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Introduction - continued
Following Cowen’s death, obituaries appeared in The Times, the Musical Times and elsewhere. These all paint the picture of a man that was out of touch with the advances in music, worthy of comment for the contribution that he had made in the past, but of whom the Muses had long since neglected to call upon. Indeed, had it not been for the enduring fame of some of his ballads, he may not have even been worthy of such a mention. Havergal Brian wrote shortly afterwards:
Shall we ever know why a musician is extolled in one age execrated in the next? (Well, neglected if not execrated, which is a worse fate!) We have had recently an instance in the case of Frederic Cowen, whose ballads alone for some years reminded us that a musician of that name ever existed…But where…was the musician whom we in our own youth had known as the composer of Thorgrim, the Scandinavian Symphony, and the orchestral suite known as The Language of Flowers? The portraits published recently show him very much as I knew him first, forty years ago, when conductor of the Hallé Orchestra – smartly dressed, alert and keen-eyed…he was a fine figure, perhaps the biggest in the company after Elgar; in addition, he was the first English orchestral conductor of any importance, holding appointments simultaneously in London, Manchester, Liverpool, Bradford, Crystal Palace, Cardiff and the Scottish Orchestra. What were the gifts that enabled him to sway for so long the musical mind of England? Nobody stops to enquire: but they put in the headlines – Death of the Composer of Three Hundred Ballads! Did that sapient newspaper suspect that it was traducing a great English composer, even though it were out of his own records? But there, Englishmen always have been bad supporters of English music, cheering the wrong men at the right time or the right men at the wrong time.
Cowen, if not the foremost, was one of the most distinguished of that group of British composers, which included Sir Charles Hubert Parry, Sir Charles Villiers Stanford, Sir Arthur Sullivan, and Sir Alexander Mackenzie, who made a bold effort to bring about a renascence of English music at the end of the nineteenth century. Indeed, Mackenzie referred to Cowen in 1927 as ‘that zealous worker in our cause’. Arthur Goring Thomas is also worthy of mention along with the above-named men, but Mackenzie does not think him praiseworthy enough to be included in such a list, perhaps because Goring Thomas showed a markedly foreign influence in his music, having studied with Durand in Paris and later with Bruch (Cecil Forsyth calls Thomas a ‘denationalized Englishman’ in his book Music and Nationalism). Several scholars have attempted to date this renascence to the first performance of Parry’s Scenes from ‘Prometheus Unbound’ in 1880 at Gloucester, but a subconscious movement had been developing for some years. Of the afore-mentioned composers, Cowen endured a more striking decline in his reputation in the latter portion of his career than of any of his contemporaries. Although the likes of Cowen, Parry, Stanford, Mackenzie and Sullivan are overshadowed by Gustav Holst, Edward Elgar and Ralph Vaughan Williams as composers, they collectively carried the torch of British music into the twentieth century, and, in so doing, diminished the stifling influence of foreign musicians. Arthur Hervey once drolly remarked that Britain’s five leading composers might have fared better if they were named ‘Sullivanski, Cowenkoi, Mackensikoff, Stanfordtscheff and Parrykine’. Cowen had not been at the centre of the musical education of the nation (although he did teach at the National Training School for a few years; sought the Principalship of Royal Academy of Music in 1887; and taught at the Guildhall School of Music in his retirement), unlike Parry, Stanford and Mackenzie, and his compositions have stood the test of time even less well than the others, but as a conductor he did much to further the cause of home-grown music and musicians, evidenced by his performing of some ninety British pieces during his tenure of office at the London Philharmonic alone. Indeed, Michael Kennedy suggests that Cowen, directly and indirectly, did much to further Elgar’s cause as a composer, both through his conducting and through contacts with publishers. Saleski said of Cowen that he had ‘an English restraint of manner, yet much enthusiasm and a marked gift of fluency of speech, directly and simply expressed’. A deep thinker, Cowen stated his ideas frankly. His music is quite individual, of no particular school, cast, moulded and developed from a lifetime of musical, literary and personal experiences. Cowen himself says: ‘I belong to no school, I admire them all for the good that is in them. If I were asked, perhaps, who comes first with me, I should say Mozart’. If his music’s early roots are in the German school, this would not be utterly surprising, having spent nearly two years in Leipzig and Berlin. So Mendelssohn and Schumann may have formed the foundation of his early music. Yet, as Willeby noted in Cowen’s youthful first symphony, a unique voice was already beginning to emerge. Cowen was a passionate admirer of Wagner, and a paid-up member of the Wagner Society. Indeed, he utilised Wagner’s technique of leitmotif in several of his compositions, but often with only limited success. Wagner professed that in his Tannhäuser: ‘declamation is song and my song is declamation’; Cowen may have sought this ideal in his later operas and choral works, but he never came close to achieving it. However, the Wagnerian influence ends there, as there is little in Cowen’s melodic or harmonic language, or in his use of the orchestra that has the least resemblance to Wagner. Ernest Walker suggests that Cowen’s style is a mixture of Sterndale Bennett and Sullivan; the former ‘can be traced in the graceful ease of the workmanship at its best and in the fondness for what may perhaps be called drawing-room pictorialism’; and the latter ‘in the talent for cleverly dainty and effective orchestration’.
However, Cowen was most successful in lighter orchestral pieces when treating fantastic or fairy subjects, and in sentiment lightly expressed, where his gifts for graceful melody and colourful orchestration are shown to best advantage (Karl Nef described Cowen’s music simply as ‘frankly pretty’). Indeed, one senses an almost child-like obsession with fairies, fairy stories and all things fanciful throughout his output. As early as 1869 we find a piano piece entitled Fairy Flowers, and in 1873 comes the Flower Fairies Suite. In 1891 comes The Fairies’ Spring, a cantata for female voices, and this is followed two years later by a song Fairyland, and a further two years elapse before A Fairy Song. In 1896 his orchestral suite de ballet In Fairyland explores the fairy world again, returning to it twice more in 1927 in his songs for children The Dream Fairy and When You Go To Fairyland. These only represent the works in which the word ‘fairy’ or its variants appear; The Rose Maiden and Sleeping Beauty both have their share of fairymania, and there are many other works that allude to similar subject matter. However, Cowen was not some crank living out his own childhood fantasy world through his music, but a man responding to a trend in the literary and artistic world, which Diane Purkiss explains thus:
In Victorian England…Fairies, elves, gnomes and small winged things of every kind multiply into swarms and infest writing and art and the minds of men and women…Many Victorians…wanted somehow to have the countryside and also the benefits of the Industrial Revolution – to have fairies, but not Queen Mab. In an age of progress, one way to square this circle was to see ideal, unspoilt innocence as a phase. The Victorians took up the Romantic notion of the child as perfect innocent, and linked that innocent child with fairies.
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