The Arts
The German composers Felix Mendelssohn (1809–1847) and Carl Maria von Weber (1786–1826) both lived and worked on Great Portland Street. No. 103 Great Portland Street is cited as one of "London's 50 Outstanding Classical Music Landmarks" because Felix Mendelssohn lodged there during the premiere of Fingal's Cave. Other notables living on the street include James Boswell, 9th Laird of Auchinleck, biographer at No. 122, Leigh Hunt the essayist and poet at No. 98, and the artist David Wilkie at No. 117 (1808-9). Sir Charles Barry, the architect, lived at No. 94 Great Portland Street from 1828 to 1841.
Pagani's restaurant, with its art nouveau frontage by Beresford Pite, was a favourite gathering place for many artists and musicians. This was perhaps due in part to the restaurant's proximity to Queen's Hall on Langham Place. Its Artist Room walls were decorated by over 5,000 notes and signatures of its many important artists of the period who included Paderewski, Puccini, Chaminade, Chevalier, Calvé, Piatti, Plançon, De Lucia, Melba, Menpes, Tosti, Sarah Bernhardt, Whistler amongst numerous others. Pagani's was bombed during the blitz but survived for a time after the war. It had first opened in 1871. Some of the artistic energy of the area dissipated after Queen's Hall was destroyed by a single incendiary bomb in May 1941. Queen's Hall was not rebuilt.
Read more about this topic: Great Portland Street
Famous quotes containing the word arts:
“But here comes Generosity; giving—not to a decayed artist—but to the arts and sciences themselves.—See,—he builds ... whole schools and colleges for those who come after. Lord! how they will magnify his name!
—One honest tear shed in private over the unfortunate, is worth them all.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
“No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who are also creating their own time refuse to accept.... For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)