Hubert Parry

Parry's first major works appeared in 1880. As a composer he is best known for the choral song "Jerusalem", the coronation anthem "I was glad" and the hymn tune "Repton", which sets the words "Dear Lord and Father of Mankind". He was director of the Royal College of Music from 1895 until his death and was also professor of music at the University of Oxford from 1900 to 1908. He also wrote several books about music and music history. Some contemporaries rated him as the finest English composer since Henry Purcell, but his academic duties prevented him from devoting all his energies to composition.

Biography

Early years

From this upper-middle class background, Parry was sent to Twyford Preparatory School in Hampshire and Eton, where his interest in music was encouraged and developed. At Eton he distinguished himself at sports as well as music, despite early signs of the heart trouble that was to dog him for the rest of his life. He took music lessons with Sir George Job Elvey, the organist of St George's Chapel, Windsor, and composed many prentice works. On going on to Oxford after leaving Eton, Parry did not study music, being intended by his father for a commercial career, and instead read law and modern history. From 1870 to 1877 he was an underwriter at Lloyd's of London. In 1872 he married Lady Elizabeth Maude Herbert (1851–1933), second daughter of the politician Sidney Herbert and his wife Elizabeth. His in-laws, like his father, preferred a conventional career for him, although Parry proved as unsuccessful in insurance as he was successful in music. married the politician Arthur Ponsonby in 1898 and had a son and a daughter. Their younger daughter Gwendolen (b. 1877) married the baritone Harry Plunket Greene (1865–1936) and had two sons and a daughter.

Double harness

Contemporary critics generally regarded Parry's orchestral music as of secondary importance in his output, but in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries many of Parry's orchestral pieces have been revived. These include five symphonies, a set of Symphonic Variations in E minor, the Overture to an Unwritten Tragedy (1893) and the Elegy for Brahms (1897). In 1883 Parry wrote music to accompany the Cambridge Greek Play The Birds by Aristophanes, a production which starred the mediaevalist and ghost-story writer, M. R. James. Parry received an honorary degree from Cambridge University in the same year. Subsequently, he wrote music for Oxford productions of Aristophanes: The Frogs (1892), The Clouds (1905) and The Acharnians (1914). He had also provided elaborate incidental music for a West End production by Beerbohm Tree Hypatia (1893). In contrast to this involvement with music for the theatre, his only attempt at opera, Guenever was turned down by the Carl Rosa Opera Company. Despite the demands of these posts his personal beliefs, which were Darwinian and humanist, led him to compose a series of six "ethical cantatas", experimental works in which he hoped to supersede the traditional oratorio and cantata forms. They were generally unsuccessful with the public, though Elgar admired The Vision of Life (1907), and The Soul's Ransom (1906) has had several modern performances.

Influenced as a composer principally by Bach and Brahms, Parry evolved a powerful diatonic style which itself greatly influenced future English composers such as Elgar and Vaughan Williams. His own full development as a composer was almost certainly hampered by the immense amount of work he took on; but his energy and charisma, not to mention his abilities as a teacher and administrator, helped establish art music at the centre of English cultural life. As head of the Royal College of Music, he numbered among his leading pupils Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst, Frank Bridge and John Ireland.

Parry was created a Knight Bachelor in 1898. He was made a baronet in 1902. The baronetcy became extinct on his death.

Books on music