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The British 19th Century: Clementi, SS Wesley and Sterndale Bennett
From London to Leipzig
Three Nineteenth Century English Symphonists
Notes on the works and composers
© Graham Lea-Cox, May 2006
Muzio Clementi (1752-1832) was of Italian birth but of adopted English nationality. The young Muzio had prodigious talent - recognised by an English Nobleman visiting Italy who, remarkably, paid Clementi’s parents to take him to England to give the boy a thorough musical training. Fame and fortune were not long in coming to the young composer, who is chiefly remembered today as a composer for the ‘new’ forte-piano. His Symphonies, however, are arguably an even more important part of his output, although now almost completely unknown to the general public. 
Clementi suffered in his early composing career from constant comparison to Haydn and Mozart. Haydn, 20 years Clementi’s senior, was then at the height of his powers and fame and Mozart, four years Clementi’s junior, was a composer of obvious genius. After some success in London but eventually discouraged, Clementi retreated from symphonic composition to concentrate on writing for the pianoforte, on his international performing career and on his piano building business – earning considerable fame in all three areas.
He returned to the symphonic form only in later life, early in the 19th century, with new symphonies premiered in the concert seasons of London’s Royal Philharmonic Society, in Paris and at the Leipzig Gewandhaus. These later works, in a greatly matured style, were received with considerable acclaim by audiences and critics alike – even when performed alongside the latest works from the new ‘Toast of Europe’, Ludwig van Beethoven. Although Beethoven was 20 years younger, Clementi recognised the younger man’s genius and became almost obsessively critical of his own work in comparison. Constantly revising his symphonies during his lifetime, Clementi resisted their publication and thus directly contributed to the near-oblivion that has all but consumed his orchestral output.
Clementi’s Fourth Symphony is a mature work, although ‘fourth’ in name only as the composer’s own numbering takes no account of the many symphonies written in London during his youth. It is a fine work of which a contemporary critic wrote after its London premiere, at the Philharmonic Society, on 21 April 1823:
“The Symphony of Clementi was a noble composition, conducted with consummate art, wrought with great judgement, and replete with fine and novel effects. It demonstrated that this justly-admired veteran is still in possession of the fullness of his powers, and displayed a vigour of imagination and conception more correspondent with a genius in the plenitude of youthful strength, than that of a man who had passed the limit by which human life is ordinarily bounded.”
(Quarterly musical magazine and review; V (1823) P 44)
His orchestral music, however, has not been served well by subsequent scholars and editors whose limited reconstructions for publication have too often been in clear conflict to the surviving autograph manuscripts. His symphonies, therefore, have never received performances as the composer intended since his lifetime.
Professor John Walter Hill, co-editor with Graham Lea-Cox of a new edition of the Clementi’s last symphony (No. 4) has written in the preface to his critical edition of the second symphony (published Garland Press, USA 1984):
“The aspects of Clementi’s late symphonies most often praised in contemporaneous reviews – their charm, pleasing melodies, rich harmonies, majesty, spirit, science, intimacy and freshness – are likely to be the qualities that will eventually bring them back into favour with listeners in our day.”
Samuel Sebastian Wesley was the son of the well-known church music composer Samuel Wesley and nephew of the famed Methodist preacher Charles Wesley. S.S. Wesley wanted to be known as a Symphonist, but failed in the end to escape the all-pervading Church music ethic of his family. This fine one movement symphony is a most attractive work, still in manuscript and unavailable in published form for the general public. Written in the early 1730’s, it is marked by a charm that is instantly recognisable as ‘English’, a sort of musical pastoral idyll that one normally associates with the fin de siècle romanticism of late 19th and early 20th century British composers. Although the ‘organ-loft’ culture, as one might call it, dominated the local scene across much of Britain throughout the 19th century, this work - Wesley’s only surviving essay in symphonic style - clearly demonstrates the formal skill and invention to be found amongst provincial British composers of the time.
William Sterndale Bennett ( (1816-1875) was in later life a pillar of the British musical establishment - conductor of the Philharmonic Society and Founder of the Bach Society, Professor of Music at Cambridge University and Principal of the Royal Academy of Music. As a young prodigy his symphonies were premiered in London at the Philharmonic Society concerts and at the famous Leipzig Gewandhaus, as had Clementi’s a few year’s earlier.
Although Bennett was befriended and admired as a composer by Mendelssohn and Schumann - indeed Schumann dedicated his Symphonic Studies to Bennet - and was buried with honour in Westminster Abbey, amongst the nation’s finest sons, he was ultimately never really taken seriously as a composer by his peers in Britain. This, paradoxically, may have been due in part precisely because of his senior position in the nation’s musical establishment. Certainly, a lessening of his powers of composition in later life troubled him and one might speculate the reasons for this, perhaps occasioned by his extraordinary load as an administrator.
There are, however, clearly other more complicated reasons for the neglect of Bennett’s music, unconnected with the intrinsic worth of his compositions. Although national myopia no doubt played its part in this process, Bennett’s compositions, in their quiet originality, had none of the avant-garde innovations of some continental composers. Apart from a few lone voices championing his music, such as conductor Sir Henry Wood, professional musicians and the general public alike have consequently largely ignored Bennett’s works since.
Das Gewandhaus (Leipzig)
The Symphony in G minor (Op. 43), published in 1872 in Leipzig, was his last. Premiered by the orchestra of the London Philharmonic Society in the season of 1867, this is his most mature essay in the symphonic style and deserves a place in the repertoire of our concert halls. A set of score and parts can be found in the Royal Academy of Music, London, marked by and as used in the early part of the 20th century by conductor Henry Wood (founder of the BBC Proms).
There is much truth in the sober assessment of this Symphony by one of the more enlightened commentators of the time, H. Heathcote Statham (1839-1924), writing in the first edition of the Grove Dictionary of Music:
“His one published symphony, that in G minor, may be thought slight and fragile in effect in comparison with the now prevalent “stormy” school of writing; but those who are alive to the fact that power of sound is not power of conception, who look to thought and feeling rather than to mere effect in music, will find no dificience of passion and impulse in parts of this beautiful work, while the grace and refinement both of composition and instrumentation are universally admitted.”
(A Dictionary of music and musicians I: edited by G. Grove. London: Macmillan, 1879, P 228
© Graham Lea-Cox, 2004