This month we look once again at Prince Albert and his love of music and the arts. Charles Hunt’s aquatint of 1841, ‘The Wonder of Windsor’, is well known and is a gentle satire on the artistic enthusiasm and accomplishment of the family into which Queen Victoria had married. Albert’s influence on musical life in Britain would soon begin to be felt, but music in the Royal Household had already been transformed by the addition of stringed instruments to the Queen’s Private Band in December 1840.

Our Exhibitions of August 2019 and September 2019 examined aspects of Prince Albert and Queen Victoria’s musical activities in more depth, but we repeat here Oliver Davies’s caption to the image above:

“One of Prince Albert’s first important royal initiatives was the expansion of the Queen’s Private [wind] Band into a full orchestra. First heard privately on Christmas Eve, 1840 at Windsor Castle, the orchestra was presented to a larger gathering in the Grand Saloon, Buckingham Palace on 10 February 1841 – the evening following Princess Victoria’s christening and the first anniversary of the royal wedding.”

Queen Victoria’s Diary for 24 December 1840 states:
“We had a Band playing during dinner, & my Band (stringed instruments) afterwards, – a great pleasure. We stayed up till shortly after ½ p. 10.”

And on 10 February 1841 she writes:
“The Band played beautifully after dinner, & we remained with the Company till ½ p. 11, when all left.”

Two documents held in the Royal Archives provide fascinating background to the image displayed above.

The first is a report, dated 29th October 1841, into the condition of the Band of Musicians of Her Majesty’s Household, with details of salary, instrument, age and health. Fully two-thirds of the 24 listed members of the band are classified as either ‘Inefficient from Age’, ‘Not Professional’, or ill, and it is highly likely that the report was commissioned by Prince Albert as part of a drive to rejuvenate and improve the ensemble. The average age of the band in 1841 was 60 years, and they were paid £45 16s 6d per annum, £15 6s 6d of which was an allowance for the purchase and maintenance of Livery.

The second document, also dated 29th October 1841, lists Queen Victoria’s Private Band, and it shows that there was very little overlap in its membership with that of the Household band. The report is mainly concerned with the instruments that each band member was required to play on different occasions, and it shows that Prince Albert’s initiative is unlikely to have caused too much upheaval. The majority of musicians at the time (and until at least mid-20th century) were ‘double handed’, in that they were proficient on more than one instrument, and what appears to have been primarily a wind band could readily produce a string section. The leader, George Anderson, was a violinist, and eight of the wind players are listed as being able to play a stringed instrument as well – although it appears from the footnotes to the report that the oboist Henry Malsch had to learn the viola especially for the Queen’s Band. But were they all proficient enough on their second instruments to manage the tricky string parts of Mendelssohn’s Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, featured in the programme above? Victoria’s diary entry certainly suggests that they were.