BOOK REVIEW: Bernard Benoliel.PARRY BEFOREJERUSALEM: STUDIES OF HIS LIFE AND MUSIC WITH EXCERPTS FROM HIS PUBLISHED WRITINGS.Aldershot and Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1997.

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Reviewed by: Parry Before Jerusalem: Studies of His Life and Music with Excerpts from His Published Writings Nigel Burton (bio) Parry Before Jerusalem: Studies of His Life and Music with Excerpts from His Published Writings, by Bernard Benoliel; pp. x + 233. Aldershot and Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1997, £49.95, $84.95. E. J. Dent once wrote of Sir Hubert Parry: “He differs from all other historians of music in that he approached musical history as a composer” (qtd. 177). Herein precisely lies the strength of the present volume: Bernard Benoliel has consistently adopted the composer’s standpoint in assessing Parry’s musical achievements. Thus one ignores the tiny flaws (the missed full stops, quotes without footnotes, and musical examples without tempo markings) as one is swept along in the maelstrom of the author’s passionate enthusiasm for his eponymous hero, and buoyed up by his shrewd and perceptive critical judgements. Parry was an artistic polymath, and to estimate his stature in the history of British music is no easy task. Benoliel makes the point that he was a Victorian through and through, despite his distrust of the upper classes (of which he was a member), his radical politics, and his “avid agnosticism” (4). As a man, he really was the near-saint that his pupils at the Royal College of Music made him out to be; yet “for all [his] many-faceted gifts—his warmth, generosity, [and] exalted nobility of feeling—he lacked the heart of darkness necessary to create tragic art” (68). Therein lies the root of the problem, for Benoliel is right in saying that if Parry now has any claim to immortality, it is on account of his compositions. Here, though, the author is in something of a cleft stick: he objectively and unsparingly identifies the causes of Parry’s limited powers, but subjectively cannot always accept them. Lavish praise is sometimes bestowed on music which is, frankly, ordinary; this is particularly true of the opening theme of the Piano Quartet in A flat (1879): the author calls it “a great tune” (43), adding that, with it “we hear for the first time since Purcell an authentic English voice” (41). This will not do, on two counts: firstly, the “great tune” turns out to be bowdlerized Robert Schumann, to which a coat of brown varnish from Johannes Brahms’s workshop has been applied; secondly, it takes no account of the many authentic native voices which existed in English music between 1695 and 1879. Benoliel takes this stance because he believes in the old shibboleth of the “English Musical Renaissance,” of which he calls Parry “the seminal creator” (116). This view—that Parry, Charles Villiers Stanford, and their followers were responsible for a sudden rebirth of British music from the 1880s onwards—is one that the perspective of time is failing to endorse. Evolution, not revolution, has been continual; it was this process which Parry enhanced (both as composer and musical historian), so that to claim he endowed British music with “a new vitality” (74) is just. Parry believed that the composer should be a public servant and moral instructor (Parry never needed to compose for money). As the author says, this was “not a wholly positive role-model for later English composers” (4). He makes a convincing case for concluding that Parry (subconsciously) “lacked love” (14), as a result of which he equated being solitary with being lonely. Here Benoliel the composer makes a vital point: solitude, for the artist, is sine qua non, since a precondition for “the [creative] process is concentrated self-removal from everyday life” (39). Moreover, Parry’s multiple duties did not permit enough time for dedicated composition, and he was scrupulously careful financially. The outcome was “a life that never focused around composition” (30). [End Page 556] Considering all this, it is perhaps remarkable that Parry the composer achieved as much as he did. Benoliel suggests that he was “capable of composing an effective opera” (36), but this seems highly unlikely, since Parry had little sense of the theatrical. Poetry was another matter, however; it always acted as an effective stimulus to his musical imagination, even though he believed (correctly) that “it...