Henry Wood, the ?Proms,? and National Identity in Music, 1895-1904

Abstract

4 T ell me, Mr. Wood, are you quite English? Your appearance is rather un-English (qtd. in Jacobs, Wood 62). Queen Victoria directed this provocative question to young conductor Henry Wood on occasion of a command performance at Windsor Castle on 24 November 1898, perhaps motivated by cut of his beard, modeled on that of Arthur Nikisch, Austro-Hungarian conductor. The question was not necessarily an insular or xenophobic one, since a preference for German music had always prevailed among royal family, dating back to visits of Felix Mendelssohn half a century earlier. For this occasion, queen had chosen five selections from Richard Wagner, rounding off program with Engelbert Humperdinck's overture to Hansel and Gretel, and selections from two non-German composers, Camille Saint-Saens and Pyotr Il'yich Tchaikovsky. A later concert at Windsor was devoted entirely to music from Parsifal. Having spent sixty years on throne in no way necessitated queen's attention, would seem, to sixty years of English music. One recentjudgment that the Victorians, seemed, could do anything with music-except compose it (Hoppen 394) follows a long line of obiter dicta that a lively scholarly dialogue in twenty-five years has increasingly challenged. The Victorians composed a great deal of music, much of better than merely pedestrian and some of of a quality that renders its neglect unjustifiable. Even in current climate of scholarly revisionism, study of such music, its reception, its performance history, and its role as cultural expression continues to lag well behind study of other nineteenth-century music among musicologists, just as has lagged behind literature, history, and visual arts as objects of study among Victorianists.1 In annals of this music, arguably only death of composer Arthur Sullivan in 1900 could be assigned a cultural resonance akin to that accorded deaths of Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning.2