The Wrong Place at the Wrong Time:

How C. Hubert H. Parry’s Symphonies Were Excluded from the Orchestral Canon

Jeff Martin

C. Hubert H. Parry, near the end of his life. Today Parry is better known for patriotic music such as I was glad and Jerusalem (here performed at the 2018 Last Night of the Proms) than for his five symphonies.

If you attend a concert at a major symphony orchestra, you are likely to hear music from one of a select few composers, often from the eighteenth or nineteenth century. This rather limited collection of music makes up what we call the “canon”: a repertoire primarily written by Germans, some French, and some Italian composers. Common wisdom has it that the orchestral canon is made of the best music written by the best composers. It naturally follows that non-canonical music from the past must be lacking in some way, undeserving of the attention of our twenty-first century ears. What would happen, though, if we take the time to explore music that has been left by the wayside and put common wisdom to the test? In this article, we will consider the fate of a less-known nineteenth century composer, C. Hubert H. Parry. Parry’s five symphonies are excellent examples of the genre, yet they failed to enter the common orchestral repertoire for reasons beyond their musical worth: bias against English composers, nationalism, and the stifling effect of the emerging orchestral canon.

Before considering Parry’s symphonies and their undeserved unhappy fate, we should know more about the composer. Born in 1848 to an upper-class British family, Charles Hubert Hastings Parry studied at Eton and later Oxford. He exhibited significant skill as a young composer, writing a cantata for a Bachelor of Music examination at Oxford. Later he would study with William Sterndale Bennett. He tried to take lessons from Johannes Brahms but was unable; this was perhaps fortunate in light of Brahms’s poor treatment of his composition students [1]. Gradually, Parry became regarded as one of Britain’s most skilled composers, known especially for choral music performed at English festivals. His first symphony came when he was in his thirties; four more followed over the years with the fifth written around 1912. Parry was appointed a professor at the Royal College of Music, eventually heading the college and holding the prestigious chair of Heather Professor of Music at Oxford University, a chair that is still extant today. As an academic, he helped to establish musicology in Britain; his writing output was prodigious and included a biography of J. S. Bach. Parry died in 1918 just before the end of the Great War. Today he is generally known for his hymn Jerusalem, his motet I was glad, often heard at coronations and royal weddings, and his church music.

Parry’s five symphonies are rarely performed today. I found just seven albums on Spotify that have a complete recording of at least one Parry symphony; five of these seven were recorded by the London Philharmonic Orchestra, and four of those five were under the conductor Matthias Bamert. This is hardly surprising for noncanonical orchestral music. What is surprising is that Parry’s symphonies were apparently not widely performed even during his lifetime. I searched the performance databases of the BBC Proms, the New York Philharmonic, and the Vienna Philharmonic; these archives date from 1895, 1842, and 1842 respectively. The Vienna Philharmonic has never performed Parry. The New York Philharmonic has performed Parry three times, none of which were performances of symphonies. The BBC Proms has performed Parry’s fifth symphony twice – in 2010 and 2018. In its first twenty-three years while Parry was alive, none of his symphonies were performed at the Proms. The Proms database does say that Parry has been “featured in 149 events,” but seventy of these events were performances of Jerusalem. Parry was very famous in his time; at his funeral, the King, Queen, and Prince of Wales sent representatives [2], and in his obituary he was compared to Purcell [3]. Why, then, were his symphonies neglected, even during his lifetime?

We should begin our evaluation of Parry’s symphonies by addressing the possibility that they never entered the canon because they were unimaginative, second-rate work. Shortly after Parry’s death, R. O. Morris suggested that Parry “scarcely ever writes a good tune in the sense in which, for instance, Purcell, Schubert, and Brahms write good tunes.” He went on, however, to say that Parry’s music “has…a sustained power” and “is never sickly or mawkish.” He even felt that the opening of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger “might almost have been written by Parry.” [4] Unfortunately, claims like these are rather subjective – it would be difficult and likely impossible to establish a reliable method to clearly evaluate the quality of a composer’s work. We can, however, examine Parry’s orchestral music through a theoretical lens, using techniques that are often applied to Beethoven and Mozart, and draw conclusions about Parry’s creativity.

Nineteenth century symphonies almost invariably use sonata form in one or more movements. One major feature of the sonata is its regular, hierarchical structure. Composers subvert sonata tradition by introducing “deformations” into a sonata, such as unexpected chords in important moments, abbreviated repetition of themes, unusual keys, and missing cadences [5]. Sonata deformations allow composers to add interest and character to their music; for example, some of Haydn’s famous musical jokes depend on sonata deformations. We could consider the use of deformations to be an indication of musical creativity, a benchmark to establish some idea of the quality of Parry’s work. While Parry’s music is not known for musical jokes, we can find obvious sonata deformations in his second through fifth symphonies [6]. The second symphony is purportedly in F major; its first movement has a slow introduction in F minor. The first movement of the third symphony prepares its second theme with an unusual chord; the second theme fails to cadence in a satisfactory way, instead establishing its new key center with an extended passage focusing on its tonic chord. The fourth symphony ends with a pause, then a gesture more typical of an opening. The fifth symphony is titled “Symphonic Fantasia 1912” and has four movements, Stress, Love, Joy, and Now, that are to be played without pause. As we have noted already, it is difficult to “prove” the “greatness” of a composer’s music. We can conclude, though, that atypical strategies like these require creativity and imagination from a composer and demonstrate thoughtfulness in the compositional process. This should certainly hint that something is unusual about the absence of Parry symphonies on the BBC Proms programs of his time.

ABOVE: The opening of Parry’s second symphony. The symphony is in F major, but it opens in F minor.

LEFT: Link to a recording of the London Philharmonic, conducted by Matthias Bambert, performing Parry's Symphony No. 2 in F major "The Cambridge" (1883)

Since Parry never entered the orchestral canon, we should consider the canon in more depth. Before the eighteenth century, most performances in Europe featured contemporary music by living composers; limitations on transportation would have meant that often these composers were relatively local. Music of the past “seemed entirely inappropriate” to “[celebrating] current events,” a mindset that would be commonly recognized in popular music today. The idea of programming mostly or exclusively older music, especially within a specific time period, was born in the nineteenth century and by 1910, “new works…took up a problematic, often marginal place within musical life.” [7] Parry was born as the canon was taking life of its own, and by the time of Parry’s death it was very difficult for an emerging composer to obtain performances by prominent orchestras. It would seem at first that Parry had a chance to enter the canon since he was born so early, but unfortunately for him the canonization process began earlier in Britain, likely due to the massive popularity of G. F. Handel in the eighteenth century. Any British composer by the last half of the nineteenth century faced an uphill battle for lasting prominence, and Parry was unable to escape the external hurdles placed around him.

It was not only the orchestral canon that stood in Parry’s way. In nineteenth-century Britain, music was an art form to be imported from other countries rather than produced at home, and composers were considered “above the parson but below the valet.” [8] Parry’s music was at times performed at provincial festivals, but not in London, and if performed in London, “suffered the fate of most British music and [was] never repeated.” [9] This inhospitable climate is likely due at least in part to the eighteenth-century importation of Handel and J. C. Bach as prominent composers in London. Eventually, whatever the reason, England apparently decided that lasting renown should not belong to its native composers; rather they should serve as curiosities at festivals and publish sheet music for the growing middle class [10]. Parry was instrumental in overturning this narrow-minded worldview. Two of his composition students at the Royal College of Music, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Gustav Holst, profited from this new, friendlier environment cultivated by Parry, and have ensconced themselves in the orchestral repertoire, but their professor was not so fortunate.

Parry’s stylistic preferences were not particularly helpful for the longevity of his music, either. He was well known as a Germanophile; upon Brahms’s death, he wrote an orchestral obituary titled Elegy for Brahms. He loved Mendelssohn and was an early advocate for Wagner’s music in Britain. By the end of the nineteenth century, the symphony was emphatically a German genre, and any new compositions in this genre would automatically be compared to Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, and the other German masters of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Parry’s adventurism notwithstanding, he was at home in the German formal idiom, and it shows in his music. Unfortunately for Parry, his death in 1918 corresponded with the end of the Great War, a time when patriotism and nationalism was at a high ebb in Britain and France, and anything associated with Germany would automatically trigger thoughts of the brutal conflict playing out on the other side of the English Channel. It cannot be accidental that Vaughan Williams and Holst were successful with the public by writing music informed by the British folk repertoire.

Parry’s conservative compositional style could have landed the final blow to his legacy in the early twentieth century. The canon already had Brahms, Mendelssohn, and Beethoven; what was the point in adding an untested British composer to orchestral programs? Parry was certainly his own self as a composer, but most of the audience for orchestral concerts would not have had the patience to probe beneath the surface and discover the strength of his writing. Vaughan Williams and Holst may have been nationalistic, but they were also more modern than Parry; at last, the British public had composers doing something new and uniquely British, something in which they could find patriotic pride.

Common knowledge tells us that the orchestral canon is a collection of masterpieces; only the best music obtains eternal life. By now we should understand that something is wrong with this picture, however. Hubert Parry is not the only composer who has been slighted in his own time or after his death. But of all the composers of the past who have failed to make it into the canon, Parry is an excellent example of someone who should be there but is not. Even if you were to argue that Beethoven was a better, more visionary composer, that would hardly justify the exclusion of Parry’s music from the canon. Parry had the advantages of being a financially stable, upper-class white male English academic and composer during the late nineteenth century. His home country, Great Britain, controlled the largest empire in world history and was immensely wealthy due to the exploitation of its colonies in Africa and Southeast Asia. Yet Parry was passed by. In the present time, advocates for the performance of music by women, BIPOC, and other underrepresented composers could use Parry as an example of the arbitrariness of the orchestral canon and its failure to adequately serve the interests of even white male composers of the past. If the canon could not do justice to white men, it should be clear that it would never do justice to anyone less privileged.

Although Parry has been neglected, his music is still there, ready for us to discover again today. Anyone who has a Spotify subscription has access to an excellent 1992 recording by the London Philharmonic Orchestra of all five symphonies. Perhaps in the future some world-class orchestra will see fit to program Parry yet again and this time upload the performance to YouTube. At any rate, all five of his symphonies are well worth hearing: all we need to do is to throw out the traditional avoidance of Parry that has been our legacy and listen to some old music that to us is really new.

Notes

[1] - Jan Swafford, Johannes Brahms (New York: Vintage Books, 1999), 505-507.

[2] - “The Funeral of Sir Hubert Parry.” The Musical Times and Singing Class Circular 59:909 (November 1, 1918), 491.

[3] - Robin H. Legge, “Charles Hubert Hastings Parry. Born: February 27, 1848. Died: October 7, 1918.” The Musical Times and Singing Class Circular 59:909 (November 1, 1918), 489.

[4] - R. O. Morris, “Hubert Parry.” Music & Letters 1:2 (April 1920), 97

[5] - James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy, Elements of Sonata Theory: Norms, Types, and Deformations in the Late-Eighteenth-Century Sonata (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 11.

[6] - As of this writing, I did not have access to the score of Parry’s first symphony.

[7] - William Weber, “Consequences of Canon: The Institutionalization of Enmity between Contemporary and Classical Music.” Common Knowledge 9:1 (Winter 2003), 79, 81.

[8] - R. O. Morris, 96.

[9] - Legge, 490.

[10] - Sophia Dussek (1775-1831) is an example of an excellent British composer who sold music for a living.

Discography

This is a list of the albums I found on Spotify that contain complete performances of at least one Parry symphony. Overall, the first symphony appears on two albums, the second appears on three, the third appears once, the fourth appears twice, and the fifth appears three times. The orchestras that perform these symphonies are based in the UK, and all of these recordings (with the exception of the Boult, which is a remaster) are fewer than thirty years old.

Elgar, Edward, C. Hubert H. Parry, and Charles Villiers Stanford. British Composers: Elgar, Stanford, & Parry. Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, London Philharmonic Orchestra. Lawrance Collingwood, Richard Hickox, Sir Neville Marriner, Sir Adrian Boult. With Choir of King’s College, Cambridge, and Stephen Cleobury. Warner Classics 0954222, April 2011, 5 compact discs.

Parry, C. Hubert H. Parry: Complete Symphonies. London Philharmonic Orchestra. Matthias Bamert. Recorded 1990, 1991, 1992. Chandos Records CHAN 9120, October 1992, 3 compact discs.

Parry, C. Hubert H. Parry: Symphony No. 4/Three Movements from “Suite moderne”/ Proserpine. BBC National Orchestra of Wales. Rumon Gamba. With Ladies of BBC National Chorus of Wales. Recorded 2017. Chandos Records CHAN 10994, October 2018, compact disc.

Parry, C. Hubert H. Parry: Symphony No. 2/Symphonic Variations in E Minor. Royal Scottish National Orchestra. Andrew Penny. Naxos 8.553469, July 1996, compact disc.

Parry, C. Hubert H. Parry: Symphony No. 5/Elegy for Brahms/From Death to Life. London Philharmonic Orchestra. Matthias Bamert. Recorded 1990. Chandos Records CHAN 8955, March 1991, compact disc.

Parry, C. Hubert H. Parry: Symphony No. 1/Concertstück. London Philharmonic Orchestra. Matthias Bamert. Recorded 1991. Chandos Records CHAN 9062, May 1992, compact disc.

Parry, C. Hubert H. Parry: Symphony No. 2 (The Cambridge)/Symphonic Variations. London Philharmonic Orchestra. Matthias Bamert. Recorded 1990. Chandos Records CHAN 8961, July 1991, compact disc.

Bibliography

Concert Archive. Distributed by the Wiener Philharmoniker. Accessed February 2021: https://www.wienerphilharmoniker.at/en/konzert-archiv.

Hepokoski, James, and Warren Darcy. Elements of Sonata Theory: Norms, Types, and Deformations in the Late-Eighteenth-Century Sonata. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Legge, Robin H. “Charles Hubert Hastings Parry. Born: February 27, 1848. Died: October 7, 1918.” The Musical Times 59:909 (November 1, 1918), 489-491.

Leon Levy Digital Archives. Distributed by the New York Philharmonic. Accessed February 2021: https://archives.nyphil.org/#program.

Morris, R. O. “Hubert Parry.” Music & Letters 1:2 (April 1920), 94-103.

Proms Performance Archive. Distributed by the BBC. Accessed February 2021:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/3SsklRvCSPvfHr13wgz6HCJ/proms-performance-archive.

Swafford, Jan. Johannes Brahms: A Biography. New York: Vintage Books, 1999.

“The Funeral of Sir Hubert Parry.” The Musical Times and Singing Class Circular 59:909 (November 1, 1918), 491-492.

Weber, William. “Consequences of Canon: The Institutionalization of Enmity between Contemporary and Classical Music.” Common Knowledge 9:1 (Winter 2003), 78-99.

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