solidity of style and impressiveness, from the time when he wrote
his earlier operas. And Arrigo Boito’s Mefistofele had an immense
influence on modern Italian music. Among the writers of “absolute”
music the most illustrious are G. Sgambati (b. 1843) and
G. Martucci (b. 1856), the latter’s symphony in D minor being a
fine work. Meanwhile a younger operatic school was growing up,
of which the first production was the Flora mirabilis of Spiro
Samara (b. 1861), given in 1886. Its culmination was in the
Cavalleria rusticana (1890) of Pietro Mascagni (b. 1863), the
Pagliacci (1892) of R. Leoncavallo (b. 1858), and the operas of
Giacomo Puccini (b. 1858), notably Le Villi (1884), Manon Lescaut
(1893), La Bohème (1896), Tosca (1900), and Madama Butterfly
(1904). The oratorios of Don Lorenzo Perosi (b. 1872) had an interesting
influence on the church music of Italy (see Palestrina).
Russia.—The new Russian school of music originated with M. A. Balakirev (b. 1836), who was instrumental in founding the Free School of Music at St Petersburg, and who introduced the music of Berlioz and Liszt into Russia; he instilled the principles of “advanced” music into A. P. Borodin (1834–1887), C. A. Cui (b. 1835), M. P. Moussorgsky (1839–1881), and N. A. Rimsky-Korsakov (1844–1908), all of whom, as usual with Russian composers, were, strictly speaking, amateurs in music, having some other profession in the absence of any possible opportunity for making money out of music in Russia. The most remarkable man among their contemporaries was undoubtedly Tschaikovsky (q.v.). A. Liadov (b. 1855) excels as a writer for the pianoforte, and A. Glazounov (b. 1865) has composed a number of fine orchestral works.
United States.—Of the older American composers, only John Knowles Paine (d. 1906) and Dudley Buck (d. 1909), both born in 1839, and Benjamin Johnson Lang (1837–1909), need be mentioned. Paine, professor of music at Harvard University, and composer of oratorios, orchestral music, &c., ranks with the advanced school of romantic composers. Dudley Buck was one of the first American composers whose names were known in Europe; and if his numerous cantatas and church music do not reach a very high standard according to modern ideas, he did much to conquer the general apathy with regard to the existence of original music in the States. Lang, prominent as organist and conductor, also became distinguished as a composer. George Whitefield Chadwick (b. 1854) has produced many orchestral and vocal works of original merit. Though the works of Clayton Johns (b. 1857) are less ambitious, they have won more popularity in Europe, and his songs, like those of Arthur Foote (b. 1853), Reginald De Koven (b. 1859), and Ethelbert Nevin (1862–1901), are widely known. Edward Alexander McDowell (q.v.) may be regarded as the most original modern American composer. Walter Johannes Damrosch (b. 1862), the eminent conductor of the New York Symphony Orchestra, and of various operatic undertakings, has established his position as an original and poetic composer, not only by his opera, The Scarlet Letter, but by such songs as the intensely dramatic “Danny Deever.” Dr Horatio William Parker’s (b. 1863) oratorio settings of the hymn “Hora novissima” and of “The Wanderer’s Psalm” are deservedly popular. Their masterly workmanship and his power of expression in sacred music mark him as a distinct personality. Numerous orchestral as well as vocal works have not been heard out of America, but a group of songs, newly set to the words of familiar old English ditties, have obtained great success. Mrs H. H. A. Beach, the youngest of the prominent composers of the United States and an accomplished pianist, has attained a high reputation as a writer in all the more ambitious forms of music. Many of her songs and anthems have obtained wide popularity. The achievements of the United States are, however, less marked in the production of new composers than in the attention which has been paid to musical education and appreciation generally. Henry E. Krehbiel (b. 1854), the well-known critic, was especially prominent in drawing American attention to Wagner and Brahms. The New York Opera has been made a centre for the finest artists of the day, and the symphony concerts at Boston and Chicago have been unrivalled for excellence. It is worthy of note that no country has produced a greater number of the most eminent of recent singers. Mesdames E. Eames, Nordica, Minnie Hauck, Susan Strong, Suzanne Adams, Sybil Sanderson, Esther Palliser, Evangeline Florence, and very many more among leading sopranos, with Messrs E. E. Oudin, D. Bispham and Denis O’Sullivan, to name but three out of the host of excellent male artists, proved the natural ability of the Americans in vocal music; and it might also be said that the more notable English-speaking pupils of the various excellent French schools of voice-production are American with hardly an exception.
United Kingdom.—English music requires more detailed notice, if only because of the striking change in the national feeling with regard to it. The nation had been accustomed for so long to consider music as an exotic, that, notwithstanding the glories of the older schools of English music, the amount of attention paid to everything that came from abroad, and the rich treasures of traditional and distinctively English music scattered through the country, the majority of educated people adhered to the common belief that England was not a musical country. The beauty and the enormous quantity of traditional Irish music, the enthusiasm created in Scotland by trumpery songs written in what was supposed to be an imitation of the Scottish style, the existence of the Welsh Eisteddfodau, were admitted facts; but England was supposed to have had no share in these gifts of nature or art, and the vogue of foreign music, from Italian opera to classical symphonies, was held as evidence of her poverty, instead of being partly the reason of the national sterility. In the successive periods during which the music of Handel and Mendelssohn respectively had been held as all-sufficient for right-thinking musicians, success could only be attained, if at all, by those English musicians who deliberately set themselves to copy the style of these great masters; the few men who had the determination to resist the popular movement were either confined, like the Wesleys, to one branch of music in which some originality of thought was still allowed, that of the Church, or, like Henry Hugo Pierson in the days of the Mendelssohn worship, were driven to seek abroad the recognition they could not obtain at home. For a time it seemed as if the great vogue of Gounod would exalt him into a third artistic despot; but no native composer had even the energy to imitate his Faust; and, by the date of The Redemption (1882) and Mors et vita (1885), a renaissance of English music had already begun.
For a generation up to the ’eighties the affairs of foreign opera in England were rather depressing; the rival houses presided over by the impresarios Frederick Gye (1810–1878) and Colonel J. H. Mapleson (1828–1901) had been going from bad to worse; the traditions of what were called “the palmy days” had been forgotten, and with the retirement of Christine Nilsson in 1881, and the death of Therese J. A. Tietjens in 1877, the race of the great queens of song seemed to have come to an end. It is true that Mme Patti was in the plenitude of her fame and powers, but the number of her impersonations, perfect as they were, was so small that she alone could not support the weight of an opera season, and her terms made it impossible for any manager to make both ends meet unless the rest of the company were chosen on the principle enunciated by the husband of Mme Catalani, “Ma femme et quatre ou cinq poupées.” Mme Albani (b. 1851) had made her name famous, but the most important part of her, artistic career was yet to come. She had already brought Tannhäuser and Lohengrin into notice, but in Italian versions, as was then usual; and the great vogue of Wagner’s operas did not begin until the series of Wagner concerts given at the Royal Albert Hall in 1877 with the object of collecting funds for the preservation of the Bayreuth scheme, which after the production of the Nibelungen trilogy in 1876 had become involved in serious financial difficulties. The two seasons of German opera at Drury Lane under Dr Hans Richter (b. 1843) in 1882 and 1884, and the production of the trilogy at Her Majesty’s in 1882, under Angelo Neumann’s managership, first taught stay-at-home Englishmen what Wagner really was, and an Italian opera as such (i.e. with Italian as the exclusive language employed and the old “star” system in full swing) ceased to exist as a regular institution a few years after that. The revival of public interest in the opera only took place after Mr (afterwards Sir) Augustus Harris (1852–1896) had started his series of operas at Drury Lane in 1887. In the following season Harris took Covent Garden, and since that time the opera has been restored to greater public favour than it ever enjoyed, at all events since the days of Jenny Lind. The clever manager saw that the public was tired of operas arranged to suit the views of the prima donna and no one else, and he cast the works he produced, among which were Un Ballo in maschera and Les Huguenots, with due attention to every part. The brothers Jean and Édouard de Reszké, both of whom had appeared in London before—the former as a baritone and the latter during the seasons 1880–1884—were even stronger attractions to the musical public of the time than the various leading sopranos, among whom were Mme Albani, Miss M. Macintyre, Mme Melba, Frau Sucher and Mme Nordica, during the earlier seasons, and Mme Eames, Mlle Ravogli, MM. Lassalle and P. H. Plançon, and many other Parisian favourites later. As time went on, the excellent custom obtained of giving each work in the language in which it was written, and among the distinguished German artists who were added to the company were Frau M. Ternina, Frau E. Schumann-Heink, Frau Lilli Lehmann and many more. Since Harris’s death in 1896 the traditions started by him were on the whole well maintained, and as a sign of the difference between the present and the former position of English composers, it may be mentioned that two operas by F. H. Cowen, Signa and Harold, and two by Stanford, The Veiled Prophet and Much Ado about Nothing, were produced. To Signor Lago, a manager of more enterprise than good fortune, belongs the credit of reviving Gluck’s Orfeo (with the masterly impersonation of the principal character by Mlle Giulia Ravogli), and of bringing out Cavalleria rusticana, Tschaikovsky’s Eugen Onegin and other works.
If it be just to name one institution and one man as the creator of such an atmosphere as allowed the genius of English composers to flourish, then that honour must be paid to the Crystal Palace and August Manns, the conductor of its Saturday concerts. At first engaged as sub-conductor, under a certain Schallehn, at the building which was the lasting result of the Great Exhibition of 1851, he became director of the music in 1855; so for the better part of half a century his influence was exerted on behalf of the best music of all schools, and especially in favour of anything of
