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Norfolk Highlights 1584 - 1881
By George Holbert Tucker
Chapter 24
Music in Old Norfolk
Norfolk's earliest musical activities were principally of amateur nature
with occasional performances by travelling professionals to relieve
the monotony.
That there were persons in pre-Revolutionary Norfolk who could scrape
a tune on a "fiddle" is well known. And it was these unknown
musical tyros, many of them fiddle-playing slaves, who provided the
music for the more elaborate balls at the Mason's Hall or for the more
informal dances at weddings, christenings, and other festivities in
the homes of the more wealthy.
It is also a matter of record that the more popular ballad operas of
the period, such as "The Beggar's Opera," were performed by
travelling companies on the state of Norfolk's first theater on King's
Lane, while the church music of that era was restricted to the singing
of metrical versions of the Psalms, the only kind of music then heard
in Virginia's Anglican churches.
After the Revolution, however, when Norfolk became more cosmopolitan
and the visits of professional actors and musicians became more frequent,
the musical horizons of the borough broadened considerably.
According to Simmon's Norfolk directories for 1801 and 1806-7, all
of the Norfolk music masters of that period were either French or German.
Later, in 1818, another musician, J.H. Hoffman, advertised in the Norfolk
Herald for pupils, offering to teach the "clarionet, trumpet, French
horn, bugle horn, oboe, grand hautboy or voce umane, trombone, fife,
German flute or additional keyed flute, flageolet, Sacbut, viel hurdy
or beggars lyre, violin, violoncello, bass viol, bass drum, cymbals,
etc.," an amazing offer in any period.
Norfolk's first pipe organ was installed in the first Christ Church,
built in 1800 on Church Street across from the old Borough Church. Its
organist, James H. Swindells, Norfolk's first recorded "minister
of music" was responsible for greatly improving the quality of
church music in the borough.
On May 21, 1818, Swindells, directing a large group of singers and
a "band composed of several eminent professors and a number of
amateurs, among which were gentlemen of cultivated taste and fine power
of execution," gave an appreciative audience of over a thousand
its first taste of the music of Handel, Pergolesi, and other first-rate
composers.
Forty years later, on August 31, 1858, Professor Philip H. Masi, Norfolk's
leading musician of his time, led a picked group of soloists and singers
in the city's first rendition of Rossini's "Stabat Mater"
in the recently completed St. Mary's Catholic Church at Holt and Chapel
streets.
Meanwhile, serious Norfolk music lovers were increasingly receiving
more generous doses of professionally performed music. Travelling opera
companies, featuring better than average performances of the then standard
repertoire, appeared with relative frequency at the Church Street Opera
House, which opened in 1856. On its stage early in April in 1864, Louis
Moreau Gottschalk, America's first internationally known pianist and
matinee idol, whose celebrated "bedroom eyes" kept his female
auditors in a constant state of flutter, performed "several of
his latest compositions that have caused such a sensation in Boston,
Philadelphia, New York, and other cities."
Professional musicians visiting Norfolk at that time also appeared
at the Mechanic's Hall on Main Street, completed in 1850, that finally
ended its career as the Gaiety Theater, a burlesque house, in 1960.
On January 26, 1853, the ten-year-old Adelina Patti, who was to become
one of the greatest coloratura sopranos of all time, appeared there
in a joint recital with the Norwegian violinist, Ole Bull, and thrilled
Norfolk music lovers with her already phenomenal vocal pyrotechnics.
 Chapter
25
Norfolk Theater History - Part I
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