Programme Notes

CHARLES HUBERT HASTINGS PARRY 1848-1918

SYMPHONIC VARIATIONS FOR ORCHESTRA

An individual who began to compose at the age of eight and took his B Mus while still at Eton, where he was the musical prodigy of his generation, was clearly marked out for great things. Even if Hubert Parry never quite achieved as a composer the heights promised by these early distinctions, he did come to occupy a commanding place in English music at a time when the well of inspiration was in danger of drying.

When he came down from reading music at Oxford, Parry did the unexpected. He went to work at Lloyd's Register of Shipping in the City, a wholly anomalous job situation, at odds with everything he wanted from life, and he did it solely to earn enough money to marry the girl he had fallen for. She was Maudie Herbert, daughter of one of England's oldest aristocratic families, who disapproved furiously of their affair and did their best to thwart it. Yet, whatever his future in-laws may have thought, and city or no city, Parry's musical instincts could not be repressed, and at 25 he became a pupil of Wagner's champion in England, the pianist Edward Dannreuther, whose house was the veritable focus of musical culture in London. He considered Parry a genius. All Parry's early chamber works were first performed at Dannreuther's, and with this useful support he was soon making a wider reputation. His choral works were being heard at festivals, and his name became widely known with the performance -- by Dannreuther at the Crystal Palace in 1880 -- of his Piano Concerto in F-sharp, and the Cantata, Scenes from Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, at the Gloucester Festival. In 1883, aged 35, he was appointed to teach Musical History at the newly-formed Royal College of Music, and four years later he succeeded George Grove there as Director. In 1887 he crowned this appointment with his election as Professor of Music at Oxford. In 1898 he was knighted. Five years later he became a baronet.

Though in appearance he was the conventional English gentleman, combining, said someone, 'a somewhat military look with a nautical breeziness,' he was intellectually unconventional - a religious agnostic who was inclined politically to the liberal left. Those who knew Parry spoke of his geniality, kindness, generosity and the warmth of his personality, and all these qualities, no less than his own example as a composer, were not insignificant in the renaissance of English music. Vaughan Williams was a pupil and honoured the man, saying he was the inheritor of a great English choral tradition that passed from Tallis and Byrd, down to the Wesleys: Parry, he said, 'has passed on the torch to us and it is our duty to keep it alight.'

Parry had told Vaughan Williams he should write choral music 'as befits an Englishman and a democrat,' and in our times, Hubert Parry's own choral works are the best remembered of his output. Not only Jerusalem, which practically has the status of an alternative national anthem, but I was Glad, composed for the coronation of Edward VII and played at every coronation since. But he also composed five symphonies, two piano concertos, an opera, much theatre music and a number of miscellaneous orchestral pieces. Donald Tovey, another pupil of Parry's, wrote that the Symphonic Variations we hear tonight vividly recall the man. The music, he said, revealed 'a character that grounded optimism on a brave recognition of facts, that lost all sense of duty and self-sacrifice in the simple pleasure of goodness, and unconsciously destroyed conceit and priggishness.' There are 27 Variations on an original theme, and the work is in five main sections, so organised that they suggest the progress and form of a symphony. The work was first performed in June 1897 at a concert of the Royal Phiharmonic Society. Parry himself was the conductor.

Programme Notes by Paul Vaughan ©

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