1816–1875 · United Kingdom
William Sterndale Bennett (1816-1875) was a British composer, pianist, conductor and teacher, a friend of Mendelssohn and Schumann. He wrote mainly for the piano, taught at the Royal Academy of Music and later headed it. His works include the Preludes and Lessons, written for students, and a large number of piano pieces.
William Sterndale Bennett was born in Sheffield on 13 April 1816. His father, Robert, was the organist of the parish church, and also composed, played the piano and taught. He gave his son the name of a friend, the Sheffield poet William Sterndale, whose verses Robert had set in two vocal cycles.
The boy lost his mother in 1818 and his father in 1819, and was orphaned at three. His father's father, John Bennett, a professional bass singer in the choirs of Cambridge colleges, brought him up in that city. His first musical lessons came from his grandfather.
In 1824 the boy, who had a good alto voice, joined the chapel choir at King's College and sang in it for two years.
In 1826, at ten, Bennett entered the Royal Academy of Music, founded four years earlier. The examiners thought so well of the child's ability that they excused him from paying for his tuition. He remained a student of the Academy for ten years.
To please his grandfather he started out as a violinist, with lessons from Paolo Spagnoletti and then Antonio James Oury. Piano lessons came from W. H. Holmes; five years in, his grandfather agreed that the piano should become his chief instrument. Composition he studied under William Crotch and then Cipriani Potter, who took charge of the Academy in 1832. At the Academy he befriended J. W. Davison, later a music critic.
His student output included a symphony, an overture on The Tempest and the First Piano Concerto (D minor, Op. 1). The concerto was first played in public at Cambridge on 28 November 1832; Bennett himself was the soloist. Further performances followed in London, and also at Windsor Castle on royal invitation, where he played in April 1833 before William IV and his queen, Adelaide. The Academy paid for the concerto's printing.
In 1833, Felix Mendelssohn was in the audience at a London concert. He was so impressed that he asked Bennett to come to the Düsseldorf festival, the Lower Rhenish Music Festival.
In 1834 Bennett was made organist of St Ann's in Wandsworth, in London, a post he kept for a year. Then he taught private pupils in central London and pupils at schools in Edmonton and Hendon. At a concert of the Philharmonic Society of London in May 1835 he gave the first performance of his Second Piano Concerto, and he introduced his Third there the year after. He was also a member of a body set up in 1834, the Society of British Musicians.
In May 1836 Bennett travelled with Davison to Düsseldorf for the festival at which Mendelssohn's oratorio St Paul was first performed. The trip was made possible by a grant from the piano makers John Broadwood & Sons. The journey up the Rhine inspired him to start The Naiads, an overture published as Op. 15.
After that he made three long working visits to Leipzig. The first, from October 1836 until June 1837, brought his Gewandhaus debut: he was the soloist in his Third Piano Concerto under Mendelssohn's baton. During those months he also organised the earliest cricket game in Germany.
Bennett's friendship with Robert Schumann was never formal: by day they went on long walks in the countryside, and by night they visited the local taverns. Each gave the other a large piano work as a dedication. In August 1837 Bennett received the dedication of Schumann's Symphonic Studies, and a few weeks later he repaid it with the Fantasie, Op. 16. Schumann also published an essay on Bennett in 1837, in his journal Neue Zeitschrift für Musik.
The second long German stay was between October 1838 and March 1839; in that time he performed the Fourth Piano Concerto (Op. 19) and the overture Wood Nymphs (Op. 20). The third trip took place from January to March 1842. It also took him to Kassel, Dresden and Berlin, and in Leipzig he performed his Caprice for piano with orchestra, Op. 22.
From 1837 Bennett taught at the Royal Academy of Music, and he stayed connected with it for most of his life; later he also taught at Queen's College in London. Back in London from March 1842, he went on working at the Academy. In 1843 he put himself forward for the music professorship at Edinburgh University, with Mendelssohn's strong backing, but he was not appointed.
Leipzig had shown him what chamber-music concerts were, and in London they were a rarity. In 1843 Bennett began a series of his own, whose programmes had piano trios by Spohr and Beethoven, solo piano pieces, and string sonatas by Mendelssohn and other composers. Taking part were the virtuoso pianist Alexander Dreyschock and Carl Filtsch, a pupil of Chopin.
Bennett married Mary Anne Wood in 1844. After that, composing receded: his days filled up with lessons and the running of musical affairs. The composer Alice Mary Smith was among those he taught. Since 1842 he had sat among the directors of the Philharmonic Society of London and helped relieve its precarious finances: at his urging Mendelssohn and Spohr played with the society's orchestra, and the halls were full. Mendelssohn took the final six concerts of the 1844 season himself and put some of Bennett's music on the programmes.
In May 1848, when Queen's College opened in London, Bennett, as one of its founding directors, delivered the opening lecture and became a member of staff, while carrying on at the Academy and with private pupils. He composed thirty Preludes and Lessons (Op. 33) for the college's piano pupils. They appeared in print in 1853, and music students went on using them widely into the twentieth century.
Mendelssohn's death in 1847 was a heavy loss for Bennett, and in 1848 he broke with the Philharmonic Society after a dispute with the conductor Michael Costa. It began over something small, a disagreement about the interpretation of the overture Parisina at the last rehearsal. Neither side would give way, the quarrel grew, and it lasted through the rest of his career. Bennett was angry that the society did not support him, and he resigned.
Bennett was the first president of the Bach Society in London, founded in 1849. On 6 April 1854, under his direction, the society presented Bach's St Matthew Passion to an English audience for the first time. His own edition of the work was issued in 1862, its text translated into English by his pupil Helen Johnston.
June 1853 saw Bennett's final concert as an orchestral soloist, playing his Fourth Piano Concerto. In the same year he was invited to become conductor of the Gewandhaus Orchestra in Leipzig. The offer tempted him greatly, but he declined, feeling it was his duty to stay in England because he would not let his pupils down.
In 1856 Bennett was chosen to conduct the Philharmonic Society, and he held the post for ten years. Clara Schumann, wife of his old friend, played Beethoven's Emperor Concerto at his opening concert on 14 April 1856, which was her English debut. In March of that year Bennett was also elected to the music chair at Cambridge University. He changed the way music degrees were awarded, bringing in oral examinations and requiring doctoral candidates to take the Bachelor of Music degree first.
In 1858, after yet another clash involving Costa, Bennett left the Academy and did not return until 1866. His wife died at the end of 1862, after a painful illness. In 1865 he visited Leipzig again, where he met old friends, among them Ferdinand David, and where his symphony, Op. 43, was performed.
In 1866, when the previous head of the Academy announced his retirement, the post was offered first to Costa and then to Otto Goldschmidt; Goldschmidt declined and urged that Bennett be appointed. As Principal, Bennett took on not only the running of the Academy but also its rescue: the government refused to renew its grant, the directors decided to close the school, and with the backing of the faculty and students he took over as chairman of the board.
He won the government grant back and restored the Academy's finances. In 1866 its standing was poor, in influence and reputation alike, but under Bennett its authority and popularity grew markedly. At the end of 1868 it had 66 students, by 1870 there were 121, and by 1872 there were 176. He taught the composition class himself.
Honorary degrees came to Bennett from Cambridge (1867) and Oxford (1870), and in 1867 he was given the gold Beethoven medal of the Philharmonic Society. In 1871 Queen Victoria knighted him. In 1872 a public tribute was held for him at St James's Hall in London, and the money raised there paid for an Academy scholarship and prize that are still given.
Bennett's death came on 1 February 1875, at home in St John's Wood, London. The burial took place on 6 February at Westminster Abbey, next to Henry Purcell's grave.
When he first went to Germany in 1836 he had already composed, among much else, five symphonies and three piano concertos. His early period was fruitful, and it includes the works most valued today. The musicologist John Caldwell rates the early songs as finely judged and close to Mendelssohn, and names the coherence of their accompaniments as a strong point.
The scholar Firman calls Bennett's finest works those for the piano. Bennett did not chase the outward brilliance of many contemporaries, but formed a style of his own, classical in nature, with echoes of many influences from the music he played himself. Schumann praised his early piano pieces. They include the Musical Sketches, Op. 10, the Impromptus, Op. 12 (1836), and the Fantasie, Op. 16 (1837), in effect a sonata. The musicologist Nicholas Temperley finds traces of that Fantasie in Schumann's Novelette no. 7 from Op. 21 (1838), and parallels between Bennett's Impromptus and Schumann's Arabeske, Op. 18.
Geoffrey Bush calls Bennett at heart a piano composer, while Temperley suggests that Mozart, not Mendelssohn, was his model, despite his respect for Mendelssohn. For the piano students of Queen's College he wrote thirty pieces, the Preludes and Lessons, Op. 33.
From 1858 Bennett was composing again. The works of this time include The May Queen (Op. 39), a pastoral cantata composed to mark the 1858 opening of Leeds Town Hall; a Tennyson setting, the Ode Op. 40, for the 1862 International Exhibition in London; a G minor symphony (Op. 43); The Woman of Samaria, a sacred cantata written for the 1867 Birmingham festival; and and, last on the list, The Maid of Orleans (Op. 46), his second sonata for piano. A good many of these pieces were written on summer holidays at Eastbourne. The late works were popular but were thought old-fashioned, and drew less critical enthusiasm than the youthful ones.
In recent years interest in Bennett's music has revived: a symphony, the piano concertos, some of the vocal music and many piano pieces have been recorded. In 2016, the composer's bicentenary, concerts and other events took place, among them events at the Royal Academy of Music.
The site has the Toccata in C minor for solo piano, at the intermediate-plus level.