1868–1946 · United Kingdom · 20th century
Granville Bantock (1868–1946) was a British composer, conductor and teacher born in London. He studied at the Royal Academy of Music, taught in Birmingham and helped to found a symphony orchestra there. The site offers five of his songs for voice and piano.
Granville Ransome Bantock was born in London on 7 August 1868. His father was a Scottish surgeon, and his younger brother Leedham became a dramatist and director.
His parents had intended him for the Indian Civil Service, but because of poor health he first turned to chemical engineering. Composers' manuscripts drew him to music: at the age of twenty he began to study them in the library of the South Kensington Museum and was drawn into the musical world.
Bantock began at Trinity College in London under Gordon Saunders, and in 1888 he moved to the Royal Academy of Music to study harmony and composition with Frederick Corder.
The Macfarren Prize was awarded for the first time that year, and it went to him.
As early as 1892 came Caedmar, a one-act romantic opera to a libretto by Corder; it was staged at the Royal Academy of Music on 12 July and afterwards at the Crystal Palace. The same year saw The Fire Worshippers, a dramatic cantata after Thomas Moore's Lalla Rookh, whose prelude August Manns conducted at the Crystal Palace.
In 1894 Bantock wrote The Pearl of Iran, a one-act romantic opera to his own libretto, the symphonic overture Saul with organ, and two orchestral scenes from Robert Southey's poem The Curse of Kehama. Those two scenes were played at a Philharmonic Society concert in 1897.
His earliest conducting jobs sent him travelling the world with a musical comedy company. Leedham and he also turned out two music hall songs that did fairly well. In 1893–1896 Bantock published the magazine The New Quarterly Musical Review.
From 1897 he led the concerts at New Brighton Tower, where he gave a platform to Charles Villiers Stanford, Hubert Parry, Edward German, Charles Steggall, Frederic Hymen Cowen, Joseph Holbrooke, Corder and others. Some concerts were given over entirely to a single composer.
He also led the Liverpool Orchestral Society, with which he gave the first performance of Delius's Brigg Fair on 18 January 1908. In 1898 Bantock married Helena von Schweitzer (1868–1961), who wrote texts for him.
In 1900 Bantock became principal of the school of music of the Birmingham and Midland Institute. He was a professor at the University of Birmingham until 1934, succeeding Edward Elgar in that post.
Bantock played a leading part in setting up Birmingham's city orchestra, the one that became the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. At its first performance, on 5 September 1920, the orchestra played Saul, an overture he composed especially for the occasion.
Maria Matos Priolli, Dorothy Howell, Eric Fogg, Lilian Elkington and Anthony Bernard were among those who studied with him. Bantock's close friend was the composer Havergal Brian. He received his knighthood in 1930. Trinity College of Music in London had him as chairman of its corporation from 1934. Between 1926 and 1933 he lived in Birmingham at Metchley Lodge.
In the 1900s Bantock wrote a series of tone poems: Thalaba, The Destroyer (1900), Dante and Beatrice (1901), Hudibras and The Witch of Atlas (both 1902), and Lalla Rookh (1902), dedicated to Joseph Holbrooke. The choral epic Omar Khayyám was heard in instalments: Part I at the Birmingham Festival in 1906, Part II at the Cardiff Festival in 1907 and Part III in Birmingham in 1909. The complete work was performed in London in February 1910.
The choral symphony Atalanta in Calydon, to words by Swinburne, was sung in 1912 under Harry Evans, and the choral symphony Vanity of Vanities, from Ecclesiastes, followed in Liverpool in February 1914. In 1914 Bantock wrote The Song of Liberty for the twenty-first festival of the Labour Party at Bradford. For brass band he also composed the Festival March, which was written for Keir Hardie and the party's twenty-first conference in Bradford.
Among his orchestral works is Fifine at the Fair. It was meant for a Royal Philharmonic Society concert in the 1911–12 season, but that was cancelled over a dispute about fees, and the Society played it on 26 November 1917 under Thomas Beecham. The choral ballet The Great God Pan was heard at the Sheffield Festival in 1920, and Bantock began The Song of Songs in 1912 and finished it in 1922.
Choral and stage works followed. The Seal Woman, a Celtic folk opera with words by Marjory Kennedy-Fraser, was given in Birmingham on 27 September 1924 under the composer. For the BBC Bantock wrote The Pilgrim’s Progress for soloists, chorus and orchestra, which was performed at the Queen’s Hall under his direction on 23 November 1928. He composed King Solomon, written for the 1937 coronation of George VI and Queen Elizabeth and performed on 6 May 1937.
He also wrote music for plays. For London's Court Theatre he composed Salome, after Oscar Wilde, staged on 19 April 1918, and in 1926 he wrote the music for Macbeth in Sybil Thorndike's production. The music was later worked into the Macbeth Overture.
Bantock died in London on 16 October 1946. A Bantock Society was founded soon afterwards, with Jean Sibelius as its first president; Bantock had promoted Sibelius's music in the first years of the century. Bantock is also the dedicatee of Sibelius's Third Symphony and of the second Pomp and Circumstance march by Elgar.
The Cadbury Research Library at the University of Birmingham keeps the composer's own manuscripts of most of his works, along with letters from him, chiefly to his son Raymond and to Ernest Newman.
Bantock often drew on English national folklore: he arranged English folk melodies, and he orchestrated and edited music by the English virginalists. Hebridean folk song and the works of Richard Wagner shaped his style. A number of his works have an “exotic” colouring, the choral epic Omar Khayyám among them.
Two of his best-known pieces are the Pierrot of the Minute overture (1908) and the Pagan Symphony (1928). For brass band he wrote the Oriental Rhapsody (1930), while the plan for a cycle of twenty-four tone poems after Southey stopped at two orchestral scenes. Since the 1990s many of his works have appeared on commercial recordings. His symphonies include the Hebridean, the Celtic Symphony for strings and six harps (1940) and The Cyprian Goddess (Symphony No. 3), and the Pagan Symphony is dedicated to his son Raymond.
Bantock also wrote smaller suites for orchestra: Russian Scenes (1899), English Scenes (1900) and the Old English Suite (1909), and for strings Scenes from the Scottish Highlands (1913) and The Land of the Gael (1915). For cello and orchestra he composed the Elegiac Poem (1898), the Sapphic Poem (1906) and the Celtic Poem (1914). He wrote two violin sonatas as well, in D major (1932) and in G major (1929), the latter dedicated to Albert Sammons. His comedy overtures after Aristophanes are The Frogs (1935), The Women’s Festival (1941) and The Birds (1946). For piano he wrote Arabian Nights (1920), a set of seven pieces inscribed to Gustav Holst, and Memories of Sapphire (1938), which carries a dedication to Muriel Mann.
Bantock also wrote for the voice. In 1905 came Five Ghazals of Hafiz for baritone and Ferishtah’s Fancies for tenor, in 1906 nine fragments of Sappho in translations by Helena Bantock, and in 1941 The Sphinx, a cycle for baritone or contralto to words by Oscar Wilde.
The site offers five of Bantock's songs for voice and piano: four at the Medium+ level (Under the Moon, The Old Fisherman of the Mists and Waters, Return of Spring, The Ghost Road) and one at the Advanced level (The Celestial Weaver).