Richard Bratby

Return of the Muse

Only by ignoring European taste, and daring to be vulgar, did British music come into its own

It’s October 1895 and the spirit of Music has been absent from Britain for exactly 200 years. Why she fled, and why she should return now — specifically, to the Leeds Festival — is not clear. Undaunted, Charles Hubert Hastings Parry, the poet Robert Bridges and the massed choral and orchestral forces of the West Riding send up a prayer to the exiled ‘Myriad voicèd Queen’: ‘Thy many-hearted grace restore/ Unto our isle, our own to be’. You read that correctly: the composer whom Edward Elgar would call ‘the head of our art in this country’ begins his Invocation to Music by swallowing whole the Germanic libel that 19th-century Britain was ‘Das Land ohne Musik’. Well, of course he does. By 1895 it was practically a reflex. Since the death of Purcell (which Parry’s Invocation commemorates), generations of British composers had internalised a cultural cringe towards Europe that lingers, in certain quarters, to the present day. The young Parry sought lessons with Brahms and headed his Second String Quartet — written at a country house in Gloucestershire — Zweite Quartette C-dur. The historical irony of the Invocation is doubly cruel. As Parry and Bridges prophesied, Britain was indeed about to witness a new musical dawn, but posterity has tended to consign Parry to the Victorian twilight before it. That’s the problem with posterity — it generalises. When Parry finds precisely the right balance of inspiration and technique, as in his great Milton setting Blest Pair of Sirens (1887), he’s unsurpassable. As for the five symphonies and the large-scale choral works on which his Victorian reputation rested; well, who really knows whether Ernest Newman’s notorious crack about Parry ‘sickening for another oratorio’ was fair or not? We never hear them, outside of anniversaries or occasional recordings. A pile-up of centenaries — Parry’s death in 1918, the partial granting of women’s suffrage, and the Armistice — has provided a chance to reassess that pre-dawn generation of British composers.

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