Prof Michael Allis on exploring the legacy of music critic Herbert Thompson

All this and much more is covered a new book based on Thompson’s handwritten memoir and diaries, scrapbooks, anotated scores, photographs and correspondence which he bequeathed to the Brotherton Collections at the University of Leeds Library. The Reminiscences and Selected Criticism of Herbert Thompson has been co-edited by Michael Allis, professor of musicology at Leeds University, and Paul Watt, adjunct professor of musicology at the University of Adelaide.

“We were really thinking what could we try to do to promote this collection, so I came up with the idea of transcribing Thompson’s memoirs, his unpublished reminiscences, and I’ve got a colleague out in Australia who has chosen selected criticisms from The Yorkshire Post,” explains Prof Allis. “We’ve referred to the diaries where we can and some of the letters, so it’s celebrating the Brotherton Collections but also it’s music in Yorkshire a lot of the time that Thompson is talking about as well as London and Cambridge.

“There has been a lot of interest in British music criticism in the last 10 years but Thompson hasn’t appeared and neither has The Yorkshire Post. People have been talking about Samuel Langford and Neville Cardus at The Guardian, but a lot of it’s been quite London-centric, so I think it’s nice to celebrate a little bit more what’s going on around here.”

In his memoir, Thompson talks about how he got the newspaper job. Born in the Leeds suburb of Hunslet, he was the son of a bank manager and amateur flautist. He grew up in Malton and Durham and was sent to school in Wiesbaden in Germany for two years before studying law at St John’s College, Cambridge. “He wanted to be an artist but his father wasn’t keen,” Prof Allis says. “He joined the Honourable Society of the Inner Temple and worked at the bar. He moved back to Leeds and then in 1886 he joined The Yorkshire Post. There was a guy called William Creser who was doing a few of the crits but his heart wasn’t in it and Thompson says they cobbled a few things together. Creser said to him, ‘why don’t you go and see the editor, Charles Pebody, and see if he’ll give you the job?’ and he did virutally on the spot.

“He served 50 years as music critic, in 1888 he was art critic as well and he was also the musical correspondent for The Musical Times. He probably did more writing but because a lot of it’s not signed in that period it’s hard to tell.”

Thompson’s writing covered a “broad” spectrum, Prof Allis says. “He covered the Leeds Festivals – in the reminiscences he charts each year. Some of the works that were premiered included Elgar’s (cantata) Caractacus and Falstaff, Vaughan Williams’ A Sea Symphony and Toward the Unknown Region, quite a few works by Charles Villiers Stanford whose centenary of his death it is this year, Parry’s Ode on St Cecilia’s Day, Gustav Holst’s Ode To Death and the Choral Symphony.

“In the criticism a lot of the things are really topical. Music education he’s very hot on, particularly for children and he says that if you get it right there you’ll see the benefits later on. He likes folk songs being sung in schools and he likes oratorios being performed in schools, but he hates jazz – he says with Schumann you get a bit of syncopation but Schumann knows where to stop, with jazz it just keeps going, that’s the one thing he can’t get his head around.

“He wants better standards of opera and he often criticises the programming at Covent Garden. I think there was one year they didn’t have any German repertoire and he says why not, don’t let your primadonnas dictate what you perform. He’s not a fan of performing opera in Italian, which was a thing in the late 19th century even if it was originally written in German, he says of The Flying Dutchman it just doesn’t work. Higher standards of orchestral playing in Yorkshire he wants because he says at the festivals if you’re doing Handel and things like that that’s fine but once we get into the 20th century and people are playing Elgar and things are getting more complicated for the orchestra, so he wants better standards of orchestral playing.

“He wants proper training for conductors because he says often it’s the local organist, often they might be OK but they might not, it’s a little bit unfair on them, so he says it would be nice to have proper conducting training. He talks about some of the periodicals of the day – The New Quarterly Musical Review is one, which Granville Bantock set up, he’s a composer I’m quite interested in; The Chord is another one. He likes programme notes at concerts, he talks about George Grove’s at the Crystal Palace but also more locally AWM Bosville, who did the notes at the Bridlington Festival. He talks about the Hovingham Festival, that’s close to Malton, Canon Percy Hudson helped set those up and they got great performers of the day coming up from London, people like the violinist Joseph Joachim.”

Thompson also discusses state subsidies for the arts. “Muncipal orchestras, he likes that idea, and he says a muncipal art gallery doesn’t have to make money, why does music, so he’s quite ahead of his time,” says Prof Allis. “He’s talking about it’s there for the wellbeing of the community – that’s what we’re saying now and with all these cuts, so that’s quite topical. He also talks about dumbing down – some of the arguments don’t go away. I think he puts it that he’s quite happy for the man in the street to listen to his music but he doesn’t want to be begrudged for listening to the sonata and the symphony which he feels is on another level. He’s not apologising for it, but it sometimes feels he’s being seen as a little elitist.”

He did, however, like music technology. “The gramophone and the pianola, he sees these are useful things,” Prof Allis notes. What also comes otu of the reminscences is which composers and conductors he really likes. “He met Johannes Brahms in 1889 in Hamburg and that he says was one of the greatest moments of his life, he spoke to him in German, but he was also a big fan of Wagner – Die Meistersinger and Tristan and Isolde he thought were the two great operas of Wagner and probably the best dramatic music ever written, and he sees that as a British thing. Quite often people were either (for) Brahms or Wagner, but he could appreciate both.

“In 1889 he has a European tour and he goes to Bayreuth and he’d very impressed with the lighting – he says that’s better than opera productions over here. He goes to Vienna, Berlin, Prague, talking about the architecture of the opera houses and the standards of singing. He likes Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel, and there are some British works he feels are perhaps undervalued and some of them are not really familiar even now by the likes of Edward German and Alexander Mackenzie, a Scottish composer. Also, Viotti’s violin concertos and Dvorak’s Saint Ludmila, which was another Leeds premier. But he’s not so keen on Mendelssohn, he says there’s a streak of sentimentality that repelled him. Verdi operas like Falstaff and Otello come out well.

“He hates an opera by Anton Rubenstein called The Children of the Moorland, he said that’s the worst opera he’d ever seen in his life. There was a cantata called The Fire-King by Walter Austin that he describes as awful trash. Alexander Mackenzie did a cantata called The Witch’s Daughter but even in the day it was called ‘The Ditch’s Water’ colloquially.”

The Reminiscences and Selected Criticism of Herbert Thompson co-edited by Michael Allis and Paul Watt is published by Clemson University Press. https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/book/10.3828/9781638040934