Nicholas Temperley

INTRODUCTION: THE STATE OF
RESEARCH ON VICTORIAN MUSIC

ANYONE WHO HAS STUDIED VICTORIAN HISTORY OR LITERATURE IS LIKELY TO BE well aware of the presence of music, for it played a prominent part in Victorian life. Yet music has played little part in Victorian studies. This is a fact that needs some explaining. It also needs remedying, and this collection of essays is intended to open up the territory and to encourage further exploration.

The importance of music in Victorian life is easy to demonstrate. We already know how much it meant to writers like Charles Dickens, Alfred Tennyson, Edward Lear, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and George Bernard Shaw. One aspect of music in fiction is treated in this volume by Mary Burgan, while Linda Hughes analyzes a major musical setting of a Tennyson poem. Public figures like Prince Albert, William Gladstone, and Arthur Balfour also attached due importance to music, as did many leaders in other fields like Isambard Kingdom Brunei, William Dyce, and Herbert Spencer. To these names we may add that of John Ruskin, whose musical ideas are explored in William J. Gatens’s essay.

More systematic evidence shows that music was no laggard in the general bigger-and-better trend of the age. The number of music editions copyrighted per year climbed steeply from 151 in 1835 to 8,063 in 1901¹; the number of pianos manufactured yearly rose from 23,000 in 1850 to 75,000 in 1910²; the proportion of London parish churches maintaining choral services increased from under five percent in 1858 to over 38 percent in 1882³; and the number of professional musicians and music teachers grew from about 6,600 in 1841 to about 39,300 in 1901.⁴ Still more significant are the completely new developments originating in that dynamic period: the mass sight-singing movement, musical education in state-supported schools, cheap octavo editions of choral works, colleges of music,⁵ university courses in music (Rainbow, “Music in Education,” pp. 29-34), diploma-granting professional organizations, and the Musical Association (now Royal) for the scholarly study of music.⁶

Music, then, was hardly slighted by the Victorians. But Victorian music has been slighted by scholars and writers of later years. In its forty years of existence, the Journal of the American Musicological Society has never printed an article on any aspect of Victorian music; neither has Acta Musicologica, the journal of the International Musicological Society; neither has the eleven-year-old journal 19th Century Music.⁷ Even the Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association yield only eight historical papers on Victorian subjects in the eighty-seven years since 1901, not counting obituary tributes. Victorian Studies itself, until the Autumn 1986 issue which is the basis of this book, had published only two articles on music in its twenty-nine years.⁸ The first time, to my knowledge, that a panel of speakers on Victorian music was ever assembled at an interdisciplinary conference was at the meeting of the Midwest Victorian Studies Association at Ann Arbor, Michigan, in May 1984. The Institute of Victorian Studies at Leicester University organized the first known conference devoted to Victorian music in September 1979. Scholarly editions of Victorian music, too, are a very recent development.⁹

If music meant so much to the British in the nineteenth century, why has the twentieth shown so little interest in the music they produced? In an attempt to answer this question I must first discuss the scholarly study of music in general—the discipline of musicology. There are two distinct goals in the study of the music (or any other art product) of a period: one for its value in itself, as art; the other for what it may tell us about the culture it represents. The conflict between them runs through the history of musicology and is very much with us today, with its overtones of a larger tension between the humanities and the social sciences.

Musicology is one of the youngest disciplines in the humanities. It is not to be confused with music theory, an ancient field of speculation. Musicology, in its historical phase, arose out of antiquarianism. When people began to feel curious about the music of past ages, they created a demand for experts who could interpret obsolete musical notation and explain early theoretical treatises and instruments. The earliest efforts centered on the music of classical Greece, but the sixteenth-century humanists found insuperable difficulties in resurrecting that defunct art. With the dawn of Romanticism in the eighteenth century, antiquarians began to turn to the music of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Here the English took the lead in developing the necessary knowledge and began to revive early music in both publication and performance well before 1800.¹⁰ The first two general histories of music were also the work of English authors.¹¹ These pioneers were musicians and men of letters; they never dreamed of calling themselves musicologists. It was the Germans who elevated musical scholarship into a distinct discipline (Musikwissenschaft) and developed its theoretical and philosophical framework, and many of its systems and methods. The seminal article for the new discipline was published by Guido Adler a century ago, to open a new journal.¹² British scholars long resisted such codification of their work. Edward Dent, professor of music at Cambridge from 1926 to 1941, is said to have pronounced that “German musicologists write only for other German musicologists”.¹³

The distinction between English and German styles of musical scholarship has been lucidly drawn by Vincent Duckles, who concludes: “The truth of the matter is that Englishmen, in their thought about music, have always taken greater interest in the artistic than in the scientific aspect of their discipline. They have never ceased to regard music as a realm of concrete experience, not a field for philosophical speculation” (Duckles, “Musicology,” p. 484). Suspicion of systems has tended to persist in modern British musicology, although there are exceptions. Thus, we find today that London is the world capital of the movement for historically authentic performance of early music. The kind of scholarship needed for the recovery of music of the Baroque and earlier periods is perfectly suited to the talents and inclinations of the modern British musicologist, who is often a gifted performer as well: such a person as Christopher Hogwood, or the late David Munrow. But when we come to the more methodical study of musical history as a part of social history or the history of ideas, to the systematic study of musical documents, or to the analysis of musical styles, we frequently find that more real progress is being made elsewhere, especially in Germany and the United States. American musicology has inherited both British and German traditions, to its great benefit, but if anything it has leaned towards the German, thanks to the influence of German-trained refugees in the 1930s and 1940s who were the second founders of American musicology.

When nineteenth-century music began to be opened up for scholarly study, the obvious subject matter was the music of genius—of Beethoven, Schubert, Berlioz, Wagner, Verdi. Nineteenth-century music, more than any other, presents itself as a succession of masterpieces of great composers, who reduce their contemporaries to insignificance. It happens that none of these giants were British.¹⁴ Nevertheless, it would have been a natural thing for British scholars to take an interest in the music of their recent forebears, as they have conspicuously in that of the more distant past. If few have done so, it may be partly due to this very tendency to focus on the artifact, described so clearly by Duckles. After all, there is little stimulus to work towards the revival of Victorian music in performance. For one thing, we already know how to perform nineteenth-century music—or we think we do; there are few problems of notation, obsolete instruments, or performing practice that require the intervention of scholars. For another thing, there is already an abundance of first-rate nineteenth-century masterpieces in the standard repertory. So there is little to interest the British scholar who is oriented towards revival of historical music. And if British scholars have not taken a strong lead in the revival of Victorian music in performance, there is the less reason for Continental or American scholars to follow.

It is not surprising, then, that much of the best recent scholarship on Victorian music has been of the kind that does not deal with the performance and critical evaluation of music itself, but with music as a reflection of society; and a good part of this work had been done by American rather than British scholars, and by people who are not musicologists by profession. Three good examples are Donald W. Krummel’s work on music printing and publishing, Martha Vicinus’s on industrial folksong, and William Weber’s on concert life and middle-class values.¹⁵ Among British scholars Bernarr Rainbow has done pioneering work on music education and the sightsinging movement, and Cyril Ehrlich on piano manufacture and more recently on the organization of the musical profession.¹⁶ Good biographical research has been done on Victorian composers such as Edward Elgar, John Stainer, Arthur Seymour Sullivan, and Samuel Sebastian Wesley.¹⁷

But sooner or later it becomes necessary to deal with the music itself: to evaluate Victorian music as art. Naturally this side of the matter is concerned with art music.¹⁸ Popular and functional music, almost by definition, do not invite critical evaluation; instead they are judged by their popularity or their functional utility, as the case may be. The evaluation of Victorian art music has been traditionally negative. Prejudice against serious Victorian music has persisted long after the general reaction against things Victorian peaked and subsided.

Much of this attitude stems from the Victorians themselves. They were prejudiced against native products in music much more than in the other arts. The sobriquet “Das Land ohne Musik,” coined as the title of a German book about Britain (not about British music) published in 1914,¹⁹ was founded squarely on the Victorians’ estimation of themselves. Although some critics like James William Davison championed English art music and asserted its equal status with that of any other nation, they were clearly on the defensive. George Alexander Macfarren, composer, writer, and musical scholar, published an article in the Cornhill Magazine in 1868 expressly to refute the “almost proverbial saying—The English are not a musical people.’”²⁰ Indeed the belief that English music was inferior, or even nonexistent, goes back more than a century before Victoria’s reign, to the overwhelming prestige that Italian music enjoyed in the Augustan age, when the supreme exponent of Italian opera in London was a German, George Frideric Handel. During the nineteenth century Italy maintained its hegemony in opera; in instrumental music and the art song it gave way not to English but to German dominance, while France continued to be the main source for dance music and, later, operetta.

Many countries besides Britain experienced foreign domination of their music, and several in the nineteenth century produced a strong reaction that is known as musical nationalism. One of the first to do so was Germany: composers like Carl Maria von Weber, Robert Schumann, and Richard Wagner devoted much of their energies to establishing German music as the equal or superior of Italian. In this they were supremely successful. Poles, Russians, Czechs, Hungarians, Norwegians, and Spaniards also looked for what was distinctive in the music of their own cultures and emphasized it in their compositions, building styles based on recognizable and colorful rhythms, scales, and instruments of their nations’ folk song and dance. Musical nationalism was often linked with political independence movements, and, like them, was not truly a phenomenon of the “folk,” but of intellectuals of the professional classes and the civil service. Frédéric Chopin, exiled in Paris from his native Poland, which was under oppressive Russian occupation, vented his patriotism in mazurkas, polonaises, and Polish songs. Later, in Russia itself, Modest Mussorgsky and Alexander Borodin, tired of the exclusively West-European musical tastes of the Russian aristocracy, asserted native values in the 1850s and 1860s in works like Boris Godunov and Prince Igor.

There was a corresponding movement in Britain. The cultivation of Scottish and Irish songs by Robert Burns, Thomas Moore, and their colleagues is certainly an example of it. Even in England, where the political motive was lacking, there was some manifestation of musical nationalism, as we will see in the final chapter.²¹ But it did not develop strongly until the turn of the century, as Plantinga has pointed out.²² It was then a reaction to German domination and was linked to the increasing political hostility between the two countries; it is perhaps best exemplified in the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams.²³

But beyond the weakness of the nationalist impulse lay the rooted belief that the English were by nature unmusical. It was even stated categorically that there was no such thing as English folksong. William Chappell, in the 1855 preface to his pioneering collection of English folksong, wrote: “I have been at some trouble to trace to its origin the assertion that the English have no national music.”²⁴ This astounding illusion could only be sustained by a kind of selective deafness, for there was English folk music to be heard everywhere: in city streets as well as country lanes; in theatres, taverns, churches, dance halls, warehouses, and factories, and for that matter in drawing rooms, where young ladies vied with each other in playing fantasias and variations on English airs. The trouble seems to have been that English folk music was not recognized as such. It was too close to the mainstream of art and popular music, and lacked those exotic, colorful traits that distinguished the songs of Ireland and Scotland or, for that matter, of Poland, Hungary, and Spain. By the same token, European art music, however much it was dominated by Italian and German composers, did not sound to the English like an alien imposition. It was their idiom too, and they had played a part in its development.

For all these reasons the concert-going public was highly receptive to Continental music, performed if possible by Continental singers and players; and increasingly, they preferred the “classics”—music of dead composers accepted permanently into the repertory, in a temple where they were enshrined above criticism (Weber, pp. 61-69). In the first tier of this monumental structure Handel stood alone. He was thought of as “our great national composer,” but far beyond the reach of imitation. In the later Victorian period, Bach began to challenge this position, as his great choral works became widely known. In a second tier were Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, soon joined by Spohr, Weber, and Mendelssohn—Germans all, representing the modern era. This hierarchy is not only revealed by statistics from Victorian programs and writings. It was carved in stone in the architecture of the old St. James’s Hall, opened in 1858, and can also be found in a neoclassical decorative design on the covers of Novello’s vocal scores (see figure 1).²⁵

(1) The cover of J. S. Bach’s O Jesu Christ, Thou Prince of Peace, as published by Novello & Co.

Again, our cover illustration, representing an amateur musical gathering in 1849, has books of music strewn about the floor in front of the players, showing a similar assortment of names: Bach, Beethoven, Cherubini, Handel, Haydn, Mendelssohn, Mozart, Palestrina, Pergolesi, Sphor [sic], Spontini, and Weber. There is not an English name among them.

Was it the case that there were no talented English composers? As far as inborn musical ability goes, we can discount this possibility. England had just as many precocious musical children and prodigies as any other country, and they were brought before the public at a time when this was fashionable. William Crotch (1775–1847) far exceeded even Mozart in precocity: there is excellent evidence that he publicly performed “God Save the King” with a bass of his own devising at the age of two and a half.²⁶ He was also a talented painter. He became professor of music at Oxford and then an ultra-conservative early Victorian composer. One of Crotch’s successors at Oxford, Frederick Ouseley (1825–89), had had two compositions—one a full-length Italian operatic scena—reviewed in print before he was nine.²⁷ George Aspull (1813–32) was also famous for his precocity as pianist and composer.²⁸ The works of all these, and of others like them, are almost entirely forgotten today.

The problem surely lay in the lack of encouragement for English composers. In the eighteenth century, and still in the early nineteenth, the attitudes of the landed aristocracy were decisive in this as in most other matters. Unlike the petty princes of Germany and Italy, whose rivalry did so much to provide support for music and musicians at their courts, English noblemen did little to promote the art at home. Instead, they demonstrated their superiority by their knowledge of foreign languages and music. The Italian opera was their great musical stronghold—at the King’s Theatre in the Haymarket (later Her Majesty’s Theatre), and from 1848 also at the Royal Italian Opera House, Covent Garden, from which the word “Italian” was not dropped until 1892. In his essay, Robert Bledsoe discusses the Victorians’ reception of the operas of the greatest Italian composer of their time, Giuseppe Verdi. French, German, Russian, and even English operas had to be translated into Italian before they could be performed there: Wagner’s Der fliegende Holländer, for instance, appeared as L’Ollandese dannato.²⁹ Only one opera by a British (in this case, Anglo-Irish) composer was ever commissioned for either Italian opera house during the Victorian period: Michael William Balfe’s Falstaff, to an Italian libretto by the in-house poet, S. Manfredo Maggione, had its premiere at Her Majesty’s in 1838.

Together with this affectation of Italian taste came the aristocratic idea that music was no pursuit for a gentleman, except as a dilettante. Mary Burgan finds this attitude in the writings of John Locke; it is also trenchantly expressed in Lord Chesterfield’s letters to his son.³⁰ Music, by this standard, was something to be provided for one’s entertainment by lesser breeds, among which Italians and ladies were certainly included. Young ladies in bourgeois and aristocratic families were encouraged to study the piano, the harp, and singing, as a superficial accomplishment valued in the marriage market.

Not all these attitudes were adopted by the increasingly formidable middle classes, from whose ranks one might have hoped that great English composers would emerge. There were, of course, many different strains within the middle classes, and one must beware of easy generalization. A substantial fraction of professional business men belonged to religious denominations that had a long history of proscription of the theatre; this included evangelical Anglicans as well as most dissenters. They would not countenance opera and would accept oratorio only when it moved out of the theatres and into the churches, or into such respectable venues as Exeter Hall and the town halls of Birmingham and Leeds. Reared perhaps on unadorned hymn singing, they gradually came to accept instruments and elaborate musical forms if associated with Biblical or other uplifting texts.

More widespread in middle-class circles was a prejudice against Italian music, associated as it was with the theatre, the Catholic church, and the more frivolous pursuits of the nobility. Those who did cultivate music tended to turn instead to the Protestant, sober, and serious music of northern Europe. It was indeed in middle-class organizations such as the Philharmonic Society (founded in 1813) that the dominance of German instrumental music was established.³¹ The beginning of serious and profound appreciation of music as an art was also evidently a middle-class phenomenon, supported perhaps by a handful of aristocrats. A telling indicator is audience behavior. At the fashionable concerts attended by the nobility, according to a French observer in 1829, “Hardly has the accompanist given the signal by preluding on the piano, when colloquies are established throughout the room; the chattering soon becomes similar to that of a public place or market, and lasts till the end of the piece.”³² In the middle-class chamber music concerts established in London in the 1830s, a very different atmosphere prevailed—one familiar enough today, but considered worthy of description in 1838: “The prolonged silence indicates the deepest interest; the subdued whisper acknowledges the sympathy felt at particular points of the performance; and the cordial applause, at the close of each piece, appears a relief to the high-wrought enthusiasm of the hearers.”³³

Some newly rich people, on the other hand, were known for philistinism, for a tendency to esteem things only for their palpable practical or social utility. That meant giving music a low rating in general, and, insofar as they valued it at all, looking only for what had social prestige or displayed mechanical dexterity, while ignoring inner meaning. Such attitudes were satirized in this mock-antique excerpt from “Mr. Pips his Diary” in Punch for 21 April 1849, which was printed below the caricature by Richard Doyle reproduced on our cover:

To MR. JIGGINS’S, where my Wife and I were invited to Tea and a little Musique ... I do prefer a stronger kind of Musique as well as Liquor. Yet it was pleasing enough to the Ear to hear the fashionable Ballads, and the Airs from all the new Italian Operas sung by the young Ladies; which, though they expressed nothing but common-place Love and Sentiment, yet were a pretty Sing-Song . . . Besides the Singing, there was Playing of the Piano Forte, with the Accompaniment of a Fiddle and Bass Violl, the Piano being played by a stout fat Lady with a Dumpling Face . . . They did call this Piece a Concerto, and I was told it was very brilliant; but when I asked what Fancy, Passion, or Description there was in it, no one could tell. . . After the Concerto, some Polkas and Waltzes, which did better please me, for they were a lively Jingle certainly, and not quite unmeaning. Strange to find how rare a Thing good Musique is in Company; and by good Musique I mean such as do stir up the Soul. . . My Wife do Play some brave Pieces in this Kind, by Mynheer Van Beethoven, and I would rather hear her perform one of them, than all I did hear to-night put together . . . But every one to his Taste; and they who delight in the trivial Style of Musique to theirs, as I to mine, not doubting that the English that have but just begun to be sensible to Musique at all, will be awake to the nobler Sort of it by and by.³⁴

Middle-class people in general were probably no more anxious than their social betters to have their children become professional musicians. For men, any serious interest in music was thought effeminate as well as unpractical, and the subject was not included in most public-school curricula, as Bernarr Rainbow points out in his essay. Women might pursue music as an accomplishment, but it was taken for granted that they were incapable of serious attainment, particularly as composers.³⁵

Thus, although there were plenty of English men and women who were gifted in music, most of them failed to get a fair hearing if they attempted serious work. Their lives were often a heartbreaking series of disappointments. A prime example is William Sterndale Bennett (1816-75), whose career began in a blaze of excitement and enthusiasm. The most promising student coming out of the Royal Academy of Music in the 1830s, Bennett went to Germany and was hailed by Mendelssohn and Schumann as the bright new star from the West. In those early years he was producing some three major orchestral works every year, as well as songs, chamber music, and piano pieces, and was getting them performed and published in both England and Germany. But when he settled down to his career in London the hard reality soon came home to him: the British public at large did not support his serious aims. He wrote to his Leipzig publisher, Friedrich Kistner, in 1840: “You know what a dreadful place England is for music; and in London, I have nobody who I can talk to about such things, all the people are mad with Thalberg and Strauss, and I have not heard a single Symphony or Overture in one concert since last June. I sincerely hope that Prince Albert our Queens husband will do something to improve our taste.”³⁶ Bennett’s output soon dwindled, and the quality of his compositions declined, because he was forced to devote all his energies to teaching and, later, administration. The other alternative, to resort to popular music, was against the high artistic principles he shared with the German Romantics. Although he gained growing official recognition and status, culminating in a knighthood recommended by Gladstone in 1871, he never recovered his early brilliance as a composer.³⁷

But there were some exceptions to the lack of encouragement and opportunity that Victorian composers generally faced. One was the Church of England, which supported a large number of musicians, and which was still an almost exclusive preserve of native composers, with traditions largely independent of Continental music. Several Victorians who devoted their energies to the composition of cathedral music achieved both frequent performance of their works and some critical acclaim: for instance, besides Ouseley and Stainer, John Goss (1800-80), Thomas Attwood Walmisley (1814-56), and Charles Villiers Stanford (1852-1924). For the same reasons, their works have continued to be heard occasionally in our own time, and others could easily be revived by cathedral choirs. One cathedral musician, Samuel Sebastian Wesley (1810-76), was a composer of genius, particularly inspired in his response to the words of the Bible. He is the subject of Peter Horton’s essay. On a less exalted level, many female as well as male organists had part-time employment in parish churches and nonconformist chapels, and the huge market for hymn tunes was a forum for hundreds of British composers.³⁸

There was, secondly, a school of Engligh-language opera, which continued to flourish, though at a far lower level of prestige and finance than the Italian opera. It enjoyed something of a rebirth in the 1830s when a new school of English romantic opera was founded (Temperley, “English Romantic Opera”), and Balfe’s Bohemian Girl (1843) and William Vincent Wallace’s Maritana (1845) enjoyed a success that lasted a hundred years, well into the era of the radio and phonograph. Some of the songs and ballads from these operas were perennially popular; one of these, “I dreamt that I dwelt in marble halls” from The Bohemian Girl, is included on the cassette accompanying this book. In later years, of course, Sullivan found a place in the sun for his comic operas. Like Balfe and Wallace, he was of Anglo-Irish stock. Studies of William Schwenk Gilbert tend to slight Sullivan’s contribution to their joint triumph, but his music was original, technically brilliant, and often passionate. It supplied the lyric warmth that Gilbert himself conspicuously lacked. Sullivan’s idiom is not sharply distinguished from the general European style of the day; there is nothing nationalistic about it. It was Gilbert who gave the Savoy operas their thoroughly English complexion and who, partly by avoiding all suggestions of impropriety, won over a new opera public who had originally avoided opera altogether.

The Savoy operas show no signs of losing their popularity, even with the decline of British government subsidy and the demise of the D’Oyly Carte company. As with cathedral music, the survival of some examples makes the revival of others a comparatively risk-free proposition, and there have been recent performances of little-known late works like Utopia Limited, and of Sullivan’s pre-Gilbert operetta Cox and Box. But Sullivan composed seriously in many other fields—oratorio, church music, incidental music, symphonies, songs, and piano music—and he wrote one grand opera, Ivanhoe (1891). The time seems to have come when some of this music will at last get a fair hearing.

At the turn of the century another composer, Edward Elgar, broke the barriers and entered the realms of the great: the decisive factor here was that his music was taken up in Germany shortly after 1900.³⁹ Now a great Elgar revival is in progress in Britain. It can be interpreted as part of the nostalgia for the imperial high noon that is now engulfing the country, seen also in the many films and television productions dealing with the Edwardian period, the Great War, the twenties and thirties, and the Raj. But Elgar has been given no more than his due.

In all these cases—cathedral music, the Savoy operas, Elgar—upward reevaluation can build on a living tradition of performance. It is quite another matter with music that has dropped out of the repertory. When we try to revive and revalue neglected writers, thinkers, artists, and architects, the process can be easily initiated within the academic community; we can all read the books for ourselves, while paintings, drawings, and buildings are readily available to be looked at with fresh eyes. It is much more difficult to revive music, and the degree of difficulty escalates as we go from piano music and songs, through chamber music and partsongs, to orchestral music, oratorio, and grand opera. The number of people who can read a score in a library and imagine how it would sound is quite small. For wider assessment, one needs performances and recordings. They cost money, time, and trouble, which few are willing to invest on untried bodies of music.

This inherent difficulty has tended to perpetuate the judgments of previous generations. It is the final reason for the backwardness of musical scholarship in opening up the Victorian age. Serious Victorian music is a Lost Chord: the sound of it is out of our reach, in a way that the sight and message of other Victorian arts is not. The chord was heard only faintly by the Victorians themselves, being drowned out by sounds coming across the Channel; after their time, in the words of Adelaide Procter’s song, it “trembled away into silence.”

It is in the hope of overcoming this handicap that we are attaching a specially recorded cassette to this volume, containing music which, for the most part, is difficult or impossible to hear on commercial recordings.

First, I have recorded a few songs to illustrate some of the points made in this introductory essay.⁴⁰ Edward James Loder (1813-65) was another victim of prejudice against serious music by English composers. Having no source of income except his composing, he tried to make a living by writing popular ballads under contract with a London publisher, but he made a sharp distinction between these and his art songs. “Invocation to the Deep” is one of the latter, with a text by the then-fashionable Felicia Hemans, who asks the sea to restore its victims. Not a great poem, it is yet well suited to music, and Loder makes the most of his opportunity to illustrate the swelling waves in a way that also conveys passionate feeling.

Next, Charles Stanford was a figure of the late Victorian musical establishment who composed prolifically in many branches of music. In 1892 he published a set of songs from Robert Louis Stevenson’s Child’s Garden of Verses. “Foreign Children” illustrates that ineffable cultural superiority of the English to which allusion has been made; but it is here combined with some delicate touches of musical exoticism.

Several late Victorian women joined the ranks of serious British composers, among them Maude Valérie White, Ethel Smyth, and Liza Lehmann. Lehmann (1862-1918), like Loder, spread her talent over a spectrum of musical styles from the drawing-room ballad to the art song. The setting of Shelley’s “Widow Bird” is one that succeeds in powerfully conveying landscape and atmosphere on a small scale; if Loder’s song is comparable to Mendelssohn’s or Schumann’s, Lehmann’s need not be ashamed to stand beside Hugo Wolf’s.

To exemplify middle-class popular music I have chosen Balfe’s “I dreamt that I dwelt in marble halls,” from The Bohemian Girl. In the opera it makes a strong dramatic point, in that the heroine, brought up among gypsies, is really remembering her patrician childhood when she thinks she is dreaming. But ballads were placed in operas primarily for subsequent sale as sheet music, in association with the name of the primadonna who had launched them on the stage: hence their nickname “music-shop ballads.” Alfred Bunn’s text, taken out of its stage context, neatly expresses the dreams of a middle-class Victorian girl: riches, social standing, admiration, romance, and a constant lover. Balfe writes a smooth melody and a murmuring, static accompaniment to induce a state of dreamy fantasy.

The last example is of working-class popular music, and was sung by perhaps the greatest of all music-hall singers, Marie Lloyd, “the expressive figure of the lower classes”.⁴¹ As many have pointed out, both the verses and the music of such songs were quite ordinary; the poets and composers were nonentities. Everything depended on the spirit and personality of the singer and her rapport with the audience,⁴² which we can only do our best to echo. In “Buy Me Some Almond Rock” Lloyd is indulging in a pleasant fantasy of social aspiration. She imagines herself flirting with the political leaders of the day, and so cuts them down to size.

To illustrate the essay by Mary Burgan, the recording continues with two contrasted piano pieces such as Victorian young ladies played. “The Battle of Prague,” an old war-horse by the Bohemian Franz Kocžwara, was first published at London in about 1788, presumably to commemorate Frederick the Great’s victory of 1757. It is difficult to say why this piece of claptrap remained so popular long after the general fashion for illustrative battle pieces had abated, and it was a frequent subject of jokes and parodies in the Victorian period. Mendelssohn’s “Fantasia on a Favorite Irish Melody” was also first published in London—in 1830, when the composer was deeply stirred by his direct experience of the wilder Celtic parts of Britain.⁴³ “ ’Tis the last rose of summer,” on which it is based, was perhaps the most popular of all Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies. This wonderfully romantic piece is a superior example of the countless fantasias and variations on “national airs” that so many lady pianists delighted in; and many, the young queen among them, retained for Mendelssohn a special place in their affections.

The six songs composed by Ruskin, though nobody would claim for them high musical merit, are interesting curiosities which, so far as we know, have never before been recorded. To some extent they are experimental, as William Gatens explains. By contrast, we have in Samuel Sebastian Wesley a composer who has always been recognized as a genius, if an erratic one, and who is arguably the greatest master of Anglican cathedral music since the time of Purcell. Peter Horton has found new significance in the connection between the style of these three works and Wesley’s employment at Leeds parish church.

Finally, the Tennyson song cycle by the late Victorian composer Arthur Somervell marks what some have called the English Musical Renaissance of that time,⁴⁴ and certainly demonstrates a new sensitivity on the part of British composers to the meaning of poetry on many levels. That is the subject matter of Linda Hughes’s essay.

These assorted fragments of Victorian music—high and low, professional and amateur, original and conventional—can give some echo of the immensely varied and vital musical life the Victorians knew. But a fully informed and considered judgment on the sum of their musical achievement can only be made after their greatest works have been made available once more to the scholarly community and the public at large.

______________________

¹ See D. W. Krummel, “Music Publishing,” in Nicholas Temperley, ed., The Romantic Age, Volume 5 of The Blackwell History of Music in Britain, 6 vols. projected (London: Athlone Press, 1981; repr. Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), pp. 46-59, especially Table 1 (p. 49).

² Cyril Ehrlich, The Piano: A History (London: Dent, 1976), p. 210.

³ Nicholas Temperley, The Music of the English Parish Church, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), I. 279.

⁴ Cyril Ehrlich, The Musical Profession in Britain Since the Eighteenth Century: A Social History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), p. 235, Table 1.

⁵ Both the sightsinging movement and the introduction of music in schools are treated by Bernarr Rainbow in his essay and also in The Land Without Music: Musical Education in England 1800-1860 and Its Continental Antecedents (London: Novello, 1967). See also his “Music in Education,” in Temperley, ed., The Romantic Age, pp. 29-45, especially pp. 34-39. One college, the Royal Academy of Music, is pre-Victorian (1822). For information on inexpensive octavo editions, see Anon., A Short History of Cheap Music (London: Novello & Co., 1887).

⁶ Founded in 1874, the Musical Association had two predecessors, the Musical Institute of London (1851-53) and the Musical Society of London (1858-67). See A. Hyatt King, “The Musical Institute of London and Its Successors,” Musical Times 117 (1976), 221-223. For diploma-granting professional organizations, see Ehrlich, The Musical Profession, pp. 116-120.

⁷ The subject is touched on, however, in David B. Levy, “Thomas Massa Alsager, Esq. [1779-1846]: A Beethoven Advocate in London,” 19th Century Music 9 (1985-86), 119-127. An article “Schumann and Sterndale Bennett” is due to appear in 1989.

⁸ These were Temperley, “The English Romantic Opera,” 9 (1965-66), 293-301, and Robert Bledsoe, “Henry Fothergill Chorley and the Reception of Verdi’s Early Operas in England,” 28 (1984-85), 631-655, which is included in this volume.

⁹ The series Musica Britannica: A National Collection of Music began publication in 195 1, but broached the Victorian period only with its 37th volume, William Sterndale Bennett: Piano and Chamber Music, edited by Geoffrey Bush (London: Stainer & Bell, 1972). A volume of Romantic Songs (1800-60) followed in 1979, and several volumes of late Victorian songs, edited by Bush, are now in progress. Other scholarly series that substantially cover the music of the Victorian period are Gerald H. Knight and William L. Reed, eds., A Treasury of English Church Music, Vol. 4: 1760-1900 (London: Blandford Press, 1965); Nicholas Temperley, ed., The London Pianoforte School, 1766-1860, 20 vols. (New York: Garland, 1984-86), of which vols. 16-18 are wholly, and vols. 19 and 20 partly, Victorian; and WilliamS. Gilbert and Arthur S. Sullivan, The Operas, ed. Steven Ledbetter and Percy M. Young, l3 vols. (New York: Broude Brothers, forthcoming). See also note 39.

¹⁰ See Vincent Duckles, “Musicology,” in Temperley, ed., The Romantic Age, pp. 483-502, especially pp. 492-494.

¹¹ These were john Hawkins, A General History of the Science and Practice of Music, 5 vols. (London: T. Payne and Son, 1776); and Charles Burney, A General Hisotry of Music, 4 vols. (London: n.p., 1776-89).

¹² Guido Adler, “Umfang, Methode und Ziel der Musikwissenschaft,” Vierteljahrschrift für Musikwissenschaft I (1885), 3-20. For discussion see Barry S. Brook and others, eds., Perspectives in Musicology (New York: Norton, 1972).

¹³ A tradition at Cambridge University. I personally recall R. Thurston Dart (1921-71), Dent’s successor in the Cambridge chair of music from 1962 to 1964 and perhaps the leading British musicologist of his generation, categorically denying that he was anything other than a “musician.”

¹⁴ Edward Elgar (1857-1934) comes nearest to the pantheon. He is only just a Victorian: his two most widely acknowledged masterpieces are the “Enigma” Variations (1899) and The Dream of Gerontius (1900).

¹⁵ Krummel, “Music Publishing”; Martha Vicinus, The Industrial Muse (London: Barnes &. Noble, 1974); William G. Weber, Music and the Middle Class: The Social Structure of Concert Life in London, Paris, and Vienna Between 1830 and 1848 (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1975). One recent study by a professional musicologist suggests that the tide may be turning: William J. Gatens, Victorian Cathedral Music in Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Stephen Banfield, in Sensibility and English Song: Critical Studies of the Early Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), provides a serious appraisal of late Victorian art song, but only as an introduction to later music.

¹⁶ Rainbow, The Land Without Music; Ehrlich, The Piano and The Musical Profession.

¹⁷ Jerrold Northrop Moore, Edward Elgar: A Creative Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984); Peter Charlton, John Stainer and the Musical Life of Victorian Britain (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1984); Arthur Jacobs, Arthur Sullivan, A Victorian Musician (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984); Peter Horton, Samuel Sebastian Wesley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

¹⁸ The boundaries between folk, popular, and art music are the subject of constant discourse among musicologists. For the purpose of the Victorian period I have found it convenient to define folk music as that which people make for themselves without training or rehearsal; popular music, made for a population by professional musicians as music to listen to, but without intellectual challenge to ordinary members of that population; functional music, similarly produced, but designed as an accompaniment to other activity such as dancing, marching, or worship; art music, composed by professional musicians for a restricted population that will accept intellectual challenge on the basis of its familiarity with a body of established classics.

¹⁹ Oscar A. H. Schmitz, Das Land ohne Musik: englishche Gesellschaftsprobleme (Munich: G. Müller, 1914).

²⁰ George A. Macfarren, “The English are not a Musical People,” Cornhill Magazine 18 (1868), 344-363. Ralph Waldo Emerson, in English Traits (Boston: Phillips, Sampson, and Co., 1856), 251, n. 1, wrote: “England has no music. It has never produced a first-rate composer, and accepts only such music as has already been decided to be good in Italy and Germany.” For some earlier British expressions of similar opinions, see Musical Times 116 (1975), 439, 625, 877.

²¹ See also Henry C. Banister, George Alexander Macfarren: His Life, Works, and Influence (London: George Bell, 1891), chap. 7.

²² Leon Plantinga, Romantic Music (New York: Norton, 1984), p. 400. This is, by the way, the first general book on nineteenth;century music that accords adequate consideration to British music.

²³ For a full discussion see Frank Howes, The English Musical Renaissance (New York: Stein and Day, 1966), chaps. 12 and 13.

²⁴ William Chappell, The Ballad Literature and Popular Music of the Olden Time, 2 vols. (London: Chappell, 1855, 1859), I, xiv.

²⁵ The cover border shown in figure I was used by Novello & Co. for their octavo choral scores from about 1870. The covers are buff with dark brown lettering. Shortly after 1900 the names Weber and Spohr were dropped and replaced by Brahms and Purcell (the first English name). A parallel series of opera scores used the same design, but with orange lettering and a different selection of names: Mozart in the top panel, Beethoven at the bottom, and at the sides Auber, Cherubini, Gluck, Wagner, Rossini, and Weber.

²⁶ Dr. Charles Burney’s “Account of an Infant Musician” was published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 69 (1779), 183ff. There is also an account in Daines Barrington, Miscellanies (London, 1781), pp. 31lff

²⁷ Harmonicon 11 (1833), 102; Monthly Supplement to the Musical Library 1 (1834). 66.

²⁸ See Muriel Silbum, “The Most Extraordinary Creature in Europe,” Music and Letters 3 (1922), 201-205.

²⁹ It is a bizarre fact that one of the first British piano arrangements of Wagner’s music, a medley by Arthur O’Leary, appeared in 1871 in a series, published in London, entitled Les charmes de l’opéra italien.

³⁰ Philip D. Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield, Letters . . . to his Son (London: J. Dodsley, 1774), letter 175 (April 1749).

³¹ This is clearly stated in the Quarterly Musical Magazine and Review 4 (1821), 252. For further discussion see Weber, p. 64. An observer in 1837 noted that when Mozart’s Don Giovanni was put on at the King’s Theatre instead of the usual fare of Rossini and his imitators, a very different audience came, drawn mainly “from the East of Pall Mall”-that is, from the mercantile part of London (Musical World 5 [1837]. 124).

³² François J. Fétis, letter to his son on the state of music in London, printed in translation in Harmonicon 7 (1829), 276. It is part of a discussion of the social exclusiveness of the Italian opera and the concerts ancillary to it.

³³ Musical World 8 (1838). 50.

³⁴ “Mr. Pips his Diary,” Punch 16 (21 April 1849), 164.

³⁵ See Derek Hyde, New Found Voices: Women in Nineteenth-Century English Music (London: Belvedere, 1984). Hyde does, however, list forty-nine known women composers from this period in an appendix. See also Ehrlich, The Musical Profession, 156-161.

³⁶ From an album of hand-copied letters, entitled “W.S.B.’s Letters to Kistner,” in the Stemdale Bennett family collection at Longparish, Andover, Hants. 1 am grateful to Mr. Barry Stemdale-Bennett for allowing me access to this collection.

³⁷ For more detailed analysis of Bennett’s career, see James R. Sterndale Bennett, The Life of William Srerndole Bennett: By His Son (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1907); Geoffrey Bush, “Stemdale Bennett: The Solo Piano Works,” Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association 91 (1964-65), 85-97; Nicholas Ternperley, “Bennett, Willaim Stemdale,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (London: Mac·millan, 1980).

³⁸ For discussion of cathedral music see “Cathedral Music” in Temperley, ed., The Romantic Age, pp. 171-213, and Gatens, Victorian Cathedral Music. For women organists see Hyde, pp. 32-35. For hymn tune composition see Temperley, Music of the English Parish Church, I, 296-310, and Erik Routley, The Music of Christian Hymns (Chicago: G.I.A. Publications, 1981), pp. 89-110.

³⁹ See Michael Kennedy, Portrait of Elgar (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), pp. 97-102. A critical edition of Elgar’s works is in process of publication: Jerrold Northrop Moore and others, eds., Elgar Complete Edition, 43 vols. projected (London: Novello, 1981- ). It is the first of its kind for any British composer later than Henry Purcell (1659-95).

⁴⁰ Phyllis Hurt, who sings the five songs on this recording, also sang them in a presentation, “Victorian Songs for Every Taste,” given at the Midwest Victorian Studies Association, Bloomington, IN, 28 March 1980, and at the Northeast Victorian Studies Association, Hartford, Cf, 25 April 1981.

⁴¹ T. S. Eliot, “Marie Lloyd,” in Selected Essays, 1917-1932 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1932), pp. 369-372, especially p. 371.

⁴² See Richard Middleton, “Popular Music of the Lower Classes,” in Temperley, ed., The Romantic Age, pp. 63-91, especially p. 86.

⁴³ See Roger Fiske, Scotland in Music: A European Enthusiasm (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 116-149; R. Larry Todd, “Mendelssohn’s Ossianic Manner,” in Mendelssohn and Schumann: Essays on Their Music and Its Context, ed. Jon W. Finson & R. Larry Todd (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1984).

⁴⁴ See Ernest Walker, A History of Music in England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907; 3d ed., revised and enlarged by Jack A. Westrup, 1952), chap. 11; Frank Howes, The English Musical Renaissance (New York: Stein & Day, 1966).