Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Third Supplement.djvu/451

 His first oratorio ‘Judith’, given at Birmingham in the following year, marks a fresh stage in Parry's career. ‘Judith’, like ‘Blest Pair’, was a popular success, and from this time onward till he succeeded Sir George Grove as director of the Royal College of Music (1895) Parry was pouring out large works with almost unparalleled activity and conducting performances of them all over the country. They covered a wide range of expression. Two further symphonies, the ‘English’ in C and one in E minor, were produced in London in 1889; the same year came his first work for a Leeds festival, Pope's ‘Ode on Saint Cecilia's Day’; ‘L'Allegro ed Il Penseroso’ (Norwich, 1890) again showed his understanding of the measured stateliness of Milton's verse, and from that he turned first to the majesty of the Latin psalm ‘De Profundis’, written for triple choir (Hereford, 1891), then to the melody of Tennyson in the choric song from ‘The Lotus Eaters’ (Cambridge, 1892). Yet this is pre-eminently the period of oratorios, three in number, ‘Judith’, ‘Job’ (Gloucester, 1892), and ‘King Saul’ (Birmingham, 1894).

‘Judith’ has been called a reactionary work, and with a certain justice. It is distinctly disconcerting, notwithstanding the intrinsic beauty of many of the numbers, to find Parry in the very zenith of his powers reverting to the stereotyped form of the Old Testament oratorio, with all its paraphernalia of massive choruses and arias. But Parry's attitude to the form was not one of complaisant acceptance. His preface makes it clear that his main interest lay in ‘popular movements and passions and such results of them as occur a hundred times in history, of which the Israelitish story is one vivid type out of many’. In these works the musical experiences of his youth are sifted. He goes back in order to go forward, reviews the whole position of oratorio, and passes beyond both the conventional religious standpoint and the dramatic attractions of narrative. In the best moments of the two Birmingham works he reaches the epic expression of human feeling. ‘Job’ goes farther. Every convention of oratorio, even the choral finale, is discarded, in order that the one purpose, the growth of the soul through pain, may be traced out in the cry of lamentation, in the answer of the Lord ‘out of the whirlwind’, and in the peaceful peroration for orchestra alone. In the last two scenes of ‘Job’ we have the clue to that long chain of works which was eventually to sum up Parry's thought on the puzzle of life.

Meantime, however, there were busy years in which Parry's responsibilities as director of the Royal College of Music (he had held a professorship there since its inception in 1883), as choragus and subsequently as professor of music at Oxford, and his literary work, all made disastrous inroads on his time for composition. Most of the larger productions of the 'nineties show signs of that hasty workmanship which has seriously damaged Parry's reputation with a generation much concerned about technique, points of effect, and especially orchestration. Even the Symphonic Variations, probably his most successful composition for orchestra alone, has suffered from his carelessness in marking nuances, and certain festival works have sunk into oblivion after one imperfect performance largely on that account. The wonder is that the stream of composition went on comparatively unchecked, and that in the smaller works, from the songs collected in the various series of ‘English Lyrics’ to the ‘Ode to Music’ written for the opening of the new concert hall at the Royal College of Music, there is so much of the same lofty melody and the same sure handling of the voices which are the lovable qualities of Parry's art.

In the year after the South African War, the Royal Choral Society produced at the Albert Hall ‘War and Peace’, a symphonic ode for solo voices, chorus, and orchestra. Parry wrote the words himself (as he had often done—partially at any rate—in the case of previous works) and threw into rough and vigorous verse, suitable to his music, his thoughts on the conflicting passions of war and peace. Musically he rose to his full stature in the treatment of this theme, and it proved to be the precursor of a series of works, which in differing forms address themselves to one or other aspect of the same problem. Several cantatas, produced at a succession of Three Choirs festivals, beginning with ‘Voces Clamantium’ (Hereford, 1903), use the imagery and poetry of the Biblical writers to illustrate his message. Their very titles proclaim it: ‘The Love that casteth out Fear’, ‘The Soul's Ransom’, and ‘Beyond these Voices there is Peace’. Each has compellingly fine musical moments, but each left him feeling that the message ‘Look where thy Hope lies’ was incomplete.

In ‘A Vision of Life’ (Cardiff, 1907) he again wrote his own poem, and wrestled with the same theme, surveying as in a 425