1862–1936 · United Kingdom · 20th century
Edward German (1862–1936) was an English composer of Welsh descent, known for his music for stage productions and for comic operas, above all Merrie England. He also wrote orchestral works, songs and piano pieces, and was knighted in 1928. The site offers three of his songs for voice and piano.
Edward German was born on 17 February 1862 in Whitchurch, Shropshire, and was given the name German Edward Jones at birth. Of the five children in the family he was the second, and the older of two boys. His father, John David Jones, sold liquor and brewed beer, was a church organist, and preached at the local Congregational chapel as a layman. His mother, Elizabeth (Betsy) Cox, ran Bible classes for young women. The boy's first name was the Welsh Garmon in English dress.
From the age of five his father taught him the piano and the organ. At six he formed a boys' band that played around the neighbourhood, and in the process taught himself the violin, composition and arranging. Later he took the alto line in the church choir. At family evenings over his uncle's grocer's shop he played piano duets and acted comic sketches with his older sister Ruth.
In his mid-teens his parents tried to place him as an apprentice with a firm of shipbuilders, thinking that their son had a gift for engineering. A serious illness had held up his schooling in Chester, though, and the firm turned him away because he was now too old. As a teenager he formed a second group, a quintet: he took the violin, his sister the piano or bass, with three family friends making up the rest. He also led the Whitchurch town orchestra.
At 18 he took private lessons from Walter Cecil Hay, who conducted the Whitchurch choral society and was director of music at St Chad's in Shrewsbury. German went on to the Royal Academy of Music, and there he became J. E. German, then plain Edward German, to avoid being confused with a fellow student, Edward Jones. He kept up his violin and organ and started studying composition more formally under Ebenezer Prout.
The Academy made him a sub-professor of the violin in 1884. As a teacher he was well thought of, and he won several medals and prizes. A Te Deum scored for soloists, choir and organ earned him the Charles Lucas Medal in 1885; after that his main interest moved from the violin to composing. In 1886 he wrote a light opera for four soloists and piano, The Two Poets, which was put on at the Academy before being given at St George's Hall. In 1887 the Academy played his E minor symphony, his first, and in 1890 he conducted a reworked version of it at the Crystal Palace; meanwhile The Two Poets was touring England with success.
While at the Academy he also taught at Wimbledon School and played violin in theatre orchestras, the Savoy Theatre's among them. He travelled to Germany in 1886 and again in 1888–1889, and its opera, above all at Bayreuth, made a strong impression on him. Among his close friends at the Academy was Ethel Mary Boyce; the two got engaged. The engagement ended, but the two remained friends. German never married.
In 1888 the conductor Alberto Randegger put German in touch with the theatre manager Richard Mansfield, and the result was the post of conductor and music director at London's Globe Theatre. German began writing incidental music for the grand productions staged there, the first being Richard III in 1889. Critics liked the score, and The Times wanted a concert suite arranged from it. Soon the overture was a favourite with concert audiences.
For a production of Henry VIII, in Henry Irving's version, at the Lyceum Theatre in London in 1892, he wrote music that used elements of traditional old English dance. In under a year the dance numbers from that score had sold 30,000 copies in print. By then he was in great demand for plays. Among his commissions were Herbert Beerbohm Tree's productions of As You Like It, in 1896, and of Much Ado about Nothing, in 1898. In 1900 came Anthony Hope's English Nell, later renamed Nell Gwynn, in which Marie Tempest took the lead.
At the same time he wrote for the concert hall, at times adapting material from his stage scores. His Gipsy Suite did as well as the Richard III overture and the popular dances from Henry VIII and Nell Gwynn. In those years he also produced a number of successful songs for the drawing room and pieces for solo piano. Because of this success, music festivals began commissioning him, and in 1893 he wrote his second symphony for Norwich. George Bernard Shaw, then a young critic, objected that German's symphonies were too theatrical for the form. German was sensitive to criticism, and after Shaw's complaint he composed no further symphonies, labelling his big four-movement works symphonic suites instead.
His successful orchestral works included suites for Leeds in 1895, the symphonic poem Hamlet, performed in Birmingham in 1897 with Hans Richter conducting, and The Seasons, written for Norwich in 1899. A violin concerto planned for the 1901 Leeds Festival was never completed, since German had by then turned to light opera. For the Brighton Festival in 1902 he wrote a Rhapsody on March Themes.
In 1900 Arthur Sullivan died, and Richard D'Oyly Carte asked German to finish The Emerald Isle, which Sullivan had left behind, for the Savoy Theatre. German had done little in the way of opera or choral writing, yet he agreed, dropping the violin concerto he had been commissioned to write for Leeds so that he could meet the deadlines. The score was a hit, staged into the 1920s, and it gave him a fresh career. In 1902 he followed it with Merrie England, to a libretto by Basil Hood, who had also written the libretto for The Emerald Isle.
Merrie England was possibly the biggest hit of German's career, and listeners enjoyed its dance numbers apart from the opera too. It was revived often and became a light-opera staple in Britain. Some of its songs, among them The Yeomen of England, O Peaceful England and The English Rose, remained favourites until the mid-twentieth century.
German and Hood teamed up again in 1903 for A Princess of Kensington. The opera failed, despite a short tour and a production in New York. German looked to other things. He set words by Rudyard Kipling, among them the twelve songs that make up the Just So Song Book (1903), and a steady flow of orchestral commissions followed. One was the Welsh Rhapsody for the Cardiff Festival of 1904, whose climax is Men of Harlech.
German went back to comic opera and had another hit with Tom Jones; Robert Courtneidge produced it in 1907 at the Apollo Theatre to mark the Fielding bicentenary. It was staged in New York as well, with German himself conducting, and remained in performance for decades; its dance music was also given separately. His next collaborator was W. S. Gilbert; in 1909 their Fallen Fairies came out at the Savoy, German's final opera, and it failed. Soon after the first night the producer C. H. Workman took Nancy McIntosh out of the role of the Fairy Queen in favour of Amy Evans and requested that a number which Gilbert had removed in rehearsal be put back. Gilbert was enraged, threatened to go to court and wanted German to side with him. German, who generally shunned legal fights, declined.
Fallen Fairies failed, and German's experience of it was unhappy; he all but gave up writing new works and returned to it only rarely. Public interest in this kind of piece had waned, because tastes in musical theatre shifted as the new century began. In 1911 he was the first to compose for a British film: for a fee of 50 guineas he wrote 16 bars of music to accompany the coronation scene in Henry VIII. That year he also wrote a march and a hymn for the coronation of George V.
Few works date from his later years. They include Theme and Six Diversions (1919) and the last major piece, The Willow Song (1922), a tone poem prompted by Othello. After it he hardly composed at all. His letters show that he was ill at ease with new trends like jazz and modernist concert music. As Sullivan had done, he regretted that his fame came mostly from comic operas. German was a perfectionist, though: he went on revising his pieces and making fresh arrangements for publication, recorded some himself, and supported performances and radio broadcasts of them.
From 1886 German lived in Maida Vale, London, and he followed cricket keenly. His life was quiet: he liked walks, cycling and fishing, though he went to the theatre often. He grew very close to Sir Edward Elgar. A road accident injured him during the First World War, yet he remained a much sought-after conductor until in 1928 an eye complaint cost him the sight of his right eye. His own conducting was recorded from 1916, which made him one of the earliest composers to do so, and the recordings included complete versions of his Merrie England as well as Theme and Six Diversions.
German received a knighthood in 1928, and many eminent musicians, Elgar among them, came to the celebratory dinner. In 1934 the Royal Philharmonic Society honoured him with its gold medal, its highest award, which Sir Thomas Beecham handed over at one of its concerts. In 1936 the Worshipful Company of Musicians elected him an Honorary Freeman.
Edward German died on 11 November 1936 at his home in Maida Vale, aged 74, of prostate cancer. A cremation followed at Golders Green, and the ashes rest in the cemetery at Whitchurch.
German lived long enough to see the popularity of his orchestral works begin to decline. A note found after his death says that he was dying disappointed because his serious orchestral works had not been recognised. Even so, the best known of them continued to be heard now and then, while amateur companies kept Merrie England and Tom Jones alive on stage. Beecham recorded the Gipsy Suite in 1956. In 1994 a disc conducted by Andrew Penny appeared with The Seasons, Richard III and Theme and Six Diversions, and 2009 brought the first complete professional Tom Jones recording.
The first Edward German Festival took place in 2006 in Whitchurch, his birthplace. The patron, the cellist Julian Lloyd Webber, performed, and Merrie England was given in concert form.
German is known above all for his music for stage productions and for comic operas, in which he is regarded as the successor to Arthur Sullivan. Besides these there are symphonies, orchestral suites, symphonic poems, songs and piano pieces. Of his concert works the Welsh Rhapsody of 1904 is perhaps the best known. Some of his theatre music lived on in the concert hall too: the overture to Richard III and the dances from Henry VIII and Nell Gwynn. All of it is written in a manner imitating old England, a style with which German's name is especially closely tied.
His music often looked back to a romanticised Shakespearian or half-legendary England of merry-making. Audiences liked it: between 1895 and 1905, the Proms' opening decade, his Three Dances from Henry VIII were played well over thirty times, more often than any other English orchestral piece, and the Three Dances from As You Like It were just as popular. Of the comic operas, Merrie England was perhaps German's biggest success; its dances were heard on their own, and several songs from it stayed popular until the mid-twentieth century.
After Shaw's criticism German wrote no more symphonies and called his large four-movement works symphonic suites. He also set Kipling's texts, including the twelve songs of the Just So Song Book, and wrote songs and solo piano pieces. His later works, such as Theme and Six Diversions in 1919, were few.
German wrote his theatre music for the Globe, the Lyceum and other London stages, and in 1911 he also composed music for a film. For the festivals he created suites, the symphonic poem Hamlet and a Rhapsody on March Themes. In the drawing-room sphere he left songs and pieces for solo piano. He regretted that his fame came mostly from comic operas. German was a perfectionist: he kept revising his pieces and preparing new arrangements for publication.
The site offers three of German's songs for voice and piano. According to the site's data, My Song Is of the Sturdy North and The Dew Upon the Lily are of the Intermediate+ level, and All the World Awakes Today is of the Advanced level. It makes sense to begin with the first two.