years later. In terms of historical significance, it was "undoubtedly the largest and most ambitious pageant of the Edwardian period, if not the whole twentieth century, [and] it stands alone as a seminal moment in the growing popular appeal of pageantry"