Victorian values

Musical Times, Autumn 2004 by Thomson, Andrew

Victorian values Samuel Sebastian Wesley: a life Peter Horton Oxford Studies in British Church Music Oxford University Press (Oxford & New York, 2004); xx, 385pp; £60. ISBN 0 19 816146 8.

George Grove, music and Victorian culture Edited by Michael Musgrave Palgrave Macmillan (Basingstoke & New York, 2003); xiv, 346pp; £55. ISBN 0333 94804 1.

THESE TWO EXCELLENT scholarly and wide-ranging studies provide completely different perspectives on the condition of serious music in 19th-century England - the so-called 'Land without music' - yet taken together they complement each other extremely well. The career of Samuel Sebastian Wesley - undoubtedly the finest organist and compositional talent in the late Georgian and early Victorian eras - suffered from marginalisation in the near moribund world of provincial cathedrals, and thus his latent creative genius was unable to fulfil its full potential. Indeed, it was not a good time to be an aspiring native composer in England: whereas the galaxy of outstanding painters, poets and novelists was sustained by an appreciative and informed public, Wesley's own father Sebastian Wesley, Cipriani Potter and Mozart's pupil Thomas Attwood inter alia cut poor figures in the prevailing musical climate, where only the popular genres - amateur piano pieces, drawing-room ballads, glees - enjoyed any real commercial viability. Peter Horton's comprehensive, rounded and well written study, far from a fusty antiquarian exercise, engages admirably with Wesley's ambitious character, which was undermined by regular periods of depression exacerbated by his servile status and disheartening working conditions. He was, for instance, a regular player of musical chairs - gaining Hereford, Exeter, Leeds Parish Church, Winchester and Gloucester in succession - but each of these seats would soon give way under the weight of his unsatisfied expectations and acrimonious disputes with ecclesiastical authorities of limited vision, perhaps fearful of being up-staged by their brilliant organist. The surprising range of his compositions is admirably surveyed and discussed in appropriate detail and with copious musical illustrations - not only his well known church anthems, services and organ music but also his extensive contribution to the rapidly expanding field of hymnody. For me, the great value of Horton's book lies in its embrace of wider horizons, above all the recognition of Wesley's overwhelming admiration of German music - not only JS Bach but also Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Weber and Spohr. In fact, despite minimal opportunities for its performance, orchestral music also attracted him: the Overture in E and the single movement Symphony were written in the Hereford years, but his inadequate technical training and difficulty with extended musical structure severely hampered his promising efforts in this direction. One can only regret that, unlike Attwood and Potter, he never had the opportunity to travel and study in the German-speaking world.

Horton's opening chapter on his early years in London is particularly fascinating, and reveals how the young Wesley had been exposed to some of the most advanced musical experiences which the city could offer. As a leading choirboy in the Chapel Royal he was not only immersed in the 'conservative continuity' of Blow, Purcell, Croft, Greene and Boyce, but also took part in more up-to-date secular activities: in 1823 he appeared alongside Rossini at the exotic Brighton Pavilion to entertain King George IV, and two years later took part in a benefit performance of Weber's Der Freischütz. Subsequently he worked as pianist and chorusmaster at the English Opera House for a few years, being involved with the English stage premieres of Freuchütz and Cod jan tutti and revivals of Don Giovanni and The marriage of Figaro. In 1834 he composed the overture and 14 numbers for the melodrama The dilosk gatherer in the style of the German romantic opera of Weber and Spohr. It's interesting to speculate what his future prospects might have been if he had stayed on in London and continued his theatre work - as he was tempted to do, though he must have seen what had happened to his father there, with no proper position and condemned to a life of routine teaching. He might well have felt equally frustrated with the British stage of his time - which boasted far greater actors than contemporary playwrights - and been infuriated by pushy managers and fickle audiences. But had he persisted, might he possibly have become another Michael Balfe, struggling to establish an English national opera of which nothing survives other than The Bohemian girl (1843)? In any case, Wesley's gifts were not those of a musical impresario like Francesco Berger, who collaborated with Dickens in his amateur theatricals and eventually became secretary of the Royal Philharmonic Society.

What is not in question, however, was his very real dedication to church music and its proper role in the Anglican liturgy. His ongoing crusades for raising standards from the abysmal depths to which they had sunk by the end of the i8th century well reflect the contrarian nature of his character, highly argumentative and anti-authoritarian as it was. On one hand, he had little time for the controversial Tractarian reforms of the Oxford Movement and actually condemned the use of Gregorian chant maybe his father's flirtation with Catholicism had something to do with it; but on the other hand, more weight should be given to the missionary Methodist legacy of his grandfather and grand uncle Charles and John Wesley. I would suggest that their spirit of spiritual renewal, blinding personal revelation and 'enthusiasm' so disturbing to conventional Anglican sensibilities clearly resurfaced in Samuel Sebastian's early Hereford anthems 'Blessed be the God and Father' and 'The wilderness' - together with a sense of drama derived from the theatre, as Horton rightly maintains. (Typically Wesleyan, too, was his private fantasy of replacing the hated Deans and Chapters with a circuit system of eminent preachers!) An extremely well received course of eight illustrated lectures delivered by him in 1844 at the Collegiate Institute, Liverpool was based on the premise that from the time of the Reformation the quality and performance of sacred music had slipped far behind secular music. The remedy was a vibrant musical tradition looking to Germany; but being a creative artist rather than a logician, he was of course not entirely consistent in his opinions. We find that, though he expressed considerable reservations about the early church music of Tallis and others - 'We are working Railways with the rolling stock of Henry 8ths reign!!' - his own later anthems, notably 'Cast me not away' and 'The face of the Lord', are characterised, in Horton's words, by 'a wonderfully successful fusion of the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries'. These reflect to some extent the moderate High Church ethos of Leeds Parish Church. Likewise, as a leading adviser on the building of the organ in St George's Hall, Liverpool, he fought for the adoption of unequal temperament, by then a conservative idea totally unsuitable in practice to accommodate the intensive chromaticism and freely modulating nature of a significant number of his own compositions.