George Alexander Macfarren

Trained at the Royal Academy of Music, she was successively a concert singer and singing teacher, as well as being a writer and a prolific translator of German poetry, songs (lieder) and operatic libretti into English.

[3] He lived with "chronic bronchitis and a weak heart" but refused to abate his working schedule,[13] and died on 31 October 1887, at his house in Hamilton Terrace, St John's Wood.

[15] In 1829, at the age of sixteen, he entered the Royal Academy of Music, where he studied composition under Cipriani Potter[6] as well as piano under William Henry Holmes and trombone with John Smithies.

[7] Macfarren's eyesight had at that point deteriorated so significantly that he spent the next 18 months in New York to receive treatment from a leading oculist, but to no effect.

After the Leipzig concert Mendelssohn wrote again to say "Your overture went very well, and was most cordially and unanimously received by the public, the orchestra playing it with true delight and enthusiasm".

His composition Romance and Allegro agitato for concertina, violin, viola, cello, and double bass was first performed by Richard Blagrove in 1854.

[33] During his lifetime, Macfarren's music met with a mixed reception; "his views were often considered dogmatic and reactionary, but, unlike Grove, his theoretical and analytical expertise was indisputable.".

[37] One contemporary called Macfarren "essentially a musical grammarian, engaged all his life long in settling the doctrine of the enclitic de.

According to a contemporary commentator, Macfarren "had great originality of thought and, as a composer, would probably have had still greater success if his early composition studies had been formed on the more modern lines to which he afterwards became so devotedly attached.

"[39] Others, however, criticized the oratorio, arguing that "with all its very great and solid merit, can be said to be original in style only in virtue of the logical results of certain theories of harmony held by its composer.

"[44] Macfarren's music is "capable of graceful lyricism, [but] what may be a desire to avoid cliches in the songs leads him at times to an unexpected angularity of line that seems more awkward than fresh.

[45] However, Macfarren's St John the Baptist has been praised as "an original and imaginative piece in which the shadow of Mendelssohn, so prominent since the appearance of Elijah in 1846, is only occasionally perceptible.