Shakespearean Concert Songs in Victorian England

Abstract

This chapter re-evaluates the status of settings of Shakespeare in the context of Victorian song from Macfarren to Henry Walford Davies, taking in Sullivan, Parry, MacKenzie, Stanford, Liza Lehmann, Maude Valérie White, Wood, and Somervell. Though often neglected today, Macfarren’s songs, including a number of Shakespeare settings, represented the ‘finest products of the period’. Seen as embodying the national emblem, Parry saw Shakespeare as central in his attempt to establish English ‘serious song’ comparable with the lieder of Schumann and Brahms and the dislodgement of commercial popular song prevalent in England. Parry’s settings of various sonnets in fact started life as German songs. Parry was not altogether successful in his mission; his only true disciple was Arthur Somervell. The last of the ‘Victorians’, Henry Walford Davies, was largely dismissed as a composer out of his time, his songs old-fashioned with their ‘forthright English melody’.