Read on to discover all about the Crystal Palace - the grand British concert hall that was destroyed in a raging fire....
The Crystal Palace... legendary concert hall lost in a tragic fire
They are impassive observers of one of the grandest views in South London, at the top of Crystal Palace Park, with a horizon of Surrey and Kent beneath them: half-a-dozen terracotta sphinxes, relics of one of the greatest sites of music-making anywhere in the world, from 1854 until 30 November 1936. That’s when the Crystal Palace and its 293,000 panes of glass burned to the ground, and little, apart from the terrace the gigantic structure sat on, survived the inferno.
But the sphinxes made it through the blaze, and if they could speak, they would tell us about the jaw-dropping sounds they heard in Crystal Palace’s heyday: not only the first performances of music by Elgar, Stanford, Smyth and MacCunn, but British premieres of Schubert and Robert Schumann, and an exceptional list of visiting artists, from Clara Schumann to Grieg, Dvořák and Saint-Saëns.
August Manns... the man who shaped the Crystal Palace into a concert powerhouse
The figurehead of the weekly Crystal Palace concerts from 1855 until 1901 was the German-born conductor August Manns. He grew the band from a bunch of wind players to a fully-fledged symphony orchestra, and to his packed audiences of more than 4,000 people, he led the country’s most popular and influential classical music-making. Those novelties rubbed shoulders with triennial Handel festivals, with thousands of singers turning Handel into a mass-participation musical megastructure.
The Crystal Palace was moved from Hyde Park after the Great Exhibition in 1851, and remodelled for the new site. The sheer variety of what you could experience in its enormous halls was staggering: acrobatics, engineering, flora and fauna, and the world’s first cat show.
Yet in that 4,000-seat concert auditorium, there were still more wonders on display. And we can still hear them: in 1888, Thomas Edison’s company recorded Manns and his massed Handelians performing Israel in Egypt. Through the hiss of history, you can make out the sounds of thousands of voices raising the Crystal Palace’s roof, 137 years ago.
The fire of 1936... 'the end of an age'
Handel didn’t actually bring the ceiling down in 1888 – but that is what tragically happened in 1936. ‘The end of an age,’ Winston Churchill said – he was one of the 100,000 or so who came to watch the Palace’s oblivion. The last performance of the Crystal Palace organ came as winds of fire blew through its 4,500 pipes, its wailing sounding the death throes of a musical era.
Yet the legacy of August Mann and the Crystal Palace’s music-making lives on. Henry Wood and the BBC Proms adopted Mann’s example of getting the widest variety of classical music to as many people as possible, and the communication tower built on the same site is still used to broadcast music to the world. The sphinxes have seen and heard a lot of music up there on their hill – and there’s more still to come.
