1863–1937 · United Kingdom · 20th century
Arthur Somervell (1863-1937) was an English composer and music educator, one of the most successful writers of English song at the turn of the twentieth century. He is known for song cycles to words by Tennyson and Housman, and for his work as an inspector of music in schools. The catalogue includes his songs for voice and piano.
Arthur Somervell was born on 5 June 1863 in Windermere, Westmorland, to Robert Miller Somervell. His father manufactured shoes, sat as a justice of the peace and lived in the Windermere house "Hazelthwaite"; his dates are 1821-1899. The family name was originally Somerville, and the family came from Scotland and made its home in London in the eighteenth century.
Arthur had a brother, Colin Somervell, who also went into shoe manufacturing. Colin was High Sheriff of Westmorland in 1916, and his son, Arnold Colin Somervell, held the office later; other members of the family held it after that.
Somervell first went to Uppingham School, and then to King's College, Cambridge, where Charles Villiers Stanford taught him composition. In 1883-1885 he attended the High School for Music in Berlin. He also took composition lessons from Friedrich Kiel. From 1885 to 1887 he studied under Hubert Parry in London, at the Royal College of Music.
In 1894 Somervell took a professorship at the Royal College of Music. In 1895-1897 he conducted his own compositions at the festivals in Leeds and Birmingham.
Somervell married Edith Lance Collet in 1890. Of their four children, Viola Helen Antonia and Katharine Margaret came first, followed by Hubert Arthur and Ronald Arthur. Katharine joined Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes as a dancer, and through her the Somervells were grandparents of the writer Elizabeth Jane Howard.
Besides composing, Somervell spent twenty-eight years as an inspector of schools in the service of the Crown, with special responsibility for music teaching. In 1901 he became Inspector of Music for the Board of Education and the Scottish Education Department, taking over from John Stainer.
The following June he was awarded the degree of Doctor of Music by the University of Cambridge.
Somervell received a knighthood in 1929. After retiring, he was chairman of the School Orchestra Festivals at Queen's Hall from 1932 until his death.
Somervell died on 2 May 1937, aged 73, at 105 Clifton Hill in St John's Wood, where he lived. He was cremated, and the ashes were taken to the Lake District, his birthplace, and interred at Grasmere Cemetery.
Next to Hubert Parry, Somervell stood among the most successful and influential English song writers during the musical renaissance of the 1890s and 1900s. In the opinion of Michael Hurd, the heart of his legacy is his five song cycles, above all "Maud" to Tennyson and "A Shropshire Lad" to Housman.
Somervell wrote in a conservative style, with Mendelssohn and Brahms as visible influences. In his own day his success came from choral music: "The Forsaken Merman" (1895), and "Intimations of Immortality," conducted by the composer himself at the Leeds Festival in 1907. A further success was the short oratorio "The Passion of Christ" (1914), which for a time rivalled "Crucifixion" by John Stainer in popularity.
His only symphony, "Thalassa" (D minor, 1912), was first heard in February 1913 and plainly takes Brahms as its model. Its central slow movement, "Lost in Action," was played on its own again and again in the years of the First World War. Haydn Draper gave the first performance of the Clarinet Quintet at Wigmore Hall in May 1919, but it was seldom played afterwards until interest in it revived in recent years. Somervell dedicated his 1930 Violin Concerto to the violinist Adila Fachiri. His Handel adaptation "Silent Worship" appears in the film "Emma" (1996).
Somervell worked in other genres too: the operettas "Princess Zara" and "Knave of Hearts," the suite "In Arcady" for small orchestra, and concertante pieces - the symphonic variations "Normandy" for piano and orchestra, the "Concertstuck" for violin and orchestra and the "Highland" concerto for piano and orchestra - plus choral music, and suites and short works with violin and piano. Teaching materials form a separate strand: "Rhythmic Gradus" for piano, sight-reading exercises and charts laying out harmony and counterpoint rules.
Today Somervell is remembered chiefly for his song cycles: "Maud" to Tennyson (1898) and "A Shropshire Lad" to A. E. Housman (1904), the earliest known musical setting of those poems. Trevor Hold notes that Somervell loved literature sincerely, which shows in the wide and varied choice of his texts. "Maud" was the earliest successful English song cycle. Stephen Banfield rates his Browning cycle "A Broken Arc" (1923) as his finest work and "The Worst of It" as his best song.
The catalogue offers Somervell's songs for voice and piano. You can begin with "Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry now," "There pass the careless People," "Into my Heart an Air that kills" and "In Summer-time on Bredon" (level "Intermediate+"), then move on to the harder songs at the "Advanced" level.