Bigamists, lunatics and adventurers: the raucous world of 19th century British music

For a patriotic German in the decades before Bismarck, Britain’s power was an object of envy. But there was one thing, at least, that you could always hold over the Anglo-Saxons on their foggy little island. On 1 January 1837, Robert Schumann sat down in Leipzig to hear a new piano concerto by the 20-year-old William Sterndale Bennett. ‘An English composer; no composer,’ commented his neighbour, smugly, before the music started. Few 19th-century German music-lovers failed to point out that the land of Shakespeare had somehow failed to produce a single really significant composer since the late 17th century.

We know how that story ended; and if you want to explore the flowering of the British musical renaissance, it’s never been easier. The first recording of Parry’s oratorio Judith (1888) was released this month and recent recordings have put Sullivan back into the limelight without Gilbert for the first time in decades. (Coronavirus has sadly thwarted the Nottingham Harmonic Society’s attempt to revive Hamish MacCunn’s 1905 cantata The Wreck of the Hesperus.) But the picture grows dimmer before the last quarter of the 19th century. Are there riches waiting to be rediscovered further back?

Well, yes and no. For the young British musician of the early Victorian era, the choice seems to have been respectability via the Royal Academy of Music (founded in 1822), or outright bohemianism as an itinerant virtuoso or opera composer. Not that the Academy was all that respectable, initially at least. Its first secretary, the harp virtuoso and bigamist Nicholas-Charles Bochsa, had fled Paris after being convicted of fraud. Its principal was William Crotch (1775–1847) — a former prodigy, whose music resembles Haydn with a coating of Regency stucco. He resigned in 1832, having been caught kissing a female student (she had apparently completed a particularly fine harmony exercise).

But the Academy soon settled into politeness, instilling a due reverence for Handel and later Mendelssohn — a composer so quintessentially Victorian that in 1842, during a soirée at Buckingham Palace, he played the piano while a starstruck Queen Victoria sang his songs (‘with some trepidation’, she told her diary).