The English Musical Renaissance and the Press 1850-1914: Watchmen of Music

Meirion Hughes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351544832
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Música

The importance of nineteenth-century writing about culture has long been accepted by scholars, yet so far as music criticism is concerned, Victorian England has been an area of scholarly neglect. This state of affairs is all the more surprising given that the quantity of such criticism in the Victorian and Edwardian press was vast, much of it displaying a richness and diversity of critical perspectives. Through the study of music criticism from several key newspapers and journals (specifically The Times, Daily Telegraph, Athenaeum and The Musical Times), this book examines the reception history of new English music in the period surveyed and assesses its cultural, social and political, importance. Music critics projected and promoted English composers to create a national music of which England could be proud. J A Fuller Maitland, critic on The Times, described music journalists as 'watchmen on the walls of music', and Meirion Hughes extends this metaphor to explore their crucial role in building and safeguarding what came to be known as the English Musical Renaissance. Part One of the book looks at the critics in the context of the publications for which they worked, while Part Two focuses on the relationship between the watchmen-critics and three composers: Arthur Sullivan, Hubert Parry and Edward Elgar. Hughes argues that the English Musical Renaissance was ultimately a success thanks largely to the work of the critics. In so doing, he provides a major re-evaluation of the impact of journalism on British music history.

PART ONE
Watchmen and Watchtowers

CHAPTER ONE
The Times

Just reflect on how colossal and universal is the paper of which I am speaking.¹

As Richard Wagner acknowledged, in the 1850s The Times was the most widely-read and influential newspaper in the country, its daily sale totalling more than its five main rivals combined.² Although this dominance was undermined by the passing of the Newspaper Act of 1855 and ensuing revolutionary expansion of the press, The Times retained its intellectual authority in the teeth of the new competition – especially from the formidable Daily Telegraph.³ In terms of its readership profile, it was accepted by contemporaries that The Times spoke with a unique authority to the political and commercial elites of Victorian Britain. Yet despite its prestige, it was not a very profitable newspaper coming under price and cost pressure from more efficiently managed papers – especially the Daily Telegraph and the Daily News. In terms of its editorial line, The Times, justified its ‘Thunderer’ epithet by taking a strong line on the great issues of the day, such as Irish Home Rule (which it opposed) and ‘the Empire and its mission in the world’ (which it supported).⁴ The Times ‘thundered’ too in its promotion and projection of English music during the period surveyed, with the paper’s coverage being dominated by three outspoken, if ideologically very different, chief critics: James W. Davison (critic 1846–78), Francis Hueffer (1878–89) and John A. Fuller Maitland (1889–1911).

The Times was generous in its coverage of music throughout this period. Under James Davison (1813–85) and his successors, The Times hardly ever missed a major concert, festival or opera performance, with most reviews, as far as communications allowed, being printed the following day.⁵ Music was regarded as an intrinsic part of the paper’s format and the column space allocated to music reviews was generous, with individual works sometimes being given lengthy treatment. The Times’s music critics seem generally to have operated without excessive interference from editorial authority. Even so, Davison’s biographer noted that the critic ‘was occasionally expected to subordinate his own opinions and even the style of his writing to those of persons in authority’.⁶ Despite being given broad scope to cover music events in their own way, The Times’s critics were not well paid, with Davison starting on a salary of £200 pa in 1846 – a sum which had only risen to £250 pa by his retirement thirty years later. In comparison, the editor’s salary in the 1870s was £5,000 pa, roughly equivalent to that of a barrister.⁷ Notwithstanding the poor remuneration, the history of music criticism in the ‘Thunderer’ is the tale of how its critics, each in his own distinctive way, tried to galvanise opinion in the cause of England’s national music.

1. J. W. Davison: Musical Politician.

In art a thorough conservative, Davison was also in a certain sense a protectionist […] he looked for the diffusion amongst all artists of a spirit of fellowship […] leading to culture, higher effort and more successful expression of England’s musical power.⁸

James W. Davison joined The Times as critic in 1846 and, in a career spanning over thirty years, elevated the craft of music journalism.⁹ Davison was the most influential music journalist of his generation, his position on The Times ensuring a wide circulation for his views. His gregarious, even Rabelaisian personality mostly gave him the affection of his peers; and his prolific pen informed and entertained his readers as few others could. Davison was a seminal figure in evolving and legitimising his craft. At The Times, he transformed the position of music critic, ensuring that performance reviews ranged further afield than the fashionable London opera season and the social landmarks of the provincial festival circuit. Yet ultimately his was an unsteady talent which often succumbed to conservative prejudices and inconsistencies.

Davison venerated the German ‘masters’ from Handel to Mendelssohn and despised most developments in music after 1850. As a journalist, Davison was a music-patriot who passionately advocated the development of a ‘native school’ cast in the Mendelssohn mould. According to his memoirs, such a classical-romantic school was a distinct possibility in the 1840s, with the critic’s friend, William Sterndale Bennett (1816–75), at its head.¹⁰ The fact that such a development never took place, Davison blamed on the growing influence of Schumann and, especially of Wagner, after 1850. As a result, Davison spent most of his career railing against the new music, judging composers on their adherence to, or apostasy from, Mendelssohnian classicism. When Wagner arrived in London in 1855, Davison was overheard by the composer’s friend Ferdinand Praeger to vow, ‘so long as I hold the sceptre of music criticism, I’ll not let him have any chance here’.¹¹ Davison duly accorded Wagner’s concerts a dreadful press, confirming the composer’s own estimate of the power of the critic’s ‘sceptre’. Wagner was well aware of Davison’s threat, both in terms of reputation and hard cash, to his London visit.¹² The critic’s importance lay in the imperious manner with which he used his ‘sceptre’ to profile music in the ‘Thunderer’. Paradoxically, for all the irreverent radicalism of his journalism, Davison’s conservative legacy proved a barrier that the Musical Renaissance eventually had to overcome.

Davison’s reception and projection of English music in The Times reflected his strong prejudices against the ‘progressive’ in music. Among native composers, he favoured Sterndale Bennett whom, after a gilded youth in which Mendelssohn and Schumann favoured him, composed little after 1850. Consequently, on the rare occasions when Bennett ventured to premiere a new work, Davison was effusive, as with the oratorio The Woman of Samaria which he dubbed a ‘fresh start’ before going on to comment that it brought back ‘the Sterndale Bennett of old times, with all his graceful finish, his pure and flowing melody’.¹³ Another of Davison’s friends favoured in his column was George A. Macfarren (1813–87), who shared his reverence for Handel and Mendelssohn. When, at the age of sixty-three, Macfarren received his first major choral commission, Davison was there as The Times’s ‘own reporter’ to draw a direct parallel with Mendelssohn and his Elijah: ‘in The Resurrection another masterpiece has been added to the catalogue of works which the Birmingham Festival may claim the credit of having brought into existence’.¹⁴ Davison was a critic who ceaselessly looked back to a perceived golden age that was brutally cut short by Mendelssohn’s death.

As far as younger English talent was concerned, Davison was very supportive so long as the music conformed to his conservative musical agenda. In the 1850s, The Times promoted and projected the music of three promising newcomers: Henry Leslie (1822–96), William Bexfield (1824–53) and Charles Horsley (1822–76), all of whom contributed to the quest for a ‘great’ English oratorio in the Mendelssohn tradition. Although he gave both Leslie and Bexfield generous column-space when they brought forward new choral works, his notices were encouraging rather than effusive. Bexfield was the least favoured, so that when his Israel Restored, was premiered, Davison could not conceal his disappointment, finding it to be ‘a long oratorio, but not a great one’.¹⁵ As for Leslie’s Immanuel, although deemed to have music which was ‘not on a level with the subject’, Davison still thought it to be:

if not a work of imagination and strong originality, [then] one of excellent tendency and unquestionable talent, an honour to its composer, and a valuable addition to the English school of sacred music.¹⁶

For Davison, Horsley was the composer to watch in the 1850s, and when his oratorio David was given its London premier it was powerfully endorsed in the Musical World where Davison declared:

When will...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Illustrations
• General Editor’s Preface
• Glossary of Acronyms and Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part One: Watchmen & Watchtowers
• Part Two: The Watched
• Conclusion
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• Bibliography
• Index