City in Australia, capital of Victoria. Founded in 1834 as a port, Melbourne expanded rapidly into the largest and most active city in Australia when gold was discovered in Victoria in the 1850s. An evolving moneyed class encouraged the development of musical life, and the city became the major Australian centre for concert parties and opera troupes travelling the Empire circuit.
In 1853 John Russell founded the still extant Melbourne (later Royal Melbourne) Philharmonic Society, the first permanent choral society in Australia and the best known of many local groups that together formed the large 19th-century festival choirs. In 1868 the Melbourne Liedertafel was established by German-speaking migrants, followed two years later by the Metropolitan Liedertafel and thereafter by similar groups in outlying areas of Victoria. All abandoned German as their club language when English colonists joined in numbers, attracted by the social life and business contacts available. The two Melbourne groups amalgamated in 1903 as the Royal Victorian Liedertafel, disbanding only in the 1980s. Other choirs include the professional bodies associated with the ABC and various opera companies, as well as numerous amateur groups. The leading choir of the late 1990s was the Melbourne Chorale.
Opera troupes of the gold-rush era included Black's English Opera Company (1856), a venture by George Coppin and Anna Bishop (1857) and the Bianchi Royal Italian and English Opera Company (1860). In 1861 William Saurin Lyster began his association with the city as impresario, fostering a period of feverish operatic activity: Melbourne was – and is – opera mad. Lyster died in 1880, and his crown passed to James Cassius Williamson, though not without challengers: the companies of Montague-Turner and the Simonsens, and the Cagli and Paoli troupes and their derivatives. Williamson fell out with his partners Garner and Musgrove in the 1890s, but their attempts to oust him as the dominant Melbourne entrepreneur were not successful. In 1911 he brought Melba home for her first opera season since she had achieved international stature, beginning in the city from which she derived her name and where she lived, taught, retired and was buried. Williamson died in 1913, but his firm lived on to present the huge 1924 Melba-Williamson seasons and the 1928 co-productions in which Melba did not appear. (Other Melbourne singers to have achieved international recognition include Florence Austral, John Brownlee, Ronald Dowd, Joan Hammond, Sylvia Fisher, Elsie Morrison and Marie Collier.)
In 1913 the Thomas Quinlan company presented the first Ring cycle in Australia. World War I prevented this troupe's return and it was left to the Gonzalez and Rigo companies to challenge the Williamson organization, now known as the Firm and run by the Tait brothers, who presented smaller seasons during the economic depression of the 1930s. In 1934–5 Sir Benjamin Fuller presented the Melbourne centenary season centred on Austral. World War II saw a contraction to radio opera, but with public interest also kept alive through the Sun Aria Competition, the Mobil Quest and the Australian Broadcasting Commission's vocal competitions. The era of imported stars supported by local choruses and orchestras did not fade completely until after the 1965 Williamson season with Joan Sutherland. In the immediate postwar period Gertrude Johnson's National Theatre Movement (founded in 1935) gradually built up standards and gave rare opportunities to local artists.
The Victorian Opera Company, at one time the country's second largest, was founded in 1962 and renamed the Victoria State Opera in 1974; Richard Divall was its musical director from 1972 to 1995. Its main home was the Princess Theatre until it moved into the Victorian Arts Centre's State Theatre, which opened in 1984. Though the stage of the State Theatre is vast and technically comprehensive, its pit is small. In 1996 it effectively ceased operations as a separate organization and has since been absorbed into Opera Australia. Opera is also presented by Chamber Made, whose unconventional productions of works outside the standard repertory have provided new insights and an outlet for local composers. Oz Opera, the research and development arm of Opera Australia, is based in Melbourne.
Orchestral music was the province of pit players in the many theatres and of regimental bands. Town bands had existed in the city and suburbs since 1839, when George Tickell, a plasterer, assembled 12 players to parade on Christmas Eve. Professional dance bands, with Wilkie, Greggs and the Hore family bands among the earliest, arrived in the 1840s, but the most conspicuous bands were those of the total abstinence societies. The brass-band movement was to take hold in Melbourne and almost every rural centre.
Megson, Reed, Clarke, Buddee and Gautrot organized the earliest concerts. After the sudden increase in population caused by the goldrush, entrepreneurs followed the lead of Charles Winterbottom and began offering promenade concerts, often employing theatre musicians, the amateurs of the Philharmonic Society's oratorio performances and the town's many professional teachers to create ad hoc orchestras. In the 1860s orchestral standards rose under the influence of the composer-conductor Charles Horsley. By the 1880s acclaimed orchestras were being employed for major festivals, notably that of the 1888 Centennial International Exhibition, which presented 244 concerts during its six-month run. The orchestra was briefly retained by government grant as the Victorian Orchestra, but failed in the 1890s economic depression. It was revived and augmented under the name of the composer-conductor G.W.L. Marshall-Hall, who went about a systematic education of public taste in a series of Town Hall concerts running from 1892 to 1912. Then the Melbourne SO, founded in 1906, attempted to fill the gap, becoming the major orchestra under Alberto Zelman jr and his successor, the composer-conductor Fritz Hart. In 1936 it was amalgamated with the university orchestra under Bernard Heinze and passed into the control of the ABC. Between 1949 and 1964 it was known as the Victorian State Orchestra, but then returned to its original name. Resident conductors have included Alceo Galliera, Juan Jose Castre, Walter Susskind, Kurt Wöss, Georges Tzipine, Willem van Otterloo, Fritz Rieger, Hiroyuki Iwaki and Marcus Stenz. In the 1970s the Proms were popularized by the conductor John Hopkins; open-air concerts have been a regular feature at the Myer Music Bowl. The newer State Orchestra of Victoria plays mainly with the opera companies and the Australian Ballet; the Australian Pops Orchestra is also based in the city.
The Musical Society of Victoria, founded in 1861 by Horsley, has continuously promoted recitals, joined in 1945 by Sydney-based Musica Viva. The Melbourne branch of the ISCM was particularly lively in the 1960s and 70s under the influence of the composers Keith Humble and George Dreyfus, when it presented Australian and other new music, as did the Astra Chamber Orchestra and Choir under George Logie Smith. The latter organization continued as the Astra Chamber Music Society. Other chamber groups include the Australian Chamber Soloists, the Academy of Melbourne, Australia Pro Arte, the Australian Art Orchestra and the Ensemble Gombert. Elison was based in Melbourne until its move to Queensland in 1997.
The Melbourne University Conservatorium opened in 1894 under the direction of Marshall-Hall, who the next year founded the Melba Memorial Conservatorium, at which Melba conducted her singing school. Music departments were subsequently established at Monash University, the Victorian College of the Arts and La Trobe University.
Music patronage, originally the province of individuals – William Clarke, Francis Ormond, George Tallis, Herbert and Ivy Brookes, Sidney Myer and James and Louise Dyer among them – has largely passed to the state. Arts Victoria is the major provider of funding, together with the Australia Council. Australia's oldest music-publishing house, Allan and Co., founded in 1850, is based in Melbourne.
In the late 20th century Melbourne's music making proliferated. Rock music is played in hundreds of venues; recording companies appear and disappear as the technology becomes easier and cheaper; radio is still a major source of access to both popular and classical forms. With the largest immigrant population in Australia, the city has also absorbed the music of other cultures. There is reason to anticipate hybrids evolving out of this dynamic mix. Jazz is in a state of reappraisal and development, notably through such activities as the Montsalvat Jazz Festival and, more recently, the Melbourne Jazz Festival. In a very different vein, there is a long-standing annual Melbourne International Organ and Harpsichord Festival, and choral festivals are seeing a revival of older traditions and the appearance of new forms.
T. Radic: Aspects of Organised Amateur Music in Melbourne 1836–1890 (thesis, U. of Melbourne, 1969)
T. Radic: Some Historical Aspects of Musical Associations in Melbourne 1888–1915 (diss., U. of Melbourne, 1978)
T. Radic: G.W.L. Marshall-Hall: Portrait of a Lost Crusader (Perth, 1982)
J. Murdoch: A Handbook of Australian Music (Melbourne, 1983)
H. Love: ‘Drama and Music in Colonial Melbourne’, Victoria's Heritage: Lectures to Celebrate the 150th Anniversary of European Settlement in Victoria, ed. A.G.L. Shaw (Sydney, 1986), 191–200
T. Radic: Bernard Heinze (Melbourne, 1986)
T. Radic: Melba: the Voice of Australia (Melbourne, 1986)
A. Ford: Composer to Composer: Conversations about Contemporary Music (Sydney, 1993, 2/1996)
THÉRÈSE RADIC