Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Parry, Charles Hubert Hastings
PARRY, Sir CHARLES HUBERT HASTINGS, baronet (1848–1918), composer, musical historian, and director of the Royal College of Music, was born at Bournemouth 27 February 1848. He was the second son and youngest child by his first wife of Thomas Gambier Parry [q.v.], of Highnam Court, Gloucestershire. Gambier Parry was a lover of the arts, a collector of Italian pictures, and himself a painter of more than ordinary amateur ability. He was a keen supporter of the ‘high-church’ movement. Though the religious forms of Hubert's youth were completely outgrown later, and the growth involved some violent reaction from them, the life at Highnam laid a stable foundation for his habit of associating seriousness with art and beauty with seriousness.
Hubert Parry's predilection towards music appeared early. Childish compositions, beginning with single and double chants, appear in note-books which have been preserved from the age of nine. A list of his compositions when he was sixteen contains every form of Anglican church music, with piano and organ pieces, fugues, canons, madrigals, and songs interspersed. He was then at Eton, and the diaries which contain this list give a vivid picture of the zest with which he entered into every phase of public school life. That the keeper of ‘School Field’ should take a leading part as pianist and singer in the concerts of the Eton Musical Society was sufficiently unusual. He further surprised every one by passing the examination for the degree of bachelor of music at Oxford during his last ‘half’ at Eton. The method is typical. Education was for him the accumulation and sorting of diverse experiences. He had no exclusions. He would learn how things were done from the men who knew, whether the thing were the structure of a fugue or the rigging of a yacht. When he knew, he would use the knowledge in his own way. In music, Handel and Mendelssohn, imbibed at a succession of Gloucester festivals, were his first heroes. At Oxford, where he matriculated as a commoner of Exeter College in 1867, concerted chamber music became an absorbing interest, and he was instrumental in founding the University Musical Club. He spent his first long vacation at Stuttgart, studying orchestration and kindred matters with Henry Hugo Pierson [q.v.], learning German, attending the opera, and also taking lessons in viola-playing.
In 1873 Parry settled permanently in London, having married in the previous year Lady Elizabeth Maude Herbert, second daughter of Sidney, first Lord Herbert of Lea [q.v.]. He was at this time a member of Lloyds, and though his diaries and correspondence show that he was fully determined to make music the central interest of his life, the idea of the musical profession as a career was naturally not then entertained. In one sense it may be said that he never was a professional musician, since he was never under the necessity of earning a living by music. Yet his desire to do something of worth imposed on him a stern discipline of study. At first his ambition was towards piano-playing, and during a winter which he spent at Cannes for his wife's health, he gave several concerts with the violinist, Guerini. In London he sought out as his piano teacher Edward Dannreuther, who soon became his closest friend and counsellor. Every new composition was submitted to Dannreuther's judgement for many years after the days of pupillage were passed, and the words ‘Dann approves’ occur constantly in the record of his undertakings. It was through Dannreuther that Parry went to the first Bayreuth festival (1876) and came under the spell of Der Ring des Nibelungen. When Wagner visited London in the following year, Parry formed an acquaintance with him through Dannreuther, and revelled in every opportunity of steeping himself in Wagner's music.
The Wagnerian gospel found the most immediate response in Parry's soul. He was going through a necessary period of revolt against many of the narrow traditions of his upbringing, social, artistic, and religious. In composition he concentrated chiefly on instrumental music. He wrote for the violin and piano a fine Partita in D minor and a Duo for two pianos in E minor, long a favourite work (published by Breitkopf and Haertel). A whole series of concerted chamber works for piano and strings came out at the private concerts which Dannreuther gave regularly at his house in Orme Square, and a Nonet for wind, ‘written as an experiment’, as also the now well-known Fantasia and Fugue for organ (Novello, 1913) belong to these years. A concert of Parry's chamber music given at the house of Mr. A. J. (afterwards Earl of) Balfour in Carlton House Terrace in 1879 has been generally referred to as a landmark in his career. In none of these compositions does the influence of Wagner seem peculiarly strong, but they certainly showed an independence of thought which was disquieting to some of Parry's friends. His father shook his head sadly over the heterodoxy of ‘poor dear Hubert’. A letter to one of the nearest of these friends shows Parry's own standpoint. He says, ‘I like my compositions as little as possible. I feel that they are far from what they ought to be; but I take a good deal of pains and do not write ill-considered reflections of Wagner, and though I feel the impress of his warmth and genius strongly I am not tempted to tread in the same path in the matter of construction, because what is applicable to the province of dramatic music is entirely alien to instrumental music. I have my own views on the latter subject. …’
Towards the end of 1875 Sir George Grove [q.v.] had invited Parry to collaborate with him as assistant editor of the monumental Dictionary of Music and Musicians, and the research which Parry's own articles entailed, together with the varied duties of editorship, stimulated that wide historical outlook which bore fruit later in his literary works, particularly The Art of Music (1893), The Oxford History of Music, vol. iii (1902), and Style in Musical Art (1911).
The customary division of a composer's work into periods is always dangerous; in the case of so continuous and consistent an artist as Parry it is doubly so, yet it is necessary if such a summary of his activities as this is to be anything more than a catalogue. What may be called the formative period came definitely to an end with the production in 1880 at the Crystal Palace of a piano concerto written for Dannreuther's performance. The same year ‘Scenes from Shelley's Prometheus Unbound’ for solo voices, chorus, and orchestra was given at the Gloucester festival and was the firstfruit of the type of work with which Parry was to make an indelible impression on the taste of his generation.
The spirit of splendid rebellion in the poem was Parry's inspiration; he brought to its expression all that growth towards freedom which he had acquired in years of probation. Naturally the technical influence of Wagner, the Wagner of The Ring, is evident; the subject encouraged it, for here he was nearer to ‘the province of dramatic music’ than he had been before. There is also more warmth of colouring and scenic suggestion in the orchestral music than in any of Parry's later work. But the quality of the melody, the sensitiveness to the English language, and the subtle beauties of the writing for the choir, are unmistakable. Here was a new voice in music; it happened to be an English voice.
In spite of the mixed reception of ‘Prometheus’, the way was now open for wider activities in composition. Two symphonies followed quickly on one another, that in G and the one known as the ‘Cambridge’, not only because it was written for the Cambridge Musical Society but because it had as background a ‘programme’ of undergraduate life. The Cambridge Society had rescued ‘Prometheus’ from its fate in an admirable performance, and in the years in which the Society was guided by (Sir) Charles Stanford many of Parry's works were given there as they appeared. A setting of Shirley's ode, ‘The Glories of our Blood and State’, appeared in the same year as the Cambridge symphony, and showed that Parry's mind was already turning to what became ultimately the dominating issue of his life—reflective choral music.
The music to ‘The Birds’ of Aristophanes (Cambridge, 1884) led to his one experiment in opera, ‘Guinevere’, a romantic opera in three acts, which he composed with enthusiasm in 1886, though with many misgivings about the libretto. A single attempt to get it performed led to nothing; Parry laid aside the score and with it all aspirations towards opera, the conditions of which became increasingly distasteful to him in later years. Yet his music to the comedies of Aristophanes at various times, ‘The Frogs’ (Oxford, 1891), ‘The Clouds’ (1905), and ‘The Acharnians’ (1914) shows that he retained a sympathy with and a certain instinct for the theatre, though he regarded these things rather as an academic ‘rag’ than as the serious business of his art.
The period was completed with the noble setting for double choir and orchestra of Milton's ode ‘At a solemn Music’ (‘Blest Pair of Sirens’). It has since become the most famous of all his works. Parry, together with many of his Eton and Oxford friends, had delighted in singing the choruses of the Mass in B minor, for the first English performance of which the Bach Choir had been originally formed. He wrote ‘Blest Pair’ for these friends at the suggestion of Grove, and its instant success amongst them, when the Bach Choir sang it in 1887, made amends for all the carping disparagement with which professional critics had pursued his earlier works.
His first oratorio ‘Judith’, given at Birmingham in the following year, marks a fresh stage in Parry's career. ‘Judith’, like ‘Blest Pair’, was a popular success, and from this time onward till he succeeded Sir George Grove as director of the Royal College of Music (1895) Parry was pouring out large works with almost unparalleled activity and conducting performances of them all over the country. They covered a wide range of expression. Two further symphonies, the ‘English’ in C and one in E minor, were produced in London in 1889; the same year came his first work for a Leeds festival, Pope's ‘Ode on Saint Cecilia's Day’; ‘L'Allegro ed Il Penseroso’ (Norwich, 1890) again showed his understanding of the measured stateliness of Milton's verse, and from that he turned first to the majesty of the Latin psalm ‘De Profundis’, written for triple choir (Hereford, 1891), then to the melody of Tennyson in the choric song from ‘The Lotus Eaters’ (Cambridge, 1892). Yet this is pre-eminently the period of oratorios, three in number, ‘Judith’, ‘Job’ (Gloucester, 1892), and ‘King Saul’ (Birmingham, 1894).
‘Judith’ has been called a reactionary work, and with a certain justice. It is distinctly disconcerting, notwithstanding the intrinsic beauty of many of the numbers, to find Parry in the very zenith of his powers reverting to the stereotyped form of the Old Testament oratorio, with all its paraphernalia of massive choruses and arias. But Parry's attitude to the form was not one of complaisant acceptance. His preface makes it clear that his main interest lay in ‘popular movements and passions and such results of them as occur a hundred times in history, of which the Israelitish story is one vivid type out of many’. In these works the musical experiences of his youth are sifted. He goes back in order to go forward, reviews the whole position of oratorio, and passes beyond both the conventional religious standpoint and the dramatic attractions of narrative. In the best moments of the two Birmingham works he reaches the epic expression of human feeling. ‘Job’ goes farther. Every convention of oratorio, even the choral finale, is discarded, in order that the one purpose, the growth of the soul through pain, may be traced out in the cry of lamentation, in the answer of the Lord ‘out of the whirlwind’, and in the peaceful peroration for orchestra alone. In the last two scenes of ‘Job’ we have the clue to that long chain of works which was eventually to sum up Parry's thought on the puzzle of life.
Meantime, however, there were busy years in which Parry's responsibilities as director of the Royal College of Music (he had held a professorship there since its inception in 1883), as choragus and subsequently as professor of music at Oxford, and his literary work, all made disastrous inroads on his time for composition. Most of the larger productions of the 'nineties show signs of that hasty workmanship which has seriously damaged Parry's reputation with a generation much concerned about technique, points of effect, and especially orchestration. Even the Symphonic Variations, probably his most successful composition for orchestra alone, has suffered from his carelessness in marking nuances, and certain festival works have sunk into oblivion after one imperfect performance largely on that account. The wonder is that the stream of composition went on comparatively unchecked, and that in the smaller works, from the songs collected in the various series of ‘English Lyrics’ to the ‘Ode to Music’ written for the opening of the new concert hall at the Royal College of Music, there is so much of the same lofty melody and the same sure handling of the voices which are the lovable qualities of Parry's art.
In the year after the South African War, the Royal Choral Society produced at the Albert Hall ‘War and Peace’, a symphonic ode for solo voices, chorus, and orchestra. Parry wrote the words himself (as he had often done—partially at any rate—in the case of previous works) and threw into rough and vigorous verse, suitable to his music, his thoughts on the conflicting passions of war and peace. Musically he rose to his full stature in the treatment of this theme, and it proved to be the precursor of a series of works, which in differing forms address themselves to one or other aspect of the same problem. Several cantatas, produced at a succession of Three Choirs festivals, beginning with ‘Voces Clamantium’ (Hereford, 1903), use the imagery and poetry of the Biblical writers to illustrate his message. Their very titles proclaim it: ‘The Love that casteth out Fear’, ‘The Soul's Ransom’, and ‘Beyond these Voices there is Peace’. Each has compellingly fine musical moments, but each left him feeling that the message ‘Look where thy Hope lies’ was incomplete.
In ‘A Vision of Life’ (Cardiff, 1907) he again wrote his own poem, and wrestled with the same theme, surveying as in a dream the greatness and pitifulness of human struggle throughout salient epochs in the world's history. Even his last orchestral symphony (1912) shares in the thought, for the first three of its four linked movements bear the titles ‘Work’, ‘Love’, and ‘Play’, and the whole is summed up in a mood of optimism by a finale labelled ‘Now’. Nor was this all, for in his last years he was much occupied with a book, Instinct and Character (unpublished, though typed copies have been deposited, and may be seen, in the British Museum, Bodleian, and Royal College of Music libraries), which endeavoured to examine the grounds of human action, reaction, and progress and to show where his hope lay for the future of mankind.
All this shows the impossibility of estimating Parry solely as the musical artist, even though it is through his music that he has done most towards ‘winning the way’. The joyous freshness of the ‘Ode on the Nativity’, his last work for a Three Choirs festival (Hereford, 1912), shows that his purely musical inspiration still ran clear, and the boyish sense of fun was ready to break out again in such things as ‘The Pied Piper’ and the music to ‘The Acharnians’. Nor must it be forgotten that during these years he so steeped himself in the mind of J. S. Bach, that he was able to produce the most intimately sympathetic study of ‘a great personality’ in music which the literature of this country possesses.
Parry's vivid interest in many things outside music, his love of the open air and the sea (he was a member of the Royal Yacht Squadron, and sailing his own yacht was easily first among his favourite recreations), his sympathy with young people, his constant desire to explore new ways of thought, even those ways in modern music which were most antipathetic to him—all contributed to keep his nature sane and sweet. He could be intolerant, hasty, and even forbidding. He never ‘suffered fools gladly’, but only fools failed to get at the essential simplicity and truth of the man. It was primarily his example and presence as head of the musical profession which compelled that enlarged outlook on the part of musicians themselves and that favourable change in their position amongst their fellows which in the last generation has brought new life to the art in England. He made music a man's concern.
The ‘Songs of Farewell’, six motets for unaccompanied voices, together with some solo songs and organ preludes, are the product of Parry's last years. The European War had shattered everything most dear to him, and he did not see the end of it. Its shadow is cast on his music, yet in these motets he holds to the convictions he had so hardly won, and in ‘Never weather-beaten Sail’, ‘There is an old Belief’, and ‘Lord, let Me know mine End’, there is a serenity and confidence which places them among the really great achievements of music.
He died at Rustington 7 October 1918, and was buried in the crypt of St. Paul's Cathedral.
Parry was knighted in 1898, and was made a baronet on the occasion of King Edward's coronation in 1902. His wife and two daughters survived him, but he left no male heir. The estate of Highnam Court, which he inherited from his father, passed to his half-brother. A tablet to his memory, bearing an inscription by the poet laureate (Mr. Robert Bridges), has been placed by public subscription in Gloucester Cathedral.
[Unpublished Diaries and Letters; personal knowledge. A fairly complete list of Parry's compositions to date of publication, 1907, is included in the second edition of Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, edited by J. A. Fuller-Maitland. For further biographical details, see C. L. Graves, Hubert Parry: His Life and Works, 2 vols., 1926, published since this article was written.]