The Music of Johannes Brahms in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century England and an Assessment of His Reception and Influence on the Chamber and Orchestral Works of Charles Hubert Hastings Parry and Charles Villiers Stanford

Abstract

The music of Johannes Brahms currently enjoys popularity comparable with that of Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven throughout England. However, unlike composers such as Handel and Mendelssohn who preceded him, Brahms never actually set foot on English soil, thereby making the introduction and eventual acceptance of his music in England long and difficult. This process was eventually engineered principally through the determination and perseverance of several prominent performers, conductors and critics, such as Clara Schumann and August Manns, during the latter half of the nineteenth century.

Aside from a small number of relatively short articles and unpublished lectures, the reception and subsequent influence of the music of Brahms in England, and in particular on the composers Charles Hubert Hastings Parry and Charles Villiers Stanford, has not been the subject of any major or substantial study, yet is still a popular notion in many texts on nineteenth century British music. This thesis attempts to assemble and evaluate all the available information on the subject, from the principal people responsible for introducing the music of Brahms to England, to an assessment of the appearance of his supposed reception and influence in England in historical and biographical texts. Finally, a much needed analytical evaluation of key chamber and orchestral compositions across Parry and Stanford’s relative outputs concludes the thesis, attempting to bring clarity to the vexed, outdated, but still commonly accepted notion that their works were merely an inferior assimilation of those of Brahms.