Alexander Mackenzie (composer)
Together with Hubert Parry and Charles Villiers Stanford, he was regarded as one of the fathers of the British musical renaissance in the late nineteenth century.
[3] Shortly after starting at the Academy, he was awarded a King's Scholarship, the income from which Mackenzie augmented by playing in theatre and music hall pit-bands, as well as in classical concerts under the leading conductor Michael Costa.
He undertook a heavy workload of teaching, both privately and in local colleges, and from 1870 he was in charge of music at St George's, Charlotte Square.
He also played the violin in orchestral concerts both locally and at the Birmingham Festivals from 1864 to 1873, meeting visiting musicians including the conductor Hans von Bülow, who became a firm friend.
[5] Two of Bülow's pupils in Florence, Italy, Giuseppe Buonamici and George F. Hatton, introduced Mackenzie to the musical philanthropists Carl and Jessie Hillebrand.
[5] His cantatas The Bride and Jason were successfully given, and the Carl Rosa Company commissioned his first opera, Colomba, written to a libretto prepared by Francis Hueffer, music critic of The Times.
A second opera, The Troubadour, produced by the same company in 1886, was less successful, though Liszt thought well enough of the piece to begin work on a piano fantasia based on themes from it.
[5] In October 1887, the principal of the Royal Academy of Music, Sir George Macfarren, died, and in early 1888 Mackenzie was appointed to succeed him.
He was fortunate in enjoying the friendly support of his opposite numbers at the College, George Grove, and, from 1895, Hubert Parry, and the two institutions established a close working relationship of mutual benefit.
[3] In his later years as principal, Mackenzie became markedly conservative, forbidding his students to play the chamber music of Ravel, which he stigmatised as "a pernicious influence".
From his early days playing in orchestras in Edinburgh and Birmingham he had met and become friendly with many leading international musicians, including Clara Schumann, Joseph Joachim, Charles Gounod and Antonín Dvořák.
[8] In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Mackenzie's professional prominence brought him many honours from universities and learned societies in Britain and abroad.
On 15 October 1923 the BBC broadcast one of the earliest examples of a one-composer programme, devoting one hour and 45 minutes to performances of Mackenzie's works, conducted by the composer.
[9] On his eighty-sixth birthday, over forty distinguished musicians presented him with a silver tray inscribed with facsimiles of their signatures, including Elgar, Delius, Ethel Smyth, Edward German, Henry Wood, and Landon Ronald.
[4] The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography says of Mackenzie's music that it is "cosmopolitan in style and somewhat old-fashioned for its period, displaying influences of French and German composers, including Bizet, Gounod, Schumann, and Wagner.
[16] The words were adapted from the Song of Solomon by Joseph Bennett, music critic of The Daily Telegraph, who later provided Sullivan with the text for The Golden Legend.
"[19] This even applied to his one excursion into comic opera, His Majesty, a piece in the Gilbert and Sullivan vein, with a libretto by F. C. Burnand and R. C. Lehmann and additional lyrics by Adrian Ross, presented at the Savoy Theatre in 1897.
[20] The Times commented, "Mr Burnand's experience as a librettist of comic opera, and Sir Alexander Mackenzie's inexperience in this class of composition might lead the public to expect a brilliant book weighed down by music of too serious and ambitious a type.
