Sullivan was the son of a clarinet player and teacher. He also began, as did so many British Islanders, as a choir boy and entered the Royal Academy of Music on a Mendelssohn Scholarship. Later he went to the Leipsic Conservatory and wrote some music to Shakespeare’s Tempest, which established his fame in England. Besides his operas he wrote much incidental music, some anthems and cantatas, among these The Golden Legend and The Prodigal Son are the best. He wanted very much to write grand opera, but he never seemed to work well in this vein and his Ivanhoe did him little good.
And so, we leave opera until the wand of the Wizard Wagner changes the whole path of music.
CHAPTER XXIV
The Poet Music Writers—Romantic School
Schubert—Mendelssohn—Schumann—Chopin
You have seen how Romantic Music began, and why Beethoven is often the first name mentioned when Romanticism is talked about, for he was the colossal guidepost pointing the way.
He was as far from the classical forms of Bach, as from later writers who have “jumped over the musical traces” altogether. All were, and still are, trying to free themselves from conventions, and to express their feelings satisfactorily.
It is natural to begin the Romantic school with Schubert, the first figure of great importance. But there was one John Field (1782–1837) from totally different surroundings who is still remembered for his fine piano nocturnes.
Impressed with the quiet and solemnity of the night, he knew how to put it into beautiful melody. He was born in a little out-of-the-way street in Dublin, not far from St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and near the birthplace of that romantic poet, Tom Moore. His father and his grandfather, both musicians, forced the infant prodigy, and at ten, he played, publicly, a concerto composed by his father.
At twelve, the boy was apprenticed, or “hired out,” as pupil and salesman to Clementi, the composer and piano manufacturer in London. He showed off the pianos so well to the customers, that Clementi soon realized he had made a good bargain. The boy played in London as the “ten-year-old pupil of Clementi,” on whom he no doubt tried out his Gradus ad Parnassum. (Page [320].)
Five years later he played his own “Concerto for the grand fortepiano, composed for the occasion.” Clementi was shrewd, and started a branch of his piano business in St. Petersburg, taking Field with him.