William Sterndale Bennett
The critic of The Harmonicon wrote of this concert:[T]he most complete and gratifying performance was that of young Bennett, whose composition would have conferred honour on any established master, and his execution of it was really surprising, not merely for its correctness and brilliancy, but for the feeling he manifested, which, if he proceed as he has begun, must in a few years place him very high in his profession.
[23] At this time Bennett wrote to Davison:[Mendelssohn] took me to his house and gave me the printed score of [his overture] 'Melusina', and afterwards we supped at the 'Hôtel de Bavière', where all the musical clique feed ...
The party consist[ed] of Mendelssohn, [Ferdinand] David, Stamity [sic] ... and a Mr. Schumann, a musical editor, who expected to see me a fat man with large black whiskers.
Mendelssohn wrote to the principal of the university, "I beg you to use your powerful influence on behalf of that candidate whom I consider in every respect worthy of the place, a true ornament to his art and his country, and indeed one of the best and most highly gifted musicians now living: Mr. Sterndale Bennett."
Bennett wrote to Mendelssohn on 24 July, displaying some querulousness, "The Philharmonic Directors have engaged Costa ... with which I am not very well pleased, but I could not persuade them to the contrary, and am tired of quarrelling with them.
"[39] In May 1848, on the opening of Queen's College, London, Bennett, as one of the Founding Directors, delivered an inaugural lecture and joined the staff, while continuing his work at the RAM and private teaching.
"[44] Bennett became a victim as well as a beneficiary of a trend towards professionalization in the music industry in Britain; "The Principal and the Professor became powerful, whereas the status of the composer and the executant (unless foreign) was implicitly downgraded.
"[45] In 1849, Bennett became the founding president of the Bach Society in London, whose early members included Sir George Smart, John Pyke Hullah, William Horsley, Potter and Davison.
[40] Further performances of the Passion were given by the Society in 1858 and 1862, the latter coinciding with the publication of Bennett's own edition of the work, with a translation of the text into English by his pupil Helen Johnston.
[49] This performance was given with a new organization, the Orchestral Union, and followed a snub from Costa, who had refused to conduct the pianist Arabella Goddard (Davison's wife) in Bennett's Third Concerto at the Philharmonic Society.
[56] Moreover, comparing London with other centres around the mid-century, Ehrlich notes "Verdi was in Milan, Wagner in Dresden, Meyerbeer in Paris, Brahms in Vienna, and Liszt in Weimar.
"[57] He instances the London premiere of Schumann's Paradise and the Peri in the 1856 season, which, by engaging Jenny Lind as soloist, and with Prince Albert in the audience, brought in a substantial subscription, but was musically disastrous (and was not helped by the chaos of a seriously overcrowded venue).
[58] Temperley writes: "After 1855 [Bennett] was spurred by belated honours, and occasional commissions, to compose a respectable number of significant and substantial works, though it was too late to recapture his early self-confidence.
[67] In Stanford's words, "As Chairman he succeeded, after the Government had withdrawn its annual grant, in winning it back, restored the financial credit of the house, and during seven years bore the harassing anxiety of complex negotiations with various public bodies of great influence who were discussing schemes for the advance of national musical education.
[73] Bennett himself taught composition at the RAM; this was undoubtedly where his greatest interests lay at this period, and it appears that the examples he gave to his pupils concentrated on his own 'conservative' favourites of Mendelssohn, Beethoven and Mozart.
[1] In 1871, he was knighted by Queen Victoria (two years after his old antagonist Costa had been accorded the same honour), and, in 1872, he received a public testimonial before a large audience at St James's Hall, London.
[81] The first concert of the Philharmonic Society's season, on 18 March, began with a tribute to its sometime conductor: pieces from his unfinished music for Sophocles's tragedy Ajax, and the complete The Woman of Samaria, for which the choir was provided by the RAM.
[91] W. B. Squire wrote in 1885: His sense of form was so strong, and his refined nature so abhorred any mere seeking after effect, that his music sometimes gives the impression of being produced under restraint.
It is this which makes him, as has been said, so peculiarly a musician's composer: the broad effects and bold contrasts which an uneducated public admires are absent; it takes an educated audience to appreciate to the full the exquisitely refined and delicate nature of his genius.
Stanford writes that "his playing ... was undoubtedly remarkable and had a fire and energy in it which does not appear on the gentle surface of his music", and notes that Bennett's performances were eulogized by, amongst others, John Field, Clara Schumann, and Ferdinand Hiller.
[51][98][99] In a subsequent lecture he opined that Verdi was "immeasurably inferior" to Gioachino Rossini,[100] and could only say in favour of Berlioz that he "must be allowed the character of a successful and devoted artist ... it cannot be doubted that his treatment of a great orchestra is masterly in the extreme.
[104] Temperley feels that the early symphonies are the weakest works of this period, but he suggests that "few piano concertos between Beethoven and Brahms are as successful as Bennett's in embodying the Classical spirit, not in a stiff frame to deck with festoons of virtuosity, but in a living form capable of organic growth, and even of structural surprise.
[109] Bennett edited some of the keyboard works of Beethoven and Handel and co-edited the Chorale Book for England with Otto Goldschmidt (1863), based on German hymns collected by Catherine Winkworth.
The London critic William Ayrton wrote: ... a discharge of musical artillery in the shape of drums, seconded by blasts of trombones and trumpets that seemed to realise all that we have heard of a tropical tornado. ...
So very clever and promising a young man ought to meet with every kind of reasonable encouragement, but judicious and true friends would have hinted to him that his present production is the dry result of labour.
[116]Schumann, by contrast, wrote: "The overture is charming; indeed, save Spohr and Mendelssohn, what other living composer is so completely master of his pencil, or bestows with it such tenderness and grace of colour, as Bennett? ...
"[116] Outside these countries, Bennett remained almost unknown as a musician, although his reputation as a conductor led Berlioz to invite him to join his Société Philharmonique, and the Dutch composer Johannes Verhulst solicited his support for the Netherlands Society for Encouragement of Music.
In the United States, meanwhile, the New York Tribune called Bennett "probably the greatest composer produced by England" with the exception of Henry Purcell two centuries earlier, echoing Schumann's sentiments about The Wood Nymphs and hailing the G minor symphony (Op.
He does not profoundly impress the feelings, rouse the imagination, carry the listener along by the irresistible force of genius; and his music, though its charm will long be recognized, can have no lasting effect upon the development of art.
[120] Temperley assesses Bennett as the most distinguished British composer of the early Victorian era, "the only plausible rivals being Samuel Sebastian Wesley (1810–76) and Michael William Balfe (1808–70)".
