Nicholas Temperley

MUSICAL NATIONALISM IN ENGLISH
ROMANTIC OPERA

MUSIC HISTORIANS ARE AWARE OF A GROUP OF COMPOSERS OF THE LATER NINEteenth century who are usually called the Nationalists. These men asserted their national identity in the face of German or Italian dominance by emphasizing colorful aspects of their country’s folk music, as well as by choosing nationally significant subject matter. The primary examples of the nationalist school are the five Russian composers sometimes called the “Mighty Handful,” of whom the most famous are Modest Musorgsky (1839-81), Alexander P. Borodin (1834-87), and Nikolay A. Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908). Lesser nationalist schools of the same period include the Czech, led by Bedřich Smetana (1824-84) and Antonin Dvorak (1841-1904); the Hungarian, led by Franz Liszt (1811-86); the Norwegian, led by Edvard Grieg (1843-1907); and the Spanish, led by Felipe Pedrell (1841-1922).

In the most recent text of nineteenth-century musical history, Leon Plantinga’s Romantic Music, there is an admirable chapter on Nationalism which includes a section on English music of the later nineteenth century. Plantinga makes the following point:

The usual factors in the growth of cultural nationalism—status as a developing nation, struggle against a foreign oppressor, feelings of cultural inferiority—were of course lacking in England. It was mainly in a quickening of interest in the “Celtic fringes” that certain nationalist traits appeared in music, and this occurred only late in the century.¹

As examples he refers to Charles Villiers Stanford’s Irish Symphony of 1887, Alexander Mackenzie’s Scottish Piano Concerto of 1897, and some late nineteenth-century orchestral pieces of Hamish MacCunn. English nationalism, as opposed to Irish or Scottish, is relegated to the twentieth century. I propose to challenge this interpretation.

The word “nationalism” implies the existence of a nation, and so it is not generally used to refer to the efforts of minorities within a nation to assert their rights. The nationalism of the Russians had nothing to say about the various oppressed minorities that formed part of the Tsar’s Empire. It accepted the existence of the Russian state, and resisted the cultural subservience of that state to Western European influences—to the French language that was still used at court and by many Russian aristocrats, and to the Italian opera and German instrumental music that enjoyed overwhelming prestige in the musical life of the great cities. Russian nationalism was a movement of the middle classes and intelligentsia. It made no difference to Russian peasants whether the operas performed at Moscow and Leningrad were in Italian or Russian, nor whether they were based on coloratura arias or Russian folk songs. But the newly powerful businessmen, professionals, and civil servants were riled to find that their own language and culture were excluded from the high position which they should rightly have occupied in the cultural life of the nation.

One can discern three stages in the process of throwing off a foreign musical domination. In the first stage, the primary goal is to establish that a native product can be as good as a foreign import. This cannot be done by writing nationalistic music, because such would be rejected by most of the public as primitive or irrelevant. For instance, in Russia in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the only kind of opera that enjoyed prestige was Italian. Russian musicians were forced to prove their worth by actually writing Italian operas, or at least by imitating Italian style. This was the path taken by Dmitry Bortnyansky (1752-1825) and his Russian contemporaries.

When the status of native composers has been established, the second stage sees the beginning of musical nationalism, in which elements of folksong and dance are introduced, and subjects of national interest are chosen. This may be seen in the music of Mikhail Glinka (1803-57) and the more tentative works of the Mighty Handful; the folksong elements are imposed on a style that is still fundamentally of the “mainstream.”

The third stage is marked by a radical change of style, in which the classical forms, harmonies, and compositional techniques are replaced by newly created ones inspired by the national folk material, or by actual innovation. In my view, Boris Godunov (1874) is the first work of any country in which this third stage is fully developed. In Hungarian music, for example, it was not Liszt in the nineteenth century, but Bartók in the twentieth, who forged a radically nationalistic idiom.

Let us see how some of these ideas apply to the Anglo-Saxon countries in, say, the 1860s. The situation in Great Britain and the United States was not unlike that in Russia, despite great political differences. Britain, like Russia, was a large and powerful empire and was in no doubt of its political strength and importance; the United States was not yet a world power but was sure of its ability to become one, and it was not politically threatened or dominated by foreign powers. In all three countries, progressive changes were taking place: the emancipation of serfs in Russia and of slaves in America; in Britain (after 1866), rapid extension of the franchise and social reform. Musically speaking, both Britain and the U.S. were subservient to the same forces that dominated Russian music—Italian opera, German instrumental music, and French ballet (and later operetta).

Of course, in both Anglo-Saxon countries, as also in Russia and Eastern Europe, there was a subculture of indigenous musical theatre. It was always possible to hear English-language plays with music, musical entertainments and spectacles, pantomimes, burlesques, and sketches, in the smaller theatres and in taverns, pleasure gardens, warehouses, and barns. But the high ground of musical theatre—the opera and kindred forms—is the arena of musical nationalism. It was in opera that the middle classes, confident of their new strength, wanted to mount a challenge to the foreign-dominated cultural hegemony of the aristocracy.

Italian opera, of course, was the aristocratic musical entertainment. It had been introduced in London in the first decade of the eighteenth century and consolidated by the success of Handel’s operas from 1720 onwards. For a hundred years the King’s Theatre in the Haymarket enjoyed a legal monopoly for the performance of through-composed opera and exercised that monopoly by performing exclusively Italian-language operas, which were composed by Italians (with an occasional German or Bohemian) and sung primarily by Italian singers. The King’s Theatre was the only London theatre patronized to any extent by the nobility; even Covent Garden and Drury Lane were socially inferior, and they concentrated on legitimate drama without music, although a species of English opera did develop there. It was left for the low-class “minor” theatres to develop genres such as the burletta and melodrama.

The first successful challenge to the dominance of Italian opera in London was begun in 1834 with the opening of the English Opera House at the Lyceum Theatre, and the successful staging there of Nourjahad by Edward Loder (1813-65), The Mountain Sylph by John Barnett (1802-90), and Hermann by John Thomson (1805-41). Next year came the first opera of Michael William Balfe (1808-70), who with William Vincent Wallace (1812-65), George Alexander Macfarren (1813-87), Loder, and Julius Benedict (1804-85) formed the nucleus of an English Romantic school of opera. They were not quite such a mighty handful as the Russian five, and their music has not lasted until our time. But it should be recalled that they did have considerable and lasting success; their best-known works were popular on the Continent and in the United States and were still in the standard repertory in the 1930s.

To what extent can we call these operas nationalistic? When you study the scores you are not struck by much in them that is particularly English in character. There are usually three or four strophic ballads of the “music-shop” variety, like “I dreamt that I dwelt in marble halls” from Balfe’s The Bohemian Girl (1843), and probably a glee; these are different in kind from anything you would find in a Continental opera of the time. There is spoken dialogue. But apart from these, the style is a mixture of Italian, French, and German, with Rossini, Donizetti, Weber, Auber, and Meyerbeer as the chief models, while the librettos are almost invariably adapted from Continental dramas that were already familiar on the London stage, through imported operas or ballets, or translated plays. They generally deal with times, places, and events far removed from the experience and cultural history of the audience.

For instance, the plots of Balfe’s first two English operas, The Siege of Rochelle (1835) and The Maid of Artois (1836), were based on earlier French works, and their style was strongly Italian, with the exception of a few English-style ballads. The Musical World commented: “Let [Balfe] forget Donizetti and Auber, follow the example of Barnett, and much may be expected from his future efforts.”² But Barnett’s Mountain Sylph (1834), here held up for emulation, was admired not because it was more English, but because its models were German rather than Italian or French: namely, Weber’s Freischütz (1821) and Oberon (1826). Its plot had been borrowed from the highly successful French ballet La Sylphide, made familiar to the London public two years before. In their musical forms these English operas took from Italy the overture, the cavatina and caballetta and gran’ duetto, the preghiera and barcarolle, an occasional recitative, and the concerted finale; French influence was often found in comic patter songs, choruses, and dances. When gothic or supernatural effects were needed, Weber was often the model.

Evidently, then, these Romantic English operas are not truly nationalistic, but mark the first stage of national assertion. In the words of a correspondent to The Times (probably Barnett), “The cant that Englishmen did not possess sufficient genius to develop a consecutive drama, with appropriate melodies and corresponding harmonies, one short season sufficed to crush.”³ However, the triumph was fragile, and the next sixty years saw a series of attempts to set up a National Opera Theatre, all of which either led to speedy bankruptcy of the management, or had to compromise by introducing foreign operas in translation. Thus, the need to assert that English composers could write good operas in a foreign style was going to be a pressing one for several generations to come.

The accepted historiography of British music tells us that the second and third stages of English nationalism were not reached until after 1900. Then, we are told, the folksong revival accelerated to the point where composers such as Ralph Vaughan Williams and Gustav Holst could base a new style on its modes and scales, blended with a harmonic idiom inspired by that of the sixteenth century.⁴ The discovery of folksong was seen above all as a means of salvation from the late Romantic or Wagnerian style. But I will maintain that a much earlier composer, sixty years older than Vaughan Williams, had already followed a path that in all respects qualifies as the second stage of musical nationalism. He belonged, indeed, to the generation of Balfe, Wallace, and Loder.

George Alexander Macfarren, born in 1813, was presumably of Scottish descent, but his immediate forebears were English, and he identified himself strongly with England rather than Scotland. His father, George Macfarren (1788-1843), was a London dancing master, fiddler, and dramatic author, evidently a self-taught man, but a man of many parts. Macfarren was one of the early pupils at the Royal Academy of Music, which he entered in 1829. Already by that time he had had trouble with his eyesight, which steadily worsened, until he became totally blind by 1860. Nevertheless, he continued his career as a musician and composed prolifically in every major branch of music, eventually winning honors and awards, and a knighthood in 1883.

His father seems to have been a strong influence on his English musical nationalism, which developed steadily from the 1830s until the end of his career. The father, according to the son, “was a thorough patriot, and this character had impelled him to some of his early poems during the war with Bonaparte; had given enthusiasm to his writing of ‘Edward the Black Prince’ and ‘Guy Fawkes’ [both theatre pieces]; and prompted the subject of the never-acted opera of ‘Caractacus.’”⁵ During the 1830s William Chappell (1809-88), who was preparing the publication of his pioneering Collection of National Airs, asked the elder Macfarren to supply verses to folk tunes for which the original words were not known. Perhaps at the father’s suggestion, the son was also brought into the enterprise and was asked to provide harmonizations of some of the tunes.

By the time Chappell’s work reached its more famous form, The Ballad Literature and Popular Music of the Olden Time (1855-59), Macfarren had entirely reharmonized all the tunes, replacing the versions of William Crotch, which had been found “incongruously scholastic,” and the “trivial” versions of Joseph Augustine Wade,⁶ and also revising his own harmonizations. By this time Macfarren had studied deeply in musical history and theory, and he was able to bring to his task an almost unrivalled knowledge of the English musical styles of the past. He had edited Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas (1689) for the Musical Antiquarian Society in 1840, and also works of the Elizabethan and Jacobean composers Orlando Gibbons, John Dowland, and Thomas East. His knowledge allowed him to develop a stylistic awareness unusual in the nineteenth century, so that instead of forcing the old folk tunes into the Classical or Romantic idiom of the time (as Haydn and Beethoven had in their arrangements of Scottish tunes), he tried (with varying success) to develop styles of harmony suited to the probable periods of origin of the tunes he was dealing with.

Not surprisingly, this began to have its effect on his original compositions as well. In 1836 he had been asked to write the overture to a theatre piece called Chevy Chase, by J. R. Planché, and he “determined to introduce the old English tune, which, however, he did not know, at least in connection with its name.” He got his brother to hunt it up, and it “proved to be an old acquaintance.” The Chevy Chase overture became one of Macfarren’s most popular works; when Wagner conducted it at the Philharmonic Society in 1855, he wrote appreciatively of its “peculiarly wild, passionate character,” though he did not take to its composer, whom he called “Macfarrinc, a pompous, melancholy Scotsman.”⁷

From 1831 to 1840 Macfarren composed music for at least ten theatrical works. In this early phase he does not seem to have attempted to give his works an English character except in the one instance of Chevy Chase. He wrote bitterly in 1840:

We are all aware of the low esteem in which English music is held by English people. . . . In my opinion, . . . the only thing that could make English operas receivable by the world, or place their authors on a level with men of equal talent in any other country, would be to form a colony of British composers in some great continental town, whence their works, having met the encouragement they might deserve from the world at large, would find their way home with the credential of a foreign reputation—the best, if not the only, recommendation to English favour ... I have a spirit red-hot for the cause, and am anxious for an opportunity to jump into the struggle.⁸

In 1849 Macfarren boldly presented a grand opera on an English subject, King Charles II, with a libretto by Desmond Ryan. It introduced an Elizabethan-style madrigal but was still predominantly in an Italian idiom, with strong Mozartian overtones. To Macfarren Mozart was “the greatest musician who has delighted and enriched the world.”⁹

In 1860 Macfarren returned to opera, composing six full-length works in the next five years. All were on English subjects. In Robin Hood (1860) we have an opera with a thoroughly patriotic theme that would have pleased Macfarreris father. It was written by Macfarren’s close friend, John Oxenford. Robin is portrayed as an Anglo-Saxon leading the struggle against arrogant Norman intruders, and Oxenford had a field day with such verses as “Englishmen by birth are free” (example 1). Macfarren set this in a bluff, diatonic style that was conceived as typically English, and which was perhaps a good deal influenced by his long study of folk songs, dances, and ballads. Later, in a short male chorus of Robin’s retainers, there is a blatant use of a modal chord at the words “Death to thy foe.”

EXAMPLE 1

In the love-interest side of the opera, Macfarren’s nationalism is much more restrained. In Maid Marian’s song from the second act, she is anxiously awaiting Robin’s return from a dangerous exploit:

The music indeed suggests a preghiera of Italian opera, or of the rather similar scene in Weber’s Freischiitz. Macfarren is careful to make his melody largely pentatonic (example 2), but his harmony sounds thoroughly “Victorian.” The nationalism of this song, if present at all, is quite tentative, but in the more extroverted parts of the opera the nationalistic flavor is strong. The second-act finale depicts a country fair with an archery match, which of course is won by Robin Hood in disguise. It is constructed on a refrain that is first sung by a unison chorus (example 3). The melody is strictly diatonic, and in places modal; the harmony makes full use of the diatonic chords on the second, third, and sixth scale degrees, which had been downplayed in Romantic harmony in favor of secondary dominants and chromatic chords; and the rhythms suggest the English country dance.

EXAMPLE 2

EXAMPLE 3

Robin Hood had a long run after its first performance at Her Majesty’s Theatre in 1860, and it enjoyed critical acclaim and some popular success, though Macfarren was never able to match the phenomenal popularity of Balfe and Wallace. It is interesting that the English musicologist Edward Dent thought Robin Hood the best of the pre-Sullivan Victorian operas and suggested reviving it at Sadler’s Wells in the 1940s. He said it was “very full of good fun and on the way to Sullivan.”¹⁰

Perhaps the success of Robin Hood encouraged Macfarren in the direction of musical nationalism. His most thoroughgoing nationalist opera was The Soldier’s Legacy, produced in 1864. This was “on the way to Sullivan” in a more concrete sense, for it was commissioned by the German Reeds for performance at the Gallery of Illustration in Regent Street, which only five years later was to be the setting of the premiere of Cox and Box. The previous year, Macfarren’s Jessy Lea was also premiered there. Full orchestral scores of these works exist in manuscript, but Macfarren also arranged the accompaniments for piano and harmonium, and it is possible that they were performed in this way at the Gallery of Illustration. Both works carry the designation “opera di camera.”

The Soldier’s Legacy appears to be an original comedy by Oxenford, though it uses stock characters and situations: the heroine Lotty has a middleaged guardian, Christopher, on the Bartolo model, who wants to marry her himself; there is a widow who is trying to get him for a husband, and there is a romantic hero, Jack, who finally gets the girl. The plot hinges on a vow which Jack had made to a dying comrade to take care of his child, and it is compounded with the usual misunderstandings, disguises, and revelations. Although the story is set in rural England, there is nothing particularly nationalistic about it. But Macfarren went further than before in putting an English stamp on his musical style, and he succeeded in giving some individuality to his characters in the process.

The music begins with a “motto” theme (example 4) that represents the soldier’s legacy of the title—the vow made by the hero on the deathbed of his fellow soldier. This theme is a solemn series of chords, largely triads, and is a sequence of the kind recognized by the Victorians as “ancient” harmony by its avoidance of chromatic dissonance, its use of triads other than I, IV, and V, and its 4-3 suspension cadence without a dominant seventh. (A more conventional harmonization of the second measure would have called for an A-major secondary dominant followed by a D-minor triad.)¹¹ This motto returns during the melodrame in which Jack tells the story of his vow, and it also recurs at key points of the opera when his conscience recalls him to the path of duty.

EXAMPLE 4

In addition to this principal motto Macfarren adopts a new device of introducing eight motives or tags, always accompanying Christopher, the guardian, who is a professional fiddler. Most of these motives were wellknown English popular songs that were meant to be recognized, and they are identified by name in footnotes in the published vocal score. They are given with their labels in example 5. Despite the labels, I have failed to identify Nos. 3 and 4 from ordinary reference sources such as Chappell and the National Tune Index.¹²

1. Off she goes.” Macfarren mentioned this song when writing about his father, who he said had composed it, along with “many country dance tunes that had great popularity”; he said it “may sometimes now be heard on street organs” and has been “claimed as an Irish national melody”.¹³ Chappell also attributed it to the elder George Macfarren, but this is unlikely, as Samuel Wesley published variations on the tune in 1802 when the elder Macfarren was only fourteen. I learned the tune as “Humpty Dumpty,” and a similar tune appears in a collection of country dances published in 1751 as “Johnny’s Frolic.”¹⁴ In this case Macfarren has used it to suggest fiddling; it appears when Christopher is announcing his profession.

2. “When the heart of a man is oppressed with cares” appears in The Beggar’s Opera (1728); Macfarren has slightly misquoted the first line, “If the heart of a man is depressed with cares.” It goes on “The mist is dispelled when a woman appears; Like the notes of a fiddle, she sweetly, sweetly Raises the spirits, and charms our ears,” although the original song from which Gay took the tune was “Would you have a young virgin of fifteen years old.” The reference in the opera is ambiguous. Christopher, the fiddler, is instructing his young ward on how to fend off suitors.

EXAMPLE 5

3. “The tank.” I have been unable to find this tune anywhere, by name or by incipit. It sounds like a fiddle reel. Christopher is telling his ward Lotty to lock her house door securely.

4. “Drops of brandy.” Again I have had no success in finding this tune, and the phrases used by Macfarren seem to be fragments only. Christopher is coming home late and is commenting in spoken monologue: “Really, people should think twice before they make a musician and a man of business lose his precious time on a fool’s errand. The sergeant’s wedding is put off until tomorrow.” Perhaps the tune suggests he is drunk.

5. “Cease your funning.” Here Christopher is begging his ward to let him into his house, but she is taking his instructions literally and saying “No!”, thus giving her lover time to escape. The situation in The Beggar’s Opera, from which this tune is taken, has no obvious bearing, and perhaps Macfarren was just referring to the words of the first line taken out of context.

6. “Cold and raw” [the wind did blow]. This tune also comes from The Beggar’s Opera, but here Macfarren gives it its older name. Again the reference seems to be immediate and superficial, as Jack, the hero, is telling his story about how he was wandering late at night in rainy and cold weather.

7. “Here’s to the maiden.” This is a well-known drinking song which is a toast to the female sex—“Here’s to the maiden of bashful fifteen, here’s to the widow of fifty.” The words are by Sheridan. Macfarren has used the refrain, “Let the toast pass, drink to the lass; I warrant she’ll prove an excuse for the glass.” This is used as a refrain to Christopher’s principal song giving his cynical view of the female sex: “The man who is doomed of a lass to take care A burden of trouble is likely to bear.” Macfarren first brings in the lower line of example 6, with its own harmonization; then this refrain is sung a second time, now forming the bass of the harmony, while Tag No. 7 is heard above it, as in example 6.

EXAMPLE 6

8. I have always known this tune as “Here we go round the mulberry bush,” which is a standard nursery rhyme, though oddly enough it does not appear in the Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes.¹⁵ The tune is not in the National Tune Index, although a similar tune called “Jenny Sutton” is listed there from a 1788 collection of country dances.¹⁶ The tune appears, changed into the minor mode, just at the point where Christopher is humiliated and exposed, and a mistaken identity is resolved.

These tags are used entirely in the comic situations which prevail in this opera. For the more serious or sentimental vein, Macfarren provided strophic ballads, outwardly of the type that had been traditional in English opera for a hundred years; but their style shows, much more strongly than Maid Marion’s song from Robin Hood, the general influence of Macfarreris work with English folksongs. This is true of the opening number of the opera, sung by the Widow (example 7).

EXAMPLE 7

After 1864, Macfarren wrote no more operas, turning instead to cantatas and oratorios. But he continued to develop his ideas about English music. He contributed a weighty article to the Cornhill Magazine in September 1868 to refute “the almost proverbial saying, The English are not a musical people.’“ In 1870 he delivered a series of four lectures at the London Institution on “the National Music of Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and England,” which was substantially published in The Musical Times later that year. In each of the first three lectures he attempted to demonstrate that many of the tunes generally regarded as Irish, Scottish, or Welsh were really English in origin. He offered the following definition:

A melody is national when it has been commonly sung by a people through several generations, and sung because it naturally expressed the people’s feelings, not because of its artistic merit. Every melody must have had a composer, and that composer must have been a technically trained musician. . . . Thus, Dibdin, or Carey, ... or Purcell, . . . may have made a tune; it is the people who . . . have made it national.¹⁷

This is a surprisingly modern notion of the nature of folksong. Later in the lecture he placed the blame squarely upon Italian opera, from Handel’s time onwards, for the failure to establish an English national school of opera.

We can see then that Macfarren’s motivation was not materially different from that of the nationalist composers of Eastern Europe, despite the great difference in the political standing of Great Britain from that of, say, Bohemia. His national pride was offended by the low prestige which the ruling classes of his country gave to indigenous opera, and he set himself single-mindedly to do something about it, first by demonstrating that he could write an attractive and successful opera in the accepted (i.e., Italian) manner, then by gradually introducing English elements into his style.

He did not reach the third stage of radically remolding his style. His nationalism is comparable to Glinka’s or Smetana’s. It is mild by the side of Mussorgsky’s: of course he lacked Mussorgsky’s genius and power, but there were other factors involved. Public support for English musical nationalism was weak, since Englishmen were successfully asserting their national character in other fields that were given much higher importance than music. Most were quite content to leave music to foreigners. Again, much English folksong was not far enough away in its idiom from the European mainstream to provide a radically distinctive style. The Englishness is grafted on to Macfarren’s normal style, which is classical, or more specifically Mozartian. Fifty years later Vaughan Williams would blend English folksong with Renaissanceinspired harmony, making a composite that is more strikingly distinct from the ordinary romantic idiom.

But for all that, I believe Macfarren was the pioneer of English musical nationalism, unless one prefers to give that title to John Gay. One can see his influence as early as 1862 in Julius Benedict’s opera The Lily of Killarney, a far more popular work than any of Macfarren’s and one which held the stage until the 1930s. It had been called the first Irish opera. The story is based on Boucicault’s The Colleen Bawn, and the libretto is by Oxenford. It is of course set in Ireland, but there is no trace in it of Irish national aspirations, which presumably would not have passed the Lord Chamberlain’s scrutiny. Benedict was a German-born pupil of Weber whose early operatic experience was in Italy; he had no particular feeling for Irish style, but he succeeded in developing an Irish operatic convention by using Macfarren’s methods, while borrowing a few specific formulas from Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies.

A more important successor to Macfarren was Arthur Sullivan. Although the Savoy Operas owe much of their musical resources to German, Italian, and French models, whenever Sullivan tried to be recognizably English in manner I think we may suspect Macfarren’s influence, especially in the earlier works. In Pinafore there is “We sail the ocean blue,” the glee “A British tar,” and the modal strophic duet “Kind captain, I’ve important information”; in Pirates “Pour, O king, the pirate sherry” is strikingly pentatonic, and “When Fredric was a little lad” suggests one of Macfarren’s folksong harmonizations. Of course, Gilbert’s nationalism was satirical, and by the time we get to The Yeomen of the Guard, an English subject if ever there was one, there is little trace left of the Macfarren brand of musical nationalism, even in a song like “When our gallant Norman foe.” Sullivan’s style had moved in other directions. It was left for Stanford and Hamish MacCunn to take up the cudgels of musical nationalism and pass them on to Holst and Vaughan Williams.

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¹ Leon Plantinga, Romantic Music (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1984), p. 400.

² The Musical World 1 (1836), 191.

³ The Times, 12 May 1835.

⁴ See for instance Frank Howes, The English Musical Renaissance (New York: Stein & Day, 1966), chap. 12.

⁵ Henry C. Banister, George Alexander Macfarren: His Life, Works, and Influence (London: George Bell and Sons, 1891), p. 136.

⁶ Banister, p. 135.

⁷ Richard Wagner, My life, “authorised translation” (London: Constable & Co. Ltd., 1911), p. 630.

⁸ The Musical World 13 (1840), 364.

⁹ From a series of articles on Mozart written by Macfarren in February 1849, and cited in Banister, p. 221.

¹⁰ Hugh Carey, Duel far Two Voices (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 167.

¹¹ Since this cannot easily be played on the piano as written here (in a direct quotation from the published piano/vocal score), it presumably represents the combined piano and harmonium parts.

¹² William Chappell, The Ballad Literature and Popular Music of the Olden Time, 2 vols. (London: Chappell & Co., 1855, 1859); Kate van Winkle Keller and Carolyn Rabson, eds., The National Tune Index (New York: University Music Editions, 1980).

¹³ Banister, p. 3.

¹⁴ A Choice CoUection of 200 Favourite Country Dances, Vol. 6 (London: Jno. Johnson, 1751). (Traced through the National Tune Index.)

¹⁵ Iona and Peter Opie, eds., The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951).

¹⁶ Thompson’s Complete Collection of 200 Favourite Country Dances, Vol. 5 (London: S. A. & P. Thompson, 1788).

¹⁷ The Musical Times 14 (1870), pp. 520; cited Banister, pp. 149-50.