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At length the date of the first concert arrived, and a brilliant
audience rewarded the enterprise, completely filling the Hanover
Square Rooms, at that time the principal concert hall in London.
It had been opened in 1775 by J. C. Bach, the eleventh son of the
great Sebastian, when the advertisements announced that "the
ladies' tickets are red and the gentlemen's black." It was there
that, two years after the date of which we are writing, "Master
Hummel, from Vienna," gave his first benefit; Liszt appeared in
1840, when the now familiar term "recital" was first used;
Rubinstein made his English debut in 1842; and in the same year
Mendelssohn conducted his Scotch Symphony for the first time in
England. In 1844 the "wonderful little Joachim," then a youth of
thirteen in a short jacket, made the first of his many subsequent
visits to London, and played in the old "Rooms."
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