1875–1938 · United Kingdom · 20th century
Cyril Rootham (1875–1938) was an English composer, organist and teacher. From 1901 until the end of his life he was organist of St John's College, Cambridge, where he also taught at the university and led the university's musical society. Arthur Bliss was among his students. The site has his The Ballad of Kingslea Mere for voice and piano.
Cyril Bradley Rootham came into the world on 5 October 1875 at Redland, in Bristol. His mother and father were Mary, née Gimblett Evans, and Daniel Wilberforce Rootham. The father was a singing teacher of some renown, who taught Eva Turner, Clara Butt and Elsie Griffin, and who also held a directorship at the Bristol Madrigal Society.
Rootham attended Bristol Grammar School and went up to St John's College, Cambridge, in 1894 to read classics. He took his first degree in 1897 and a second one, this time in music, by 1900. As a student he was a successful athlete.
He continued his musical training at the Royal College of Music. Among his teachers there were Hubert Parry, Charles Villiers Stanford, Walter Parratt and Marmaduke Barton, along with others.
Rootham's first professional post was as organist of Christ Church, Hampstead, in London, where in 1898 he took over from the composer Walford Davies. In 1901 he spent a short time as organist of St Asaph Cathedral in north Wales. That same year he was named organist of St John's College, Cambridge, and he kept this position for the rest of his life.
Rootham married Rosamond Margaret Lucas in 1909; she supported and encouraged him. Rosamond was given charge of costume-making for the concerts of the Cambridge University Musical Society, and the household was never short of garments for a forthcoming performance. Jasper St John Rootham, their son, was born in 1910.
In 1912 the Cambridge University Musical Society (CUMS) acquired Rootham as its conductor. His energetic leadership and bold programmes gave the society real weight in English musical life of those years. Handel oratorios and Mozart operas returned under him, together with Purcell and other forgotten pieces.
CUMS concerts also acquainted audiences with new music. Rootham led performances of Psalmus Hungaricus by Zoltán Kodály, Le roi David by Arthur Honegger and works of Ildebrando Pizzetti. He invited several living composers to a concert in 1930: Manuel de Falla, Kodály and Honegger were present, as was Kathleen Long.
Rootham's friendly manner and enviable build made him popular with students. That popularity contributed to the success of CUMS concerts, which mostly took place outside the university's teaching programme.
Rootham's first major works were vocal. Among his choral and vocal works are Andromeda, a dramatic cantata to words by Charles Kingsley (1903–05), and Coronach for baritone, chorus and orchestra, after Sir Walter Scott (1908). The year 1909 brought The Lady of Shalott, a setting of Alfred Tennyson for chorus and orchestra, and 1911 brought The Stolen Child, a setting of William Butler Yeats.
The 1910s produced two orchestral rhapsodies, A Passer-by, after Robert Bridges (1910), and Pan (1912), and Four Dramatic Songs for voice and orchestra, with texts by Mary Elizabeth Coleridge (1913). Marjory Fausset wrote the libretto for the opera The Two Sisters, which draws on the ballad of the two sisters of Binnorie. Between 1919 and 1921 Rootham composed groups of songs to poems by Siegfried Sassoon, some of them made together with the poet himself.
In his later years Rootham wrote a G minor Sonata for violin and piano (1925), the Milton setting Ode on the Morning of Christ's Nativity (1927–28), a Septet scored for viola, wind quintet and harp (1930), the orchestral Psalm of Adonis (1931) and a piano trio with violin and cello (1932). City in the West, for chorus and orchestra with words by his son Jasper, dates from 1936, and the Second Symphony occupied him in 1936–38.
In 1914 Rootham was given the university post of lecturer in form and analysis of music and became a fellow of St John's College. In 1924 he was appointed senior lecturer in counterpoint and harmony.
Orchestration was another subject he taught, and his pupils valued it. They included Percy Young, Bernard Stevens, Robin Orr, Basil Maine, Walter Leigh, Patrick Hadley, Armstrong Gibbs, Christian Darnton, Arnold Cooke and Arthur Bliss, who thought highly of Rootham's instruction in that subject.
In 1912 Cambridge University Press brought out Rootham's work Voice Training for Choirs and Schools.
Rootham championed other composers' music but did little to place his own in the repertoire. He himself conducted the premiere of the opera The Two Sisters. His choral piece to verses by Laurence Binyon, For the Fallen, sparked a quarrel, since Elgar's version of the same verses was published shortly afterwards; neither man was the one who began it.
Within CUMS he also performed Handel's Semele and brought back a tradition of mounting Greek plays at three-year intervals, with newly composed music; the tradition outlived him. In addition, Rootham was the one who first presented Vaughan Williams's opera The Poisoned Kiss.
Illness dogged Rootham in his last years. A stroke was followed by progressive muscular atrophy, and in 1936 he left the running of CUMS to Boris Ord. Despite being ill, he finished several works, among them City in the West and his Second Symphony in three movements. His close friend Patrick Hadley orchestrated the finale after the composer's death. Rootham died in Cambridge on 18 March 1938, at the age of sixty-two, at the height of his creative strength.
Rootham had many commitments beyond composition, yet he left a catalogue: an opera, a pair of symphonies, a handful of shorter orchestral works, chamber music and a range of choral pieces. Apart from the symphonies, his orchestral output includes the rhapsodies Pan and A Passer-by, the small-orchestra St. John's Suite (1929–30) and Processional for the Chancellor's Music. For organ he wrote a Fantasia Overture in D minor, Epinikion (Song of Victory) and an Elegiac Rhapsody on an Old Church Melody, which varies the tune Iste Confessor, a hymn. His chamber music takes in a Capriccio for string quartet, a Sonata for violin and piano, a Miniature Suite for piano quintet, a Trio and a Septet.
Rootham took music with the utmost seriousness, yet he never thought of it as a luxury for a chosen few. Perhaps that is why he did not make a complete break with tradition: Stanford echoes faintly in his music, and Parry most of all. Modal writing is found in much of it, and in the later works there are parallel harmonies and bitonality. The glittering orchestral colours of Psalm of Adonis (1931) recall Kodály, while his later works show traces of Delius and Vaughan Williams. Rootham acknowledged the English folk-song revival but did not take part in it directly; even so, his opera The Two Sisters rests on a version of a folk ballad and, in place of an overture, begins with six unaccompanied verses.
Writing for chorus and voice was where Rootham felt most at ease, and his first major works were vocal. Henry Colles found in his style an energy and warmth that mirrored the composer's personality. City in the West, with words by his son Jasper, The Stolen Child and Ode on the Morning of Christ's Nativity are ranked among his best achievements. The Symphony No. 1 in C minor is an energetic work, and Arthur Hutchings locates Rootham's most typical music in its opening and closing movements. A near-vocal treatment of the brass is characteristic of the symphony. His refined string writing shows in Rhapsody on Lazarus, a rhapsody on an old English tune for double string orchestra. The songs include settings of Sassoon: Butterflies, Idyll, Everyone Sang and others.
The Dana Piano site currently has one of his pieces: The Ballad of Kingslea Mere for voice and piano, at an upper-intermediate level.