Sir George Grove (13 August 182028 May 1900) was an English engineer and writer on music, known as the founding editor of Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians.
Grove was trained as a civil engineer, and successful in that profession, but his love of music drew him into musical administration. When responsible for the regular orchestral concerts at the Crystal Palace, he wrote a series of programme notes from which eventually grew his musical dictionary. His interest in the music of Franz Schubert, which was neglected in England at that point in the nineteenth century, led him and his friend Arthur Sullivan to go to Vienna in search of undiscovered Schubert manuscripts. Their researches led to their discovery of the lost score of Schubert's Rosamunde music, several of his symphonies and other music in 1867, leading to a revival of interest in Schubert's work.
Grove was the first director of the Royal College of Music, from its foundation in 1883 until his retirement in 1894. He recruited leading musicians including Hubert Parry and Charles Villiers Stanford as members of the college faculty and established a close working relationship with London's older conservatoire, the Royal Academy of Music.
In addition to his musical work, Grove had a deep and scholarly knowledge of the Bible. He contributed to the English literature on the subject, including a concordance in 1854 and about a thousand pages of Sir William Smith's 1863 Bible Dictionary. He was a co-founder of the Palestine Exploration Fund.
Biography
Early years
Grove was born in Clapham, the eighth of the eleven children of Thomas Grove (1774–1852), fishmonger and venison dealer, and his wife, Mary ( Blades; 1784–1856). A younger sister, Eleanor, was the founding principal of College Hall, London.
He went to a preparatory school, on Clapham Common, where one of his schoolfellows was George Granville Bradley, later Dean of Westminster, whose sister Grove subsequently married. He next entered Stockwell (later known as Clapham) Grammar School, run by Charles Pritchard, the astronomer, who was inspired by the progressive principles of King's College, London. The educational curriculum was based on classics, divinity, mathematics and natural philosophy, and rigorously tested by annual examination. Pritchard also encouraged his pupils to develop interests in literature and music.
Grove was a regular worshipper at Holy Trinity, Clapham, where he listened to the music of Bach and Handel. By the age of sixteen, he was competent in classics and mathematics; he left the school in 1836 and was apprenticed to Alexander Gordon, a well-known civil engineer in Westminster. In his free time, he immersed himself in music, attending concerts and studying scores. During this period, he lived in Chester, hearing music in the cathedral and also becoming familiar with Welsh folksong. This was in 1849, when the Great Exhibition of 1851 was in preparation. Grove was the society's secretary for the duration of the exhibition.
On 23 December 1851, he married Harriet Bradley, daughter of Charles Bradley and sister of his old school friend George Bradley. After the Great Exhibition closed in 1852, its principal building, known as "the Crystal Palace", was dismantled and rebuilt in the south London suburb of Sydenham as a centre for education, the arts and leisure. Grove was appointed secretary of the Crystal Palace. He engaged a wind band and a conductor, Heinrich Schallehn. The latter was found to be unsatisfactory, and was replaced by August Manns, who, with Grove's encouragement, developed the band into a full-sized symphony orchestra. With programmes chosen by Grove and Manns, the Crystal Palace concerts became a central feature of London's musical scene and remained so until the end of the century.
Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians
After nearly twenty years of service at the Crystal Palace, Grove resigned the secretaryship at the end of 1873 and accepted an offer from the publishers Macmillan and Co. to join their staff and become a director of the firm. He edited Macmillan's Magazine and wrote a primer of geography for Macmillan's "History Primers". By far the most important outcome of his connection with Macmillan was A Dictionary of Music and Musicians, for which his name is best remembered. The idea of the dictionary was entirely his own. He stated, in the prospectus of the dictionary, in March 1874, that "The want of English works on the history, theory, or practice of Music, or the biographies of musicians accessible to the non-professional reader, has long been a subject of remark."
Grove conceived of a work to fill the gap he had identified; he originally proposed two volumes of about 600 pages each, but by the time of its first publication, it ran to four volumes containing a total of 3,125 pages. The Musical Times wrote of the work, "His masterly biographies of Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Schubert are models of biographical literature, and are written in a most fascinating style. He made two special journeys to Germany to obtain materials for his Mendelssohn article, and more than two to Vienna in connection with Schubert and Beethoven." The National Training School was re-formed as the Royal College of Music in 1882, and Grove was appointed its first director. His second focus, examination, followed the Victorian trend to form professional bodies regulating and standardising the activity of members of each profession. An example is the Institution of Civil Engineers to which Grove had been admitted in 1839. In 1896 Grove's Beethoven and his Nine Symphonies, "addressed to the amateurs of this country", appeared.