Hubert Parry
Sir Charles Hubert Hastings Parry, 1st Baronet, was an English composer, teacher and historian of music. Born in Richmond Hill, Bournemouth, Parry's first major works appeared in 1880. As a composer he is best known for the choral song "Jerusalem", his 1902 setting for the coronation anthem "I was glad", the choral and orchestral ode Blest Pair of Sirens, and the hymn tune "Repton", which sets the words "Dear Lord and Father of Mankind". His orchestral works include five symphonies and a set of Symphonic Variations. He also composed the music for Ode to Newfoundland, the Newfoundland and Labrador provincial anthem.
After early attempts to work in insurance at his father's behest, Parry was taken up by George Grove, first as a contributor to Grove's massive Dictionary of Music and Musicians in the 1870s and '80s, and then in 1883 as professor of composition and musical history at the Royal College of Music, of which Grove was the first head. In 1895 Parry succeeded Grove as head of the college, remaining in the post for the rest of his life. He was concurrently Heather Professor of Music at the University of Oxford from 1900 to 1908. He wrote several books about music and music history, the best-known of which is probably his 1909 study of Johann Sebastian Bach.
Both in his lifetime and afterwards, Parry's reputation and critical standing have varied. His academic duties were considerable and prevented him from devoting all his energies to composition, but some contemporaries such as Charles Villiers Stanford rated him as the finest English composer since Henry Purcell; others, such as Frederick Delius, did not. Parry's influence on later composers, by contrast, is widely recognised. Edward Elgar learned much of his craft from Parry's articles in Grove's Dictionary, and among those who studied under Parry at the Royal College were Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst, Frank Bridge and John Ireland.
He was also an enthusiastic cruising sailor and owned successively the yawl The Latois and the ketch The Wanderer. In 1908 he was elected as a member of the Royal Yacht Squadron, the only composer so honoured.
Biography
Early years
Hubert Parry was born in Richmond Hill, Bournemouth, the youngest of the six children of Thomas Gambier Parry and his first wife, Isabella née Fynes-Clinton, of Highnam Court, Gloucestershire. Gambier Parry, the son of Richard and Mary Parry, had been orphaned at the age of five and brought up by his maternal family, adopting their name, Gambier, as part of his surname. Having inherited enormous wealth from his grandfather, Thomas Parry, Gambier Parry was able to buy a country seat at Highnam Court, a seventeenth-century house near the River Severn and two miles west of Gloucester.Gambier Parry was an eminent collector of works of early Italian art at a time well before it was fashionable or widely known, and was also a painter and designer of some talent; he invented "spirit fresco", a process of mural painting appropriate for the damp English climate, which he used in his private chapel at Highnam as well as in Ely Cathedral. Besides his love of painting, Gambier Parry was himself musical, having studied piano and French horn as well as composition during his education at Eton. However, his advanced taste in the visual arts – he was a friend of John Ruskin and an admirer of Turner – did not transfer to his musical interests, which were highly conventional: Mendelssohn and Spohr were the limit of his appreciation for modern music. Nonetheless, he staunchly supported the Three Choirs Festival, both financially and against the threat of their closure between 1874 and 1875 by the puritanical Dean of Worcester.
Three of Gambier Parry's children died in infancy, and Isabella Parry died of consumption, aged 32, twelve days after the birth of Hubert. She was buried in the churchyard of St Peter's Church, Bournemouth, where Hubert was baptised two days later. He grew up at Highnam with his surviving siblings, Clinton and Lucy. Gambier Parry remarried in 1851, and had a further six children. Isabella's untimely death almost certainly affected her children, most obviously the eldest surviving son, Clinton, who was only seven when she died, and, more subtly, Hubert: according to his daughter Dorothea, his stepmother Ethelinda's "love for the young ones", meaning her own children, gave her little or no time for her stepchildren. Gambier Parry was often absent from home, being either away in London or on the Continent. Hubert's early childhood, with Clinton away at school and Lucy seven years his senior, was largely solitary, his only regular companion being a governess.
Clinton learned to play cello and piano, and his considerable musical talent became evident ahead of Hubert's. Yet despite their father's active interest in music, such activity was seen as a pastime, and was frowned upon as a career as being too uncertain and, unlike painting, a less than professional pursuit unseemly for a gentleman.
From January 1856 to the middle of 1858, Hubert attended a preparatory school in Malvern, from where he moved to Twyford Preparatory School in Hampshire. At Twyford, his interest in music was encouraged by the headmaster, and by two organists, S. S. Wesley at Winchester Cathedral, and Edward Brind, at Highnam church. From Wesley he gained an enduring love of Bach's music, which according to The Times "ultimately found expression in his most important literary work, Johann Sebastian Bach, the Story of the Development of a Great Composer ".
Brind gave Parry piano and basic harmony lessons, and took him to the Three Choirs Festival in Hereford in 1861. Among the choral works performed at that festival were Mendelssohn's Elijah, Mozart's Requiem, and Handel's Samson and Messiah. Orchestral works included Beethoven's Pastoral and Mendelssohn's Italian symphonies. The experience left a great impression on Parry, and effectively marked the beginning of his lifelong association with the festival.
Eton and the youngest Bachelor of Music
Just as Parry left Twyford for Eton College in 1861, home life was clouded by Clinton's disgrace: after a promising start at Oxford, studying history and music, Clinton had been sent down for womanising, drinking and indulging in opium. During Parry's first term at Eton, further news came that his sister, Lucy, had died of consumption on 16 November. That Parry was deeply affected by this is evident in his 1864 diary where he confessed a profound sense of loss. Nonetheless, Parry threw himself into life at Eton with characteristic energy, and distinguished himself at sport as well as music, despite early signs of the heart trouble that was to dog him for the rest of his life. Meanwhile, Clinton, despite the intervention of his father to secure his return to Oxford, was sent down a further two times, the last irrevocably for not working; in 1863 Clinton left for Paris under a cloud. Though Parry never mentioned being under family pressure, his biographer, Jeremy Dibble, speculates that since "his interest in music had grown to such a point where it could no longer be ignored or thrown away... the knowledge of his father’s opposition to a musical career, and having seen how such a denial had contributed to the rebellious nature of his brother's character, the burden of expectation must have seemed enormous."Eton was not at that time noted for its music, despite the interest of a number of its pupils. As there was no one at the school competent enough to advance Parry's studies in composition, he turned to George Elvey, the organist of St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle, and began studies with him sometime in 1863. Elvey was musically conservative, preferring Handel to Mendelssohn, and though Parry initially idolised his teacher, he eventually realised how unadventurous he was compared to S. S. Wesley. Parry nonetheless benefited from Elvey's tuition and gained the advantage of being able to write anthems for the choir of St George's Chapel, which under Elvey's direction had reached a standard exceptional in English choral singing of that time. Elvey started his pupil on the contrapuntal disciplines of canon and fugue; recognising his pupil's talent, he soon became ambitious to train him to a standard sufficient to earn the music degree at Oxford. He therefore introduced his student to the string quartets of Haydn and Mozart, and ultimately to some of the rudiments of orchestration. Meanwhile, Parry, on his own initiative, explored the orchestral scores of Beethoven, Weber, and his beloved Mendelssohn. While still at Eton, Parry successfully sat the Oxford Bachelor of Music examination, the youngest person who had ever done so. His examination exercise, a cantata, O Lord, Thou hast cast us out, "astonished" the Heather Professor of Music, Sir Frederick Ouseley, and was triumphantly performed and published in 1867.
In 1867 Parry left Eton and went up to Exeter College, Oxford. He did not study music, being intended by his father for a commercial career, and instead read Law and Modern History. His musical concerns took second place during his time at Oxford, though during one summer holiday, acting on the advice of Wesley, he went to Stuttgart and studied with Henry Hugh Pierson. As Parry recalled, Pierson's prime aim appeared to be "to disabuse me of Bach and Mendelssohn", and he set Parry the task of re-orchestrating works by Weber, Rossini and Beethoven, as well as some of Parry's own works. Parry came back to England much more critical of Mendelssohn's music, and discovered more adventurous repertoire through attending concerts at London's Crystal Palace: he was particularly taken by Schumann's Second Symphony, with its "wildly glorious" Scherzo and the slow movement's "delicious" orchestration and "most wonderful... modulation". He went into raptures about Beethoven's Sixth and Eighth symphonies, confessing in his diary: "I can hardly bear to hear or smell a large work by Mendelssohn in the same week as a great work of dear old Beet." Yet, as Dibble notes, Mendelssohn's influence on Parry's own music persisted.