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23 Shakespearean Concert Songs in Victorian England
Get accessChristopher R. Wilson is Professor Emeritus of Music at the University of Hull. He is a graduate of the University of Oxford, where he studied with F. W. Sternfeld and John Buxton. He was the UK Research Associate for the Shakespeare Music Catalogue and wrote the Shakespeare entries for Grove Opera and Grove Music. His dictionary (with Michela Calore) Music in Shakespeare, first published in 2005, has been reissued in its third impression as one of the Arden Shakespeare Dictionaries (2014). His book Shakespeare’s Musical Imagery (2011) investigates categories and thematics in musical metaphor and contextual reference throughout the plays and poems. His database of music in Shakespeare is now available at www.shakespearemusic.bham.ac.uk under the auspices of the Shakespeare Institute. He has published books and articles on lute songs, lyric poetry, masques, prosodic theory, harmonic pedagogy, and neo-Latin verse of early-modern English writers, particularly Thomas Campion. His critical analyses of interactions between music and poetry in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have appeared in various journals showcasing comparative work. He has given invited lectures across Europe, Canada, and the United States, and has broadcast on BBC national radio and in Australia and Sweden. He was a music consultant for the Globe Theatre Permanent Exhibition in London.
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Published:14 February 2022
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Abstract
This chapter re-evaluates the status of settings of Shakespeare in the context of Victorian song from Macfarren to Henry Walford Davies, taking in Sullivan, Parry, MacKenzie, Stanford, Liza Lehmann, Maude Valérie White, Wood, and Somervell. Though often neglected today, Macfarren’s songs, including a number of Shakespeare settings, represented the ‘finest products of the period’. Seen as embodying the national emblem, Parry saw Shakespeare as central in his attempt to establish English ‘serious song’ comparable with the lieder of Schumann and Brahms and the dislodgement of commercial popular song prevalent in England. Parry’s settings of various sonnets in fact started life as German songs. Parry was not altogether successful in his mission; his only true disciple was Arthur Somervell. The last of the ‘Victorians’, Henry Walford Davies, was largely dismissed as a composer out of his time, his songs old-fashioned with their ‘forthright English melody’.
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