The 1890s

Arthur Sullivan’s final decade was overshadowed by increasing and debilitating ill health and growing criticism of the light-weight nature of his work by critics associated with the English Musical Renaissance centred around two younger composers, C.H. Parry and C.V. Stanford. Sullivan did at last produce the grand opera, Ivanhoe (1891), which he had wanted to write for so long. He also continued to write comic operas for the Savoy Theatre, most of them with librettists other than Gilbert. He wrote a ballet and a hymn tune for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, set a patriotic song by Rudyard Kipling to raise funds for the families of troops serving in the Boer War, and wrote a Te Deum to be used when that war ended. He died in 1900, mourned and remembered as much as a church musician and for his sacred works as for his comic operas.

William Sterndale Bennett: Imitator or Original?

Sterndale Bennett has often been characterized as an imitator of Mendelssohn. While it is true and unsurprising that there are similarities in the two composers’ musical language, actual imitation is difficult to substantiate. Bennett’s reputation as a composer has passed through several phases in the last 200 years. It was high in his lifetime in Germany as well as in Britain, when resemblance to Mendelssohn was counted as a positive asset, but later assailed by promoters of the ‘English Musical Renaissance’, who needed a preceding dark age and tended to dismiss early Victorians as copiers of Mendelssohn. Recent writers have shown a more positive attitude to the Victorian period in general. Bennett’s individuality has in fact been fully recognized from the first by such widely differing commentators as Mendelssohn himself, Robert Schumann, Henry Heathcote Statham, Frederick Ouseley, Charles Gounod, Charles Stanford, Geoffrey Bush, Peter Horton and Larry Todd. His style was founded on the Austro-German classical tradition and the London Pianoforte School headed by Clementi and Cramer, through his teacher Cipriani Potter, as is confirmed by early sources. This article surveys some of Bennett’s most characteristic piano pieces, and ends by analysing notably original features of his harmonic style that owe nothing to Mendelssohn, such as the inverted pedal note, evaded resolution of dissonance, and harmonic anticipation.

Making an English Voice: Performing National Identity during the English Musical Renaissance

This article examines constructions of national musical identity in early twentieth-century Britain by exploring and contextualizing hitherto neglected discourses and practices concerning the production of an ‘English’ singing voice. Tracing the origins and development of ideas surrounding native vocal performance and pedagogy, I reconstruct a culture of English singing as a backdrop against which to offer, by way of conclusion, a reading of the ‘English voice’ performed in Ralph Vaughan Williams's song ‘Silent Noon’. By drawing upon perspectives derived from recent studies of song, vocal production, and national and aesthetic identity, I demonstrate that ‘song’ became a place in which the literal and figurative voices of performers and composers were drawn together in the making of a national music. As such, I advance a series of new historical perspectives through which to rethink notions of an English musical renaissance.

The Crystal Palace Concerts: Canon Formation and the English Musical Renaissance

This article examines the role of London's Crystal Palace in the popularization of ““classical music”” in Victorian Britain, and in the creation of the orchestral canon in the nineteenth century. The Crystal Palace was originally built in Hyde Park for the Great Exhibition of 1851 and was reconstructed in the London suburb of Sydenham in 1854. This popular attraction assumed a musical prominence in British culture when the ambitious conductor Augustus Manns established an orchestra there in 1855, and presented a series of Saturday Concerts until 1900. Central to this discussion of the significance of the Crystal Palace concerts are two audience plebiscites that Manns conducted, in 1880 and 1887, which shed much light on Victorian popular taste and musical values. As well, particular attention is given to his involvement in the ““English Musical Renaissance”” in both of its aspects: as a campaign to raise British composers to canonic stature (to construct a ““British Beethoven””); and as an effort to securely embed classical music within British culture.