Horatio Parker and the English Choral Societies, 1899-1902

Abstract

Slightly over a decade following Horatio Parker's death in 1919, John Tasker Howard commented that Parker could have been the greatest of our American had he been as productive in instrumental as he was in vocal music.' Parker's true metier may be further qualified as being that of choral music. Although he also composed songs and anthems as well as piano, organ, chamber, and orchestral music as a young organist-choirmaster in New York City, his conservative but popular oratorio Hora Novissima catapulted him to fame in the early 1890s and set his course as a composer. Thereafter, he strove in his cantata and oratorio writing to infuse these genres with novel ideas, many of them dramatic, that are evident in the leading-motive treatment of The Legend of St. Christopher (1897-98), the pictorial writing in A Wanderer's Psalm (1900), the rhapsodic A Star Song (1902), the sustained pathos of King Gorm the Grim (1908), the Parsifal-like Morven and the Grail (1915), and the tableaux of The Dream of Mary (1918). For his first opera, Mona, produced by the Metropolitan Opera in 1912, Parker wrote only one chorus. Some critics pointed to the opera's lack of choral writing and may have caused Parker to make his next opera, Fairyland, written for the American Federation of Music Clubs convention at Los Angeles (1915), an epitome of his choral writing. As a choral composer who experimented with many of the dramatic innovations imparted to that idiom at the turn of this past century, Parker was naturally attracted to the work of English composers such as Charles Villiers Stanford, C. H. H. Parry, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, and Edward Elgar. Furthermore, Parker had toured the English cathe-