BMS readers may remember my feature on the early years of Sir William Sterndale Bennett (1816–1875) in Sheffield, published in September 2022. Well, he has popped up again.!
This time I spotted him in the form of an English Heritage blue plaque on a rather grand Victorian terrace in Queensborough Terrace, Bayswater, now incorporated into the Byron Hotel.
Number 38 was Bennett’s home from autumn 1865 until 1870, and briefly again from 1872–73. By the time he moved here, the Sheffield prodigy had become one of the most powerful figures in English musical life – but also a complicated one. Was Bennett one of the men who rescued English music from mediocrity? Or did his devotion to an increasingly conservative musical tradition actually help to hold it back?
Bennett had entered the newly established Royal Academy of Music in March 1826, just before his tenth birthday. His precocious ability as both pianist and composer quickly attracted attention and in 1833 Felix Mendelssohn heard him perform his First Piano Concerto at the Academy.
Mendelssohn was sufficiently impressed to invite the young Yorkshireman to Germany, ‘not as my pupil but as my friend’. Bennett subsequently spent extended periods in Leipzig, where he also became close to Robert Schumann and established a reputation which few English composers of the period could match.
Germany transformed him, but unfortunately it also made England seem rather disappointing. Writing to his Leipzig publisher Friedrich Kistner in 1840 he complained:
“You know what a dreadful place England is for music; and in London I have nobody who I can talk to about such things, all the people are mad with Thalberg and Strauss, and I have not heard a single Symphony or Overture in one concert since last June. I sincerely hope that Prince Albert … will do something to improve our taste.”
It is an illuminating remark. It clearly indicates that Bennett genuinely wanted to improve musical standards in England, and he was about to prove that he could. As a director of the Philharmonic Society from 1841 he used his connections to attract figures including Mendelssohn and Spohr to London, helping both the artistic reputation and the finances of the organisation.
But Bennett was not always an easy colleague. The arrival of Michael Costa as conductor of the Philharmonic Society in 1846 was particularly unwelcome. Costa’s world was closely associated with Italian opera while Bennett’s musical loyalties lay elsewhere. He complained to Mendelssohn:
“The Philharmonic Directors have engaged Costa … with which I am not very well pleased, but I could not persuade them to the contrary, and am tired of quarrelling with them. They are a worse set this year than we have ever had.”
“Tired of quarrelling” is an interesting phrase – but there was more to come. Two years later matters came spectacularly to a head during a rehearsal of Bennett’s overture Parisina. Bennett thought Costa was taking the music too slowly and sent a message instructing him to go: ‘Fast, fast, fast!’
Costa was not amused and refused to conduct the piece. What should have been a disagreement over tempo developed into a feud which was to last for years with neither man seemingly able to back down.
The rupture was to contribute to Bennett resigning from the Philharmonic Society.
However, the story had another twist when Costa himself departed in 1854. Following an unhappy season under Richard Wagner, Bennett succeeded him as conductor in 1856 and was to remain for the next decade.
There were other battles to come. Bennett resigned from the Royal Academy of Music in 1858 after another disagreement involving Costa. This time it was due to an intervention by the Academy’s president, the Earl of Westmorland.
Yet Bennett invariably returned, and this is where the house in Queensborough Terrace enters the story. Widowed since 1862, Bennett moved into number 38 in the autumn of 1865. A year later he returned to the Royal Academy of Music, this time as Principal.
He could hardly have chosen a more difficult moment. The Academy was in serious financial trouble, student numbers were falling and in 1868 the government withdrew its £500 annual grant, with Disraeli declaring its results unsatisfactory. By the end of the year only 66 students remained. Bennett fought back, helping to restore the Academy’s financial credibility and secure the reinstatement of government support. His role in ensuring its survival was crucial.
Meanwhile in Queensborough Terrace, Bennett was composing again. His earlier creative career had faltered badly as he became overwhelmed by teaching, conducting and administration, accompanied perhaps by a crisis of confidence of his own.
Yet his years in Bayswater brought something of a late creative revival. The Woman of Samaria, first performed at the Birmingham Festival in 1867, was well received, while The Maid of Orleans piano sonata followed in 1873.
So perhaps this blue plaque commemorates more than simply an address. It marks a period in which Bennett was simultaneously administrator, educational reformer and, once again, a composer, even if by now his music was considered to be rather old-fashioned.
Belated honours followed. Oxford awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1870 and Queen Victoria knighted him in 1871 – two years after his old adversary Michael Costa.
But the question still remains: For a man so determined to improve the state of English music, was Bennett perhaps too set in his ways regarding what he considered to be ‘good music’? His musical ideals had been formed by Mozart, Bach, Mendelssohn and the German classical tradition. These were hardly poor models, and his advocacy of Bach alone was enormously important: he founded the Bach Society and conducted the first English performance of the St Matthew Passion in 1854.
Yet the musical world was moving. Berlioz, Wagner, Verdi, Liszt and others were pulling nineteenth-century music in directions which Bennett found difficult and he was gradually becoming a defender of established musical taste.
Yet it would be unfair to overlook a man who fought for better musical education, rescued an endangered Royal Academy, championed Bach, taught a remarkable generation of younger musicians and maintained the idea that an English musician could command serious international respect.
Bennett’s legacy is therefore double-edged: he was progressive in education but conservative in taste; internationally respected yet frustrated by English musical life; a champion of English musical standards even though his own artistic compass pointed towards Germany.
Perhaps the most intriguing paradox is this: the man who helped to save English musical education may also have helped to keep English musical taste looking backwards.
Either way, the Sheffield orphan had travelled a remarkable distance. And there he still is, gazing metaphorically down from a blue plaque in Bayswater, reminding us that the people who shape musical history are rarely quite as straightforward as the reputations they leave behind.
Written by Nicholas Keyworth