thumb|right|Hubert Parry in [[The Musical Quarterly, c. 1916]]
Sir Charles Hubert Hastings Parry, 1st Baronet (27 February 1848 – 7 October 1918), was an English composer, teacher and historian of music. Born in Richmond Hill, Bournemouth, Parry's first major works appeared in 1880. As a composer he is best known for the choral song "Jerusalem", his 1902 setting for the coronation anthem "I was glad", the choral and orchestral ode Blest Pair of Sirens, and the hymn tune "Repton", which sets the words "Dear Lord and Father of Mankind". His orchestral works include five symphonies and a set of Symphonic Variations. He also composed the music for Ode to Newfoundland, the national anthem for the Dominion of Newfoundland.
After early attempts to work in insurance at his father's behest, Parry was taken up by George Grove, first as a contributor to Grove's massive Dictionary of Music and Musicians in the 1870s and '80s, and then in 1883 as professor of composition and musical history at the Royal College of Music, of which Grove was the first head. In 1895 Parry succeeded Grove as head of the college, remaining in the post for the rest of his life. He was concurrently Heather Professor of Music at the University of Oxford from 1900 to 1908. He wrote several books about music and music history, the best-known of which is probably his 1909 study of Johann Sebastian Bach.
Both in his lifetime and afterwards, Parry's reputation and critical standing have varied. His academic duties were considerable and prevented him from devoting all his energies to composition, but some contemporaries such as Charles Villiers Stanford rated him as the finest English composer since Henry Purcell; others, such as Frederick Delius, did not. Parry's influence on later composers, by contrast, is widely recognised. Edward Elgar learned much of his craft from Parry's articles in Grove's Dictionary, and among those who studied under Parry at the Royal College were Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst, Frank Bridge and John Ireland.
He was also an enthusiastic cruising sailor and owned successively the yawl The Latois and the ketch The Wanderer. In 1908 he was elected as a member of the Royal Yacht Squadron, the only composer so honoured.
Biography
Early years
thumb|A blue plaque marking Parry's birthplace at 2 Richmond Terrace, Bournemouth
thumb|[[Highnam Court, Gloucestershire, the family's country house]]
Hubert Parry was born in Richmond Hill, Bournemouth, the youngest of the six children of Thomas Gambier Parry (1816–1888) and his first wife, Isabella née Fynes-Clinton (1816–1848), of Highnam Court, Gloucestershire. Gambier Parry, the son of Richard and Mary Parry, had been orphaned at the age of five and brought up by his maternal family, adopting their name, Gambier, as part of his surname. Having inherited enormous wealth from his grandfather, Thomas Parry (a director of the East India Company who died in 1816), Gambier Parry was able to buy a country seat at Highnam Court, a seventeenth-century house near the River Severn and two miles west of Gloucester.
Gambier Parry was an eminent collector of works of early Italian art at a time well before it was fashionable or widely known, and was also a painter and designer of some talent; he invented "spirit fresco", a process of mural painting appropriate for the damp English climate, which he used in his private chapel at Highnam as well as in Ely Cathedral. Besides his love of painting, Gambier Parry was himself musical, having studied piano and French horn as well as composition during his education at Eton. Isabella's untimely death almost certainly affected her children, most obviously the eldest surviving son, Clinton, who was only seven when she died, and, more subtly, Hubert: according to his daughter Dorothea (1876–1963), his stepmother Ethelinda's "love for the young ones", meaning her own children, gave her little or no time for her stepchildren. Gambier Parry was often absent from home, being either away in London or on the Continent. Hubert's early childhood, with Clinton away at school and Lucy seven years his senior, was largely solitary, his only regular companion being a governess.
Clinton learned to play cello and piano, and his considerable musical talent became evident ahead of Hubert's. Yet despite their father's active interest in music, such activity was seen as a pastime, and was frowned upon as a career as being too uncertain and, unlike painting, a less than professional pursuit unseemly for a gentleman.
thumb|left|Parry studied with [[William Sterndale Bennett (l) and Edward Dannreuther]]
Parry continued his musical studies alongside his work in insurance. In London he took lessons from William Sterndale Bennett, but finding them insufficiently demanding he sought lessons from Johannes Brahms. The first performance of the latter has been held to mark the start of a "renaissance" in English music, but was regarded by many critics as too avant garde. In 1905 he produced a lighter work, The Pied Piper of Hamelin , described later as "a bubbling well of humour." Parry, along with Stanford and Alexander Mackenzie, was regarded by some as joint leader of the "English Musical Renaissance"; Shaw considered them a mutual admiration society, purveying "sham classics"; reviewing Eden by Stanford in 1891 he wrote
Contemporary critics generally regarded Parry's orchestral music as of secondary importance in his output, but in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries many of Parry's orchestral pieces have been revived. These include five symphonies, a set of Symphonic Variations in E minor, the Overture to an Unwritten Tragedy (1893) and the Elegy for Brahms (1897). In 1883 Parry wrote music to accompany the Cambridge Greek Play The Birds by Aristophanes, a production which starred the mediaevalist and ghost-story writer, M. R. James. Parry received an honorary degree from Cambridge University in the same year. Subsequently, he wrote music for Oxford productions of Aristophanes: The Frogs (1892), The Clouds (1905) and The Acharnians (1914). He had also provided elaborate incidental music for a West End production by Beerbohm Tree, Hypatia (1893). Among Parry's considerable output of music for the theatre, there was only one attempt at opera: Guenever, which was turned down by the Carl Rosa Opera Company.|align=right| width=250px
When Grove retired as director of the Royal College of Music, Parry succeeded him from January 1895 and held the post until his death. In 1900 he succeeded John Stainer as Heather Professor. In an obituary tribute in 1918 Robin Legge, music critic of The Daily Telegraph, lamented these academic calls on Parry's time, believing that they got in the way of his principal calling – composition. Ralph Vaughan Williams, who studied at the RCM under Parry, rated him highly as both composer and teacher. Of Parry in the latter capacity he wrote:
As head of the Royal College of Music, Parry numbered among his leading pupils Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst, Frank Bridge and John Ireland. and on 24 July 1902 he was created a Baronet, of Highnam Court, in the parish of Highnam, in the county of Gloucester.
Last years
thumb|left|upright|Parry shown on a 1914 cigarette card
thumb|Memorial to Hubert Parry in [[Gloucester Cathedral. Inscription by Robert Bridges]]
Parry resigned his Oxford appointment on medical advice in 1908 and, in the last decade of his life, produced some of his best-known works, including the Symphonic Fantasia 1912 (also called Symphony No. 5), the Ode on the Nativity (1912) and the Songs of Farewell (1916–1918). The piece by which he is best known, the setting of William Blake's poem "And did those feet in ancient time" (1916), was immediately taken up by the suffragist movement, with which both Parry and his wife were strongly in sympathy.
In the autumn of 1918 Parry contracted Spanish flu during the global pandemic and died at Knightscroft, Rustington, West Sussex, on 7 October aged 70. The death certificate says cause of death: 1. Influenza; 2. Septicaemia. His daughter, Gwendoline Maud Greene, was present at his death.<!-- <- That's not a reference. --> At the urging of Stanford, he was buried in St Paul's Cathedral. The site of his birthplace, in Richmond Hill, Bournemouth, next door to the Square, is marked with a blue plaque; there is a memorial tablet, with an inscription by the Poet Laureate, Robert Bridges, in Gloucester Cathedral, unveiled during the Three Choirs Festival of 1922.
Legacy
In 2015 seventy unpublished works by Parry were discovered, including some which may never have been publicly performed. The manuscripts were sent for auction by Parry's descendants but failed to reach their reserve price.
Documentary film about the music and life of Parry "The Prince and the Composer" was broadcast on BBC Four on 27 May 2011. The film was presented by Charles III, the then-Prince of Wales.
Works
Music
Parry's biographer Jeremy Dibble writes:
Notes and references
Notes
References