George Marshall-Hall

George William Louis Marshall-Hall (28 March 1862 – 18 July 1915) was an English-born musician, composer, conductor, poet and controversialist who lived and worked in Australia from 1891 till his death in 1915.

[6] Marshall-Hall's father owned a 65-ton iron ocean-going yacht which, he said, was kept "in great measure to give my family fresh air, the opportunity of seeing foreign ports, of leading a healthy life such as cannot be led on shore".

So George apparently received no paternal assistance when, unable to get enough work in his chosen profession on occasions in the 1880s, he was compelled, he recalled, to sleep in the snow in Trafalgar Square and to button his jacket up to the neck when in polite society to conceal his lack of a shirt collar and waistcoat.

The deficiency of Marshall-Hall's formal qualifications for the Melbourne chair is reflected in the fact that, although he was one of 48 applicants when the post was first advertised in March 1888, the London committee declined to make a recommendation.

One member, the Professor of Music at the University of Oxford, Frederick Ouseley, conceded that there were "some eminently respectable men, and good musicians in the ordinary sense of the words" among the applicants, adding however that there were "certainly not five – hardly one – of whom I could honestly speak as first-class ...

"[24] Certainly two other committee members, principal of the Royal Academy of Music Alexander Mackenzie and concert pianist Sir Charles Hallé, while echoing Ouseley's view, agreed that Marshall-Hall was the only candidate who was "near to the mark".

[25] But when later that year the job was re-advertised, Marshall-Hall was still not considered the most suitable applicant by the committee, which selected four names, including his, to send to the Council of the University of Melbourne, but declined to rank them.

[26] The impasse was broken in 1890 when the Council obtained private advice from Hallé (then on a concert tour of Australia) and (indirectly) from Mackenzie and the Director of the Royal College of Music, Sir George Grove, all of whom recommended the appointment of Marshall-Hall.

Contemporaries remarked on his loud laughter and his habit of humming operatic airs as he strode around town, of tapping his baton importunately on the podium and glaring at restive concert audiences to achieve silence when conducting, and of writing explosive comments – such as "O superfine Assiduity" and "monstrous ignorance" – in the margins of books he read, by way of showing his contempt for the writer.

With the professor as ex-officio director[35] it opened for business in 1895, renting premises initially in the unfinished Queen's Coffee Palace on the corner of Rathdowne and Victoria streets, Carlton,[36] but moving soon afterwards to the ground-floor of the Victorian Artists' Society building in East Melbourne.

He established a largely professional orchestra which, after an initial public performance toward the end of 1891, began in the following year to give an annual series of concerts, mostly on Saturday afternoons under the professor's conductorship in the Melbourne Town Hall.

[40] He also found time to publish numerous newspaper articles, four books of verse[41] and a play called Bianca Capello,[42] as well as delivering many passionate and provocative speeches in the concert-hall and elsewhere which were widely reported in the press.

Among other things, he preached a whole-hearted, sensuous enjoyment of living, extolling "the mighty immutable goddess of laughter and love"[43] and "the splendour and vigour of ... immanent, multiplied, voluptuous vitality".

[44] He encouraged his fellows "to taste life to the full"[45] by throwing themselves with "extreme exuberance"[46] into its "manifold sensations",[47] allowing its joys to "pulse in the passionate blood and burst through the brain"[48] until "body and mind quiver and bound as though interpenetrated by an instantaneous current of electric fluid".

[44] This won him friends and admirers in Melbourne's bohemian community, including such well-known artists as Arthur Streeton (with whom he shared digs for a time in St Kilda), Tom Roberts and Lionel and Norman Lindsay, who reacted favourably to his convivial exhortations to come "Be merry while we may" in the enjoyment of "the glorious ardours of the genial bowl".

Former Victorian Lieutenant-Governor Sir William Robinson's 1890 warning to Melbourne University council that Marshall-Hall exhibited "a certain outspoken roughness in his manner"[51] was something of an understatement.

At a Town Hall concert on 24 July 1893, he took time off from conducting to inform the audience that a recent article in The Argus condemning the "putrid ... mass of ... sensuality" in the plays of Henrik Ibsen[62] was the "shameless and ignorant" work of a "scurrilous newspaper hack".

Following a campaign by the Melbourne Argus[67] and a barrage of protests from Church interests, the University Council refused Marshall-Hall's reappointment in 1900, but allowed him to submit his name as a candidate to the selection panel in London.