Operas

As an opera composer, Cowen never achieved any real long-term success. The first nights were often highly praised, but the cold light of day found his works wanting in one respect or another, although often it was his librettist that was more at fault, or simply a bit of ill-luck. Cowen does seem to have been fated with poor libretti. Indeed, as Nigel Burton observes:

An inherent theatrical instinct is, of course, a sine qua non for all would-be opera composers, and miracles can be accomplished in this respect providing the libretto contains at least one overriding or powerful idea, no matter now commonplace. Far too many British librettists of the period failed because, in trying to found a national school where none had previously existed, they sought refuge in complexity and ignored the rudimentary facts of operatic life.

Cowen’s operas nearly all failed because their libretti lacked that ‘overriding or powerful idea’. However, Cowen must take some of the blame: after Pauline, which harkened back to the British operas of Wallace and Balfe, Cowen was unable to decide whether to carry on in a similar vein or attempt to assimilate Wagnerisms into his style. This conflict of ideology in his approach was to lead to unsatisfactory compromises, and was another significant reason for his later operas’ failures. Recalling the fact that he believed that he arrived in England on the very day that the Covent Garden Theatre burnt down, Cowen writes:
Had I been superstitiously inclined, I should have taken this as a warning never to write operas, but unfortunately I did not think of it until after I had made four failures in this direction.

Choral Works

Cowen’s choral works, written for the numerous musical festivals around Victorian and Edwardian Britain, responded to the insatiable appetite of the public of his time, and were very popular with amateur societies. Cowen’s Musical Times obituary observed that his choral works ‘were born of fashion and the invitation of festival committee. They stand not for the artist but for the English musical worthy and his duty to society’. Charles Reid adds: ‘English choralism is to be congratulated on having freed itself from such conventions and obligations in our own day’. This is not to dismiss them out of hand, as within their many pages can be found much fine music worthy of a resurrection from a hundred or so years of sleep. Indeed, his Ruth, The Transfiguration, Ode to the Passions, Sleeping Beauty, John Gilpin, and The Veil, all compare well with any contemporaneous works in circulation at the time. I rather share W. H. Hadow assessment: ‘At his best he [Cowen] rises to real daintiness of fancy, at his worst he sinks to triviality and commonplace’, a view also shared by Nigel Burton and Percy Young, the latter’s evaluation: ‘Cowen…was at his best with exotic or fantastic ideas, but his skill in orchestration was unmatched by any substantial sense of musical logic’. However, even if one ignores some of the weaknesses in the music, the libretti, with their flowery Victorian metaphors, would be barely palatable to modern tastes.

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