Reminiscences of a Country Journalist

urn:iso:std:iso:639:ed-3:eng

166-167

text excerpt

[T]he London Pavilion Music-hall [was] a place of amusement which I very frequently visited twenty years ago. Though one of the leading music-halls of the metropolis, ranking at that time after the Alhambra and the Oxford, there were no stalls, the whole of the floor seats being one charge; and this was one reason for the place which it held in my favour. The proprietors, MM. Loibl and Sonnhammer, are Germans, from Vienna, and all the waiters are, or were, of the same nationality, as uniformly as those at Gatti’s are Italians. At the time of which I am now writing, every member of the orchestra, with one exception, were, if not all Germans, all foreigners. The conductor, M. Valckenaere, was a Belgian; the pianist and the flutist were Frenchmen, the cornet a Hungarian, the clarionet a Scotchman, and the two violins and the bass, Germans. 

Always reaching the hall in time for the overture,--Rossini’s, for “William Tell” was finely given, and more often than any other—I always sat close to the orchestra, and through that proximity and my frequent visits became acquainted with the Hungarian cornet-player, whose name was Besznak. 

excerpt from 'Reminiscences of a Country Journalist' pp. 166-167 (196 words)

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