Antecedents: Frederic Hymen Cowen's orchestra at the 1888 International Exhibition

For the 1888 Centennial Exhibition in Melbourne the English composer and conductor Frederic Cowen shipped to Australia 15 English instrumentalists he had selected from military bands such as the Royal Horse Guards, from London theatres including Covent Garden and the Alhambra and even from the band of the Glasgow Choral Union.Footnote ¹⁴ On the advice of the music-seller George Allan he added another 57 from a pool of German, Italian and English as well as Australian-born musicians.Footnote ¹⁵ This orchestra presented 263 concerts at the exhibition and appeared later in a series of concerts in Sydney. It disbanded with Cowen's departure in 1889, when the organist, composer and conductor Hamilton Clarke arrived from London to conduct a successor, the Victorian Orchestra. Despite ambitions to present more than 80 concerts per year this orchestra was a failure, reduced to only 42 players by the end of 1890. According to Table Talk it had ‘come down to the level of a German band, and play[ed] tunes to please the ears of the groundlings’.Footnote ¹⁶ Thérèse Radic concludes that the absence of secure funding and Clarke's lacklustre leadership were to blame.Footnote ¹⁷ Marshall-Hall arrived to take up a post as first Ormond professor at the University of Melbourne in January 1891, and the first performance of what would become known as the Marshall-Hall Orchestra (MHO) took place on 21 December 1892.Footnote ¹⁸ Only 19 musicians played in all three of the orchestras formed since 1888, but 34 transferred from Cowen's orchestra to Marshall-Hall's, which suggests that many of Cowen's recruits refused to play under Clarke.Footnote ¹⁹ This is all the more remarkable when the Victorian Orchestra offered the prospect of permanent orchestral work, something as yet generally unobtainable, even in London.Footnote ²⁰

Many of the men who transferred from Cowen's orchestra of 1888–89 to Marshall-Hall's in 1892 were independent, touring musicians who probably had little formal musical education – Cyril Ehrlich reports that in the middle of the nineteenth century musicians in Britain were ranked ‘scarcely above an ordinary artisan’.Footnote ²¹ Yet their performing experience would have been considerable and they were presumably the best in their class in the country at the time. The leader of the MHO for 18 years from its beginnings to the end of 1910 was the German violinist Franz Dierich (born c. 1859), a rank-and-file first violinist under Cowen.Footnote ²² Probably originally from Berlin and a former member of Hans Richter's Richter Orchestra, he was in his late twenties when he arrived in Melbourne.Footnote ²³ He appeared in concerts as early as February 1888 and then in Cowen's orchestra from June that year. The press described him as ‘witty and gracious’, a chess player and bon vivant – he was to become a close friend of Marshall-Hall and the teacher of a generation of Australian violinists.Footnote ²⁴

Also originating in Cowen's orchestra were the violinists Albert Vaughan Wallenstein, Robert Frederick Hess, Hermann Schrader, Felix Wilhelm Kruse, Christopher Alger, George Albert Sutch and George Stevens. Wallenstein (born c. 1859), the son of a piano-maker from Wurzburg in Bavaria, played 15 seasons with the MHO and became a violin teacher at the Albert Street conservatorium.Footnote ²⁵ Hess's father, born in Bavaria in 1842, had travelled throughout Australia as a clarinettist for theatre and circuit orchestras.Footnote ²⁶ Hess himself (born 1869) was 19 when he played in the second violins in Cowen's orchestra. Hermann Schrader (born 1860), the son of a German cornet player who migrated to Adelaide, had twice been to Europe for further studies, the first time under Hans von Bulow in Munich and the second in Leipzig.Footnote ²⁷ He was equally talented as a violist and a pianist and would be appointed to Melbourne's university conservatorium as a professor of viola. Kruse was the half-brother of the virtuoso Johann Secundus Kruse, who made his career in Germany as an associate of Joseph Joachim. F.W. Kruse (born 1868) had appeared in Melbourne concerts at least as early as the age of 17, played in the Cowen orchestra at 20 and then only for the first season of the MHO. His father, an analytical chemist trained at the University of Göttingen, founded the Melbourne School of Pharmacy.Footnote ²⁸ After Kruse Senior's death in 1895, it was Felix who managed the family's John Kruse Analytical Laboratory. The other three mentioned were the sons of Englishmen who immigrated to Australia in the 1850s. Alger (born 1859), the son of a Greenwich baker, played only a single concert with the MHO, in 1893. Sutch (born 1859) was the son of a Marylebone musician who emigrated to Sydney.Footnote ²⁹ As well as playing in all three of the principal orchestras from 1888, he became a violinist and conductor for the theatrical company of J.C. Williamson. Stevens was born in London in 1863 and had immigrated by the time of his marriage in 1890. During his years in the MHO (1896–98) he suffered from melancholia caused by ‘too much study’ and left the orchestra (and his wife) to play in theatre orchestras in London and Shanghai.Footnote ³⁰

Of the two cellists Marshall-Hall inherited from Cowen, George Park Frayling (born 1852) was from Bridgwater, Somerset, the son of a butcher and wine merchant. Arriving in Sydney in 1879, he travelled Australasia as a musician and was described as ‘one of Victoria's most able cellists’.Footnote ³¹ The other was Claude William Harrison (born 1867) from Geelong, who missed very few concerts in ten years in the MHO despite a developing career in concert management. The remaining two string players from Cowen's orchestra were the double bass players Friedrich Augustus (Frederick) Briese and Angelo Ceschina. Briese was Prussian, born in Appelwerder c. 1831, and was to play in the MHO until 1909, when he was in his late seventies.Footnote ³² Ceschina was Italian, born in Milan in 1851. He and his English wife were both musicians and had spent years touring with opera companies before being employed by Cowen. Angelo played consistently with the MHO until 1895, when either touring commitments or his worsening alcoholism intervened. A year before his death in 1902 he was earning his living as a street musician.Footnote ³³

The second oboe in Cowen's orchestra was William Cook Thomson, who was born in Paisley in Scotland in 1857 and emigrated with seven brothers and sisters in 1865.Footnote ³⁴ Not apparently a member of the Victorian Orchestra, he played with the MHO from 1895 until the end of 1909 and later established himself as a music teacher and piano tuner. The principal clarinet in Cowen's orchestra was William John Lundborg, born Johan Wilhelm Lundborg in Uppland, near Stockholm, in about 1826, arriving in Australia in 1853. In his early sixties at the 1888 Exhibition, he would continue playing in the MHO until he was seventy. The leading bassoon player in Cowen's orchestra, and possibly the only one of the imported men to remain in Australia long enough to play three seasons with Marshall-Hall, was one of its most able. Philip Langdale was born in Sevenoaks in Kent in 1854 and from childhood dreamed of joining the Coldstream Guards Band.Footnote ³⁵ With that group for twelve years he also toured with opera companies and played under some of the greatest European conductors, including Mann at Crystal Palace and Richter at St James Hall. Richter in fact attempted to persuade him to transfer to the Boston Philharmonic, but Cowen intervened, and he chose Australia instead. On his departure from Australia in 1894 the papers claimed that ‘we have never had his equal’.Footnote ³⁶ Also hand-picked by Cowen was the 16-year-old Welsh harpist Frederick Barker. As a 12-year-old he had competed at the National Eisteddfod and attracted the attention of John Thomas, harpist to the Queen.Footnote ³⁷ After his stint in Australia he returned to Caerphilly to become a professor of music. It was his brother Walter (born c. 1864) who, having studied organ, violin and piano at the RAM and played in London concerts, emigrated to Melbourne via Boston in about 1890. Said to be ‘without doubt one of the finest harp players that has ever visited Australia’, he was appointed to the university conservatorium in 1895 and appeared with the MHO from the date of the grand Wagner concert of August 1893 until the end of 1910.Footnote ³⁸

Frederick (or Fritz) Lüttich (born 1838) settled in Melbourne as a member of William Lyster's opera orchestra in 1875. Although not a member of Cowen's orchestra he did play in the Victorian Orchestra and was almost certainly the most versatile instrumentalist in the MHO. Probably originally from Berlin, he was capable of playing 20 wind and brass instruments, in the early days of the MHO taking the parts of the flute, cor anglais, bassoon, bass clarinet and tuba.Footnote ³⁹ He was appointed to the university conservatorium in 1895 to teach oboe and cor anglais and taught all of the leading flute, clarinet and oboe players in Melbourne, including the virtuoso John Amadio.

There were three members of the Stoneham family in Cowen's orchestra and five would play in Marshall-Hall's. William, the patriarch, born in Hobart in 1832, was known as ‘one of the fathers of music in Australia’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Several of his 14 children were musicians, one of them a London music-hall artist, another a piano tuner and one a music publisher. The eldest, Herbert L. Stoneham (born 1855), was a flautist whose tone, according to newspaper reports, was ‘simply marvellous’.Footnote ⁴¹ Nellie Melba classed him as the best flautist she had ever heard, and there were to be several Australian rivals for that claim.Footnote ⁴² William Stoneham played the trombone for Cowen and William Jr (born 1868?) the cymbals. Three other English brass players transferred from the Cowen orchestra, the cornet player Edwin Rawlins (born 1842), formerly of the band of the Royal Horse Guards, and two horn players from the 1st Life Guards, Alfred Flewin (born 1871) and A.M. Lawson (born c. 1842).Footnote ⁴³ Cowen's timpanist, John Munyard Jr, was born in Deptford, Kent in 1831 and arrived with his family in 1854.Footnote ⁴⁴ He was proprietor of a music warehouse in 1893, the year he began playing in the MHO, and he (and/or his son Jack, born 1859) remained in the orchestra until 1909.Footnote ⁴⁵

The Beginnings of the Marshall-Hall Orchestra

After the initial concert in 1892 the MHO presented annual concert seasons organized by leading businessmen. From 1902 the ophthalmologist James Barrett, a member of the university council (later vice-chancellor), an enthusiast for German literature and music and a tireless supporter of Marshall-Hall, founded a trust fund to oversee the orchestra's finances.Footnote ⁴⁶ Named after Lady Northcote (wife of the governor-general), its board included businessmen and advocates of high culture such as Carl Pinschof (husband of the Marchesi-trained soprano Elise Wiedermann) and the solicitor S.G. Pirani, whose son Max would become a professor at the Royal Academy of Music. Lee donated £1,000 (the equivalent today of £123,000) to the trust fund in 1908 and when she visited in 1909 Nellie Melba pledged 100 pounds per year for five years, assuring Melbourne music-lovers that ‘every pound … will be retained for all time for the advantage and improvement of music’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Endorsement of the orchestra's activities thus came from the city's social and financial elite, as well as from musicians and music-lovers.

The official count of the orchestra's concerts was 112, and this study draws on programmes for 96, each listing the members of the orchestra by instrument and surname.Footnote ⁴⁸ Approximately 370 instrumentalists appeared with the orchestra over 20 years, although 50 of them played only one or two concerts.Footnote ⁴⁹ Among the total were 58 women. The average number of musicians per concert was 56 in the first three seasons, increasing to 77 at the peak of the orchestra's success in 1906–07 and seventy-three in the final seasons of 1911–12 (Fig. 1). In the ten concerts of 1893–94 the orchestra called upon 108 players and in nine concerts in 1911–12 recruited 114, but the churn this indicates was mainly in the wind and brass and numbers might vary according to the requirements of the works performed.Footnote ⁵⁰ The average age of the MHO men, judging from the 147 I can find records for, was 35, whereas the average age of the women was just under 25. Some of the men were in the twilight years of their career or had retired from professional work, while many of the women were on the cusp of theirs. Whereas as many as 80 per cent of the women were born in Australia the male musicians (especially the string players) were just as likely to have been born in England or Germany. They were musicians, bandmasters, professors, music sellers, instrument dealers and violin makers, but their number also included a financier, a tailor, a dentist, a chemist and an architect. Their presence in Australia is indicative of what Stephen Banfield has called ‘fascinating patterns of networking, uprooting, linking or severing between Britain and its British world’.Footnote ⁵¹

Fig. 1

Average membership per year of the MHO, 1893–1912.

Marshall-Hall insisted on copious rehearsals, six for the first concert and sometimes as many as 17.Footnote ⁵² At the first sectional he discarded four violinists, found four more and then threw out three more, and after a full rehearsal he rejected another two. He reported to the pianist William Laver, ‘The men are thoroughly willing, good tempered and energetic – but alas! Not always capable.’Footnote ⁵³ When the theatre musicians were unavailable it fell to Barrett to locate suitable woodwind and brass players and persuade them to audition for Marshall-Hall. ‘Even I often knew’, he later reported, ‘when the player had given out a dozen notes that he would not do, yet the Professor would take an hour showing him what was wrong and how he might rectify his methods’.Footnote ⁵⁴ More than once Marshall-Hall admitted to Barrett the difficulties of his task, writing, in about 1903, ‘There is no comparison between our scratch orchestras and those of Germany – our difficulties are simply thousand-fold.’Footnote ⁵⁵ Occasionally the orchestra was unable to manage a particular work, as in 1907 when neither the strings nor the trombones were competent to tackle an extract from Tannhäuser (‘We might even have a smash up!!!’, warned Marshall-Hall).Footnote ⁵⁶ In spite of this, there were memorable successes, such as the concert in 1912 that programmed Beethoven's fifth, the prelude to Tannhäuser, a new work by George Hurst (a local student) and Tchaikovsky's Air with Variations. As Marshall-Hall informed Barrett,

For most of its duration the orchestra relied on staples from the nineteenth-century repertoire, in the final years attempting several newer works, at times on the advice of Lee, who first heard them in London.Footnote ⁵⁸ Of the 528 items listed in Thérèse Radic's record of the orchestra's performances, 111 were by Beethoven (all of the symphonies and the Leonora and Egmont overtures) and 119 by Wagner (mainly overtures and arias from the operas).Footnote ⁵⁹ The most ambitious concert of all was the ‘Grand Wagner concert’ of 1901: in the orchestra were 60 string players, three of each of the wind instruments, two harps and eight percussionists. With the 21 performances of works by Marshall-Hall these three composers made up almost 50 per cent of the total, the bulk of the remainder being the symphonies of Brahms, Schubert and Schumann, and arias or overtures from Weber operas. English composers were rarely programmed, the principal exception being Hamish MacCunn, a personal friend of Marshall-Hall.Footnote ⁶⁰ The most complex works attempted were Schéhérazade in 1906 (‘a tricky task’ in the words of a critic), Debussy's Afternoon of a Faun, in 1911 (the result ‘only passable’) and two tone poems of Strauss, Death and Transfiguration and Don Juan.Footnote ⁶¹ Concerto performances were frequent after about 1902, the guests including Mark Hambourg in 1903 and 1908, Paderewski in 1904, Teresa Carreño in 1907, Kubelík in 1908 and Melba in 1909. Members of the orchestra were also given their chance, Louis Hattenbach playing his own cello concerto in 1909, Emily Dyason (who played the glockenspiel in 1907) was the soloist in Beethoven's third piano concerto in 1908, Maurice Le Plat played Marshall-Hall's Caprice for violin and orchestra in 1910 and the violinist Florence Hood starred in four solo appearances, the last of them Lalo's Symphony espagnole in 1912. Other conservatorium teachers, the pianist Eduard Scharf and soprano Elise Wiedermann, appeared repeatedly. All but one of the official total were conducted by Marshall-Hall.Footnote ⁶² A vehement advocate of ‘art for art's sake’, he believed in ‘a higher ideal life, the life of the soul, which reveals itself to most of us in occasional flashes, and which is at all times open to him to whom it is given to see beneath the sensuous veil of art’.Footnote ⁶³

Immigrant German Musicians in the MHO

In 1891 the number of European-born nationals then living in the state of Victoria was very small: only 586 from Austria, 1,274 from France, 1,717 from Italy and 3,214 from Sweden or Norway. But there were 10,764 Germans, more than two thousand of whom had arrived in the previous decade.Footnote ⁶⁴ German men (7,772) far outnumbered German women (2,992) but their families were often large, one recent study of Germans in New Zealand estimating that they each had between 1,137 and 3,500 descendants.Footnote ⁶⁵ I have identified birthplaces and dates for 60 out of the 91 men who played in the MHO's first season in 1893, and of these nearly a quarter were born in Germany or Austria.Footnote ⁶⁶ Almost certainly, assumptions of Teutonic racial superiority eased the assimilation of German musicians and accorded them a status confirmed as much by their accent as their proficiency.Footnote ⁶⁷ By 1914 the university conservatorium appeared to be ‘teeming with the German element’.Footnote ⁶⁸

There were four German musician families playing in the string sections of the MHO in the 1890s. Trauegott Wiedemann was born c. 1829 in Teichwolframsdorf, a village near Zwickau, arriving in Melbourne in 1856. With his German-born wife he had 10 children, including Charles (born 1864) and Alfred (born 1879, known as Mick). At least one of them played in the orchestra from its beginnings in 1893 to 1905, all of them as violists. Similarly, Heinrich Weinberg (born c. 1837) and two of his Australian-born sons, Henry (born 1862) and Fred (born 1878), were all violinists in the orchestra from 1893. Carl Niehoff, born in Hanover in 1822, married in St Petersburg, where his first seven children were born. They had arrived in Australia by the 1870s, when there are records of them performing in country towns as ‘Mr Niehoff's prize band’.Footnote ⁶⁹ One or more Niehoffs were violinists in the orchestra from 1893 to 1907. For the grand Wagner concert in 1901, two played the violin (probably Charles, born 1848, and Joseph, born 1844) and another played the triangle (possibly Friedrich, born 1854). Likewise, at least three of the four sons of Claus August Jochimsen (born in 1835 in Schleswig-Holstein) were violinists. Detlef Jochimsen emigrated to the USA in 1893 but August (born c. 1868) played in the MHO as well as in the band at Cole's Book Arcade.Footnote ⁷⁰

Several of the orchestra's German and Austrian musicians had arrived in Melbourne with touring ensembles. The Austrian Strauss Band, ‘55 of the finest musicians in Vienna’, arrived in October 1880 to tour Victoria and Tasmania.Footnote ⁷¹ Appearing both at the Town Hall as an orchestra of 45 and in outdoor venues as a military band, it included Othmar Kühr (born 1865) on horn, a former pupil at the Vienna Conservatoire said to produce a sweetness of tone that had never before been heard in Melbourne.Footnote ⁷² By 1881 Othmar had settled in Gympie in Queensland, where he taught piano, organ, harmonium and French horn.Footnote ⁷³ He appeared with the MHO in 1895, but it was his brother Hermann (born c. 1864), also a former student at the Vienna Conservatoire, who led the horn section for the entire 20 years of the orchestra's existence. According to Punch there was no better horn player ‘south of the line’.Footnote ⁷⁴ When Kuhr premiered Marshall-Hall's Phantasy in 1906, the Australasian reported ‘there was not a single sputter or false note; and the cadenza, which covered the whole range of the instrument, was faultlessly rendered’.Footnote ⁷⁵ Also among the Austrian Strauss Band were three brothers, Adolf (born c. 1857), Rupert (born 1863) and Raimund Pechotsch (born 1864), sons of a court composer in Vienna.Footnote ⁷⁶ Raimund played the violin, the others the double bass and trumpet, but in the MHO Raimund or Rupert played the horn and Adolf the trombone. Raimund Pechotsch later achieved success in Sydney as a composer and his son Raimund (1887–1915) made a career in London as a violinist.Footnote ⁷⁷

Two of the orchestra's German musicians arrived with Herr Hopf's Leipzig Instrumental Concert Company in 1894. The cellist Louis Hattenbach, born in Ahrensböck near Lübeck in 1869, was one of 11 in the company. Initially a violinist, studying with a pupil of Spohr, at 18 he switched to the cello, which he studied in Leipzig with Julius Klengel, principal cellist of the Gewandhaus Orchestra. By the time he reached Australia he had toured Russia, Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Germany.Footnote ⁷⁸ Persuaded to stay by Marshall-Hall, he became the university conservatorium's cello teacher and from 1895 the leader of the cellos in the MHO, an invaluable ally to Marshall-Hall in chamber music ventures as well as in the orchestra. Also in the Leipzig company was Franz Richard Ruhl (born c. 1871), who dazzled audiences with his mastery of the slide trombone. ‘His tone is perfect’, reported the Hobart Mercury, ‘and it is difficult to believe that it is possible to obtain the soft round notes from such an instrument’.Footnote ⁷⁹ He too settled in Melbourne and played with the MHO from mid-1896 until 1905.

Several other German string players immigrated with credentials that supported their self-imposed identification as professors of music. German instrumentalists who had already had an international career before their arrival included the double bass player Herman Lüder, born in Bockenau near Mainz in about 1848, who advertised his origins in Maguire's opera house in San Francisco, and the violinist Johann Brennecke, born in Bremen in 1869, who described himself in advertisements as the product of the Royal Conservatoriums of Cologne and Berlin.Footnote ⁸⁰ Ferdinand Hautzinger (born c. 1880?) was the son of Tellos Hautzinger, an exponent of the ‘Joachim school’ who had conducted the orchestra at the King's Palace Theatre in Milan.Footnote ⁸¹ Franz Schieblich (born 1872) and his family left Hamburg for New Zealand in 1874, his mother appearing in concerts there with her three elder children, all of them on the violin. Madame Schieblich (née Huhn), who claimed to be the daughter of the director of the Dresden conservatory (actually a shoemaker by trade), abandoned her husband (a soap maker) and emigrated with the children to Melbourne in 1878, where Franz, at the age of five, joined the family in concert performances.Footnote ⁸² Reviews describe Madame Huhn as an ‘artiste’, her playing ‘equal to that of many male violin soloists’.Footnote ⁸³ As well as establishing a teaching practice, she founded the Melbourne Ladies' Orchestra and continued to appear as leader or conductor until her death in 1910. Franz Schieblich was a member of the MHO by 1894, when he was 21, and was to play an influential role in music in Melbourne as a teacher (with his first wife, a piano teacher, and his second, a violist).

Reasons why several other Germans emigrated to Melbourne are unclear. But as for most immigrants following the gold rush in the 1850s, they left their homeland with hopes of a more prosperous life. One of those who left Germany for the goldfields was the Frankfurt-born violinist and composer William Gollmick (born 1829), the son of the composer and musicologist Carl Gollmick and brother of Adolf Gollmick, composer of several English comic operas. Arriving in Castlemaine in 1855 the younger Gollmick soon discovered better prospects as a piano teacher; he played in the MHO for 16 years and by the time he was naturalized in 1902 had become a ‘Professor of Music’. He had 12 children, and of the six who survived childhood at least four became professional musicians.Footnote ⁸⁴

Immigrant English Musicians in the MHO

English-born men amounted to a significant proportion of the orchestra, and several of them also founded musical dynasties.Footnote ⁸⁵ The violist Ernest King (1846–1927) was the son of the violinist Edward King (who began his professional career in England playing under Balfe and John Loder Cramer) and nephew of Henry John King (1831–88), from 1854 the organist at Melbourne's St James’ Old Cathedral.Footnote ⁸⁶ Also arriving in the 1850s was the violinist Walter James Brown (born 1822), descended from the Brown family of violin makers from Spitalfields in London. At the Melbourne exhibition in 1880 Brown offered for display violins by Gaspard di Salo, Amati and Guarnerius, among others.Footnote ⁸⁷ Both Walter J. and his son Walter A. (born 1887) were double bass players in the MHO from the outset while also proprietors of a business in the city as violin and bow makers. Also from East London was the musician George Zeplin (1813–81).Footnote ⁸⁸ The three Zeplins who played the violin in the orchestra from 1893 to 1909 may have included his son Thomas (born c. 1841), leader of the orchestra at the opera house, and his grandson Thomas (born 1870), who in 1894 became the musical director of an American opera company.Footnote ⁸⁹

Alfred Montague (born c. 1837) left Liverpool with his father in 1852, choosing at the last minute to emigrate to Australia rather than America.Footnote ⁹⁰ Although only 15 he had studied piano and cello in London for eight years and played under conductors including Michael Costa, conductor at the Philharmonic Society and the Birmingham Festival. After nine years on the diggings Montague joined Lyster's opera company as a cellist, while also playing piano and violin in theatres and teaching in rooms attached to Allan's warehouse in the city. He was a cellist in the MHO from 1899, his son Arthur joining him in the 1909 season; another son, Leonard, played only one concert. All three titled themselves professors of music (Alfred's daughter Lilian, however, called herself a music teacher).Footnote ⁹¹ Others from families of English musicians were the violists Walter John Rice (born c. 1835) and his son William (Billy) Walter Rice (born 1869) and the trumpeter George Oppenheim (born in Stepney in 1855), the son of a Dutch cornet player who emigrated to New Zealand.Footnote ⁹² Edward (or Edmund) Lupton (born c. 1861), whose parents were a celebrity elocutionist and a harpist, was a bassoonist in J.C. Williamson's theatres for almost 30 years and a member of the MHO sporadically from 1904 to 1909.Footnote ⁹³

Among the orchestra's Englishmen were some who might be described as adventurers. The violinist James Bennett Connolly was born in 1860 in Aldershot, where his father was an army sergeant, and by 1890 he was a music teacher in Wellington, New Zealand.Footnote ⁹⁴ After several dissolved partnerships he left for Australia and played intermittently in the MHO from 1893 to 1909. The trombonist W.R. Sinnotte also had a chequered past. Born in Liverpool in 1866, he arrived in Melbourne having been apprenticed on the navy's training ship, served in the Sudan with a NSW contingent and then deserted to become a trombonist in a theatre orchestra in Brisbane.Footnote ⁹⁵ A member of the MHO from 1893 to 1896, in 1900 he was a theatrical agent with a head office in central Sydney.Footnote ⁹⁶

Immigrant Italian Musicians in the MHO

Several members of visiting Italian opera companies remained in Australia and some of their descendants were to become members of the MHO. The most prominent of visiting Italians was the violinist and conductor Alberto Zelman, who arrived in Sydney in 1871 to join the Cagli-Pompei Royal Italian Opera Company as the conductor.Footnote ⁹⁷ Born in Trieste in 1832, he had studied composition with Luigi Ricci and toured northern Italy as an opera conductor before leaving for overseas engagements. After marrying in 1873, he settled in Melbourne to become a teacher, organist and conductor, deputizing for Cowen at the exhibition when the chief conductor was absent. Although Zelman neither played in nor conducted the MHO, his son Alberto Jr (born 1874) played 18 seasons, and another son, Victor (born 1877), a violist, played almost as long. Alberto Jr was a violin prodigy who learned all the orchestral instruments, most likely with a view to a career as a conductor. At 17 he toured Tasmania and at 18 he joined the MHO. He must have had ambitions to become leader of the violins but Marshall-Hall clearly preferred Dierich, and Zelman was only ever a co-leader (from 1903) or leader of the seconds. Without achieving the prized position of concertmaster, he left in 1910 to conduct a breakaway orchestra.

Another who arrived with a touring opera company was the entrepreneur Martin Simonsen, born in Hamburg in 1830, who disembarked in Melbourne with his wife, the French lyric soprano Fannie Simonsen, in 1865.Footnote ⁹⁸ While she was the prima donna in several companies, he was a violinist and occasional conductor. Later, in the 1880s, he managed several companies, recruiting an Italian opera company in 1886 and a troupe of Spanish students in 1888. By 1889, after the failure of the Spanish company, he was insolvent; but despite this and increasing deafness he played with the MHO in the seasons of 1896–97.Footnote ⁹⁹ Two other opera stars, the mezzo Giulia Tamburini Coy and tenor Leandro Coy, settled in Melbourne, Leandro becoming a professor of singing and opening a pastrycook's shop.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Their son Hannibal became the principal violinist of Her Majesty's Theatre and played in the MHO from 1896, when he was only 20, until the end of 1909.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Others who arrived with opera companies included the horn player Cesare Cesari (born 1857), who played in Simonsen's company in 1888 and became a member of the orchestra at the Princess Theatre, and the violinist George Paans (born 1875) from Antwerp, a member of J.C. Williamson's Italian opera company.Footnote ¹⁰² After the company failed, Paans set up a teaching practice in Melbourne and played in the MHO in 1903 and 1906.

The number of Italians in Victoria almost doubled between 1881 and 1891, increasing from 947 to 1,717.Footnote ¹⁰³ There were at least eight Italian families represented in the MHO, most from the neighbouring hilltop villages of Viggiano and Marsicovetere in Basilicata, where as many as one in five men were musicians by trade.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The decline of farming in the region had long encouraged men or family groups to travel for work, and Italian bands were known on the streets of Australia from as early as the 1860s, some of them reportedly returning home ‘with well filled purses’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ In Melbourne 30 years later they were teaching, repairing harps and violins, importing string instruments and playing in family bands, cinema and theatre orchestras. The patriarch of the Di Gilio family, Michelangelo Di Gilio (born c. 1849), arrived in about 1893 to become a well-known violinist and bandmaster.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ It is likely that he was the harpist with that surname who played alongside Barker when two were required for the MHO's grand Wagner concerts in 1893 and 1895. His son August (Agostino, born c. 1895) would play the violin in the orchestra in 1911–12. The two harpists by the surname of Nigro and Vita in the MHO in the final two seasons were most likely Francesco Nigro, born in Viggiano in 1853, and Matteo Vita, born in Viggiano in 1886.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Vita would have a career as an orchestral harpist, by 1924 playing with the South Australian Orchestra as well as playing violin, cello and sousaphone in local bands. A third Viggiano harpist, Prospero Arcaro (born c. 1883), was probably the violinist listed under that surname in the MHO in 1912.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Also from Marsicovetere were the well-known band leaders Francesco Curcio (born 1855), a violinist in the MHO from 1905 to 1909, and Giuseppe Briglia (born c. 1879), a violinist in the orchestra from 1907 to 1912.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

Australian-Born Men in the MHO

Unlike the immigrant musicians who were trained overseas or within their family, the male musicians born in Australia around 1880 progressed from a young age through eisteddfods, local competitions or the system of examinations administered by the London colleges of music. Several of them were outstanding. Master Claude Solomon (born 1884), for example, ‘displayed remarkable talent’ on the violin in public concerts in 1895, and by 1898 Punch was listing the many open competitions he had won.Footnote ¹¹⁰ A member of the MHO for three seasons from 1905, he later moved to Sydney. The violinist Leslie Bobsien (born c. 1891) was also a boy wonder, studying with Franz Schieblich from the age of eight and winning 30 competitions by the time he was 13. Of German origins (his grandfather had emigrated from Hamburg to the goldfields), he was described as ‘one of the rising geniuses of this State’.Footnote ¹¹¹ He played a few concerts with the MHO in 1909 and was conductor of the orchestra at West's Palace by 1911 but died in 1919 at the age of 28.Footnote ¹¹² Another violinist, Stanley Adams (born c. 1885), began his career as an ‘exceedingly clever’ child banjoist.Footnote ¹¹³ He began playing in the MHO in 1902, the year he commenced studies at the Albert Street conservatorium, and later went on to play in the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra.Footnote ¹¹⁴

Two Australian-born cornet players in the MHO were prodigies who became well-known figures in the profession. Percy Rhys Jones (born 1885) was admitted to a Geelong orphanage on the death of his mother in 1891 and shortly after became conductor of the orphanage band.Footnote ¹¹⁵ In 1904 and 1905 he won the Australian solo cornet championship and in 1906 his band won the championship at the Ballarat eisteddfod, the most prestigious band competition in the country. After two years in the MHO from 1906 to 1907, the citizens of Geelong provided him with funds for overseas study. In Vienna under instruction from the instrumentalists of the Vienna Imperial Opera company, he studied every instrument in the military band.Footnote ¹¹⁶ After meeting bandmasters in London, Paris and Berlin he returned to Geelong to become music master at Geelong Grammar and to play in the final year of the MHO. The other cornet champion, Percy Code (born 1888), was the son of the bandmaster of Code's Melbourne Brass Band, winner of the intercolonial competition in 1898.Footnote ¹¹⁷ During his three seasons with the MHO, 1909–11, he too won the solo championship at Ballarat and was then invited to play with the Besses o’ th’ Barn in England.

The leader and deputy leader of the MHO in the 1911–12 seasons were both prodigies from working-class families. J.B. North, born in Melbourne in 1881, was the son of a storeman from Thame who immigrated in 1862.Footnote ¹¹⁸ He first appeared with the MHO in 1899, when he was 18, and was deputy leader of the MHO in 1911–12. The leader in those years was Ernest Toy (born 1880), who claimed to be the first Australian violinist to achieve the licentiate of the Royal Academy of Music.Footnote ¹¹⁹ He gave a solo recital at Bechstein Hall in London in 1902, and toured Germany and France, Australia and New Zealand before being appointed in 1906 as professor of violin at the London Academy of Music. After two years (1911–12) as leader of the MHO he emigrated to the USA.Footnote ¹²⁰ Other prodigies include the cellist Fred Clutsam (born 1869), brother of the London-based composer George Clutsam, and the flautist John Amadio.Footnote ¹²¹ Born in Christchurch in 1883, Amadio took up the flute under the influence of his stepfather and by the age of 18 was principal flautist with the Williamson Italian Opera Company. Either John or his stepfather was playing in the MHO in 1901; and in 1908 both J. and A. (either his stepfather Antoni or his younger brother Adrian) were listed in its programmes. John Amadio became principal flautist in 1909 and remained with the orchestra until its demise in 1912. Such was his reputation that in 1913 Punch described him as the ‘celebrated flautist, whose reputation is not bordered by the limits of this particular Commonwealth’.Footnote ¹²²

Women Musicians in the MHO

Some of the finest women violinists in the world toured Australia in the late nineteenth century: Jenny Claus in 1873, Camilla Urso in 1879–80 and 1894, Lady Hallé (Wilma Norman-Neruda) in 1890 and Terese Liebe in 1891. Lady Hallé's first concert on 23 May 1890 was described by the Argus as ‘for ever memorable in the musical annals of the colony’.Footnote ¹²³ In that year the orchestra of Melbourne's Metropolitan Liedertafel included ‘at least six lady violinists’.Footnote ¹²⁴ The first MHO concert including women took place on 17 August 1899, a benefit for the Australian pianist Elsie Hall. The Argus noted that the orchestra that day was largely composed of amateurs but made no comment on the sight of seven women among the violins.Footnote ¹²⁵ No woman violinist appeared with the orchestra between October 1899 and April 1902, when only 21-year-old Isabella (Bella) Whitley was listed. But from May 1903, when two more joined her, the numbers of women steadily increased, to ten in 1906, 16 in 1907, 24 in 1908 and 33 in 1911 (Fig. 3). At the peak, the orchestra incorporated 26 women violinists, four violists and three cellists, representing 59 per cent of the string section as a whole, but no woman ever played in the woodwind or brass sections and a woman harpist was a rare occurrence.Footnote ¹²⁶

Fig. 2

T. Humphrey, ‘Professor Marshall Hall and His Orchestra’, Weekly Times, 20 May 1899: 11.

Fig. 3

Percentage per season of women musicians in the MHO, 1899–1912.

The inclusion of women from 1899 was a remarkable accomplishment, fully 14 years before women were drafted into one of the London symphony orchestras.Footnote ¹²⁷ Only one photo of the MHO exists and no woman is present, but women's participation would have been unmistakeable when most were in their teens or early twenties, when as string players they sat towards the front of the stage and when it was customary for women performers to wear white.Footnote ¹²⁸ Oddly, the press virtually ignored them, and their proficiency seems to have been taken for granted. After the concert of 16 May 1903, which included three women violinists, the Australasian described the orchestra as ‘all the best instrumentalists in Melbourne’.Footnote ¹²⁹ In May 1904 after a concert including five women, Punch praised it as ‘a perfect musical instrument, upon which the professor played with consummate art and soul-stirring effect’.Footnote ¹³⁰ There was a large increase in the number of women in 1907 (from 14 to 20) when the orchestra's management decided to experiment with evening concerts, thereby excluding men who played in the theatres. In this case the Australasian found that ‘the string tone was not in any way inferior to that to which we have become accustomed’.Footnote ¹³¹ By 1908, when some but not all of the principals remained (men such as Hattenbach on cello, Kühr on horn and Lupton on bassoon) and theatre musicians were still absent, the Australasian referred to the 66 musicians (23 of them female) as ‘mostly professionals’.Footnote ¹³²

Of the first 15 women to play in the orchestra, 11 were born in Australia, two in England, one in New Zealand and one in West Africa; none were German and I have found only two of the total who had German ancestry. At least 11 of this group had fathers in the professions, such as law, medicine, engineering or academia. Several came from prominent families, whether in politics or business. The violinist Ivy Deakin (later Mrs Brookes) was the daughter of Alfred Deakin, prime minister of Australia three times between 1903 and 1910, a period that overlapped with Ivy's presence in the MHO, from mid-1904 until the end of 1912. She enrolled at Marshall-Hall's Albert Street conservatorium in 1901 and studied violin with Dierich; in 1903 she won a scholarship to study singing at the university conservatorium.Footnote ¹³³ Another woman violinist who came from a well-known family was Lucy Archibald, the half-sister of the flamboyant journalist J.F. Archibald, proprietor of the famous Bulletin. Lucy Archibald was to play in more MHO concerts than any other woman – 58 – and described herself in electoral rolls as a student (at the Albert Street conservatorium), a gentlewoman and a teacher. After her brother's death in 1919 she was independently wealthy.

The four women cellists in the orchestra all came from elite and prosperous families. Edith Bear (born 1861) was the daughter of John Pinney Bear, the proprietor of the Chateau Tahbilk winery. As a child Edith had travelled in France and Germany, and had studied music in Dresden; later, like her three eldest sisters, she enrolled at Girton College, Cambridge.Footnote ¹³⁴ In 1902, while in London, Edith taught piano and cello, took cello lessons with W.H. Squire, professor at the Royal College of Music, bought a Guillami cello and formed a band of 12 professional women to play at homes and garden parties. She played in the MHO from 1904 to 1910 when she had a teaching practice in Melbourne. Hilda Fink (born 1882) may have been one of her students, the daughter of a barrister and journalist well known in artistic circles as a writer for Punch and friend of the Heidelberg group of artists.Footnote ¹³⁵ Amy Wischer (born 1871), the wife of a prominent Melbourne solicitor and sister of the artist Dora Meeson, played the cello in the MHO in the 1910 and 1911 seasons. Nellie Reid (born 1878) was one of the six daughters of the businessman and politician Robert Reid, whose Balwyn estate was often the scene of high-society garden parties.Footnote ¹³⁶ With her sisters, Nellie had travelled to Japan and the USA as well as to Europe, and most of the family was in London when her father died unexpectedly in 1904.Footnote ¹³⁷ She was probably a student of Louis Hattenbach, and she played with the MHO in the 1907 and 1908 seasons.Footnote ¹³⁸

At least half of all the women in the MHO attended a conservatorium and more than a fifth of them had the means to study in London, Leipzig, Dresden, Prague or Vienna. Florence Ewart and Helena Hume Black had already studied overseas by the time they made their debut with the MHO. Ewart, born in 1864 in London, won a scholarship to the South Kensington National Training School (later the RCM) at 13 and made her debut at the Albert Hall at 14.Footnote ¹³⁹ With diplomas from both the RCM and Leipzig conservatories, from 1886 she established a career in Birmingham as a composer, soloist and conductor of her own orchestra. Marriage to the botanist Alfred Ewart brought her to Melbourne when he was appointed to the university in 1906, the year she played a single concert with the MHO (she played only a further four, in 1912). Miss Hume Black (born 1867), a cellist, was the daughter of a Queensland sugar planter and politician. Hume Black studied with Walter MacFarren and Franklin Taylor at the Royal Academy, was appointed as the headmistress of the Ladies College of Music in Shropshire and completed the LRAM in 1893.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ By 1902 she had a thriving teaching practice in Brisbane. In Melbourne she played for two seasons (1911–12) with the MHO. Both Ewart and Hume Black were involved with women's orchestras, Ewart as conductor at the Women's Work Exhibition in 1907 and Hume Black as founder in 1909 of the Southern Cross Women's Orchestra.

The violinists Florence Hood and Ethel Mercer both studied with Ottakar Ševčík in Prague after only one or two seasons with the MHO. Hood (born 1880) was one of the four daughters of the supreme court judge Sir Joseph Hood and a student of Hermann Schrader. She played four concerts with the MHO in 1906 before travelling to Prague. She had returned by 1911, when she appeared as a soloist with the MHO and Sydney Symphony Orchestra playing Brahms and Bruch. By 1913 she had left to become one of Ševčík's student demonstrators at his Meisterschule in Vienna.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Ethel Mercer was also studying with Ševčík in Prague in 1907, having played in ten concerts with the MHO. The daughter of a colonial surveyor, she was born in West Africa, had her first violin lessons in England and made her debut in Melbourne in 1893. She spent a year in Prague and returned in 1909.Footnote ¹⁴²

Of all the women, the only one who was the daughter of a professional musician was Gertrude Summerhayes (born 1873), who played with the MHO only in 1907. Her mother, the pianist Madame Cecilia Summerhayes (born 1840), was herself the daughter of a Taunton organist.Footnote ¹⁴³ She left England in 1879 when Sir Horace Brinsmead invited her to Sydney to demonstrate his pianos at the international exhibition. She and her daughters appeared in concerts in Victoria and Tasmania in the 1890s, with Punch describing Gertrude as ‘a talented violinist of most brilliant attainments’.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Gertrude's marriage to a woolclasser in 1914 lasted only two weeks and she continued to work as a musician, conducting the ‘ladies-only’ Magpie Orchestra that played in clubs, salons, garden fetes and the tea rooms at a city department store.Footnote ¹⁴⁵

For those women in the orchestra who were daughters of tradesmen, a conservatorium education was probably only possible if they were talented enough to earn a scholarship.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ The violinists Ruby Campbell (born 1883) and Bessie Conacher (born 1891) and violists Fanny Charge (born 1870) and Violet Martin (born 1885) were the daughters, respectively, of a gardener, bricklayer, engine driver and French polisher. None of them ever appeared in a conservatorium concert, suggesting that they were not enrolled students, although they might have been taught by a conservatorium teacher. On the other hand, the violin prodigy Gertrude Healy (born 1894), daughter of a Ballarat engine driver, appeared with the MHO from 1910 to 1912 and was runner-up to future professor Bernard Heinze in the Clarke scholarship competition, awarded for study at the Royal College of Music. Having earned a reputation as the most promising of the younger violinists (‘her musicianly style, her delicate sentiment, and her pure tone have been the delight for connoisseurs and amateurs’), she left Melbourne in 1913 for studies in Berlin with Siegfried Eberhardt and in London with Albert Sammons.Footnote ¹⁴⁷

Several others from the families of tradesmen married into the profession. The violinist Lila Jaques (born 1887), the daughter of a Yarraville blacksmith, married the London-born violin teacher and pedagogue Charles Manby in 1906 and played in the MHO from 1908 to 1912. Three other women married men from the orchestra: the harpist Grace Barnett (born 1891) married the violinist Claude Solomon; the violist Etheldreda McMahon (born 1881) married her teacher, Franz Schieblich, after he divorced his first wife in 1917 (having accused her of adultery with one of her piano students); and the violinist and music teacher Louisa Metters (born 1883) married the violist Hjalmar Josephi in Sydney in 1928, when she was 45.Footnote ¹⁴⁸

Membership of the MHO enabled several of the generation of women musicians born in the 1880s to envisage a career as well as economic independence. Although it has been assumed that they were all amateurs,Footnote ¹⁴⁹ all of those with a conservatorium diploma had more professional training than many of the men. For those without the post-nominals who needed to earn a living as performers or teachers, performances with the orchestra were a useful marker of their ‘professional’ status.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ The violinist Blanche Walters (born 1884), for example, advertised herself as a member of the ‘Marshall-Hall Professional Orchestra’.Footnote ¹⁵¹ Another means of marking professional status was membership of the Musicians’ Union. An invitation to become a union member survives in the papers of Ivy Brookes (née Deakin) and the use of her maiden name suggests that it dates from before her marriage in 1905.Footnote ¹⁵² However, there is no record of whether she accepted.Footnote ¹⁵³ When the union men formed an orchestra in 1910 the only woman admitted was the second harpist, Violet Barclay.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ If the women were by then excluded from the union this bias is as much a symptom of simmering class conflict as of gender discrimination. In any case, the growing power of the unions in a climate of insecure employment was to profoundly disrupt the life of the orchestra and drive a wedge between men and women as well as between professionals and amateurs.

The Effect of Unionism on the MHO

When the Professional Orchestral Musicians’ Union was founded in Melbourne in 1900, with Marshall-Hall as its inaugural president, its objective was ‘to unite the professional musicians of Australia for the better protection of their interests; to regulate prices and business appertaining to the musical profession; the enforcement of good faith and fair dealing between its members, and to give a guarantee that every member is a professional musician’.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Grievances at that date included competition from civil servants and itinerant Italian street musicians, and the inability of rank-and-file theatre musicians to establish teaching practices because of their unpredictable hours.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ The plight of the hard-working musician must have been all the more perilous when the city's two conservatoriums were producing accomplished diploma graduates – both men and women – who had been trained by the likes of Dierich and Hattenbach, Lüttich and Kühr.

There is ample evidence that poverty dogged the men of the MHO. As in Britain, the supply of musicians was greater than demand.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ But in Australia this situation was made far worse by the recession that hit in the early 1890s, when banks collapsed, insolvencies multiplied, schools closed and the birth-rate plummeted.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ Few musicians were prosperous, existing on three pounds a week or less, which they regarded as ‘starvation wages’.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ The English violinist Nicholas La Feuillade, the son of a London cordwainer, toured Egypt, India and Java in the 1860s with the Christy Minstrel Troupe and was insolvent by 1873 ‘for want of remunerative employment’.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ A member of the MHO from 1896 until he turned seventy in 1903, one obituary recalled his tale of playing his violin with a fence paling.Footnote ¹⁶¹ The tenure in the orchestra of the Australian-born violinist M.A. ‘Mozart’ Phillips (born 1864) ended in 1903 when he was charged with larceny and thrown in the city lockup. On another occasion he was arrested for pawning the violin of a friend.Footnote ¹⁶² Several of the men went through acrimonious divorces, which publicly exposed their misery. Edward Lyons was one of them. Born in Tipperary in 1858 and a veteran of South African wars, he imported musical instruments for sale in his shop in the centre of Melbourne and played in the MHO from 1893 to 1905.Footnote ¹⁶³ He began an extra-marital affair with a barmaid in 1898, but having rented a home for her he found his business failing and began drinking and assaulting his wife, who accused him of rape.Footnote ¹⁶⁴

Marshall-Hall was surely aware of the financial plight of the musicians when his own salary as director of a conservatorium (nominally £400) varied from year to year.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ The income from Lee's donation provided a useful subsidy but it seems that Barrett himself underwrote annual losses.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ When the orchestra seemed to be able to balance its books members of the union assumed that its management was hiding the extent of its financial support.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ Conflict between the union and the MHO escalated at the end of 1909, when the union announced that its members would not play in the orchestra unless it was composed exclusively of unionists. Complaining that rehearsals were not being paid for, that management would not allow the union to scrutinize its financial records and that they were not receiving the recognition and prestige they deserved, unionists established a rival Victorian Professional Orchestra. At the heart of the dispute was the perception that Marshall-Hall recruited beyond professional circles when, as the unionists contended, ‘it was necessary to be three years in an orchestra to learn the harmony’.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ James Barrett, in charge of the MHO's finances, raised the basic player's fee from 18 shillings to 30 shillings per concert and reduced the number of obligatory rehearsals to two rather than the usual six, but the dispute continued to fester over the issue of payment for a third rehearsal.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ The union's secretary, W.J. Hopkins, insisted that every member of the orchestra should belong to the union and that unionists would be expelled if they played with non-unionists. The upshot was that the concert season began in April 1910 without many of the theatre musicians, who could least afford to antagonize the union or to be fined for non-compliance. In response, several of Marshall-Hall's allies – Ivy Brookes, Bella Whitley, Hattenbach, Dawson, North, Amadio and the conservatorium secretary, J. Sutton Crow – established a Victorian Orchestral Association expressly to encourage the interactions of amateur and professional and to stimulate interest in chamber music.Footnote ¹⁷⁰

Hopkins also targeted non-musicians, the ‘semi-professional who plays for “expenses”, which generally means half fee, and thus robs the professional man of his legitimate work’.Footnote ¹⁷¹ Overlooking ‘pretty young ladies’, whom he seemed to think were purely decorative, it was the ‘semi-professional’ male who was stealing the thunder of the genuine ‘professional’.Footnote ¹⁷² Marshall-Hall however insisted on the right to appoint the best musicians solely on the basis of merit and availability.Footnote ¹⁷³ Some of these, like the teacher Franz Schieblich and the instrument-seller Edward Lyons, had no need to join the union but must have, given that they appeared in the list of members in the professional orchestra.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ One who did not appear in that list and who was in a position to distance himself from the union was the violinist Charles Darley Hume (born 1865), a Durham-born cabinet-maker who made a career in Melbourne repairing bows and violins as well as teaching.Footnote ¹⁷⁵

‘Semi-professionals’ were clearly identified in MHO programmes by the asterisks that began to appear from 1907 to identify those players who ‘kindly give their services’ (see Figure 4). Perhaps unwittingly, this divulged which women were from wealthy families, as well as identifying those who earned a salary elsewhere or possessed independent means. Some of these fit the description of the ‘gentleman amateur’.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ The cor anglais player Dr James F. Rudall, for instance, was a Collins-Street oculist and son of the eminent doctor James Thomas Rudall and his wife Georgiana, a descendant of William Blair of Blair, MP.Footnote ¹⁷⁷ Dr Rudall Jr (born 1866) played the famous cor anglais solo from Tristan and Isolde in several MHO concerts, to great acclaim, and appeared regularly from about 1899 to 1912.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ His younger brother Charles (born 1874), a civil engineer and bassoonist, also played, sporadically, from 1899 to 1905. Additional musicians whose names were asterisked were the cellist Dr Emil Schellenberger (born 1869), a South Melbourne dentist; the French-born violinist Leon Lambert (born 1872), a prominent architect and occasional conductor of amateur orchestras; and the flautist Alfred Weston Pett (born 1864), the son of the Punch artist Warwick Weston Pett and the ‘popular pianiste’ Madame Victorine Pett, who on her death in 1915 left an estate of £117,000.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ On the other hand, the horn player Albert Daly Finlay (born 1880) established a business selling bicycles while also playing in the MHO (from 1905 to 1912) – the lack of an asterisk next to his name suggests that he accepted payment for his performances, as did the double bass player Claude Haigh (born 1874), a well-regarded soloist then forging a career as a theatrical manager, and the clarinettist Walter B. Mohr (born 1870), a South Melbourne stationer.

Fig. 4

Programme of the Marshall-Hall Orchestral Concert, 9 July 1910. Louise Hanson-Dyer Music Library, University of Melbourne.

Fig. 5

Melbourne Town Hall, 1910. H2000.5, State Library of Victoria.

M.P. Fox, when he was manager of the MHO, confided to Lee his view that the underlying factor in the union's actions was jealousy of Marshall-Hall's achievements.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ Indeed, Barrett alleged that even when he offered to hand the orchestra's management to the union on the sole condition that Marshall-Hall was retained, his offer was refused.Footnote ¹⁸¹ The unionists’ orchestra presented its first concert in May 1910, conducted by Alberto Zelman, to high praise from the critics. Yet they continued to praise the MHO as well. Curious to hear how the loss of the unionists had affected the orchestra's sound, the Australasian declared, ‘it was quite manifest that Mr. Marshall-Hall had got together an orchestra for all practical purposes as good as those of former years, and had already succeeded in inspiring its members with his own magnetic personality and enthusiasms’.Footnote ¹⁸² On the occasion of the MHO's hundredth concert in August Marshall-Hall was recalled twice before the interval and presented with 100 guineas, a handsome walking stick and a laurel wreath. The Australasian explained,

Altogether that year the union orchestra presented six Town Hall concerts, the conductors including Hermann Schrader, a former member of the MHO, and the London-born violinist and conductor Gustave Slapoffski. Critics reported that the standard of performance declined in the last two and Marshall-Hall calculated that the players had been paid less than five shillings per concert, with nothing for extra rehearsals.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ Thus the union had propagated the very ‘sweating’ that it had been formed to prevent. At a concert in December Marshall-Hall took the liberty of inveighing against music being ‘reduced to a trade, governed by a sort of Trades-hall caucus’.Footnote ¹⁸⁵

In May 1911 the Musicians’ Union succeeded in establishing a federal award for payment, four pounds per week for grand opera and three for the theatre, with principals to be paid one pound per week extra.Footnote ¹⁸⁶ Nevertheless the union battled with the management of the forthcoming Melba tour to achieve these rates. In 1912 the union attempted to place a ban on picture-theatre musicians who also played in the MHO and when Marshall-Hall denounced the union's actions as political rather than musical the Argus supported his fight against ‘coercion or victimisation of non-unionists’.Footnote ¹⁸⁷ In his orchestra that year were several of the longstanding section leaders (including Hattenbach on cello, Amadio on flute and Kühr on horn) and 21 women violinists, as well as his own son Hubert. To present a concert at all was a triumph over adversity (‘we have once more downed the enemy’, Marshall-Hall wrote to Barrett, now absent on a world tour).Footnote ¹⁸⁸ But by the final concert that year he had probably already resolved to leave for London in the hope of a production of his opera Stella. After his departure in February 1913 he wrote to Barrett, ‘O! the unions, & the strikes, & the dunderheaded donkeys – let them bray, bray, bray!’Footnote ¹⁸⁹

The Legacy of the MHO

On Marshall-Hall's return to Melbourne in 1915 he insisted that he would only conduct if he could amass a capable orchestra. Much to his surprise he received an assurance from the union that its principles would not be infringed if members played alongside non-members. ‘If this is really so’, he wrote to the violinist J.B. North, ‘they are indeed holding out the palm of peace!’Footnote ¹⁹⁰ Alas, Marshall-Hall's death in July 1915 abolished all possibility of a resumption.

Many of the MHO musicians reverted to teaching or work in the theatres. Some like the bassoonist Albert Ingamells – ‘probably without peer on his instrument in Australia’ – gravitated to Sydney to play with the orchestra conducted by the Belgian import Henri Verbrugghen, and then with the state orchestras of the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC).Footnote ¹⁹¹ After a sojourn playing trumpet in the San Francisco Orchestra under Alfred Hertz, Percy Code became an ABC conductor and by the end of his career was said to have conducted two thousand concerts.Footnote ¹⁹² The most well-known of the orchestra's women who continued to work in Melbourne as musicians and teachers were Madame Ewart, as a composer, and Gertrude Healy, as a soloist, conductor and conservatorium teacher. Nonetheless, by my count only 40 per cent of the MHO women were still working in the profession in Melbourne in the 1920s, half of them as teachers.Footnote ¹⁹³ Among those who had reverted to ‘home duties’ was the violinist Ruby Nicholas (née Campbell), the mother of Nola Nicholas, who was to marry Yehudi Menuhin.

Several members of the orchestra emigrated permanently. At least ten of the orchestra's women pursued a career overseas, including Florence Hood in Montreal, Isobel Stuckey in London and Louise Croucher in Christchurch. Franz Dierich left for Berlin in 1911 and played in the San Francisco Symphony (as a violistFootnote ¹⁹⁴) – 25 years later in a letter to Ivy Brookes he rated Marshall-Hall as the equal of Hans Richter ‘for musicianship, sincerity and enthusiasm’.Footnote ¹⁹⁵ Ernest Toy emigrated to the United States in 1914 and spent the remainder of his career in Chicago.Footnote ¹⁹⁶ Hermann Kühr left Melbourne for London in 1913 and immediately found work with the Carl Rosa opera company.Footnote ¹⁹⁷ From 1919 John Amadio was a touring artist, accompanying Lisa Tetrazzini and later his wife, Florence Austral, on overseas tours, playing to great acclaim in London orchestras and in concerts for the ABC.Footnote ¹⁹⁸

Fifteen years after the demise of Marshall-Hall's orchestra and in the absence of so many of its stalwarts Melbourne was described as ‘a starved community as far as music was concerned’.Footnote ¹⁹⁹ Such a prolonged void demonstrates even further what a remarkable accrual of human capital the orchestra had been. Although hampered in myriad ways by distance from the centres of new music, and dependent for its existence on an English benefactor, its extraordinary amalgam of expertise and experience exemplified the benefits of international trade in people as much as material goods, and its inclusion of women was a reflection of the new rights and freedoms that Australian women enjoyed well before their imperial cousins.Footnote ²⁰⁰ The key factor in the orchestra's achievements was the undeniable attraction of a colonial city to the ambitious professional, the keen amateur, the fortune-hunter and the adventurer, chief among them Marshall-Hall himself.Footnote ²⁰¹ Williams argues for the importance of migration from the provinces to the metropolis as a trigger for early modernism, and that ‘it cannot too often be emphasised how many of the major innovators were, in this precise sense, immigrants’.Footnote ²⁰² Perhaps more than any other of Melbourne's cultural institutions, the polyglot, ethnically diverse and multi-talented Marshall-Hall Orchestra was indicative of the vitality and complexity of a city reinventing itself as a modern metropolis.