14 Schubert’s reception history in nineteenth-century England
The songs
During his lifetime Schubert was known almost solely as a composer of Hausmusik – songs, dances, marches, and other characteristic pieces for the piano. So much is clear from the fact that of the 478 compositions published before his death (SDB 946), 209 were solo songs or partsongs with piano accompaniment, and 249 were keyboard pieces. It was as a song composer that he first made his name in Vienna, and inevitably when his name first began to be heard abroad it was for his songs. In London the pioneer was a German from Bremen called Christian Wessell, who came to London in the 1820s and founded the publishing firm of Stodart and Wessell.
The sequence of events as reflected in the Harmonicon , a musical monthly which managed to survive for eleven years (1822–32), was as follows. In December 1830 the London firm of Johanning and Whatmore published a Christmas and New Year annual which included as one of its items Schubert’s F Minor Moment musical (D780, 3) under its original published title of Air Russe. The annual, called the Cadeau , also appeared a year later, and this time included Schubert’s Erlkönig (D328), using Sir Walter Scott’s translation of the text. In the summer of 1832 the famous dramatic soprano Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient came to London to take the prima donna role in the first London production of Beethoven’s Fidelio , and took the opportunity to introduce Erlkönig to a London audience, whereupon Wessell and Stodart decided to publish the song with Scott’s words “as sung by Madame Schröder-Devrient.” 1
Wessell himself continued to publish Schubert songs till he retired in 1860. Where he led, others were not slow to follow. In the 1840s for instance, Cramer, Addison and Beale of London brought out a series of song volumes with the texts “imitated from the German by Thomas Oliphant.” It was not till 1871 that Ernst Pauer, a pianist and critic of German origin, attempted anything like a representative collection of Schubert songs with the original texts. This was in four volumes, containing eighty-two songs, with original German texts and English translations. The 1870s saw a veritable flood of Schubert editions, culminating in 1885 with the earliest of Max Friedländer’s edition of the songs (for the Edition Peters) , enthusiastically welcomed by Federick Niecks as a revelation in a three-page essay in the Monthly Musical Record of March 1885.
Pauer’s inclusion of the two complete song cycles in his four-volume edition is significant. Individual songs from them had been sung as interludes in orchestral concerts since the 1830s, and many were favorites with audiences, though usually with bland and sometimes banal English words. Julius Stockhausen had sung Die schöne Müllerin (D795) complete in Vienna in May 1856, but there is no evidence of a complete performance in England before 1904, when Raimund von zur Mühlen sang the complete cycle at the newly built Bechstein Hall, now the Wigmore Hall. 2
Until the 1860s Schubert and Schumann were both regarded as “modern,” indeed as avant-garde composers, and underrated, much as Mahler, Schoenberg, and Berg were underrated in the first half of the twentieth century. In London, as in Vienna, the new mercantile and professional aristocracy of talent was slowly but surely assuming the reins of power from the old aristocracy of birth, but it was more concerned to defend the music of the great Classical masters than to promote the “new music” of the early Romantics. The only progressive organization in the London musical world in the 1830s was the Society of British Musicians, founded in 1834 to promote the music of contemporary native composers. It was little more than a small group of young enthusiasts, with the critic James William Davison as their leader, who looked to William Sterndale Bennett to revitalize English music. Davison, who took over as chief critic of The Times in 1846 and remained as a sort of unofficial chairman of the London corps of music critics until his death in 1885, had no use for the “new music” and must be held partly responsible for the tone of acrimonious depreciation which appears in some Schubert notices in the press. In 1844 for instance, Mendelssohn came to London at the invitation of the Philharmonic Society to conduct their annual series of concerts, and brought with him the orchestral parts of two Schubert works, the Overture to Fierrabras (D796) and the “Great” C Major Symphony (D944), intending to perform them in London. But the orchestra refused to rehearse the symphony, and Mendelssohn was so angry that he withdrew his own overture to Ruy Bias from the program and insisted on playing Schubert’s overture instead. This performance, on June 10, 1844, was the first Schubert orchestral work played in England. Davison’s notice in the Musical World dismissed it as “literally beneath criticism” and added:
Perhaps a more overrated man than this Schubert never existed. He has certainly written a few good songs. But what then? Has not every composer who ever composed written a few good songs? And out of the thousand and one with which Schubert deluged the musical world it would indeed be hard if some half-dozen were not tolerable. And when that is said, all is said that can justly be said about Schubert. 3
At which point all that needs to be said surely is that Davison himself had written, and published, a few (not so good) songs, and fulsome notices of two of them appeared in this same issue of the Musical World.
The publication of Schubert Lieder, as we have seen, owed much to the enterprise of German-speaking foreign nationals who made their homes in London, and the performance of them probably owes even more. Josef Kroff, the Bohemian singer and composer who arrived in London in 1835, sang Der Wanderer (D489) at a Classical quartet concert in 1836, presumably in German. The Austrian bass, Josef Staudigl, spent much of his time during the 1840s in London, and was much admired for his Schubert Lieder. It comes as something of a surprise however to find English artists noted in the musical press for what must surely have been the first public performance of Der Hirt auf dem Felsen (D965) in England. “Mrs. Bishop sang ‘The Swiss Peasant on the Rock,’ a cantata by Schubert, at the Hanover Square Rooms. Thomas Willman played the clarinet obbligato.” 4
The reception history of Schubert’s instrumental music in England, however, can be satisfactorily covered only as an account of the careers of two German musicians who made England their permanent home, and were devoted to his music: Charles Hallé (1819–95) and August Manns (1825–1907). To complete the picture, we shall have to include George Grove (1820–1900), the English publicist, polymath, biographer and critic, but his contribution was essentially supportive, as he would have been the first to acknowledge. Hallé and Manns were the key figures.
Piano music
Sir Charles Hallé was born plain Karl Halle in April 1819 at Hagen in Westphalia, the son of the local church organist. The acute accent on the E came later, probably in 1836, when he went to Paris intending to study piano under Friedrich Kalkbrenner. He is usually remembered nowadays as the founder of the orchestra which bears his name, and his achievement as a pianist has been largely forgotten. Yet he made his name as a pianist, and from 1850 always reserved the months of May and June for keyboard recitals either in London or elsewhere. He was among the first to make the piano sonata Konzertfähig , and the very first to play all thirty-two Beethoven sonatas from memory in a single series of recitals. In Paris he met Liszt, Chopin, Berlioz, the young Wagner, and the galaxy of creative genius which made Paris at that time the artistic capital of the world. The revolution of 1848 brought him and his family, along with many other musicians, to London, and coincidental circumstances led to his accepting an invitation to move to Manchester, then known only as the financial and industrial capital of north England, and “take the musical life of the city in hand,” as he put it in his memoirs. 5
In January 1849 he initiated a series of chamber concerts with internationally known artists, taking the financial risk on his own shoulders. At the end of the year, he made his own terms and accepted the conductor-ship of the “Gentlemen’s Concerts.” He also started an amateur choir, which became the forerunner of the Hallé Choir. Nothing daunted by the fact that only three single tickets and a handful of others were sold for the first of his chamber music concerts, Hallé’s optimism in the end was fully justified. Within two years the series had to be extended from six to eight concerts. He seized the opportunity to give the first performances in England of Schubert’s two piano trios. The E flat Piano Trio, Op. 100 (D929), was played on October 31, 1850, and repeated a month later, twice again in Manchester, and once in London. On this last occasion the artists were Hallé (piano), W. B. Molique (violin), and Alfredo Piatti (cello). The first performance of the B flat Piano Trio, Op. 99 (D898), was given by the same artists on November 10, 1853, and repeated first in Manchester and then in London.
In 1859 the “Monday Popular Concerts” began at the new St. James’s Hall in London, with a consciously educational motivation. The aim was to meet the growing demand for chamber music at prices which would attract the vast population of potential but unattached music lovers. Hallé, with Arabella Goddard and Clara Schumann, became a regular performer at these concerts, and took the opportunity to introduce audiences to Schubert’s piano music. Moreover, from 1861 on he mounted a regular series of solo piano recitals in May and June each year in London. This became a feature of the London musical scene until the 1890s. It has to be remembered that the solo “recital” – even the word was regarded with suspicion – was unknown until Liszt experimented with it in the 1840s. Hallé did more than anyone to familiarize the musical public with it in England. In 1861 he played all Beethoven’s piano sonatas in chronological order in a series of eight recitals. (This feat was repeated in 1862, 1866, and finally in 1891.) In 1867 he turned his attention to the Schubert piano sonatas, having already introduced five of them at the “Monday Pops,” and played nine of them. An even more ambitious program followed in 1868, when Hallé played all eleven Schubert sonatas then available in print, together with all the shorter keyboard works of Beethoven. Here is a sample program:
| Part I | Grand Sonata in A Minor, Op. 164 | Schubert |
| Song The Violet | Mozart | |
| Twenty four Variations on a theme in D | Beethoven | |
| Part II | Fantasia Sonata in G Major, Op. 78 | Schubert |
| Song Marie | Schubert | |
| Bagatelles, Op. 126 Nos. 1–2–3–4 | Beethoven | |
| Suites de Valse Allemagne, Op. 33 | Schubert | |
| Pianoforte: Mr. Charles Hallé | ||
| Vocalist: Miss Anna Jewell | ||
In thus juxtaposing the work of Schubert and Beethoven, Hallé was consciously challenging the orthodox nineteenth-century view that Schubert did not belong among the great composers, because his music lacked the unity of form, continuity of theme and architectonic power of a Beethoven. The point was not lost on the critics. The Musical World observed: “In associating Schubert with Beethoven and dividing his program between the two, Mr. Hallé has imparted quite a new interest to his recitals.” And the Musical Times: “The ten grand sonatas of Schubert, the one Fantasia Sonata in G, and the Fantaisie in C are all on a grand scale of form and development worthy of Beethoven, and approach nearer to that grand model than any similar work by any other composer.” To complete this comprehensive demonstration of Schubert’s keyboard works, in 1867–68 Hallé edited for Chappell and Co. the first English edition of the eleven “grand sonatas” of Schubert, followed by the Impromptus, Op. 90 (D899), the Moments musicaux , the “Wanderer” Fantasy, Op. 15 (D760), and other minor works. 6 Between May 1859 and June 1868 Hallé was responsible for the premières in England of all these works except one. The single exception was the A Minor Sonata of 1825 (D845) which was first performed by Walter Macfarren in May 1865.
What, one wonders, would we make of Hallé’s pianism if we could hear him today? Writing at the turn of the century, Hermann Klein remembers him as “coldly correct and scholastic,” and so he may well have seemed in comparison with lions of the keyboard like Paderewski and Anton Rubinstein. A. M. Diehl (Alice Mangold) says that “he was essentially an artist devoted to the interpretation of the musical classics, rather than the executant using them to express his own individual emotions.” Perhaps the most convincing account of his keyboard manner, however, comes from Joseph Bennett, the critic of the Daily Telegraph:
He exemplified a school that was fast passing away – the school in which it was taught that the pianoforte rightly claimed to be a distinctive instrument, and not a sort of parlor orchestra. His playing was all refinement, precision and neatness. He struck no wrong notes, and dropped no right ones; nevertheless there were moments when one could have wished him less rigidly correct. He would have been more human, and in consequence more interesting. In rendering Schubert, however, he was unapproachable. 7
The chamber music
The publication of the chamber music proceeded more slowly. Performances began in London in May 1852, when a quartet led by Joachim played the D Minor Quartet, “Death and the Maiden” (D810), at one of John Ella’s “Musical Union” concerts. But it was naturally to the “Monday Pops” (which became the “Monday and Saturday” Pops in 1865) that music-lovers looked for performances of Schubert’s string quartets and major chamber works by international artists from 1859 onward. The “Trout” Quintet (D667) was first played in 1867. The first performance of the great C Major String Quintet (D956) was given on January 19, 1863, and fourteen performances followed over the next twenty years. The artists in the first performance were Sainton, Ries, Webb, Paque, and Piatti. Joseph Bennett in the Daily Telegraph found it “gloriously overflowing in original, striking and beautiful ideas.” 8
In February 1869 Joachim, Blagrove, and Piatti achieved a world première at St. James’s Hall with Schubert’s early (1817) String Trio (D581). The Octet for Wind and Strings (D803) was played for the first time in England in March 1867 in the abridged version (omitting the Variations and the Menuetto and Trio). The firm of Peters in Leipzig published the full score in 1872, and it rapidly became a favorite; over twenty performances were given at St. James’s Hall over the next fifteen years.
Orchestral works
August Friedrich Manns was born at Stolzenberg in Stettin on March 12, 1825, the fifth son of a glass-blower with a talent for playing the fiddle. At home he learned to play the cello and the horn as well as the violin. At fifteen he was apprenticed to the town musician at Elbing, and later volunteered for the army as a bandsman, in this way gaining a working knowledge of the instruments of the orchestra which was to stand him in good stead later. He came to England in May 1854 as E flat clarinettist and assistant conductor of the newly founded Crystal Palace orchestra, and in October 1855, after an unpleasant passage at arms with the conductor and a spell as freelance, took over as conductor and director of that orchestra at the invitation of George Grove, the recently appointed secretary to the Crystal Palace Company. Thus began the alliance between Grove and Manns which was to set new standards of orchestral playing in England, and reveal for the first time the greatness of Schubert’s symphonic works.
Their talents and experience were complementary. Grove was the musical amateur in his many and diverse enthusiasms, literary skill and administrative ability, also perhaps in his occasional errors of judgment. Manns was the professional, with a wide-ranging knowledge of the orchestra and the repertory which made him, in Stanford’s judgment, the best conductor in England. Together they were able to bring about a revolution in public taste in the second half of the century by means of the regular Saturday concerts at the Crystal Palace. This revolution led to the revaluation of Schubert’s orchestral music which coincides in the 1860s with Hallé’s advocacy of the piano sonatas so as to make this decade a sort of Wunderjahrzehnt for Schubert lovers. It also coincided with the first attempts to put together a coherent story of Schubert’s life and work. Heinrich Kreissle von Hellborn’s biography, published in German in 1865, was released in an English translation by Arthur Duke Coleridge in 1869. 9 Kreissle’s study made a strong impression on George Grove, and led indirectly to his famous visit to Vienna in 1867.
In 1865 also the fantastic story of the “Unfinished” Symphony broke on an unsuspecting world. In October 1866 Spina, Diabelli’s successor, sent the score of the symphony to Grove, and Manns gave the first performance at the Crystal Palace on April 6, 1867. Later in the year this was followed by performances by the Philharmonic in London (May 20) and by Hallé in Manchester (December 5).
In the meantime Grove had decided to go to Vienna, taking the young composer Arthur Sullivan with him. Grove himself tells the story in the appendix to Coleridge’s translation of Kreissle’s biography. They returned with copies of the score of the “Tragic” Symphony (D417) and the C Major Symphony of 1817 (D589), the missing parts of the Rosamunde music, retrieved at the last moment from a dusty pile of music in the cupboard of Dr. Schneider, the nephew and heir to Schubert’s brother Ferdinand, and a promise from Dr. Schneider to send them copies of anything else that might turn up!
In his book Forty Years of Music Joseph Bennett, the critic of the Daily Telegraph , gives an evocative account of what it was like to be a devotee of the Saturday concerts in the 1860s: “All that was great,” he writes,
… in the London musical world might have been seen at Victoria Station on the winter Saturdays, as the special trains were backing to the departure platforms. It was a goodly crowd, however looked at [e] but they talked music, and in 1867–68 principally Schubert, who then was, for the first time, shining in all the glory of his heaven-descended art. It was not a company of many opinions, but a band of worshippers, having one faith and one soul. And it was good to be among and of them. 10
The story of the “Great” C Major Symphony is well known and needs only to be briefly recounted. It was first performed, without the repeats in the first and last movements, by Mendelssohn at the Leipzig Gewandhaus in March 1839. The parts were published in 1840, and also a four-hand piano arrangement. When Manns, who was anxious to perform it at the Crystal Palace, planned to include it in his plans for 1856, Grove was at first unwilling to agree, because of its length and reputation for being unplayable. Manns wisely invited him to attend a rehearsal, and from then on Grove became the work’s most enthusiastic supporter. As a precaution, however, the first performance was divided into two; the first three movements were played on Saturday, March 5, 1856, and the last three a week later. The first complete performance took place a year later, on July 11, 1857. 11 But for many years it remained a problematic work to perform. When first performed at the new St. James’s Hall in March 1859 it prompted a lively correspondence in the musical press, and when Hallé gave the first performance in Manchester, the critic of the Manchester Guardian wrote: “There are ideas enough in it to make up half a dozen symphonies, and beautiful and striking ideas too, but sown broadcast as it were, with little coherence and presenting scarcely a trace of that consistency of design which is one of the great charms in the symphonies of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Mendelssohn.”
Grove and Manns, like Hallé, were firm believers in the doctrine that if you count yourself an enthusiast for the music of a great composer, you must be interested in everything he wrote. They set out to present Schubert whole, all his compositions, preferably in chronological order, so that the development of his genius could be effectively studied. Manns’s astonishing record of first performances was sustained by this belief, even though it was made possible by the special relationship between Grove in Sydenham and Spina in Vienna. The list of Schubert symphonies, with dates when they were first performed at the Crystal Palace, speaks for itself. All performances were conducted by Manns except the realization of the incomplete E Major sketch in 1883, conducted by the orchestrator, J. F. Barnett.
No. 1 in D Major Feb. 5, 1881 World première No. 2 in B flat Major Oct. 20, 1877 World première No. 3 in D Major Feb. 19, 1881 World première No. 4 in C Minor Feb. 29, 1868 First performance in England No. 5 in B flat Major Feb. 1, 1873 First performance in England No. 6 in C Major Nov. 21, 1868 First performance in England No. 7 sketch in E May 5, 1883 World première No. 8 in B Minor April 6, 1867 First performance in England No. 9 in C Major April 5/12, 1856 First performance in England
In February and March 1881 Manns played the complete symphonies of Schubert in chronological order, and on this occasion (March 19) the B Minor Entr’acte from Rosamunde was used as the finale of the “Unfinished.” Joseph Joachim’s orchestration of the “Grand Duo” (D812) was played at the Crystal Palace on March 4,1876.
The phenomenon of Schubert’s popularity with the public in the late 1860s was so sudden and so marked that it was called the “Schubert episode” in Frederick Shinn’s short history of the Saturday concerts. 12 The Queen honored all the principal actors in this story with a knighthood: Grove in 1883, Hallé in 1888, and Manns in 1903. In the 1890s the musical scene changed. New executants and new composers occupied the center of the stage, and Schubert was largely forgotten. So much so that when in the 1920s Artur Schnabel took up the piano sonatas once again it seemed to some critics that they had never been played in public before. Grove was remembered for his dictionary, Hallé for his orchestra, and Manns for his association with the Crystal Palace, but their claim to be remembered as the champions of Schubert’s genius and the architects of his place among the great composers has been largely forgotten.