Page:EB1911 - Volume 19.djvu/99

Rh English growth. Through evil report and good report he supported his convictions, and for many years he introduced one English composer after another to a fame which they would have found it hard to gain without his help and that of Sir George Grove, his loyal supporter. In 1862, when Arthur Sullivan had just returned from his studies in Leipzig, his Tempest music was produced at the Crystal Palace, and it is beyond question that it was this success and that of the succeeding works from the same hand which first showed Englishmen that music worth listening to might be produced by an English hand. Sullivan reached the highest point of his achievement in The Golden Legend (1886), his most important contribution to the music of the renaissance. An important part of the Crystal Palace music was that the concerts did not follow, but led, popular taste; the works of Schubert, Schumann and many other great masters were given constantly, and the whole repertory of classical music was gone through, so that a constant attendant at these concerts would have become acquainted with the whole range of the best class of music. From 1859 onwards the classical chamber-music could be heard at the Popular Concerts started by Arthur Chappell, and for many years their repertory was not less catholic than that of the Crystal Palace undertaking; that in later times the habit increased to a lamentable extent of choosing only the “favourite” (i.e. hackneyed) works of the great masters does not lessen the educational value of the older concerts. The lovers of the newer developments of music were always more fully satisfied at the concerts of the Musical Union, a body founded by John Ella in 1844, which lasted until 1880. From 1879 onwards the visits of Hans Richter, the conductor, were a feature of the musical season, and the importance of his work, not only in spreading a love of Wagner’s music, but in regard to every other branch of the best orchestral music, cannot be exaggerated. Like the popular concerts, the Richter concerts somewhat fell away in later years from their original purpose, and their managers were led by the popularity of certain pieces to give too little variety. The importance of Richter’s work was in bringing forward the finest English music in the years when the masters of the renaissance were young and untried. Here were to be heard the orchestral works of Sir Hubert Parry, Sir Charles Villiers Stanford, Sir A. Campbell Mackenzie and Dr F. H. Cowen; and the names of these composers were thus brought into notice much more effectually than could have been the case in other surroundings. Meanwhile outside London the work of the renaissance was being carried on, notably at Cambridge, where by the amalgamation of various smaller societies with the University Musical Society, Stanford created in 1875 a splendid institution which did much to foster a love of the best music for many years; and at Oxford, where private meetings in the rooms of Hubert Parry brought about the institution of the Musical Club, which has borne fruit in many ways, though only in the direction of chamber-music. The Bach Choir, founded by Mr Arthur Duke Coleridge in 1875, and conducted for the first ten years of its existence by Mr Otto Goldschmidt and subsequently by Professor Stanford, worked on purely uncommercial lines ever since its foundation, and besides many important works of Bach, it brought forward most important compositions by Englishmen, and had a prominent share in the work of the renaissance. Parry’s earlier compositions had a certain austerity in them which, while it commanded the homage of the cultivated few, prevented their obtaining wide popularity; and it was not until the date of his choral setting of Milton’s Ode at a Solemn Musick that he found his true vein. In this and its many successors, produced at the autumn festivals, though very rarely given in London, there was a nobility of utterance, a sublimity of conception, a mastery of resource, that far surpass anything accomplished in England since the days of Purcell; while his “Symphonic Variations” for orchestra, and at least two of his symphonies, exhibit his command of the modern modifications of classical forms in great perfection. Like Parry, Stanford first caught the ear of the public at large with a choral work, the stirring ballad-setting of Tennyson’s Revenge; and in all his earlier and later works alike, which include compositions in every form, he shows himself a supreme master of effect; in dramatic or lyrical handling of voices, in orchestral and chamber-music, his sense of beauty is unfailing, and while his ideas have real distinction, his treatment of them is nearly always the chief interest of his works. The work of the musical renaissance has been more beneficially fostered by these two masters than by any other individuals, through the medium of the Royal College of Music. In 1876 the National Training School of Music was opened with Sullivan as principal; he was succeeded by Sir John Stainer in 1881, and the circumstance that such artists as Mr Eugen d’Albert and Mr Frederic Cliffe received there the foundation of their musical education is the only important fact connected with the institution, which in 1882 was succeeded by the Royal College of Music, under the directorship of Sir George Grove, and with Parry and Stanford as professors of composition. In 1894 Parry succeeded to the directorship, and before and after this date work of the best educational kind was done in all branches of the art, but most of all in the important branch of composition. Mackenzie’s place among the masters of the renaissance is assured by his romantic compositions for orchestra—such as La Belle dame sans merci and the two “Scottish Rhapsodies”; some of his choral works, such as the oratorios, show some tendency to fall back into the conventionalities from which the renaissance movement was an effort to escape; but in The Cottar’s Saturday Night; The Story of Sayid; Veni, Creator Spiritus, and many other things, not excepting the opera Colomba or the witty “Britannia” overture, he shows no lack of spontaneity or power. As principal of the Royal Academy of Music (he succeeded Macfarren in 1888) he revived the former glories of the school, and the excellent plan by which it and the Royal College unite their forces in the examinations of the Associated Board is largely due to his initiative. The opera just mentioned was the first of the modern series of English operas brought out from 1883 onwards by the Carl Rosa company during its tenure of Drury Lane Theatre: at the time it seemed as though English opera had a chance of getting permanently established, but the enterprise, being a purely private and individual one, failed to have a lasting effect upon the art of the country, and after the production of two operas by Mackenzie, two by Arthur Goring Thomas, one by F. Corder, two by Cowen and one by Stanford, the artistic work of the company grew gradually less and less important. In spite of the strong influence of French ideals and methods, the music of Arthur Goring Thomas was remarkable for individuality and charm; in any other country his beautiful opera Esmeralda would have formed part of the regular repertory; and his orchestral suites, cantatas and a multitude of graceful and original songs, remain as evidence that if his career had been prolonged, the art of England might have been enriched by some masterpiece it would not willingly have let die. After a youth of extraordinary precocity, and a number of variously successful attempts in the more ambitious and more serious branches of the art, Cowen found his chief success in the treatment of fanciful or fairy subjects, whether in cantatas or orchestral works; here he is without a rival, and his ideas are uniformly graceful, excellently treated and wonderfully effective. His second tenure of the post of conductor of the Philharmonic Society showed him to be a highly accomplished conductor.

In regard to English opera two more undertakings deserve to be recorded. In 1891 the Royal English Opera House was opened with Sullivan’s Ivanhoe, a work written especially for the occasion; the absence of anything like a repertory, and the retention of this one work in the bills for a period far longer than its attractions could warrant, brought the inevitable result, and shortly after the production of a charming French comic opera the theatre was turned into the Palace Music Hall. The charming and thoroughly characteristic Shamus O’Brien of Stanford was successfully produced in 1896 at the Opéra Comique theatre. This work brought into public prominence the conductor Mr Henry J. Wood (b. 1870), who exercised a powerful influence on the art of the country by means of his orchestra, which was constantly to be heard at the Queen’s Hall, and which attained, by continual performance together, a degree of perfection before unknown in England. It achieved an important work in bringing music within the reach of all classes at the Promenade Concerts given through each summer, as well as by means of the Symphony Concerts at other seasons.

The movement thus started by Mr Wood increased and spread remarkably in later years. His training of the Queen’s Hall Orchestra was characterized by a thoroughness and severity previously unknown in English orchestras. This was partly made possible by the admirable business organization which fostered the movement in its earlier years; so many concerts were guaranteed that it was possible to give the players engagements which included a large amount of rehearsing. The result was soon apparent, not only in the raising of the standard of orchestral playing, but also in the higher and more intelligent standard of criticism to which performances were subjected both by experts and by the general public. The public taste in London for symphonic music grew so rapidly as to encourage the establishment of other bodies of players, until in 1910 there were five first-class professional orchestras giving concerts regularly in London—the Philharmonic Society, the Queen’s Hall Orchestra, the London Symphony Orchestra (described by Dr Hans Richter as “the finest orchestra in the world”), the New Symphony Orchestra under Mr Landon Ronald (b. 1873), a composer and conductor of striking ability, and Mr Thomas Beecham’s Orchestra. Mr Beecham, who had come rapidly to the front as a musical enthusiast and conductor, paid special attention to the work of British composers. Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool and Edinburgh, had their own orchestras; and it might be said that the whole of the United Kingdom was now permeated with a taste for and a knowledge of orchestral music. The effect of this development has influenced the whole of the musical life of England. The symphony and the symphonic poem have taken the place so long held by the oratorio in popular taste; and English composers of any merit or ability find it possible to get a hearing for orchestral work which at the end of the 19th century would have had to remain unperformed and unheard. The result has been the rapid development of a school of English orchestral composers—a school of considerable achievement and still greater promise.

The new school of English writers contains many names of skilled composers. Sir Edward Elgar established his reputation by his vigorous Caractacus and the grandiose imaginings of his Dream of Gerontius, as by orchestral and chamber compositions of