attending a fair in aid of distressed foreigners in the Rooms in 1833 from
Richard Horwood's 1795 map of London. The Hanover Square Rooms are marked as "concert rooms" next to No.4 Hanover Square (click 3x for detail). , describing them as "performed under his direction at Mr. Salomon's Concert, the Festino Rooms, Hanover Square". , exhibited in the Rooms in 1798 The site had previously been occupied by a mill, hence its previous name Mill Field and that of the currently adjoining Mill Street. Originally the property of
Earl of Plymouth, leased out to Lord Dillon, in June 1774 it was sold for £5,000 to
Viscount Wenman, who on the same day conveyed it to Gallini, Bach and Abel. Gallini owned half the freehold and each of the other two a quarter. On the site formerly occupied by a garden and office, they constructed, as extensions to the house, assembly rooms for concerts and public meetings. The main room on the first floor measured , with a height of between : its vaulted ceilings had paintings by the decorative painter
Giovanni Battista Cipriani; and
Thomas Gainsborough, a friend of Bach and Abel, was commissioned to produce the transparent paintings on glass for the Rooms. In addition there was a small room off the North side of the main room and a larger room on the ground floor beneath it. The concert hall there, where concerts started under Bach in February 1775, became one of the principal musical venues in London. For these concerts the convention was that "The Ladies' tickets are Black, and the Gentlemen's Red." An entry from April 1776 in the diary of Edward Piggot gives the following description of a concert: In November 1776 Gallini bought out the shares of his partners to become the sole owner of the freehold. Bach and Abel, continuing the tradition of subscription concerts they had started together in 1763, carried on organising
festinos in the Rooms until 1783, when Gallini's father-in-law
Lord Abingdon withdrew his financial support. Until his imprisonment in 1795 for libellous statements concerning a "pettifogging lawyer" who had allegedly cheated him, Lord Abingdon switched his allegiance to the rival orchestra in the
Pantheon. From 1783 to 1793 programming was arranged by the violinist
Wilhelm Cramer who led the group "
The Professional Concerts", advertised as founded by "eminent professors of music, many years resident in London." The Rooms enjoyed royal patronage from 1785 to 1793, with George III and
Queen Charlotte frequent concert-goers. The King even had a room set aside as the "Queen's Tea Room," to which he donated a large gilt mirror for the mantelpiece. In 1776 parallel series of concerts was started in the Rooms by the violinist and impresario
Johann Peter Salomon. The Rooms were used by the
Concert of Ancient Music from 1804 onwards; for the annual benefit performance of
Handel's
Messiah for the
Royal Society of Musicians from 1785 to 1848; from 1833 onwards by the
Philharmonic Society, established in 1813 under patronage of the
Prince Regent; and, from 1848 until its dissolution in 1861, by the
Amateur Musical Society, a choral society founded by
Henry David Leslie in 1847. The estrangement in 1813 between the Prince Regent and
Beau Brummell is reported to have taken place at a fancy dress ball in these Rooms, where Brummell, on not being recognized by the Prince, asked one of his companions in a stage whisper, "Alvanley, who's your fat friend?" Over the years the Hanover Square Rooms were visited by many leading musicians and performers including
Joseph Haydn (1791–1794),
Johann Nepomuk Hummel (performances of Haydn piano sonata, 1791, and
Mozart piano concerto, 1792)
Harriet Wainwright (whose opera
Comala premiered in 1792)
Felix Mendelssohn (1842, first performance of
Scottish Symphony),
Niccolò Paganini (performing to empty benches, to his chagrin, 1834),
Franz Liszt (1840),
Anton Rubinstein (1842),
Joseph Joachim (performing the
Beethoven violin concerto at the age of twelve under Mendelssohn's baton, 1844),
Hector Berlioz (1848 and 1853),
Clara Schumann (1856) and
Jenny Lind (the "Swedish nightingale", performing with her husband the pianist
Otto Goldschmidt, 1856). The concerts of Haydn, organised through lengthy negotiations with Salomon, featured the first nine of his so-called
London symphonies, Nos. 93–101. In a diary entry from 1791,
Charles Burney records: In 1856, after the fourth concert in which she had participated—programmed for five hours with organ arrangements of her husband
Robert Schumann's music during the interval—Clara Schumann wrote, "This was really the
ne plus ultra of a bad concert. I felt ashamed of myself among all this dreadful stuff." On the arrangement for organ of Schumann's piano duet
Geburtstagmarsch from his
12 Klavierstücke, Op. 85, she wrote that it "was one of those incomprehensible things that could happen nowhere but in England." The Hanover Square Rooms were also used for some of the first performances in England of J. S. Bach's instrumental and choral music during the English Bach revival. In the first two decades of the nineteenth century,
Samuel Wesley performed his violin sonatas with Salamon and arrangements of his organ music for two players with
Vincent Novello, sometimes with orchestral accompaniment; Mendelssohn performed a prelude and fugue on the organ in 1840 in a concert arranged by
Prince Albert; and in 1854
William Sterndale Bennett, one of the founding members of the
Bach Society five years previously, conducted the first English performance of the
St. Matthew Passion. Benefit balls for the
Royal Academy of Music were held regularly in the Rooms and attended by the Royal Family. After the 1835 ball,
Benjamin Disraeli wrote to his sister: The Rooms were used for many different purposes apart from music and balls, including public meetings ranging from lectures on the
Church of England to displays of
crewel embroidery. There were also medical talks, including, on 1 March 1842, a lecture by the Scottish surgeon
James Braid who gave one of the first public demonstrations of what he called
neuro-hypnotism or "nervous sleep" by sending 18 members of the audience simultaneously into a trance. In 1848, with both of Gallini's nieces no longer alive, the Rooms were acquired by the music publisher Robert Cocks.
Hector Berlioz narrated a performing visit he made in 1853: From 1862 onwards, having been completely refurbished, the concert-hall was used by the
Royal Academy of Music. The Rooms were used from 1868 to 1874 for meetings of the
women's suffrage movement: in 1868,
Emily Faithfull lectured on "The Claim of Woman"; in 1870 the second meeting of the recently formed ''London National Society for Women's Suffrage'' was held in the Rooms, presided over by Clementia Taylor (wife of the MP
Peter Alfred Taylor) and addressed by
Helen Taylor, Harriet Grote (wife of
George Grote) and
Millicent Fawcett; in 1873 a similar public meeting was addressed by Lady Anna Eliza Mary Gore-Langton (wife of the MP
William Gore-Langton), and Eliza Sturge (niece of
Joseph Sturge). The last concert of the Royal Academy took place in 1874. The following year the property was sold and became the premises of the
Hanover Square Club, which had already been holding committee meetings there since ownership passed to Cocks. The buildings were demolished in 1900. ==Gallery==