1852–1935 · United Kingdom · 20th century
Frederic Hymen Cowen (1852—1935) was an English pianist, composer and conductor, born in Jamaica and raised in London. His Scandinavian Symphony of 1880 brought him fame, and as a conductor he led many British ensembles. Our site has his songs with piano.
Frederic Cowen was born on 29 January 1852 in Kingston, Jamaica. At that time the family name was spelled Cohen. He was the fifth and youngest child in the Jewish family of Frederick Augustus and Emily Cohen; his mother's maiden name was Davis.
When the boy was four, the family moved to London (1856). His father worked as treasurer at the opera of Her Majesty's Theatre. His first music teacher was the pianist Henry Russell. At six Frederic published a waltz, the Minna-waltz, and at eight he composed an operetta about Garibaldi, with a libretto by his cousin Rosalind. Later he studied the piano with Julius Benedict and harmony with John Goss.
His first solo concert took place on 17 December 1863 in the hall of Her Majesty's Theatre. In June 1864 Cowen played Mendelssohn's D minor concerto at Dudley House, the London residence of the Earl of Dudley, whose secretary his father was. Joseph Joachim and Charles Santley also took part in that evening. In the same place, on 22 June 1865, his Piano Trio in A major was performed: the composer himself sat at the piano and Joachim played the violin part.
In autumn 1865 Cowen entered a competition held by the Leipzig Conservatoire; the winner received a scholarship for three years of study. His parents made him give it up, and the scholarship went to Swinnerton Heap. Cowen still enrolled at the same conservatoire, but as an ordinary student, so he remained dependent on his parents.
His studies were overseen by Ernst Friedrich Richter. Carl Reinecke taught composition, Ignaz Moscheles piano, Moritz Hauptmann harmony and counterpoint, and Ferdinand David ensemble playing. Cowen also knew Salomon Jadassohn and Ernst Wenzel, and took private piano lessons from Louis Plaidy. In January 1866 his String Quartet in C minor was performed at the conservatoire. Among his fellow students Johan Svendsen stands out.
The Austro-Prussian War interrupted his studies in Leipzig, and Cowen returned home. On 8 September 1866 his Overture in D minor was played at a concert in Covent Garden. In October 1867 he entered the Stern Conservatoire in Berlin, where Friedrich Kiel and Carl Taubert taught composition and Carl Tausig taught piano. It was in Berlin that Cowen began to conduct.
In those years he met Liszt in Weimar and, in Vienna, Brahms, Hanslick and Hans Richter. In 1868 Cowen returned to London again and carried on with the piano, now with Charles Hallé. He began to win fame as a virtuoso, performing at the Crystal Palace and for the Philharmonic Society.
Real success came on 9 December 1869, when his First Symphony (in C minor) and his Piano Concerto (in A minor) were performed at St James's Hall in London. Both scores are now considered lost. From that evening Cowen began to be seen first of all as a composer, and he appeared on the platform as a pianist less and less often. At the same time he tried his hand at conducting. His interest in opera took him to the company of Colonel Mapleson, which toured Britain and Ireland, where he worked as an accompanist.
In 1870 his cantata The Rose Maiden was performed in London, and in 1872 his Second Symphony (in F major) was given in Liverpool; like the First, it is considered lost. In 1871 he wrote music for the play The Maid of Orleans, and in 1874 the operetta One Too Many. His first opera, Pauline, based on Edward Bulwer-Lytton's play The Lady of Lyons, was staged in 1876 by the Carl Rosa Opera Company at the Lyceum and was not without success. In the same year, at the request of the conductor Michael Costa, he wrote the cantata The Corsair, after Byron, for the Birmingham Festival. In 1878 the cantata The Deluge appeared for Brighton.
In the 1870s Cowen travelled a great deal: he visited Germany, Italy and even the USA, and he went to Scandinavia three times with the French contralto Trebelli. The impressions of these journeys formed the basis of his Third Symphony, the Scandinavian (in C minor). Its first performance on 18 December 1880 brought the composer real fame. The symphony was played in Budapest, Vienna, Prague, Paris, Cologne, Stuttgart and Aachen, as well as in Britain and the USA. The Times called it the most important English symphony for many years. Until Edward Elgar's First Symphony appeared in 1908, it remained the most frequently performed English symphony.
Offers to conduct came more and more often, and in time this became Cowen's main occupation. In 1880 he replaced Arthur Sullivan as conductor of the Promenade Concerts. In 1884 he gave five concerts with the Philharmonic Society of London, and in 1888, after Sullivan left, he became its regular conductor. In that same year, 1888, he spent six months in Melbourne conducting at the exhibition marking the centenary of Australia's joining the British Empire; he was paid 5000 pounds, an enormous sum.
In 1892 Cowen left his post at the Philharmonic Society, and later held it again. In 1896 he became principal conductor of the Hallé Orchestra, succeeding the orchestra's founder Charles Hallé, who had died; three years later, in 1899, the post went to Hans Richter. In 1896 Cowen also became head of the Liverpool Philharmonic Society, and he left that post only in 1913.
The list of ensembles he led is long: the Bradford Festival Choral Society (from 1897), the Bradford Permanent Orchestra (1899—1902), the Scottish Orchestra (1900—1910), the Cardiff Festival (1902—1910) and the Handel Festivals at the Crystal Palace (1903—1923). In 1899 he also conducted the Scarborough Festival. In 1887, not long after he had conducted the Scandinavian Symphony, Cowen came down with scarlet fever.
Under his direction the Philharmonic Society of London reached a high standard of playing, its programmes were broad and varied, and its finances improved. Elgar admired Cowen's conducting, while Bernard Shaw, on the contrary, was dissatisfied with it. In time Cowen's restrained modesty was overshadowed by the more pretentious manner of Landon Ronald and Henry Wood.
Cambridge (1900) and Edinburgh (1910) universities awarded Cowen honorary doctorates. On 6 July 1911 he was knighted. After that he wrote little music and turned to literature: he published monographs on Haydn, Mendelssohn, Mozart and Rossini, and in 1913 his autobiography, My Art and My Friends, came out.
In 1908 Cowen married Frederica Gwendoline Richardson, who was thirty years younger than he was. They had no children. Cowen died in London on 6 October 1935 and was buried at the Jewish cemetery in Golders Green. His wife outlived him by forty years and died in 1971 in the town of Hove in East Sussex.
Among Cowen's works there are six symphonies. The First (in C minor) was performed in 1869, the Second (in F major) in 1872, the Third, the Scandinavian (in C minor), in 1880, the Fourth, the Welsh (in B flat minor), in 1884, the Fifth (in F major) in 1887 and the Sixth, the Idyllic (in E major), in 1897. The first two scores, like the Piano Concerto, are considered lost, while the Scandinavian remained the most frequently performed English symphony until Elgar's First appeared in 1908.
Cowen's choral works include The Rose Maiden (1870, London), The Corsair (1876, Birmingham Festival), The Deluge (1878, Brighton Festival), St. Ursula (1881, Norwich Festival), Sleeping Beauty (1885, Birmingham), the dramatic oratorio Ruth (1887, Worcester) and The Water-Lily (1893, Norwich Festival). The jubilee ode for chorus and orchestra A Song of Thanksgiving belongs to the Melbourne exhibition of 1888, and in 1902 his Coronation Ode for soprano, chorus and orchestra was performed at the Norwich Festival.
His stage works include the opera Pauline (1876) as well as Thorgrim (1890), Signa (1893) and Harold, or the Norman Conquest (1895). Pauline was shown at the Lyceum, Thorgrim at Drury Lane, Signa was first staged in Milan and Harold at Covent Garden.
Besides the symphonies, Cowen wrote orchestral works of various kinds: the overture Niagara (1881), the Sinfonietta in A major (1881), the suite for strings In the Olden Time (1883), the Coronation March (1902) and the Indian Rhapsody (1903), first played at the Three Choirs Festival in Hereford. He also left the orchestral poem A Phantasy of Life and Love (1901) and the Concertstück for piano and orchestra (1897).
Cowen regarded himself first of all as a symphonist, but he was most successful in light orchestral pieces on fantastic and fairy-tale subjects. They show his gift for melody and his colourful orchestration. Examples are the cantatas for female voices Sleeping Beauty and The Water-Lily, the concert overture The Butterfly's Ball (1901) and the ballet suites The Language of Flowers (1880, the second suite in 1914) and In Fairyland (1896). The dance movements of his suites are refined and original.
Most of Cowen's works were published in one form or another: the score of the Third Symphony was issued in Vienna together with an arrangement for piano duet, and the Fourth Symphony was published in London, among other forms in a four-hand arrangement. Many manuscripts of his orchestral works are considered lost, but some survive: the score of The Water-Lily is held by the British Library, the scores of The Butterfly's Ball and several other works by the Library of the Royal College of Music in London, the incomplete scores of The Enchanted Cottage and The Magic Goblet by the Bodleian Library in Oxford, and the score of The Rose Maiden in Toronto.
Cowen wrote about three hundred songs, from popular ballads to art songs, and it was for the latter that in 1898 he was compared with Schubert. Songs with piano are on our site: Hail!, Past and Future and The Better Land. All three are at the Medium+ level.