But Herschel didn’t want to entertain the busy but musically competitive move to London. So, after a short mission as an organist in the Halifax Parish Church in West Yorkshire-according to Miller, he informed the panel at his audition that he had already accepted a better offer elsewhere-he 1776. Moved to Bath in the year and entered an upper class city-a sophisticated class with an up-and-coming intellectual scene and a newly built octagon chapel. From there, Herschel built a small musical empire built around oratorio performances and regular concerts.
A few years ago, William’s sister Caroline followed her brother to England. The explanation of her story also obscures her interest in early music. Caroline, the first woman to receive the Royal Astronomical Society’s gold medal, the first woman to publish a scientific study, and the first female scientist to receive a salary, moved to England with the intervention of her brother. The pain of her family after the death of her father — and began taking her singing lessons, eventually becoming the resident soprano of William’s oratorio performance.
Herschel believed that music was one of the four liberal arts of quadrivium, along with arithmetic geometry and astronomy. With the help of two 18th-century books “Harmonics” and “The Complete System of Optics” by Cambridge scholar Robert Smith, he was adopted when learning English through John Locke’s dense textbook. I started working on astronomy with the same self-taught enthusiasm. And one of his first homemade Newtonian telescopes made a difference that turned Herschel into a celebrity overnight. In March 1781, the discovery of Uranus, which he initially believed was another comet. Herschel relentlessly named the planet to please George III. George III later provided him with a salary entitled “King’s Astronomer.”
That position included making a significant reduction from his profitable music business, but nevertheless Herschel abandoned music to focus his gaze on heaven. As Herschel moved to Slough to approach the king, the telescope became larger, the investigation became more ambitious, and the celebrity became more intense.
Herschel’s musical work was stopped by the move, but there is a mystery about his relationship with Haydn, who visited the observatory in June 1792. In the classic 1930s volume “Musical Analysis Essay,” Sir Donald Toby inspired the universe to the famous opening of Haydn’s oratorio “Creation,” through Herschel’s famous 40-foot telescope. .. Problem: According to records, Herschel was away from town at the time. But perhaps Caroline was his trusted assistant at this point and led Haydn to his clear moments?