CHAPTER IX
DISTINGUISHED MUSICIANS IN ENGLAND DURING THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
WILLIAM STERNDALE BENNETT
Birth—Family connected with English Church music—Enters Royal Academy of Music—Importance of the step—His work there—Proceeds to Leipzig—Schumann's appreciation of his genius—The German impress—His return to England—Life-long association with Royal Academy of Music—Bennett as pianist—Institutes chamber concerts—His conservative views—Rivalry of foreign musicians—His most important compositions—Founds The Bach Society—His place in musical history.
William Sterndale Bennett was born at Sheffield in 1816. Like the majority of celebrated English musicians, he came of a family long associated with the music of the Church; several of his relatives, including his grandfather, having been members of cathedral choirs.
When he was only eight years of age he entered the choir of King's College Chapel, Cambridge, and there became acquainted with, and as later events proved, influenced by, the ancient school of English ecclesiastical music, which, notwithstanding his subsequent foreign education, never entirely lost its effect on his mind.
He was not, however, perhaps unfortunately, allowed to remain there long, for after two years he was sent to the Royal Academy of Music in London, which was then a young institution in
which the pupils were not only taught music and given an elementary general education, but were, at that period of its history, boarded as well.
It is certainly open to question whether it was a wise step on the part of his relatives to take, seeing that it removed him from a centre where all the surroundings were English—English thought, influence, music and all that goes to mark national characteristics—to one which was, however admirable from many points of view, to say the least, cosmopolitan in character.
A genius so precocious as Bennett would be perfectly capable to assimilate, even at so early an age, the spirit of the ancient school, and this he certainly accomplished to some extent at Cambridge: the fact that it subsequently became subservient to another was, simply, the result of the force of circumstances.
In the end, it cannot be denied that the spirit of German music practically obliterated it, and, while acknowledging the independence of thought that Bennett's music often displays, and which one likes to think may be owing to his Cambridge days, it must be admitted that its similarity in style to that of, above all, Mendelssohn's, detracts from the value that it would otherwise possess.