As the glorious Llangollen Canal meanders through the borders of Cheshire, Shropshire and North Wales it touches the hidden gem of Whitchurch. Up the narrow St.Mary’s Street I was drawn inside the the Old Town Hall Vaults where the enchanting English Folk Group ‘Fizzgigs’ was in full swing.
It was as though the music pervading the fabric of this ancient panelled pub was harking back in time. Then I discovered that it was here that the composer Sir Edward German was born in 1862. How appropriate that his most famous work was to be ‘Merrie England’.
His grandfather was a brewer. His father, John Jones, ran the pub and was also the organist at the local Congregational chapel. He taught his son piano and organ from the age of five, and within a year he had formed a boys’ concert band to perform locally. He also taught himself the violin and was soon composing and arranging music. He formed a quintet in his teens with himself on the violin, his sister and three family friends. He also led the town orchestra and sang comic songs in local village halls.
At 18, his studies with local choral director Walter Cecil Hay were to be his stepping stone to the Royal Academy of Music and a more formal approach to composition under Ebenezer Prout. Edward German was a skilled violinist and in 1884 the Academy appointed him as sub-professor of the violin.
He was actually born German Edward Jones, and being of Welsh descent his first name was an anglicised form of ‘Garmon’ – although his parents called him Jim. He changed his name to Edward German to avoid confusion with another student at the Royal Academy of Music named Edward Jones.
Following a spell of teaching at Wimbledon School, he was appointed music director of the London’s Globe Theatre in 1888. Here, his extensive output of incidental music led to a production of Henry Irving’s version of Henry VIII at London’s Lyceum Theatre where he incorporated elements of old English dance. The sheet music of this sold over 30,000 copies. German was now in great demand to write music for plays.
In addition, his output of more serious music included symphonies, orchestral suites, symphonic poems , songs, piano music, and other concert music, of which his Welsh Rhapsody (1904) became well known. He received many commissions from British music festivals, although a young critic named George Bernard Shaw wrote harshly that his symphonies were ‘limited by the composer’s indulgence in theatricality and out of place in symphonic writing.’
See Ray Siese’s excellent article in the BMS Journal Volume 34 (2022): The Orchestral Music of Sir Edward German.
In the field of English comic opera, German was in many ways regarded as the successor to Arthur Sullivan following his completion of The Emerald Isle after Sullivan’s death in 1900 – although a consequence of this was that a violin concerto commission for the Leeds Festival remained incomplete! Nevertheless, this led to German’s own Merrie England in 1902 and Tom Jones in 1907.
In 1911 German became the first composer to write music for a British film – albeit only 16 bars long – when, with a 50 guinea commission, he wrote music for the coronation scene in Henry VIII. He was also one of the first composers to conduct his own music for recordings and radio broadcasts. German was knighted for his services to music in 1928 and the ensuing celebratory dinner was attended by the likes of Sir Edward Elgar, Sir Alexander Mackenzie, and Lord Berners.
Towards the end of his life, German was clearly disappointed to witness a decline in the popularity of his orchestral works. A poignant note found after his death reads: ‘I die a disappointed man because my serious orchestral works have not been recognised’. He died in London in 1936 and his ashes are interred in the cemetery in Whitchurch.
His light operas still seem to retain a special place today and Merrie England has probably been performed more often than any other 20th century British opera or operetta. As for his incidental music and orchestral works there are now several excellent recent recordings. Even establishment figures such as Elgar and Barbirolli remarked that his work was of the ‘highest quality’. In 2006 the first Edward German Festival was held in Whitchurch with cellist Julian Lloyd Webber as its patron and a concert version of Merrie England.
In his hometown there is now an enjoyable and interesting Edward German walking trail taking in all the locations with which he was associated in his younger years. The excellent Heritage Centre also contains some fascinating exhibits, including Edward German’s court dress, a video and audio recordings of his music and various other memorabilia,
But of course the quintessential Englishness of his music (as Elgar described it) reflecting a romanticised Shakespearian or semi-mythical English merry-making past still lives on in the Old Town Vaults to this very day – as I myself witnessed…
Written by Nicholas Keyworth