Becoming a national composer: Critical reception to c. 1925

In an article written for the periodical Musical Opinion and Music Trade Review (hereafter ‘Musical Opinion’) a few months before the outbreak of World War I, the eccentric British music critic Gerald Cumberland offered a prediction of how early twentieth-century British music might be viewed a hundred years later. Cumberland envisaged a ‘rather long, but not altogether tedious’ volume entitled ‘History of European Music in the Twentieth Century’, which included a chapter on the ‘So-Called British School’. The author of this chapter, he believed, would observe that between the years 1900–1915 there was undoubtedly a great and gracious flowering of British genius in the field of musical composition, but no contemporary writer appears to have been conscious of the fact. On the contrary, everybody bewailed the general lack of musical genius, and the newspaper critics were continually deploring the dead level of merit of the music they were called upon to criticize. The ‘genius’ on which Cumberland’s imaginary twenty-first-century amanuensis focused in his article consisted of five composers: Edward Elgar, Joseph Holbrooke, Cyril Scott, Frederick Delius and Granville Bantock. Occasionally his comments about these figures are surprisingly close to what one might find written today, but more often they are wildly, even hilariously, inaccurate, none more so than his prediction that in 2014 Elgar would be ‘little more than a name to-day’, with The Dream of Gerontius having ‘dropped out of public recognition... never likely to be revived’, and that Bantock’s work suffered from the ‘revival of conventional religion [that] took place in the “[nineteen] forties” and “fifties”’. Whatever Cumberland’s strengths might have been as a critic, it is safe to say that they did not include crystal ball gazing.