(Image: Edmond Choo)
By John Andrews
John Andrews has conducted many of the UK’s leading orchestras and ensembles, including the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the BBC Concert Orchestra, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, the BBC Singers, BBC Philharmonic, The Orchestra of Scottish Opera, The Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra and the Manchester Camerata. He has won the BBC Music Magazine Award three times: for Malcolm Arnold’s The Dancing Master (2021); J.F. Lampe’s The Dragon of Wantley (2023) and British Piano Concertos (2024). Alongside the BBC Music Magazine Awards, his recording of Smyth’s Der Wald won Presto Music’s ‘Rediscovery of the Year’ in 2023.
He has gained a formidable reputation for bringing neglected masterpieces back to public attention. Building on his early discoveries of the unloved corners of Italian bel canto and the English baroque, he has championed composers from Eccles, Arne and Lampe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to Arnold, Lutyens and Maconchy in the twentieth and twenty-first. He has made over twenty recordings and appears regularly with the BBC Concert Orchestra and at the English Music Festival. John has conducted over 40 operas for The Grange Festival, Opera Holland Park, English Touring Opera, Garsington Opera, Buxton International Festival and the Volkstheater Rostock.
He is Principal Guest Conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra and Artist-in-Association with the English Symphony Orchestra. 2024 sees the release of discs featuring Grace Williams, Francis Poulenc and C.V Stanford; a return to the English Music Festival with the ESO, West Green Opera with the BBC Concert Orchestra, and to Opera Holland Park for the revival of Il segreto di Susanna, as well as recordings of music by Granville Bantock, Arthur Sullivan, Errollyn Wallen and Avril Coleridge-Taylor.
Born in Nairobi and brought up in Manchester, John graduated from Cambridge University with a Ph.D in music and history. He now lives in London with his wife, children, three cats, two chincillas and a corn-snake.
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The reasons why equality of representation is important, why a diverse society should hear from a range of voices, and why we have a duty to the composers of the past to undo some of the neglect or discrimination they endured have been persuasively and clearly articulated by more eloquent voices than mine. I would like instead to take a moment to talk not about why opening up concert programming to a greater range of voices is important, but why it is so deeply rewarding. Through it, we enrich our understanding of our past and our heritage, enjoy the thrill of new discoveries and exciting surprises, and discover so much that is of outstanding quality.
Diversifying your Repertoire: Exciting, Surprising, Delightful
Having spent several decades unearthing music by composers who have been more or less forgotten, I would like to share some of the reasons why I find exploring the less-travelled paths of our collective musical heritage so rewarding. I should like to convince you that performing composers like Thomas Arne, William Boyce, and Frederick Cowen illuminates the richness of the past, deepens our appreciation of better-known composers, and leads us to wonderful musical discoveries. Broadening our perspective further, I would like to suggest that the music of those composers who succeeded in societies predisposed to dismiss them – Clara Wieck, Florence Price, William Grant Still, I could go on – offers an even more sophisticated picture of our collective past, and by virtue of the higher bars imposed on its creators by contemporaries, will more often than not exceed our expectations. Time and again, these forgotten and once-neglected composers turn out to reward our curiosity and effort in that magical moment when the house lights dim, the performers make their way to the stage, and the first notes begin their odyssey through the hall.
An Embarrassment of Riches
We have a wealth of music available like never before. In the digital age, archives around the world can be searched, scores shared, and clear performing editions created relatively quickly and inexpensively. There is almost too much new material to process. Previously unfamiliar names like George Bridgetower, Ruth Gipps, Emilie Mayer, Florence Price, Grazyna Bacewicz or Julius Eastman are appearing more and more often, and composers we thought we knew turn out to have had whole other sides to their musical personalities: Charles Villers Stanford the opera composer, Arthur Sullivan the tragedian. In the face of this disorientating range of new voices, it can be comforting to cleave to the notion that all of the greatest music was recognised as such and preserved at the time by contemporaries; that the combined judgment of seven, eight, or fifteen generations of audiences and performers has successfully filtered the wheat from the chaff; and that therefore our most familiar and beloved works must represent the totality of this northwestern corner of the world’s great music.
And yet you don’t have to question for one tiny second the towering achievements of the St. Matthew Passion, the late Beethoven quartets or Don Giovanni to see how flimsy this proposition is. That some truly transcendent works of art from the past have survived to us does not mean that it follows that all the great art of the past must necessarily have endured and flourished sufficiently to remain in concert life. Being music of outstanding quality is a desirable precondition of survival, but it has hardly ever been sufficient. The success or otherwise of a piece of music’s preservation from the society of its inception to future generations has always relied on as much good fortune as inherent quality. Before the nineteenth century, the overwhelming majority of art music was written for a single occasion or season. The reason that we have forty-odd operas from Handel is that he wrote a new one or two every year. If he revived a popular show, it would be with new arias to keep it fresh and current; the audience demanded novelty, not perfection. Gaetano Donizetti once accepted a commission for twelve operas in four seasons. It is hard to imagine the sheer volume of new works that poured through London, Paris, Vienna, Venice and Naples in that period. None of these composers assumed their works were destined for immortality: indeed, Gioachino Rossini was horrified later in life to see his early works in print, subject to the critical scrutiny that allows.
Add to this, whole genres disappeared from public view for generations: sometimes when particular instruments fell out of use (lute songs, viol consorts, harpsichord suites); or alternatively when a particular performance practice was lost (the serious operas of Rossini and Vincenzo Bellini never really survived the passing of that generation of singers). In the theatre, fine satirical comedies and political tragedies disappeared from the stage when contemporary references became distant memories. John Frederick Lampe’s The Dragon of Wantley outsold Handel’s operas in the 1730s London ten times over, but the jokes aged quickly. Of the nearly one hundred operettas of Jacques Offenbach, only a handful have survived the passing into history of his satirical targets. Finally, a whole generation can dramatically fall from fashion as so many Edwardian Romantics (Hubert Parry, Alexander Mackenzie, Stanford, Cowen, arguably Ethel Smyth) did after the emotional catastrophe of the First World War. For generations, the natural process was that music died with the composer as the social occasions it was created for evolved, and audiences sought the next musical fashion.
What distinguishes so many of the composers we’re now familiar with from their forgotten contemporaries was the appearance of a champion. This might be in the generation following them, but more important would be an advocate in the generation after that. Sebastian Bach had his sons, Handel had his publisher John Walsh, the young George III, and a century later the editor Chrysander to elevate his works with a critical edition. I am the last person in the world to question the qualities of either composer, but their stratospheric elevation over Hasse, Porpora, Stradella, and Zelenka owes at least something to the history of music after their deaths. It is not purely a measure of their musical quality. Consider also the case of Gustav Mahler: a composer who can now reliably fill the largest concert halls, but whose posthumous reputation was guarded by two of his pupils, Bruno Walter and Otto Klemperer, and still needed the advocacy of Leonard Bernstein a generation further on to make it a global force. More recently still Leos Janáček, with at least five operas a staple of the operatic repertoire, largely owes his reputation – in the English-speaking world at least – to Charles Mackerras. Richard Wagner (unsurprisingly) took personal control of this process by instituting a Festival to preserve his music. The very different Benjamin Britten achieved something similar in the creation of Snape Maltings. In contrast to the satirists mentioned above, how much do Gilbert and Sullivan owe to the D’Oyly Carte company keeping their works in repertory into the twentieth century, in particular shepherding them across the wartime chasm into which so many contemporaries disappeared? That these composers were brilliant artists is not in dispute, but to suggest that they were the only outstanding voices of their respective generations is to be willfully blind to the vicissitudes of history. And if we accept that these were the lucky ones, how much more high-quality music is out there that didn’t enjoy the beneficence of Fortuna?
The Survival of the Fittest?
In the Horniman Museum in South London, you can see, arrayed in huge glass display cabinets, the richness and diversity of wind instruments developed through the nineteenth century, narrowing to a small handful of each type of clarinet, oboe, trumpet and tuba in the twentieth, rationalising even further in the twenty-first, with the near disappearance of French bassoons and Viennese oboes, down to the standardised models we know today. This Darwinian process whereby a very slight advantage in one generation can lead to one model all but eclipsing near-identical rivals in the next mirrors a similar process with composers. Once somebody establishes a foothold in the public’s mind, they become more reliable at the box office and so are played more, and so become more reliable with audiences, further entrenching themselves in the general imagination in a self-sustaining cycle of admiration and acquaintance. The corollary of this is that second-most-popular in one generation (for instance Cherubini, Spontini, Spohr – all deeply admired by contemporaries) can all but disappear in the next.
Furthermore, if a composer also exerts a particularly powerful influence on the next generation, they can seem familiar even to new audiences. I recently performed Felix and Fanny (Hensel-)Mendelssohn together in concert. Although the choir were new to both pieces, many commented on how much more familiar the Felix felt. For a few it was through knowing his other works, but others suggested that they felt connected to his musical language through other composers they knew: for some Arthur Sullivan, for others it was the Anglican and Salvationist hymnody of their youth. While Fanny’s reputation was harshly curtailed by her family, the success of Felix’s career left his music influence imprinted on two generations of English composers. Her style, arguably more experimental and individual anyway, will always feel less familiar than his, because the contingencies of history allowed his music to percolate widely into the musical language of a continent in a way hers did not.
This question of how valuable an asset familiarity is leads to the sordid question of marketing. Even as more and more repertoire from the past becomes available to us either in the concert hall or the range of audio platforms it is becoming harder to avoid the suspicion that – for larger venues at least – familiar names have become valuable to the point where the more minor works of major composers with bankable names will sell more easily than truly great works by lesser-known composers. As artists, we must be careful that in disorientating audiences with this dazzling influx of new voices, we don’t actually make them want to cling more strongly to the familiar out of sheer vertigo. After all, does anybody seriously think Mozart’s Masses (apart from the two famous incomplete ones) are better than Michael Haydn’s? Are all of Handel’s operas better than any of Hasse’s? Would you really rather hear Beethoven’s Battle Symphony over Mayer’s Symphony F minor? It is incumbent on conductors and programmers to locate unfamiliar works sensitively, so that in opening up the richness of the past we avoid privileging the most workaday pieces of famous names over the most inspired output of their contemporaries. To that end I have another suggestion which finally fulfils the promise implicit in the title of this essay, which is that if you are dizzied by this wealth of music, why not start your explorations with those composers who succeeded against the hardest odds?
Prosperity is a great teacher; adversity a greater
So far, we have considered the barriers to a long posterity faced by even the most successful composers (I’ve mentioned Lampe above, but we could also consider Salieri, Pacini, Cimarosa, Paisellio, and many more). If musicians who enjoyed if not wealth, then certainly the status and all the benefits of the patronage and commercial structures of early modern Europe could not secure the widespread survival of their posthumous reputations, how much higher was that bar for women and composers from minority ethnic backgrounds? For their music even to have survived even in manuscript, let alone find the backing of a publisher, it needed to meet a standard far above most of their contemporaries. If you are looking for gold in the mines of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it surely makes sense to make a spacious amount of room for those who succeeded against the odds. And succeed so many of them did. Spectacularly.
To take a random handful from a rich seam of examples, Vicente Lusitano published not only a volume of motets in Rome in 1551 (Liber primus epigramatum), but followed it up with a work of musical theory in 1553. Marianna Martines was an esteemed colleague of every composer of note in late eighteenth-century Vienna. Her blue blood forbade a court position, but she was admitted to the Academia Filarmonia di Bologna and given a huge legacy by Pietro Metastasio to continue composing. Although barred by their sex from a conservatoire education, Emilie Mayer received Prussia’s Gold Medal of Art and died co-chair of the Berlin Opera Academy; Louise Farrenc, after studies with Hummel, held the professorship of piano at the Paris Conservatoire for thirty years, and Augusta Holmés was commissioned to write the Ode triomphale for the 1889 anniversary of the French Revolution. Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, despite being both mixed-race and illegitimate, was received by Teddy Roosevelt at the White House. After his death, Coleridge-Taylor’s widow was granted a Royal Pension, and his cantata Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast was as popular as Messiah and Elijah in England until the mid-twentieth century, to the point that the Performing Rights Society was founded to redress the injustice of his receiving no fees, having sold it to his publishers outright.
The first half of the twentieth century in Britain was replete with well-respected and hugely successful women composers who fell rapidly into our collective forgetfulness at its end. Leah Broad has recently illuminated the lives and careers of Ethel Smyth, Rebecca Clarke, Dorothy Howell and Doreen Carwithen, stupendous talents all. In addition, the likes of Grace Williams, Elizabeth Maconchy, Imogen Holst, and Elisabeth Lutyens were all sufficiently well-respected to receive a generous number of both Proms and radio commissions from the BBC – a clear and public demonstration of their colleagues’ and the music industry’s esteem. None of these eminent composers requires special pleading, they were the cream of their generation. Though it would be hard to prove, I would suggest that they had the ill-fortune to be writing just as the emergence of the recording industry was inviting us to begin an ever-deeper relationship with the past.
By the 1940s, the infrastructure of music dissemination had changed beyond recognition from Mozart and Martines’ Vienna. The possibility of achieving a truly global reputation was emerging, but conditional on dissemination first through published scores and then records. Unfortunately, both publishers and record companies were increasingly able to rely on a large set of dependable works of the past. It may have become easier to have a single performance commissioned, it was but harder for it to have a truly wide reach. Broad has catalogued over a thousand works by major British women composers alone, the majority never having been published. How much larger this figure is beyond the UK can only be guessed at. Even the most cynical assessment of how much of this is truly great would have to admit there must be plenty that’s rather good and a fair few that are surely rather more than that.
The Best of all Possible Reasons
By opening up to these composers’ voices, we add richness and detail to our understanding of the music of the past. Rather than a line drawing of the last four hundred years we can reveal a variegated landscape of countless swirls and colours. We can therefore also appreciate the composers we already know from an entirely new perspective if we also enjoy the work of their contemporaries. I would argue (and have elsewhere) that we wouldn’t have much of Handel’s English output in the form we do without Arne and Lampe snapping at his heels. Hearing them in him, and him in them is a much more interesting story.
Furthermore, we can more deeply appreciate those decades in music which tend to be dismissed in conventional music histories. Carl Dahlhaus famously described 1824-1876 as ‘dead time’ for the symphony between Beethoven and Johannes Brahms (the generation between Handel and Mozart is equally dismissed). This backwards reading of history, which is only interested in works insofar as they lead to others, ignores not only Felix Mendelssohn and Robert Schumann, but also Mayer and Farrenc: wonderful music that was commercially and critically successful and is not dead in the slightest. In addition, revealing this diversity of voices can only enrich our love of familiar works. We appreciate the classics in a more three-dimensional way if we hear a little more from the composers who preceded and followed them. It can also lead us to rethink nonsensical ideas such as the lack of musical culture in Britain between Purcell and Britten, bringing back to life glorious chapters of musical history and national heritage. In building up a properly detailed picture of the musical past we also bring back into focus those women and composers of colour who were often central to cultural life and whose voices just need hearing to be appreciated as part of our shared musical heritage.
Of course, programming long-forgotten works carries risks, and can’t possibly be foolproof. When the applause in the hall dies, some of these works will have turned out to be merely good, not great. And yet I would contend that even then it has enormous benefits. For a start, as I argued above, we will now enjoy and appreciate the works of their contemporaries with a more sophisticated perspective. Moreover, if we can cultivate a little of our predecessors’ relaxation towards whether an evening’s music will be life-changing or merely a damn-good hour’s entertainment, we can give living composers half a chance of developing by not expecting their every work to measure up to the mature works of their predecessors. Would we really listen to La finta giardiniera if its composer hadn’t had the opportunities to learn from its shortcomings when writing Le Nozze di Figaro? By cultivating a culture of openness that accepts the occasional miss, audiences are much more likely to be in a relaxed enough frame of mind to enjoy the unexpected hits.
And in the process of doing that, we can also rediscover that delight in novelty and surprise that our eighteenth and nineteenth-century forebears enjoyed. Surprise is inherently delightful, but it is awfully hard to deliver in the concert hall today, assuming one stays awake. My eldest child often laments that they can never again experience *for the first time* that almost religious moment in Jurassic Park where we first see the dinosaurs. Mozart’s letters to his father report with unbridled glee his deliberate wrongfooting of Paris audiences at the premier of his Symphony No. 31, leading to riotous applause when the tutti subject finally appeared. I once had the joy of performing Beethoven 9 to a largely student audience who had never heard it and who whooped and cheered repeatedly during the last movement thinking it was over, only to cheer again with renewed joy when the music resumed. Even in a deeply serious work, Beethoven was mischievously toying with his audience’s expectations. Within our settled core repertoire, such opportunities for surprise are limited to new listeners, but when you travel even just a little way into the musical woods, the possibility lurks behind every tree.
Finally then, when we travel down those paths less travelled there is real buried treasure. Those works that delighted and enthralled audiences in the past are there, and the reasons for their disappearance and neglect range from the biases and inequalities of the socio-political structures around them through to sheer bad luck and poor judgment on the part of their creators. But we now have enough evidence to know that enough of this music is truly first-rate that it would be an act of cultural masochism to deny ourselves the pleasure of enjoying it. And where those musicians battled prejudice, both personal and systemic, and nevertheless emerged through it to win the plaudits of their contemporaries, we can be pretty sure that their voices will be worth listening to. And as much as it’s good to have new recognisable faces, it is also good to help audiences just be relaxed about the ones they don’t know, because the delight on the faces of musicians when a beautiful phrase begins to unfurl itself from the pen of an unknown composer or new work, and you know that an audience are soon going to feel the same, is a truly magical one.