The Victorians revered many of the same names that still fill concert programmes today, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven etc., composers who we often think of as 'German'. But how did this fit with the parallel contemporary desire to promote 'native' British music?

Musicologist Dr Bruno Bower has found some answers from an unexpected source: programme notes, a new form of writing for the nineteenth century. These texts tend not to emphasise nations for these composers, but instead use language that is much more redolent of empire; a very different kind of political entity.

IMAGES (courtesy of the lecturer)

Crystal Palace 1873 concert programme (detail)

Canterbury Hall (Music Hall) 1856 – Wikimedia Commons

1875 Handel Festival