When the centenary of the Royal Musical Association
was celebrated in April 1974 by a concert at the Royal College of Music,
in which substantial chamber works by Stanford, Parry and Mackenzie
were heard, there was something of a stir at the quality of the music
that had been disinterred. A concert subsequently broadcast on BBC Radio
Three, it was for many the beginning of a revaluation of Victorian chamber
music, an art which had previously been largely regarded as non-existent
by all except the knowledgeable few. It is a revaluation that even now
has not developed to cover the span of the potential repertoire, but
has rather been founded on the enthusiasm of individual commentators
and performers, particularly those investigating Sterndale Bennett,
Parry, to some extent Stanford, and those who came after. By surveying
the period I hope I can suggest lines of investigation to performing
groups wanting something new to explore.
In fact in the last few years investigation of this
repertoire has indeed swung to performers who, anxious to find interesting
new repertoire for CD seem to have become very receptive to works that
only a few years ago would have been condemned, usually unheard, as
boring or old hat. Recent recordings of extended chamber works by Stanford
and his pupils Coleridge Taylor and William Hurlstone have underlined
how much fine music still awaits investigation. The recent appearance
of an enjoyable example of a typical score, hitherto little known, is
Stanford’s Piano Quartet No 1 of 1879, highlights the issue. (ASV CDDCA
1056) We will come to it later as we explore the music of the nineteenth
century in chronological sequence.
Our view of chamber music, and of chamber music by
British composers in particular, has been largely focussed by that enthusiastic
amateur Walter Wilson Cobbett, whose monumental Cyclopedic Survey
of Chamber Music encapsulated a lifetime’s interest and participation
in the medium. It is worth remembering that although his book appeared
in 1929, Cobbett was born in 1847, and so he was writing from first-hand
knowledge of much of the period, as far as British music is concerned,
and he was largely espousing what to him was contemporary music. And
Cobbett was a great champion of the then new. Thomas F Dunhill, in his
Cyclopedia article on ‘British Chamber Music’ was presumably
expressing Cobbett’s views when he wrote: ‘The musical production of
this country is vastly greater than it was thirty or even twenty years
ago, and there is infinitely more variety of thought and style in the
work which is now being produced than can be observed in any previous
period of our musical history.’ (I, 197)
My principal purpose here is to survey the second half
of the nineteenth century, and furthermore only in respect to works
for three instruments or more. If one takes the solo and duet sonata
into our remit the story would widen enormously. However, first I think
I should briefly paint the earlier background of the first half of the
19th century, to give the story a context.
It is said that the first string quartet by a British
composer was Samuel Wesley’s Quartet in Eb, written in his mid-forties,
so probably dating from around 1810. It provides us a starting point:
a British composer demonstrating himself part of the European tradition
of his day and capable, if only briefly, to take its place in a music
party perhaps organised by his friend Vincent Novello. Fortunately it
is twice recorded on CD so we are able to experience it for ourselves.
(Redcliffe RR 013; Hyperion
CDA 66780).
We need to find a reference point to illuminate the
repertoire in the first two or three decades of the century, and, given
that my principal interest is the period after 1850, I think we can
conveniently find it in the programmes of the Philharmonic, later Royal
Philharmonic, Society. The Philharmonic was founded in 1813 and the
early programmes are largely of what we now think of as chamber music,
together with vocal numbers. They provide us with a useful conspectus
of then favourite works and current styles. Over the years increasing
numbers of orchestral and choral works appeared at the Philharmonic
until by the early 1840s concerts had evolved into a format that we
would recognise today. I have been through the early programmes of the
Philharmonic and I have to report that very few British works appear,
but those that do are a useful pointer to prevailing styles. Thus between
1813 and 1822 just seven extended British chamber works were played.
In the concert of the 2nd season, in 1814, J B Cramer’s Piano
Quintet was the sole native composition. By this date Cramer, the London
public’s ‘glorious John’, and one of England’s most notable keyboard
players, was 43 and as well as a leading pianist was a music publisher,
teacher and composer, with an enormously wide circle of musical acquaintances
and contacts. One presumes he was asked to write a piece as one of the
founders of the Philharmonic Society. In the fifth concert in 1816,
Cipriani Potter’s Sestet for piano, flute & strings, Op 11, was
featured with the 23-year old composer making his debut at the keyboard
and with the celebrated bass player Dragonetti playing the double bass
part.
The cast of characters then active becomes even less
familiar to us today, for over the next four seasons new works by George
Eugene Griffin and the cellist Robert Lindley were heard. In 1817 it
was Griffin’s Piano Quartet; in 1818 Lindley’s string Trio; and in 1819
Lindley’s Trio for violin with two cellos. Later in the 1819 season
Griffin’s String Quartet is one of the first concert appearances in
the nineteenth century of a string quartet by a contemporary British
composer.
At the end of the first decade, Miles Birkett Foster
in his history of the Philharmonic gives us one of his characteristic
tables - showing the nationality of the composers represented in the
concerts - they were from Austria, the British Empire, France, German
Empire, Hungary and Bohemia, Italy, Portugal, Spain - and the music
was analysed with the number of composers from each territory, symphonies,
overtures, concertos, chamber music, miscellaneous, vocal total of compositions.
From this we are told that 964 woks were performed of which 560 were
short vocal numbers. Of the total number of 99 chamber works performed
only 11 were categorised as being by British Empire composers.
Later, during the Philharmonic’s second decade even
fewer British works are heard, and the programmes were gradually changing
as works for larger forces came to predominate. Thus at the end of the
second decade (1823-32) we have a much smaller number of composers having
been represented - 227 - of which 25 are from the British Empire but
only 3 British works are categorised as chamber music.
J B Cramer is now the only British composer represented
by chamber music, and one of very few British composers included at
all. In 1832 Cramer’s Piano Quintet - his first quintet - was programmed
with Dragonetti again taking the double bass part and Robert Lindley
as cellist. The following year Cramer’s Second Piano Quintet, a Philharmonic
Society commission, is given and is repeated in the following season.
Modern performances of the Cramer quintets would be of considerable
interest - the Quintet Op 69 was published by Probst of Leipzig, possibly
in 1826 and there is a copy in the Bodleian Library Oxford. The autograph
manuscript of the Quintet in Bb of 1832 is in the Royal Philharmonic
Society collection currently the subject of an appeal for the British
Library to purchase it (Loan 4/RPS MS 1021).
However, in 1832 the return of John Field from Moscow
was celebrated by him performing his then unknown Fourth Piano Concerto.
Patrick Piggott tell us that on this occasion Field substituted the
‘Pastorale in A major’ from his Deuxieme Divertissement for Piano
and string quartet first published in 1811. While the concerto seems
to have been regarded as old fashioned by the 1830s audience, according
to contemporary criticism they were not averse to that, and the ‘Pastorale’
was described as ‘exceedingly delicious, and excited a unanimous encore’.
Incidentally, while not in the current CD catalogue it was recorded
by Lamar Crowson and the Allegri String Quartet for The History of
Music in Sound (Volume VIII, HLP 21) and in its limpid simplicity
and fluid piano writing it usefully provides us a reference point in
the world of the London Piano School.
Geoffrey Bush in his survey of British chamber music
in the nineteenth century reminds us that ‘in the first part of the
[nineteenth] century, chamber-music making was principally a domestic
affair. In higher society it was dominated by the piano, played almost
invariably by ladies . . . the string quartet party, popular in the
later eighteenth century, was maintained here and there in the nineteenth,
especially in circles led by professional musicians . . . or in middle-class
families . . . at Leeds in the 1830s there were [quote]"at least
a dozen of our first and most influential families at which weekly quartet
meetings were held". The atmosphere at such gatherings was serious
and intense, the players dedicated; but it is not surprising that the
chief fare was the music of the Viennese classics.’
Nicholas Temperley, in his doctoral thesis, investigated
the instrumental music of the first half of the century, and cited the
Society for British Musicians, an organisation largely founded on Royal
Academy of Music circles, which between 1834 and 1850 saw the performance
of some 77 works. Possibly for our purposes those which would most reward
performance are the Mozartian String Quartet in C minor by Henry Bishop
of 1816, and the more Beethovenian Cipriani Potter’s three Grand Trios
Op 12, the first a particularly useful repertoire piece as it is optionally
for clarinet, bassoon and piano.
We start our survey proper, and Victorian chamber music,
with Cipriani Potter’s pupil William Sterndale Bennett (1816-1875).
Bennett was the pre-eminent British composer of his generation, but
was only really on fire creatively in his early years before the demands
of administration and performance seem to have exhausted him. Bennett
was a celebrated child prodigy, and in the 1830s he came to fame performing
his own Piano Concertos, the first making a sensation when the composer
was sixteen. He was invited to Windsor to perform it before William
IV, and was befriended by the young Mendelssohn, seven years his senior,
and hailed a considerable talent by both Mendelssohn and Schumann. In
our history of chamber music, Sterndale Bennett’s Sextet in F# minor,
dating from 1935, is surely the link between the new and the old, a
work usefully recorded on CD by Marco Poco (8.223304). Later in the
1840s Sterndale Bennett sponsored his Classical Chamber Concerts in
London, but this Sextet could well be equated another piano concerto,
coming between the third and fourth concertos proper.
Sterndale Bennett’s so-called Chamber Trio,
Op 26, dating from 1839 and written at the age of 23, came at the climax
of that brief creative period to which he never really returned. This
is one of the very few chamber works by a British composer to remain
in the repertoire throughout the nineteenth century, and a BBC broadcast
a few years ago, and more recently a sparkling performance at the Royal
College of Music, underlined its achievement. Claire Nelson, in her
excellent note for that occasion, characterised the music as being very
much of the English School of his day, deriving from Clementi and Cramer,
but as I wrote in News at the time ‘in the hall the flavour of
Mendelssohn was over-powering’. A delightful and tuneful work, it would
surely find a ready audience if it were played more frequently. Now,
it is possible to take a very superficial approach to British chamber
music of the nineteenth century, evoking it all in terms of other composers.
Thus it is first ‘Mozartian’, later it becomes ‘Mendelssohnian’, then
‘Schumanesque’, later ‘Brahmsian’. Certainly composers wrote in the
lingua franca of their day and Sterndale Bennett in 1839 was no exception.
What is not open to argument is the fluency and quality of what he produced.
In Geoffrey Bush’s phrase, Sterndale Bennett’s pre-eminence
as a composer is ‘emphasised by the flatness of the surrounding countryside’.
This brings us to the one composer with a significant body of work who
remains an enigma. Sir George Alexander Macfarren. Born the same year
as Wagner, 1813, he became Professor of Music at Cambridge in 1875 and
principal of the Royal Academy of Music, though at the end of his life
he became blind. No composer of major reputation has ever suffered so
complete an eclipse as Macfarren, in his day referred to as ‘the English
Beethoven’, and although two of his symphonies have recently been recorded,
his music, and certainly his extensive chamber music has not been heard
in public since the nineteenth century. It seems probable that some
of his music has not come down to us, yet his Second String Quartet
was published by Kistner in 1846, his Piano Quintet by Schott in 1856,
and a Trio for piano, flute and cello was published by Rudall Carte
in later years. Cobbett was uncharacteristically dismissive, writing
in 1929: ‘truth compels me to state that his works . . . are already
obsolete. Though I have not heard any of them myself, I understand from
competent critics that they display good musicianship, but very little
charm.’ I think we have to note that in MacFarren’s six quartets, his
Piano Quintet in G minor of 1843 and a Romanza and Allegro for piano
trio, we have a body of work by a figure distinguished in his day, and
that as far as we can trace it, urgently requires assessment in performance.
We were looking at the showing of British chamber music
in the programmes of leading concert series of the day. John Ella founded
the Musical Union in 1845 where he soon asserted ‘that there exists
no society in France, Belgium, Italy, or Germany where Chamber Instrumental
Music is better understood and appreciated’. Looking through the programmes
of the first five seasons one is again struck by the absence of British
composers, and only in the fifth concert of the second season, for 2
June 1846, do we find with the Mozart Quintet in G minor the Piano Trio
No 3 by Osborne (and also Onslow’s quintet in A minor who is claimed
as British). Osborne was the Irish-born pianist George Alexander Osborne.
Onslow, among substantial chamber music also wrote a Quintet for piano,
wind and double bass and a Septet (recorded on Jecklin JD 554-2), and
became enormously popular for his piano pieces. Onslow is almost the
only composer of his day whose has been extensively recorded on CD,
making a strong case for performance.
Various performing organisation began to emerge to
give concerts of chamber music; these included Joseph Dando’s string
quartet concerts and the Society of British Musicians who included a
Piano Trio and Piano Quartet by Charles Stephens (1821-92) and Edward
Loder’s string quartets, which now appear to be lost. Loder, of course,
the composer of the opera Raymond & Agnes which was revived
at Cambridge in the mid-1960s. However, if we want to listen to representative
examples of British chamber music of this period we have to turn to
a Sterndale Bennett pupil - F Edward Bache, who unfortunately died young.
We are probably more familiar with his brother Walter Bache who was
a great champion in England of the music of Liszt. Edward Bache’s Piano
Trio in D minor, Op 25, dates from the mid-1850s and was published posthumously
by Kistner in Leipzig with a dedication to the celebrated pianist Arabella
Goddard. Like the Sterndale Bennett Trio this has enjoyed a BBC revival
and proved to be a little gem, well worth the attention of groups looking
to expand their repertoire of this period; very much young man’s music,
it underlines what was lost when Bache died soon after its composition.
Among Sterndale Bennett pupils who wrote chamber music
we should also note a woman composer, Alice Mary Meadows White formerly
Alice Mary Smith, with no less than four piano quartets and three string
quartets. I have not heard them, but here we need to exercise some caution
for Nigel Burton, in the Women’s Grove, warns us of her ‘pallid and
anachronistic harmonic idiom’. Yet the slow movement of her Clarinet
Sonata (also orchestrated as Concerto) played by a competitor during
the BMS’s Wind competition was a most enjoyable discovery, and speaking
personally, performances would be a worthwhile practical step.
There is one other figure from the 1860s we need to
mention, just in passing. This is Frederick Gore Ousley, the Reverend
Sir Frederick Arthur Gore Ouseley, Bart., successor to Sir Henry Bishop
as Professor of Music in the University of Oxford, Warden of St Michael’s
College, Tenbury, and much more besides. His two Mozartian string quartets
date from 1868 and were viewed as antiquarian even in their day, but
would perhaps be worth investigating now.
We need to try to approach this repertoire with Victorian
ears, not with reference to the works that followed thirty and forty
years later. A case in point is the Mackenzie Piano Quartet in Eb, written
in 1874 and published by Kahnt of Leipzig almost immediately, when the
composer was 27. In his autobiography A Musician’s Narrative
Mackenzie tells how von Bülow had picked up a copy of the newly
published score in Leipzig, and enthusiastically programmed it at Munich
and Hanover. Stephen Banfield, in an article written before the RMA
revival in 1974, remarked that Mackenzie’s early works came as a welcome
breath of fresh air in Britain in the 1870s Perhaps we hear it at its
best in the rhythmic finale.
Mackenzie brings us to Parry and Stanford. There is
no doubt of the impact of Stanford and Parry in the late 1870s and early
80s, but they were viewed differently. Stanford’s chamber music, as
exemplified by his first substantial score, the first Piano Quartet,
is as we have already noted, a striking and energetic 27 year-old writing
in the lingua franca of the day. Parry on the other hand, at
least on the evidence of his chamber music, appeared as a much more
avant garde figure, and upset a few commentators. Lets look at Stanford
first.
From an intellectual middle-class protestant Dublin
family, Charles Villiers Stanford was musical from an early age. His
father, a distinguished lawyer, played the cello and sang, and Stanford
grew up in a cultured circle at the high-point of the Victorian age;
before he was ten he had heard the celebrated soprano Titiens singing
his childhood setting of Mary Queen of Scots’ prayer ‘O Domine Jesu’.
After Cambridge, where he became a choral scholar at
Queen’s College, and was appointed organist of Trinity at the age of
21, he went to Germany for 1874-76 to study music, at first with Reinecke
in Leipzig, later with Kiel in Berlin. Personally acquainted with Brahms,
Stanford wrote and spoke German fluently. It is worth hearing Kiel’s
then new First Piano Quintet in A major, Op 75, once recorded on Marco
Polo (8.223171), with which Stanford must have surely been familiar
when he was in Berlin. (There are also three piano trios recorded by
the Genberg Trio on Schwann (367382) and the Fifth Piano Trio on Tacet
TACET 91.) This is the idiom which we tend to refer to as ‘Brahmsian’.
My title for this article comes from Stanford’s Musical
Composition, a ‘short treatise for students’ first published in
1911 and dedicated ‘In grateful memory of the masters who taught me’.
Stanford writes: ‘In chamber music it is still less possible to rely
on colour as superior to design. It bears the same relation to orchestral
treatment that water-colours do to oils. The texture and the mediums
are thinner, the flaws of workmanship are all the more obvious.’ Later
Stanford writes: ‘The main principle to grasp in string-quartet writing
is the importance of providing plenty of rests. A quartet might almost
answer to the Irishman’s description of a net, as a ‘lot of holes held
together by string’.
Apart from early sonatas for cello and for violin,
the [First] Piano Quartet was Stanford’s first chamber work, and by
a curious coincidence it shares the same opus number and year of composition
as Faure’s First Piano Quartet, perhaps providing us with a useful measure
against which to judge it and what follows. Stanford’s failing in his
later chamber music has been said to be his excessive reverence for
classical models, perhaps most notable in his middle period string quartets,
yet in these early examples there is a youthful freshness and confidence,
a relishing of the medium, in which the composer is seeming to say ‘look
at me - this is how it is done’. To understand the impact of this music
on Stanford’s German friends, one has to remember that despite the works
we have already discussed, for all practical purposes there was practically
no distinctively British chamber music repertoire until Stanford and
Parry both started to write such works. This at once celebrated their
personal development, but it also signalled the wider development of
an art-form which, within thirty or forty years, would see established
a significant repertoire of British chamber music.
I think we need to say a little more about Stanford’s
First Piano Quartet, which self-evidently blew like a gale in the stuffy
world of British chamber music in the 1870s. Dated ‘April 1879’ on the
printed score, it was quickly published in Berlin by Bote & Bock.
The music is dedicated to Ernst Frank, five years older than Stanford
and a close friend of Brahms, with ‘freundschaftlichst gewidmet’. From
Cambridge, Stanford wrote to Frank, then Kapelmeister at the Frankfurt
Stadt-Theater, seeking to submit his first opera The Veiled Prophet
of Khorassan, and when they met in the late summer of 1878 Stanford
recalled ‘invaluable help in the reconstruction of some of the scenes’.
Later Frank succeeded von Bülow as Director of Court Music in Hamburg,
where he staged the opera in 1881. Stanford’s musical ‘thank you’ probably
dates from Frank’s first words of assistance. ‘He was ever-ready to
encourage and, if he believed in his man, to act’ remarked Stanford
later.
There is surely no more piquant paradox than the
received impression of Parry in the nineteen sixties as a notable
reactionary, and his actual youthful radicalism. Parry’s early music,
particularly his chamber music, was soon forgotten, and even in the
1890s as Grove’s successor as Director at the RCM he must have appeared
to the younger generation as a very establishment figure. As Bax wrote
in his autobiography ‘I should not be surprised to learn that he was
even in the position to present livings to vicars . . . such conservatism
as Parry’s does not propagate works of searching imagination’. Yet,
thanks to the work of Jeremy Dibble, if we look at Parry in the late
1870s, a period in which his chamber music predominates, we find a progressive
whose search for a viable personal style was fully abreast of the leading
composers of the day. Thanks to his teacher Edward Dannreuther Parry
was exposed to a catholic repertoire guided by a radical musician, one
of the leading concert pianists of the day, whose semi-private concerts
at Orme Square in Bayswater were a notable musical centre in their day.
How wonderful to be able to write in one’s diary, as
Parry did in May 1877, ‘there was a goodly company of artistic folk
to meet Wagner who was in great fettle and talked to an open-mouthed
group in brilliant fashion’, and then when Wagner was rehearsing his
own music Parry wrote ‘sat with George Eliot and Madame Wagner’. Yet
Parry worked hard to solve formal and textural problems he set himself,
this was real artistic pioneering, grappling with an ideas which only
slowly satisfied Parry. One has the impression that when we compare
Stanford’s early chamber works at about the same date that they had
flowed easily and fluently.
Parry had earlier submitted his work to George Macfarren
who in the mid-1870s had a considerable reputation as a composer-teacher.
I can only refer you to Dibble account of this time in his book on Parry
(122-3) but in essence Macfarren could not reconcile himself to Parry’s
‘unwarrantable progressions and un-authenticated treatment of form’.
Parry wrote three piano trios. His first, the Trio
in E minor of 1878 saw him growing in confidence in writing a substantial
work. Parry’s Piano Trio in E minor was begun during the 1877 Wagner
festival, with which, as we have seen, Parry was closely involved. Subsequently
revised, it was first performed at one of Dannreuter’s private concerts
at Orme Square in January 1878, and after two further performances it
was published by Breitkopf und Härtel in 1879. The opening of the
slow movement must have signalled to its early admirers a bold new voice.
However, here Parry - who after all had once wanted to study with Brahms
- was certainly turning to Brahms for a model. By the time of the second
and third trios in 1884 and 1889/90 he had become an established figure,
and the Second Trio - in B minor - was briefly, almost popular, published
and indeed reprinted.
We do not have to take these on trust for we have the
Deakin Piano Trio’s fine recordings on Meridian, but we should also
remember the String Quintet (with two violas) of 1884 which is yet to
be revived, though it was once published by Novello. But of all Parry’s
chamber works it is the Piano Quartet, the work heard at that RMA concert
in 1974, that so excited interest, and is surely Parry’s early masterpiece.
Again this is a case in point when it is difficult for us today to appreciate
how modern this must have sounded when it was first performed. When
it was given at a Monday Popular Concert in December 1883 it had a thin
audience, critics clearly seeing an avant garde work frightening them
away. The Musical Times excused Parry by writing ‘No fault can
attach to him for adhesion to the modern school of writing if, as there
is no reason to doubt, his principles are sincere. The composer from
whom most of his inspiration in the present instance is undoubtedly
Brahms, but in some respects he has gone beyond his model . . . Mr Parry
merges subjects and details together with irritating persistence . .
. [and] is not afraid to obey the dictates of his own inner consciousness
. . .’. The Parry Piano Quartet was one of the first, if not
the first, contemporary British chamber work to be published by Novello
when it appeared in 1884.
I am surprised that no one has yet attempted a study
of the role and reputation of the music education establishment in Germany
for British composers and musicians in the nineteenth century, and the
associated phenomenon of the British expatriate musical communities
in Germany during the same time, indeed up to the First World War. It
was certainly the ambition of almost all significant figures in British
music during the first eight or nine decades of the nineteenth century
to study in Germany. Elgar wanted to go to Leipzig, Parry wanted to
study with Brahms. Neither realised their ambition. Delius only arrived
at Leipzig after he had developed as a man and musician in the United
States, while the young Percy Grainger and his contemporaries now known
as the Frankfurt Gang all enrolled at Frankfurt-am-Main at the turn
of the century.
I would like briefly to touch on an interesting window
on this educational hegemony, in the case of the young Ethel Smyth at
Leipzig, which has a direct relevance to our study of chamber music.
Ethel Smyth vividly records her love of a Germany then vanishing, and
her not always flattering impressions of German musical education, in
her book Impressions that Remained, which is required reading.
‘At the time I signed on as a pupil of the Conservatorium’, wrote Smyth
‘that institution was merely trading on its Mendelssohnian reputation,
though of course we in England did not know that. . . . The lessons
with Reinecke were rather a farce; he was one of those composers who
turn out music by the yaerd without effort or inspiration . . . At first
I was astonished at the lack of musical enthusiasm among my fellow students;
gradually I came to realise these girls and boys had come there merely
to qualify for teachers’ certificates, and certainly whatever flame
may have been in their bosom to start with was bound to burn low in
the atmosphere of superficiality and indifference our masters distilled.
The glorious part was the rest of musical life, the concerts and the
Opera.’ (pp 164-5)
From her arrival in Leipzig in the summer of 1877,
Ethel Smyth produced a stream of music. She was very much in the Brahms
circle and when Sir George Grove was writing the programme notes for
the first British performance of Brahms Violin Concerto on 22 February
1879 he wrote: ‘the writer begs to express his thanks to Miss Ethel
Smyth, of Leipsic, for the above analysis and quotations, which in the
inevitable difficulty of obtaining the MS score he would otherwise have
been unable to give’. Smyth also made a piano transcription of the first
movement of Brahms Second Symphony in the late 1870s presumably before
it was published.
What sort of music did Smyth write as a result of this
immersion in German musical culture? Possibly the best example of her
early chamber music is the String Quintet of 1883, to which she gave
the Opus number 1, so presumably she was proud of it. It was so well
regarded at the time that it was published by Peters in 1884, and its
revival at last year’s Lichfield Festival revealed a delightful and
sunny score. We have already mentioned Alice Mary Smith among women
composers, and two more names can be added here, Dora Bright with her
Piano Quartet in D dating from 1893, and Rosalind Ellicott with a String
Quartet and 2 Piano Trios, the second of which in D minor, a big piece,
has just been recorded by the Summerheyes Trio for Meridian.
But this is to rush on. We now find ourselves in
the early 1880s, and I think it would be useful to try to take a sounding
of how the chamber music repertoire by British composers might have
looked then. For this I have compiled what I hope might be a useful
yardstick of the British chamber music of the mid-nineteenth century.
This is taken from the ‘Catalogue of Works performed at the Monday Popular
Concerts between 14 February 1859 and 4 April 1887’. Scanning this catalogue
and ignoring duet and instrumental sonatas we come up with the following,
only eight composers being featured in 1000 concerts over nearly 30
years.
CHAMBER MUSIC BY BRITISH COMPOSERS
performed at the Monday Popular Concerts
14 February 1859 - 4 April 1887
(Works listed in the period they were first performed)
From the decade 1859-69:
STERNDALE BENNETT:Piano Trio in A major 25/4/59; 2/3/1867;
14/3/70; 4/4/70; 15/2/75; 14/2/76
E J LODER: String Quartet No 6 in D major 25/4/59
MACFARREN: Piano Quintet in G minor 25/4/59
Piano Trio in E major 9/4/60
1870-79:
BALFE: Piano Trio in A major 17/3/77
STERNDALE BENNETT: Piano Sextet in F sharp minor, Op
8: 31/1/76; 21/1/82; 29/11/86.
1880-87:
F W DAVENPORT: Piano Trio in Bb Op 5: 31/1/81; 30/1/82
MACKENZIE: Piano Quartet in Eb 5/12/81; 29/11/84
PARRY: Piano Quartet in Ab 3/12/83
STANFORD: Piano Quintet Op 25 26/3/87
(Source: Catalogue of Works performed at the Monday
Popular Concerts between 14 February 1859 and 4 April 1887. London:
Monday Popular Concerts, 1887)
The repertoire is growing but only slowly, and in the
nineteenth century earlier successes tended not to remain in currency.
However, we should note how Sterndale Bennett is the most performed
composer, but how the Chamber Trio faded after he died, though the Sextet
was still heard in the 1880s. Some of the other names we have already
touched on, but I should just sketch in Francis William Davenport born
in 1847 who was MacFarren’s son in law and Professor of Harmony and
Composition at the Royal Academy of Music from 1879. His Symphony in
D minor had won the Crystal Palace Symphony Competition in 1876 beating
Stanford’s First Symphony into second place. Davenport produced a once
widely used book on harmony and did not die until 1925, but I have never
seen or heard his music, if it survives, and for us today he has remained
just a name.
The other unknown work which would reward performance
today is the Balfe Trio. When it was given at St James Hall, Balfe was
already dead, but this one-off reflects Balfe’s fluency as the composer
of many operas and works for the theatre, often written in great haste.
With its winning lyricism this is a work, which although outside the
great tradition of nineteenth chamber music, could well find a unique
following if made available again.
Despite Balfe, this account of chamber music written
during the nineteenth century by British composers has had a profoundly
Germanic ring - did we really have to wait for the liberating influence
of Debussy and Ravel before British composers moved on? And there is
one now forgotten figure who I am fortunate to have heard, and so worth
a brief word here. This was the Scottish composer Learmont Drysdale,
who studied at the Royal Academy of Music from 1889, the year in which
he wrote a short Piano Trio in one movement that is notable for its
debt to French models, notably the early chamber music of Faure. The
Drysdale Trio, of course, pre-dates the Faure Trio by nearly 35 years.
There is no doubt that the dominating figures in promoting
the idea of chamber in the 1890s were Stanford and Parry, and as I have
not summarised Stanford’s output we need to do so now. Stanford wrote
his chamber music over a period of more than forty years, and at the
end he was still writing almost in the idiom with which he set out,
though latterly without the youthful impetus which characterises works
such as the First Piano Quartet. Altogether he wrote eight string quartets,
two string quintets, two piano quartets, a piano quintet and three piano
trios. This is not too large a body of work for it all to be presented
in performance in a series, but so far revival has been piecemeal, as
individual groups or artists, looking for new repertoire have championed
one work or another. Only very recently has there been any interest
in the Piano Quintet which, with Stanford as the pianist, was often
played in the 1890s.
Apart from revivals of the piano trios and piano quartets,
we have not heard the earlier string quartets, nor the string quintets
Generally as far as Stanford is concerned, in his chamber music
early seems to be best. The first three string quartets were sufficiently
popular in their day - the mid-1890s - to have been published in miniature
score, and with their winning Schubertian lyricism would surely be worth
exploring again. Of the others the jury is still out, and possibly they
may well exemplify Geoffrey Bush’s criticism when he wrote: ‘unfortunately
chamber music was for Stanford the Holy of Holies, into which nothing
profane or vulgar must be allowed to enter’. The Seventh and Eight Quartets
were broadcast in 1968 and 1974 but for me were disappointingly earth-bound,
fully justifying Bush’s criticism. Yet, all I can say is that, as individual
works are taken up by performing groups, one is generally enthusiastic
at Stanford’s delightful invention and command of a familiar idiom.
A Stanford chamber music cycle is obviously long overdue.
Ten years after his first Piano Quartet, by when Stanford,
in his mid-thirties, was established as a significant name on the British
musical scene, and long-established as a teacher at the Royal College
of Music, he again paid tribute to a leading German musician, in this
case Hans von Bülow, with his [First] Piano Trio. Stanford’s Irish
Symphony had appeared in May 1887, and was an immediate success.
Ensuing performances conducted by von Bülow, in Hamburg and Berlin,
led to a commission for Stanford’s Fourth Symphony. In the year of his
appointment as Professor of Music at Cambridge, in a country and an
age which placed particular status on such matters, Professor
Stanford’s acceptance in Germany saw English music itself honoured.
It was in this climate that the First Piano Trio quickly
followed. Stanford’s three piano trios span his mature career, the Second
following another ten years later, while the Third is an ‘in memoriam’
to friends lost in the First World War. The first Trio’s dedication
to von Bülow reflects the warmth of Stanford’s gratitude to him.
Stanford’s Trio was composed in Cambridge in the early summer of 1889.
It came quickly, the movements dated: 27 May, 29 May, 3 and 17 June.
When Stanford sent it to von Bülow offering the dedication, the
reply came: ‘Good gracious! What wonderful progress your country is
making owing to your genius’, adding that with Brahms’ Third Violin
Sonata (of the year before) it was the best piece of music to have been
inscribed to him. In this Trio we have another allusion to Brahms, when
at the opening there seems to be a parallel between Stanford’s opening
theme and Brahms’s A major Violin Sonata, very much a subject for comment
when it was new.
Stanford’s four-movement Piano Quintet dates from March
1886, when its composer was 33, and in his lifetime it was one of his
most popular chamber works, often with Stanford himself at the piano.
The first performance was at one of Edward Dannreuther’s concerts, and
it was soon taken up by other artists including Hallé at his
chamber concerts. As I wrote in News on its revival at the RCM
on 17 July last year, for us it had become one of the great unknowns
of its period, not heard for many years, possibly since before the war.
‘This is chamber music on a big scale, running a little over 34 minutes.
Expectations were surely tipped in the direction of a Brahmsian work,
but while this is certainly music in the Germanic classical tradition
of its time, expertly crafted and in perfect taste, the opening movement
is much more redolent of Schumann, the spirit of Brahms not emerging
until the finale. This a sunny contented first movement, and Stanford’s
fluency and inventiveness in the medium was doubtless the reason for
the violinist Joachim’s interest, following the composition closely
and taking it up as soon as it was completed. The infexiously jigging
Irish scherzo is pure Stanford, the players bringing an enviable fluency
to its headlong busy-ness. But it is the soaring slow movement where
Stanford writes in his most personal vein, the expressive opening almost
Elgarian in its elegiac expansive line.’ It is good to know that the
Liverpool group LIVE-A-Music have programmed it for the Three Choirs
Fringe at Worcester this year, and hope to play it at Huntingdon Hall
on 10 August.
There is one figure very active in the last two decades
of the nineteenth century of whom we need briefly to take note, as by
a long way he published a catalogue of chamber music significantly larger
than any of his contemporaries. I refer to Algernon Ashton, just a name
today, but active as a composer in his early years almost entirely in
Germany and was able to publish a catalogue (with Hofbauer of Leipzig)
of one hundred published opus numbers by the age of 36, in 1898, including
Piano Trios, Piano Quartets and Quintets, and a large corpus of rather
Schumanesque piano music.
Ashton grew up in Leipzig and studied music there and
at Frankfurt-am-Main. It is fortunate that at least the chamber music
was published, because all Ashton’s orchestral music, still in
manuscript, symphonies and concerti, was destroyed in a fire. Yet Ashton
was long a professor of piano at the RCM (from 1885). Although his was
a backward-looking art, being content to write in very much a received
idiom, possibly the reason for his success with German publishers and
musical public. It would be fascinating to know what Stanford thought
of him. Thus Ashton’s first essays for piano quintet, piano quartet
and piano trio all pre-date Stanford’s similar works, but despite his
position at the RCM and the scale of his published chamber music, he
never integrated into the British musical world, and later did not change
when music itself began to develop in the face of a new generation in
the early years of the twentieth century. In the 1970s I knew a Mr Pettitt
(cannot remember anything more about him) who had inherited all Ashton’s
printed copies of his own music, and he gave me my copy of Hofbauer’s
catalogue, and also loaned me several sets of parts for play-through
sessions, including a very Schumanesque Piano Quintet. I wonder if any
reader might remember him and would be able to locate where his collection
of music is now.
It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the founding
of the RCM in 1883 is the line from which the growth of British chamber
music in the early years of the next century stemmed. Stanford sang
the praises of the Viennese classical school, though he encouraged his
students to keep ‘his ears open and brains alive to all that is going
on round him. The invention of others will often strike sparks out of
himself’. The example of Brahms must have been significant during the
1890s particularly when the celebrated clarinettist Mühlfeld visited
London with the Brahms Clarinet Quintet. It is said that the Clarinet
Quintet, not his only student chamber work, by the young Samuel Coleridge
Taylor was written as a response to Stanford’s challenge to write a
work un-influenced by Brahms. In this case, if we wish to suggest a
model possibly the wraith of Dvorak may occasionally be heard in characteristic
twists of melody and rhythm, but in the closing bars of the finale for
example we find the quite individual sound Coleridge Taylor had achieved.
Coleridge Taylor’s student achievement has recently been brought to
our attention by LIVE-A-Music with their public performance of the Fantasiestücke,
Op 5 and the Piano Quintet in G minor, Op 1, respectively dating from
1895 and 1893, also issued on CD. Unperformed since 1893, the Piano
Quintet is quite a find, signalling the brilliance of Stanford’s pupils
in the nineties and well worth performance today. Hilary Burrage highlights
that this is music influenced both by Schubert and Dvorak, but what
is remarkable about it is the vitality of the invention and command
of the medium demonstrated by Coleridge Taylor at the age of 20. It
will be interesting to hear the Piano Trio, Op 6, part of the coupling
for the Summerheyes Trio’s recording of the Ellicott Trio mentioned
above. Small wonder Coleridge Taylor was Stanford’s favourite pupil
at the time. His achievement underlines the importance of the chamber
music by Stanford’s pupils, which in the early 1900s would include James
Friskin, William Hurlstone and Frank Bridge.
Similarly, the early Sextet for clarinet, horn and
string quartet by John Ireland dating from 1897. In its day it was felt
that that Ireland had succumbed to the influence of Brahms, and this
was possibly the reason why after early performances the composer withheld
the work for the next 65 years. When it was revived at the Arts Council
Drawing Room in St James Square in the early 1960s, it was received
with great enthusiasm and clearly had all the freshness and memorable
invention of a young composer on fire creatively. Ireland had in fact
achieved a living score, and his technical command was surely appreciated
by his teacher Stanford, despite his waspish remarks.
Perhaps the most exciting part of a practical study
of British chamber music is to explore that rich period from the 1890s
to, say, 1910. The jump from Coleridge Taylor’s Clarinet Quintet to
On Wenlock Edge is only 14 years, yet a time which not only
saw an unprecedented stylistic revolution, but the emergence of a remarkably
large number of top line composers. In the middle of this, in retrospect,
we tend to focus on the music of Vaughan Williams, and as the revival
of RVW’s early Piano Quintet has reminded us, while not yet fully mature,
Vaughan Williams’s early chamber works demonstrate this search for an
idiom in a very real way, while being enjoyable in themselves. It is
good to know that they will be recorded by the Nash Ensemble this summer.
I would just like to touch on one final name who made
a big splash in 1900: Donald Francis Tovey, not a College student. Tovey,
with his powerful pianism, encylopaedic knowledge of the repertoire
and commanding intellect was impressive, though his talent was not the
stuff of revolutions. In retrospect Tovey appears to us as an outsider,
in thrall to classical models and prone to produce expertly constructed
music of considerable length and density. But in the early chamber music,
that great intellect is coupled with a youthful passion which can usefully
be illustrated by the Piano Quartet, first heard in 1900, and interestingly
in two movements, the second a set of variations.
From the maturing of the RCM’s first significant intake
of student composers emerged Henry Walford Davies, though a pupil of
Parry rather than Stanford. Hearing Solemn Melody playing from
Westminster Abbey as the coffin of Her Majesty the Queen Mother arrived
there the other day reminded one how popular was Sir Henry Walford Davies
in his day. Once a very familiar figure in British music, a BBC personality
of considerable reputation and wide public following, yet outside the
church his music did not really maintain its currency into the later
part of his life or since. I have only ever heard three of the choral
works on which he built his reputation before the First World War, and
certainly it has been difficult to make any kind of focus on his chamber
music.
Henry Walford Davies was born in 1869 and his musical
education was coloured by his teenage training in the choir of St George’s
Chapel Windsor and his five years as pupil assistant to Walter Parratt.
At the age of 21 a scholarship enabled him to study composition at the
Royal College of Music principally with Parry but also with Stanford.
After five years he joined the staff as teacher of counterpoint.
Walford Davies’s instrumental music is forgotten, and
it is difficult to remember that his early chamber music, written in
the 1890s, ever existed. Yet the manuscripts, in bound volumes, are
now preserved at the Royal College of Music and includes String Quartets
in D and C minor, Piano Quintets in Eb, D minor and C, orchestral works
and many songs. Surely Parry was remembering his own early chamber music,
by then beginning to be forgotten, when he encouraged Walford Davies.
Now this is the sort of thing that one writes and reads in a music dictionary
entry without much further thought. In the case of Walford Davies I
think we need to look at them again and give them an airing, particularly
when we remember that the two violin sonata from the same time were
published by Novello. Among this music there is also a setting of Psalm
23 for tenor, string quartet and harp, and in particular, that wonderful
scena Prospice, words by Browning, for baritone and string quartet,
which perhaps gives us our doorway into Walford Davies’ early chamber
music. This is recorded on CD and shows us a minor masterpiece - if
you do not know it I urge you to explore while it is still available.
While, like Parry, Walford Davies was also in thrall
to Brahms in his chamber music (he even went to Germany to meet him
in 1896 and showed him his music) like his teacher he surely transcended
him. Listen to the wide-spanning imagination and dramatic growth of
his quartet prelude to Prospice, which signals a composer not
only in command of his material but writing urgently from personal experience.
Walford Davies had suffered a life-threatening illness in 1890, and
he gives the opening words of Browning’s poem a unique resonance:
‘Fear death? - to feel the fog in my throat, the mist
in my face . . .’
Between 1900 and 1914 came the influence of the Cobbett
Competitions and the Patron’s fund, and there appeared a glorious library
of chamber music as a new generation of composers found their personal
voices and eclipsed their predecessors. The complete elimination of
the chamber music by several generations of Victorian composers, almost
overnight, was almost as remarkable as the rise of those who followed.
Bax and his contemporaries thought them ghastly dullards, but now that
we can see the span of 150 years after 1800 we can see a continuum which
as styles came and went offers us considerable rewards when we explore
it today. Let me encourage you to explore and I hope I have highlighted
a few possibilities to appeal to all tastes and sympathies.
See
what else is on offer