At the 1826 Sydney Amateur Concerts, there was a performance of a ‘comic song’ the ‘Beautiful Boy’ by Barnett Levey, a song with new lyrics set to the well-known Irish air ‘Ballynamony Ora’. Levey was a driving force behind the amateur concerts and the owner and manager of one of Sydney’s first concert venues, the Theatre Royal. Levy was not just a theatre impresario and singer, but also the colony’s first free Jewish settler (while his brother Solomon was a convict, and in fact the more successful businessman). He was known for, as one newspaper put it, his performances of ‘irresistible drollery’.

 

However, most reviews of the 1826 concert did not regard his performance as droll at all, but as something much worse. The 'Beautiful Boy' was a farcical song about disfiguring a baby in order to make it look more attractive, and indeed the end result was apparently irresistible to women. Reviews at the time regarded at it as, at best, ‘diverting’ ‘distracting’ or entertaining, and at worst a threat to civilised society. The Monitor led the charge, regarding the lyrics as ‘vulgar and grotesque’ with ‘a chattering kind of melody’ and ‘as moralists, we find it an injudicious deployment of time’.  There was in fact, considerable debate in the press about whether such songs were appropriate for concerts that were supposed to be uplifting. The Monitor usually moralised, while other papers satirised its snooty tone, but nonetheless, many writers engaged in the conversation.

 

At the heart of such rhetoric was an anxiety around was appropriate music for such a concert. Pickering and Bowan (2017) have shown that the British Empire of the nineteenth century saw an increasing preference for music that created ‘spiritual uplift’. It was hard to reconcile the 'Beautiful Boy' with this hope. This problem was made more acute in the fledgling colony of New South Wales which was striving to appear mature enough in order to be both a new England, and autonomous from it. The British notion that theatre was an instrument of ‘rational recreation’ was exacerbated in the colonies because of anxiety that the convict stain made the population ‘more ignorant than England’ (Waterhouse 1990, 24). Part of the problem was that at this stage, all music, high, low, popular and elitist, appeared in the same program, and one that was officially sanctioned by and attended by the Governor. In the subsequent decades, from the 1820s-1840s, culture would bifurcate into ‘high’ and ‘low’ class, the result of the growing size of the colony, and the moralising impetus of the Victorian age (Waterhouse, 26). Songs like the ‘Beautiful Boy’ would not be heard in such esteemed surroundings for much longer, but instead would become the fare of music halls, along with minstrelsy and other ‘low class’ forms.

 

The humour of the 'Beautiful Boy' makes it somewhat dated. Some of the 1826 program – Mozart for instance – is of course still performed today. However, it is challenging to translate this strange tale of rudimentary baby plastic surgery into something that works today. In some ways it is part of a tradition of comic song – upheld well into the twentieth century by hillbilly performers like Chad Morgan, or even comic characters like Sir Les Paterson – which satirises the sexual ego of men, contrasting their vulgar presence with a pretence of beauty. When performing it, it was hard not to think of the old maxim of comedy dating more quickly than other forms

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Sources

Kate Bowan and Paul Pickering, Sounds of Liberty: Music, radicalism and reform in the Anglophone world, 1790-1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017)

Richard Waterhouse, From Minstrel Show to Vaudeville: the Australian popular stage 1788-1914 (Sydney: NSW University Press, 1990)

‘The Amateur Concert’, The Monitor, 21 July 1826, p. 5.