A Dictionary of Music and Musicians/Glover, Stephen
GLOVER, Stephen, teacher and composer, was born in 1812 in London. From the year 1840 to nearly 1870 his facile pen produced sacred and sentimental songs, ballads, duets and pianoforte pieces, resulting in a record of some twelve to fifteen hundred separate compositions, many of them published. 'The Dream is past' dates probably from 1837; 'The Gipsy's Tent,' 'Echo's Song,' and 'The Merry Mill,' 1840; 'The Monks of old,' 1842; 'The Gipsy Countess' belongs to about the same period; 'I love the merry sunshine,' 1847; 'What are the wild waves saying?' duet, 1850; 'The Blind Girl to her Harp,' 1854; 'The Good-bye at the door,' 1856; 'The Music of the Birds' (one of his many duets for two ladies' voices), 1863; 'Beauty and the Beast,' chamber opera, 1868. Less popular but more favourable examples of his talent are perhaps contained in a collection of (12) 'Songs from the Holy Scriptures,' published by Jefferys; and his setting of Longfellow's 'Excelsior' is not without merit.
Stephen Glover, who was never very robust, retired in early life to the country; but his death took place in London (Bayswater), when he was 58, on Dec. 7, 1870.
His music received that mere drawing-room popularity which proclaimed it worthless as representative of genuine national song on the one hand, and as the effort of a pioneer of culture on the other. His success in the narrow field of his labours was enormous, and has probably not been equalled, in the publishers' sense, by any composer of the present day, although the present day also is not without its musicians who regard the expediency of the moment as their natural law. It is due to Stephen Glover to say, while considering his works in this connection, that little evidence of power to do better things appears therein. An agreeable feature in this older writer is the healthiness and cheerful spirit of his music. Sunshine, moonshine, and twilight—but especially sunshine—fairies, flowers, gipsies, and fishermen were the subjects Stephen Glover loved to treat; in conventional method and with superficial characterization, but correctly in the details of the simple forms and harmonies he affected.
Such colourless music obtained the favour of many English amateurs of the time. That the same class of performers forty years afterwards should neglect it entirely and demand a coarser, cleverer type of commonplace, serves to remind the musician that the modern drawing-room song, with its pent-up agony and morbid hues, will ere long be overtaken by its inevitable mortality.[ L. M. M. ]