1848–1918 · United Kingdom · 20th century
Hubert Parry was an English composer, teacher and writer on music who lived from 1848 to 1918. He is best known for his choral music, and for many years he headed the Royal College of Music in London. His pupils included Gustav Holst and Ralph Vaughan Williams. The site offers his songs for voice and piano.
Parry was born in Bournemouth on 27 February 1848, the youngest of six children. His father, Thomas Gambier Parry, was a well-known collector of Italian art and also painted himself. His mother, Isabella, died of consumption twelve days after her son's birth.
He grew up on the Highnam estate near Gloucester. His father was often away from home, so Hubert's early childhood was mostly solitary, and his only regular companion was a governess. In the family, music was seen as a pastime rather than a profession fit for a gentleman.
Between January 1856 and mid-1858 he was a pupil at a prep school in Malvern, before moving to Twyford School in Hampshire. There the headmaster and two organists, S. S. Wesley and Edward Brind, supported his interest in music. From Wesley he gained a lasting love of Bach. Brind gave him piano lessons and the basics of harmony, and in 1861 took him to Hereford for the Three Choirs Festival. The impression was so strong that his connection with the festival lasted all his life.
In 1861 Parry entered Eton College. No one there could teach him composition, so from 1863 he studied with George Elvey, organist of St George's Chapel at Windsor Castle. Elvey began with canon and fugue, introduced his pupil to the quartets of Haydn and Mozart, and gave him the rudiments of orchestration. Hubert studied the scores of Beethoven, Weber and Mendelssohn on his own.
His first term at Eton was clouded: on 16 November his sister, Lucy, died of consumption. Even so, he threw himself into school life with his usual energy and stood out in both sport and music, although the first signs of the heart trouble that would plague him all his life had already appeared.
While still a schoolboy he sat the Oxford examination for the degree of Bachelor of Music, and became the youngest person ever to do so. His examination cantata was performed and published in 1867.
In 1867 Parry entered Exeter College at Oxford. He did not read music there: his father intended a commercial career for him, so the young man studied law and modern history. One summer, on Wesley's advice, he travelled to Stuttgart and learned from Henry Hugh Pierson. He finished his university course in 1870.
From 1870 to 1877 Parry worked as an underwriter at Lloyd's of London. He disliked the work but kept at it so as not to disappoint his father and his future in-laws. He married Elizabeth Maude Herbert in 1872, and the couple had two daughters, Dorothea and Gwendolen.
He pursued music alongside his job. In London Parry took lessons from William Sterndale Bennett but found them not demanding enough. He wanted to study with Johannes Brahms, who was not available, and was instead directed to the pianist Edward Dannreuther. Dannreuther began with piano lessons, then moved on to analysis and composition, and introduced his pupil to the music of Wagner.
In 1875 George Grove took notice of Parry and made him assistant editor of the first edition of his Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Parry wrote 123 articles for it. The young Edward Elgar learned from them: he never attended a music college and said later in life that Parry's articles had helped him most.
Parry's first notable works were a piano concerto, first played by Dannreuther, and a choral work on scenes from Shelley's Prometheus Unbound. When Grove became the first director of the newly founded Royal College of Music, he invited Parry to teach composition and the history of music.
A greater success came with the ode Blest Pair of Sirens (1887), a setting of Milton written on commission from Charles Villiers Stanford and dedicated to him. The text was suggested by Grove. After it Parry was seen as the foremost choral composer in England at that time, and commissions for conventional oratorios followed, although he had little sympathy with that genre.
The public received the oratorios well, but Bernard Shaw, who was writing music criticism in London at the time, mocked Parry for his coolness towards the genre.
Other choral works of these years include the psalm setting De Profundis (1891), a cantata written for St Cecilia's Day (1889) and the oratorios Job (1892) and Judith (1888). In 1894 Lady Helen Radnor commissioned a suite from him for her string orchestra of women.
Parry later succeeded Grove, taking charge of the Royal College of Music, and he ran it until his death. From 1900 to 1908 he was also professor of music at Oxford University. Among his pupils at the college were Gustav Holst, John Ireland, Frank Bridge and Ralph Vaughan Williams. He was knighted in 1898 and made a baronet in 1902.
After the death of his stepmother, Ethelinda, in 1896, Parry inherited the family estate at Highnam, where he had grown up.
In 1908 Parry gave up his Oxford post on medical advice. During his final ten years he produced several of his best-known works: Ode on the Nativity (1912), Songs of Farewell (1916–1918) and Symphonic Fantasia 1912, also called his Fifth Symphony. He is known best of all for his 1916 music to Blake's "And did those feet in ancient time", which was taken up at once by the movement for women's suffrage, with which both the composer and his wife sympathised.
Parry considered the German musical tradition the summit of music and loved German culture in general, so he was sure that war between Britain and Germany was unthinkable. The outbreak of the First World War left him in despair. During the war he chaired the Music in Wartime Committee and helped poorer musicians in distress.
Parry fell ill with Spanish flu in autumn 1918 and died on 7 October 1918 at Knightscroft in Rustington, West Sussex. His burial in St Paul's Cathedral came at Stanford's urging.
Choral music is the core of Parry's legacy, and the influence of Handel can be felt in it, including in his oratorios and cantatas on classical and biblical subjects. He is regarded as one of the founders of the movement to revive English national musical culture. His best-known pieces include Jerusalem, a choral song, the ode Blest Pair of Sirens, the hymn tune Repton and music for a coronation anthem, I was glad (1902). The site has six editions of Parry for voice and piano. Four are good places to begin: My true love hath my heart, More Fond than Cushat Dove, Good night and There rolls the deep, all at the level Middle+. The more difficult ones, at the Advanced level, are The Poet‘s Song and Where shall the lover rest.
In Parry's lifetime, critics tended to treat his orchestral pieces as secondary to the rest of his output, but towards the end of the twentieth century and in the early twenty-first many of them were revived. They include Elegy for Brahms (1897), Overture to an Unwritten Tragedy (1893), five symphonies and Symphonic Variations in E minor. He wrote a great deal for the theatre as well: music for Aristophanes productions in Cambridge and Oxford, namely The Acharnians (1914), The Clouds (1905), The Frogs (1892) and The Birds (1883), and for the London staging of Hypatia (1893). He made only one attempt at an opera, Guenever, which the Carl Rosa Opera Company turned down.
Among Parry's experiments was a set of six so-called ethical cantatas, through which, out of Darwinian and humanist convictions, he hoped to replace the conventional oratorio and the cantata. Elgar admired The Vision of Life (1907), though the public gave the cantatas little welcome, and The Soul's Ransom (1906) has been performed several times in modern times. The Pied Piper of Hamelin (1905) was lighter in mood. His chamber works include a Piano Quartet in A flat major (1879) and a Piano Trio in B minor, dated 1884, in which the influence of Brahms is noted.
All his adult life Parry wrote on music. Besides his 123 articles for Grove's dictionary, he published Style in Musical Art (1911), a collection of Oxford lectures, volume three of Oxford History of Music (1902), Studies of Great Composers (1886) and The Art of Music (1893), which he enlarged into The Evolution of the Art of Music (1896). The Times rated his study of Bach (1909) as his most important book.