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William Sterndale Bennett: Imitator or Original?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 December 2016

Nicholas Temperley
Nicholas Temperley*
Affiliation:
University of Illinois Email: ntemp@illinois.edu
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Abstract

Sterndale Bennett has often been characterized as an imitator of Mendelssohn. While it is true and unsurprising that there are similarities in the two composers’ musical language, actual imitation is difficult to substantiate. Bennett’s reputation as a composer has passed through several phases in the last 200 years. It was high in his lifetime in Germany as well as in Britain, when resemblance to Mendelssohn was counted as a positive asset, but later assailed by promoters of the ‘English Musical Renaissance’, who needed a preceding dark age and tended to dismiss early Victorians as copiers of Mendelssohn. Recent writers have shown a more positive attitude to the Victorian period in general. Bennett’s individuality has in fact been fully recognized from the first by such widely differing commentators as Mendelssohn himself, Robert Schumann, Henry Heathcote Statham, Frederick Ouseley, Charles Gounod, Charles Stanford, Geoffrey Bush, Peter Horton and Larry Todd. His style was founded on the Austro-German classical tradition and the London Pianoforte School headed by Clementi and Cramer, through his teacher Cipriani Potter, as is confirmed by early sources. This article surveys some of Bennett’s most characteristic piano pieces, and ends by analysing notably original features of his harmonic style that owe nothing to Mendelssohn, such as the inverted pedal note, evaded resolution of dissonance, and harmonic anticipation.

Type
Research Article
Information
Nineteenth-Century Music Review , Volume 13 , Issue 2 , December 2016 , pp. 173 - 193
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2016 

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References

1 Variation 13, acknowledging a quotation from Mendelssohn’s overture Meersstille und glückliche Fahrt.

2 Todd, R. Larry, ‘Mendelssohnian Allusions in the Early Piano Works of William Sterndale Bennett’, in The Piano in Nineteenth-Century British Culture: Instruments, Performers and Repertoire, ed. Therese Ellsworth and Susan Wollenberg (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 108–113 Google Scholar.

3 Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, 25 November 1842; trans. Sterndale Bennett, J. R., The Life of William Sterndale Bennett (Cambridge: The University Press, 1907), 130 Google Scholar.

4 Ms Shaver-Gleason kindly sent me a copy of her paper, ‘“It sounds like Mendelssohn, it must be Sterndale Bennett”: Acknowledging German Influence in English Historiography’, which she delivered at the North American Conference on 19th-Century Music at Andover, Mass., in July 2015; she intends to publish it in revised form. The quotation in the title is attributed to Ignaz Moscheles in Fragments of an Autobiography, edited by his son Felix Moscheles (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1899), 53.

5 Fuller Maitland located the start of the ‘Renaissance’ in September 1880 with the performance of Parry’s Prometheus Unbound, and this decision was accepted by later historians. I discussed this in ‘Xenophilia in British Musical History’, Nineteenth-Century British Music Studies, ed. Bennett Zon (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), I: 3–19. It is further developed in Linda Shaver-Gleason’s article.

6 Fuller Maitland, J. A., English Music in the XIXth Century (London, 1902), 115 Google Scholar. I will dispute the judgement that Bennett’s early style was ‘remarkably similar to Mendelssohn’s’.

7 Bush, Geoffrey, ‘Sterndale Bennett: The Solo Piano Works’, Proceedings of the Musical Association 91 (1964–1965), 85–97 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 85.

8 Todd, ‘Mendelssohnian Allusions’, and Peter Horton, ‘William Sterndale Bennett, Composer and Pianist’, in The Piano in Nineteenth-Century British Culture, ed. Ellsworth and Wollenberg.

9 Sterndale Bennett, Life, 29–30.

10 For a list and some excerpts, see Temperley, Nicolas, ‘Schumann and Sterndale Bennett’, 19th-Century Music XII/3 (Spring 1989), 210–211 Google Scholar.

11 ‘Ja, gäb es nur noch viele Künstler. Die in dem Sinne, wie W. Bennett wirken – und Niemandem dürfte mehr vor der Zukunft underer Kunst bange sein.’ Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 6 (1837), 65.

12 For details, see Williamson, Rosemary, William Sterndale Bennett: A Descriptive Thematic Catalogue (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

13 It was anticipated to some extent by Bennett’s teacher, Philip Cipriani Hambly Potter (1792–1871). Bennett’s contemporary Henry Hugo Pierson (1815–1873) had most of his work published in Germany after he emigrated there in 1844.

14 See note 3.

15 In 1873 Robert Case commissioned a formal portrait of the composer from John Everett Millais (Sterndale Bennett, Life, 422–423). Thomas Case provided words for Bennett’s ‘Last Set of Four Songs’, published soon after his death in 1875: see Temperley, Nicholas, ‘Sterndale Bennett and the Lied’, Musical Times 106 (1975), 961 Google Scholar. He was soon an influential figure, and was to become president of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, in 1904.

16 I well remember Robert and his wife Dorothy’s kindness and hospitality in 1956–1957 when I was working on my doctoral research. Robert not only gave me complete freedom to work in his library but also answered many of my questions about ‘WSB’, as Bennett was always known in the family.

17 See note 12.

18 It is hoped that the third portion of the collection, inherited by another great-grandson of the composer, Thomas Odling (1911–2002), sometime clerk to the House of Commons, will also eventually be deposited in the Bodleian.

19 See Lamb, Andrew, ‘Edward James Loder’, in Musicians of Bath and Beyond: Edward Loder (1809–1865) and his Family, ed. Nicholas Temperley (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2016), 146–147 Google Scholar.

20 H[enry] H[eathcote] S[tatham], ‘Bennett, Sir William Sterndale’, in A Dictionary of Music and Musicians, [ed. George Grove] (London: Macmillan, 1879), I: 224–229.

21 Frederick Arthur Gore Ouseley, ‘Supplement’, in The History of Music, ed. Emil Naumann trans. F. Praeger (London: Cassell & Co., 1886), II: 1286.

22 Todd, ‘Mendelssohnian Allusions’, 117.

23 See note 13 above.

24 Macfarren’s address on Cipriani Potter to the Musical Association, 7 January 1884; quoted in Banister, Henry C., George Alexander Macfarren: His Life, Works, and Influence (London: George Bell and Sons, 1891), 22–23 Google Scholar.

25 Sterndale Bennett, Life, 23–24.

26 Bennett, William Sterndale, Lectures on Musical Life, ed. N. Temperley and Y. Yang (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2006), 158 Google Scholar.

27 Horton, ‘William Sterndale Bennett’, 120, 122.

28 Hogarth, George, Musical History, Biography, and Criticism (London: John W. Parker, 1835), 266 Google Scholar.

29 Most of Bennett’s piano music can be found in edited facsimile editions in volumes 17 and 18 of The London Pianoforte School, 1766–1860, ed. N. Temperley (New York and London: Garland, 1984–1987).

30 In a later, revised version Bennett felt it necessary to fill this gap: see Example 1, hardly an improvement.

31 The first set of six, later labelled Op. 19, was partly aimed at the English public and was published by J. A. Novello in 1832 as Original Melodies for the Pianoforte, reproduced in the London Pianoforte School, vol. 15. The Leipzig edition followed in 1833.

32 Williamson, Catalogue, 47.

33 I discuss these points in more detail in ‘Schumann and Sterndale Bennett’, 218–220. I recognize that my own conclusions about influence are subject to the same reservations as other people’s!

34 Williamson, Catalogue, 37.

35 Bush, ‘Sterndale Bennett’, 91.

36 Williamson, Catalogue, 53, 55, 72.

37 Bush, ‘Sterndale Bennett’, 92.

38 Horton, ‘William Sterndale Bennett’, 129.

39 See, for instance, Newman, William S., The Sonata Since Beethoven (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), 576 Google Scholar. Peter Horton has suggested Dussek as another possible model: see Horton, ‘William Sterndale Bennett’, 128.

40 Todd, ‘Mendelssohnian Allusions’, 108–113.

41 The expected closing C minor chord is replaced by a dominant seventh on C to allow for a return to F minor.

42 For other examples in Bennett’s early piano pieces, see Op. 2; Op. 11, Nos 1, 4 and 6; and Op. 12, No. 2. In Op. 11, No. 1, the word ‘Minore’ is printed above a change of key signature, not where the actual key change occurs. Todd himself (p. 114) points out another example in the Romanza, Op. 14, No. 3, which he again interprets as a meaningful act by the composer. For examples in the published work of other composers, see the following instances in the London Pianoforte School: vol. 7, pp. 107, 176; vol. 14, p. 122. It is easy to find other examples from both English and Continental publishers.

43 Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 13 (1839), 162.

44 See Temperley, ‘Schumann and Sterndale Bennett’, 218.

45 Horton, ‘William Sterndale Bennett’, 127–128 and note 31.

46 The Musical World 14 (1849), 801.

47 Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 7 (1837), 48.

48 Bush, ‘Sterndale Bennett’, 93; quoting Mendelssohn’s comment on hearing Bennett’s overture The Wood Nymphs (Sterndale Bennett, Life, 88).

49 See Horton, ‘William Sterndale Bennett’, 138.

50 Bush, ‘Sterndale Bennett’, 94.

51 Horton, ‘William Sterndale Bennett’, 140.

52 Bush, ‘Sterndale Bennett’, 88.

53 Williamson, Catalogue, WO 55, 56.

54 3 (1873), 104.

55 Newman says he found ‘references to more performances than can be credited to any other English sonata discussed in the present volume [covering the period c.1830–1930]’: Newman, Sonata, 576.

56 The autograph shows that the subject was first inspired by Robert Steggall’s poem Jeanne d’Arc, published in 1868, though the title and the quotations at the head of the four movements are taken from Schiller’s play. See Williamson, Catalogue, 299.

57 It was not performed in Germany until 1843 and not in England until 1879. See my Foreword to the New Berlioz Edition, vol. 16 (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1971), xii–xiii. Bennett could have known Liszt’s piano transcription, but is unlikely to have admired it.

58 Newman, Sonata, 577, 578.

59 The analysis of specific traits that follow are largely based on my unpublished doctoral dissertation, ‘Instrumental Music in England, 1800–1850’ (Cambridge University, 1959), I: 294–299. It has taken fifty-seven years for me to feel that there is enough interest in Bennett’s music to justify committing these findings to print.

60 H. Saxe Wyndham, August Manns and the Saturday Concerts (London, 1909), 48.

61 Williamson, Catalogue, WO 42.

62 ‘NO theory of passing notes can authorize the fifth and sixth semiquavers of that bar.’ See Davison, Henry, ed., From Mendelssohn to Wagner: Being the Memoirs of J. W. Davison Compiled by his Son (London: Wm. Reeves, 1912), 305–309 Google Scholar (my translation).

63 ‘It’s a little above my head, and does not provide the relief you wished for me after my more severe studies.’