.
London.
A Pilgrimage by Gustave Dore. Published in 1872.
.
.
The effect of music and of the dramatic art on all classes of a civilised community is of a most wholesome kind….. The rapid extension of a love of music among the English people is in great part due to that craving for relief from the pressure of the business of life….The success of Music Halls, Popular Concerts, and the musical festivals at the Crystal Palace; and the resolution with which attempts to put down Street Organs has been opposed as a designed cruelty on the poor, who have no other music…express the general comfort that is to be found in this art.
The barrel organ is the opera of the street-folk: and Punch (and Judy) is their national comedy theatre. I cannot call to mind any scene on my many journeys through London that struck the author of this pilgrimage more forcibly than walking up of a dull, woe-begone alley, to the sound of an organ. The women leaning out of the windows… pleasurably stirred, for an instant, in that long disease, their life… and the children trooping and dancing round the swarthy player!
.
That brings back a memory from when I was in Prague a couple of years ago. Listening to the barrel organ on the bridge with crowds of people bustling by and the homeless people with their begging pots.
ReplyDeleteEveryone stopped to listen to the music if only for a few moments.
In 1872 this would have been the only music the poor could expect to here.
ReplyDeleteNo radios and MP3 then.