Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/MacCunn, Hamish James
MacCUNN, HAMISH (JAMES) (1868–1916), musical composer, was born at Greenock 22 March 1868, the second son of James MacCunn, shipowner, of Thornhill, Greenock, by his wife, Barbara Neill. He enjoyed to the full in childhood the advantages of favourable environment, for his father was a student and a lover of the arts, with the means to indulge his son's tastes and the enthusiasm and foresight to guide them aright. Under a wisely ordered training young MacCunn developed musical gifts of great promise from an early age, and in 1883, when the Royal College of Music was founded in London for the encouragement of native talent, was successful in winning one of its first scholarships for composition. He studied there under (Sir) Charles Hubert H. Parry [q.v.] until 1887.
With his cantata ‘The Moss Rose’, produced at the Royal College in 1885, and an overture ‘Cior Mhor’, at the Crystal Palace in the same year, came the first signs of MacCunn's remarkable individuality; and two years later this boy of nineteen began to startle and captivate the musical world with an amazing series of full-grown orchestral and choral works, of which the most conspicuous were ‘The Land of the Mountain and the Flood’ (1887), ‘The Ship o' the Fiend’ (1888), ‘The Dowie Dens o' Yarrow’ (1888), ‘Lord Ullin's Daughter’ (1888), ‘The Lay of the Last Minstrel’ (1888), and ‘Bonny Kilmeny’ (1888). He also wrote a great number of songs, frankly melodious, but rich in his distinctive qualities; many of these were produced at concerts of his works given at the home of John Pettie, R.A. [q.v.], whose only daughter, Alison Quiller, MacCunn married in 1889.
MacCunn's sense of drama soon turned his attention to opera. In 1894 ‘Jeanie Deans’ (the libretto by Joseph Bennett) was produced in Edinburgh, and in 1896 in London; another opera, ‘Diarmid’ (1897), was a setting of a libretto by the ninth Duke of Argyll, then Marquess of Lorne, founded on heroic Celtic legends. Both these works met with more success than usually falls to the lot of a British opera, but lacked the staying power, chiefly in the librettos, essential to survival. The production of his operas established MacCunn's reputation as an able conductor, and first, or early, performances in English of the later Wagner operas were given under his direction by the Royal Carl Rosa company. In light opera, too, he attained a foremost position as conductor; and as a result, possibly, of this experience, he wrote a light opera, ‘The Golden Girl’ (the libretto by Basil Hood), produced at Birmingham in 1905.
It is perhaps to his attachment to the theatre and to his gifts as a conductor that we may attribute the comparative smallness of MacCunn's output in the later years of his life. Certain it is that as conductor of operas, both in London and in the provinces, he found his leisure for composition curtailed more and more year by year; while, towards the end, it was made almost fruitless by ill-health. He died in London 2 August 1916, leaving a widow and one son.
As a composer, MacCunn represents a type not uncommon in its early maturity, yet it is surprising that a man who did so much did not do more. Great gifts he possessed in abundance—inspiration, sensitiveness, clearness of style, an inexhaustible flow of melody, and that magical charm of utterance that goes with a vivid and imaginative personality. He was thus enabled to reveal the heart of Scotland as none had done before him, in a musical setting of great character and originality, virile and picturesque, glowing with warmth and splendour of colouring; he did all this with such tenderness and emotional beauty that he has been named, not without reason, the most Scottish of Scottish composers.
[Royal College of Music Registers; Crystal Palace programmes; Monthly Musical Record, September 1916; Musical Times, September 1916; Grove's Dictionary of Music; Dictionary of Modern Music and Musicians.]