08 November 2024
Highlights from the Royal Philharmonic Society Archive
To mark The National Lottery’s 30th birthday celebrations this year we have put together a blog post about the archive of the Royal Philharmonic Society (RPS), acquired by the British Library in 2002 thanks in part to a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund, alongside generous donations from other individuals and trusts. This post highlights some of the treasures found in the RPS archive and the research that the archive has sparked since its acquisition by the Library.
The RPS and its archive
The Royal Philharmonic Society (RPS) was founded in 1813 as the Philharmonic Society of London by a group of 30 professional musicians with the purpose ‘to promote the performance, in the most perfect manner possible, of the best and most approved instrumental music’. It continues today as a busy charitable organisation devoted to ‘creating opportunities for musicians to excel, championing the vital role that music plays in all our lives’. The Society began by establishing an annual concert season which included music by the greatest composers of the time, with new commissions from composers like Beethoven, Cherubini, Mendelssohn, Dvořák, and Saint-Saëns, some of whom were also invited to conduct their own works. The Society also has a long history of inviting distinguished performers to perform at its concerts, among them figures like Clara Schumann and Pablo Casals. You can find out more about the RPS’s impressive history and current activities on the RPS website and through the selected literature in the ‘References’ section below.
Over the years, the performing and administrative activities of the RPS resulted in the formation of a considerable archive (now British Library RPS MS 1-417). This contains over 270 manuscript scores, including many composer’s autograph manuscripts of works performed by the RPS, alongside dozens of volumes of letters and important administrative documents up to 1968. The latter include a series of 20 minute books in which the proceedings of meetings of the Directors of the RPS were recorded. These minute books are full of valuable information about the running of the Society, its financial affairs, the planning of each concert season, the commissioning of new works, matters raised by its members, and much more.
One such minute book records the commissioning of a new symphony from Beethoven in November 1822 and the Directors’ decision to offer Beethoven £50 for this. Notes of the meeting show that they hoped to receive it by March 1823, in time for performance during the 1823 concert season. This became Beethoven’s famous Symphony no.9 and the manuscript in the RPS archive is known as the ‘London manuscript’.
‘Resolved that an offer of £50 be made to Beethoven for a M.S. Sym[phon]y. He having permission to dispose of it at the expiration of Eighteen Months after the receipt of it. It being a proviso that it shall arrive during the Month of March next.’
The manuscript that Beethoven sent to the Philharmonic Society in 1824 of his Symphony no.9 was a copy prepared by three music copyists under his supervision. The manuscript includes numerous minor corrections and annotations in Beethoven’s hand, alongside markings arising from the first London performance.
In 2021 the Library held the exhibition Beethoven: Idealist. Innovator. Icon, which included a number of collection items from the RPS Archive, including the London manuscript of the Ninth symphony. This was displayed alongside Beethoven’s autograph manuscript (on loan from the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin) for the first time in the UK.
The RPS Archive also includes 47 volumes of letters from numerous British and European composers and musicians who corresponded with the RPS. Among them, one from Tchaikovsky following his visit to Britain in 1893. The composer had conducted his Fourth Symphony at a Philharmonic Society concert in May that year and wrote to the secretary, Francesco Berger, of his eagerness to return to conduct a new symphony he was working on (that was his Sixth, but Tchaikovsky died later in the year before another visit could be organised).
The archive includes much more too, from concert programmes, posters and official notices through to a number of objects. Among them are a tuning fork and numerous ivory counters with Directors’ and other members’ names on them.
Such a wide-ranging archive has provided plenty of scope for research of different kinds over the years, and indeed it has been a frequently-consulted addition to the British Library’s collection both onsite and online (the entire RPS archive was digitised in 2013 for the Gale database, Nineteenth Century Collections Online). As well as material relating to famous composers and performers, the archive also offers insights and glimpses of other individuals. People like Joseph Harris, copyist of the instrumental parts for the first London performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, who we hear from in letters describing his work (he said that the Ninth was “the longest & most difficult thing I ever copied… yet the most beautiful Composition”).
The 19th century was a period in which the ‘business’ of music making and the act of concert going became increasingly established in ways we can still recognise today. The wealth of detail in the RPS Archive has allowed researchers to map this change through the seemingly prosaic but essential processes documented in minute books, financial ledgers and other administrative documentation. Being able to preserve the archive here at the British Library is especially beneficial because of the connections with other collections held here, be it those of individuals who worked with or for the Society, or of other concert organisations. Together, such collections help to provide a rich and vivid picture of music making and concert life from the 19th century onwards.
Chris Scobie, Lead Curator Music Manuscripts and Archives
Loukia Drosopoulou, Curator Music
References
The Royal Philharmonic Society: The History and Future of Music. https://royalphilharmonicsociety.org.uk/assets/files/RPS_A5_History_booklet_08_revised.pdf
Leanne Langley, ‘A Place for Music: John Nash, Regent Street and the Philharmonic Society of London’, Electronic British Library Journal, 2013. https://doi.org/10.23636/1057
Cyril Ehrlich, First philharmonic: a history of the Royal Philharmonic Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press), 1995.