In the nineteenth century Western art music advanced towards a peak of sonorous magnificence, perhaps reached in 1848 at Paris when Hector Berlioz conducted an ensemble of 1,022 performers. The guitar, however, continued to sound at the level of a small continuo group for an Italian opera of the 1640s. During the 1800s the guitar’s reputation was deeply affected, often for the better, by its evocation of past sonorities that the ear was prepared to relinquish but the historical imagination could not bear entirely to forgo. Various attempts were nonetheless made to strengthen the sound by external and internal changes, some of them well received in their day, but no increase in the size or depth of the guitar’s body, no change in the pattern of the internal bracing and no addition of extra strings fundamentally enlarged its scope. Not suited to the new concert halls in which provincial towns and cities invested much of their civic pride, the guitar fared no better amidst the din of the music halls either, according to the guitarist and vaudeville comedian Ernest Shand (1868–1924). The editor of Shand’s compositions finds that ‘interest in the instrument was all but gone’ by the 1890s when Shand was unable to make a living from his composing, playing and teaching.