England has always possessed a considerable school of national composers. These might have achieved the highest triumphs of genius without acquiring a fraction of that social ascendancy for their art which it has gradually won. Under the auspices of the Prince Consort first, the patronage of the Court was secured for the art of St Cecilia. That day already mentioned on which Lady Lyttelton first heard the Queen’s husband playing on the organ at Windsor was an eventful one for the social esteem of music in the adopted country of the Royal executant. After this came the Prince’s directorship of the Ancient Concerts, and the arrangement of its programmes on special occasions by himself. The club principle during the married life of the Queen had in its popular illustration not gone beyond infancy. Otherwise, one of the Royal Family would, as he has since done, regularly have handled the conductor’s baton; while for the special amusement of another a series of smoking concerts might as to-day have been arranged in Piccadilly palaces.
Music of course has always been a tradition of English Royalty. The Royal Academy of Music now domiciled in Tenterden Street, Hanover Square, was founded in 1822 with the King as patron. It was opened March 24, 1823, with a small and precarious attendance of pupils seldom exceeding two or three score, even at the date of its receiving the Royal charter, June 23, 1830. The number of students at Christmas 1896 was 500, all of whom were regular in their visits. The Royal College of Music at Kensington Gore was first founded as the National Training School in 1875. Its avowed motive was to honour the Consort’s memory. It was due partly to the efforts of the Prince of Wales with a Committee of which the then Duke of Edinburgh was chairman. He was also a most indefatigable promoter of the whole scheme from the very first. Its first Principal was Dr, now Sir Arthur, Sullivan. Some years later, again at the Heir Apparent’s initiative, as a result of a meeting held at St James’s Palace, February 28, 1882, this institution was re-formed. It was opened in the building formerly occupied by the National Training School by the Prince and Princess of Wales, May 7, 1883. Of this Sir George Grove was the first director, holding the post till Christmas 1894 when he was succeeded by Dr. C. H. H. Parry. The Charter of the Royal College was obtained in 1883. It has to-day an endowment of £130,000 which provides some 60 different scholarships. This, too, in its existing shape was opened by the Prince Consort’s descendants, the Prince and Princess of Wales; it had at the Christmas of 1896, 300 regular pupils. A very important part of the institution consists of the Donaldson museum of musical instruments; these were given to the College by Mr G. Donaldson in 1894.
The Guildhall School of Music was founded in 1880 by that same Corporation which has done more perhaps than any other single body since the Queen’s accession to promote the humanities of life. Its first Principal was Mr Weist Hill; he was succeeded by Sir Joseph Barnby, who again in 1896 was followed by Mr W. H. Cummings. This Guildhall School is undoubtedly the most popular institution of the kind which we possess. Its pupils at the Christmas of 1896 were 3,496. The other great metropolitan school of music is Trinity College, London. This was incorporated in 1875 under the Companies Act. Six years later, in 1881, it was reorganized upon a wider basis. The number of pupils at Christmas 1896 shows a steady increase.
These and other institutions less important are only some of the national monuments to the progress of the study of music as an art during the last two or three decades.
The organization and the educational machinery of music have now, in the opinion of those competent judges to whom the writer of these lines is indebted, reached a point beyond which further development is neither necessary nor desirable. Production and execution leave perhaps little to be wished for. Appreciation, however, of musical excellence is not universally proportionate to musical activity. Audiences more intelligently critical and better trained are apparently the chief desiderata, if composers and performers are to rise above mediocrity. Instruction in the art now spoken of has, of course, shared in the advantages incidental to the transformation of London from an insular into a cosmopolitan capital. As a result, the best teachers from all countries are available for the London learner.
Nor in this respect does England to-day, as thirty years ago it did, compare disadvantageously with Leipsic, Paris, Berlin, Stuttgardt. There seems however reason to fear that, like Gwendolen Harleth in Daniel Deronda before Klesmer, we fail in that important and indefinable quality, style. The best critics complain that, when a student has been through the regular course here, and has perhaps become a first rate technical musician, he seldom seems to get any further; he never, in other words, develops any individuality. To some extent this result follows the collective teaching of all academies. The area of level mediocrity is, however, it may be feared, larger here than in France or Germany. There is more of delicacy and daintiness in the French student; there is more of individual expansion and thoughtfulness in the German. Both are trained in academies. The quicker intuition and more intelligent appreciation of French and German audiences are in the opinion of unprejudiced critics attributed to this cause. Hence the expert, if consulted by an English student, probably would advise him to go abroad for a year or two when his technical course has been finished in England. Unfortunately the advice too often resembles that of a medical man who might prescribe a generous diet and a glass of port wine to an invalid labourer, earning less than £1 a week.
In respect of education, cheapness and free scholarships seem to have been carried at least as far as is conducive to the real interest of learners in this country. A reform, favoured by many good judges, is to make payment for teaching universal with a few exceptions; then to give to students of promise an allowance sufficient to enable them to go abroad and complete their education. As it is, some risk is run of gratuitously training mediocrities, launching them on professional careers which can only land them in disappointment and poverty.
The late Prince Consort, though the most highly placed, is only one of several individuals whose personal influence has conspicuously encouraged the growth and the gratification of a musical taste more or less cultivated. The discussion which agitated English taste in the eighteenth century as to the merits of German and other music is summed up in a familiar epigram as the difference between tweedledum and tweedledee:—
Some say, compared to Bononcini,
That Mynheer Handel’s but a ninny;
Others aver that he to Handel
Is scarcely fit to hold a candle.
The commanding genius of the great German composer is enough to account for the traditional complaint that native genius in England has been eclipsed by foreign products. The Elector of Hanover had recognized Handel’s genius before he became George I. of England, but began his reign by showing little favour to the composer, who had absented himself without leave from his duties at the Electoral Court. Already in Queen Anne’s reign Handel’s Te Deum had celebrated in St Paul’s Cathedral the conclusion of the Peace of Utrecht. It was not till after his Water Music had procured his restoration to favour that the new English monarch took him back into his service. Gradually, however, till in 1741 it was confirmed by the Messiah produced in Dublin and by his operas in London, the triumph of the German over the Italian school thus advanced. Neither then nor later did it involve neglect of the great English composer of the seventeenth century, our own Henry Purcell,[78] organist at Westminster Abbey at eighteen years of age, and author of a greater number of songs, anthems, operas, glees and cantatas, at once famous and popular, than probably any other musician whom England has produced. Felix Mendelssohn of Hamburg, not less precocious than our own Purcell, also at eighteen produced an opera. His personal influence in England was scarcely less great than that of Handel, and of course tended towards the further popularization of Teutonic art: he lived on terms of intimate friendship during his different sojourns in this country with English musicians. The popular and accomplished pianoforte improvisatore, John Parry, who was familiar to the English public of this age from his connection with the German-Reed company, 1860-9, the forerunner of the Corney Grain and Arthur Cecil of a later day, might almost be called Mendelssohn’s pupil. By Mendelssohn, Parry was first encouraged to adopt music as a profession; the present writer well remembers how he heard from John Parry himself the account of Mendelssohn’s listening during half a winter night to the piano improvisations devised by the versatile genius of the then young man.