Ella soon set about launching his new initiative. Perceiving adequate demand for what he wanted to promote, he now planned a subscription society for chamber music concerts of the best possible musical character and the highest seriousness. It was a bold scheme, not without risk, and would keep him busy during the most frenetic months of the musical year, teaching him more about concert promotion. It would also give him a more direct and effective means for shaping audience taste than he could have hoped to achieve through his writing for the press, and eventually it would see him make his finest and most enduring contribution to London music.

❧ Ideas and ideals

A printed prospectus, probably issued around the end of 1844, hinted at the shape of things to come, while referring back to the spirit of Ella’s réunions the previous season and to the several eminent musicians who had appeared at and attended them. The new society, to be known as the Musical Union, was intended to cultivate ‘the highest order of Instrumental Chamber Music’ – by implication, the heartland of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven – ‘executed by first-rate Artists’; and to ‘promote Social Intercourse between Native and Foreign Practical, Theoretical, and Literary Members of the Profession, and Amateurs of cultivated and refined taste’ in seeming emulation of Parisian salon culture. Further gravitaswas borrowed from Cicero (Ella chose as a motto Cicero’s words ‘Honor alit artes’ / ‘Honour nourishes the arts’), and there was the promise of a published record of activity, along with other trappings of institutionalization including a prominent list of office-holders.