Jürgen Schaarwächter’s Two Centuries of British Symphonism from the Beginnings to 1945 falls into the venerable category of genre history, a staple of modern musical scholarship. Genre histories of the symphony can trace their roots back to the late nineteenth century. F.L.S. von Dürenberg’s Die Symphonien Beethovens und anderer berühmter Meister mit hinzuziehung der Urtheile geistreicher Männer analysirt und zum Verständnisse erläutert, published in 1876,Footnote ¹ has a decidedly Beethoven-centric orientation: over half of the nearly 200-page volume is devoted to a detailed analytical description of each movement of the nine symphonies. The remaining pages discuss Mozart (six symphonies), Louis Spohr (two), followed by one each for Joseph Haydn (No. 103), Niels Gade, Robert Schumann, Felix Mendelssohn and Anton Rubinstein. Michel Brenet’s (a pseudonym for Marie Bobillier) Histoire de la symphonie à orchestra, depuis ses origines jusqu’à Beethoven inclusivement, published in 1885, is an actual genre history (one of the earliest) rather than a collection of analytical descriptions.Footnote ² She begins with the symphony’s precursors and early history, briefly discusses the symphony in France (mostly those of François-Joseph Gossec), before proceeding to chapters on Haydn, Mozart, their contemporaries and picturesque and dramatic symphonies before landing on Beethoven (whose coverage makes up not quite 40 per cent of the volume). This Beethoven-centric, great masters, focus became the default orientation of most twentieth-century histories of the symphony, but as Schaarwächter observes, German scholarship has more recently moved to a model that concentrates on the landscape of a genre rather than on the mountain tops (pp. 797–8), a trend also found in English-language scholarship.

His work embodies this approach: the ‘greater’ composers of British symphonies may have more pages devoted to them, but the others are not pushed out of the picture. He also follows a recent trend in genre histories of the symphony, where comprehensive surveys have become ever more difficult as the corpus of symphonies grows. In the last 50 years or so, one common way of whittling down what is now an immense topic has been to narrow the topic to a shorter time span, a single country or both.Footnote ³ Jürgen Schaarwächter has chosen this last option for his Two Centuries of British Symphonism from the Beginnings to 1945, which is based on his PhD dissertation.Footnote ⁴ He has chosen to expand only backward to cover the earlier parts of the symphony’s development in the ‘Land without Music’ (Schaarwächter mentions this sobriquet, based on a 1914 book by Oscar Adolph Hermann Schmidt, in his ‘Preliminary Note and Acknowledgements’ and returns to the concept in his conclusion).Footnote ⁵ His two-volume, continuously paginated book is divided into two parts, with the first, ‘Creating an Identity’, containing chapters on reception and methodology and covering composers from Thomas Arne through Edward Elgar (pp. 1–352). The second part, ‘Uniqueness in Diversity’ covers post-Elgar composers up to 1945 (pp. 355–800). The appendices comprise an ‘Alphabetic Catalogue of British Symphonies up to 1945’ (pp. 801–1018) and the bibliography (pp. 1019–41), followed by a list of illustrations and the index. The volumes are richly illustrated with portraits and photographs of composers and a smattering of illustrations of concert halls and musical institutions, in addition to copious musical examples, most of them small snippets of themes, though piano reductions and score excerpts do appear as well.

In the first chapter of Part I (‘British Symphonies? An Introduction’), Schaarwächter explains the decisions that determined his choice of repertoire to examine. His reason for his choice of eighteenth-century works is somewhat opaque:

Although he decided to rely on the ‘intentions of the composers themselves’, he found that he was ‘forced to exclude quite a number of eighteenth-century works counted by others as symphonies, and on the other hand, to include cantatas named symphonies or sinfonie (sacre) by the composer’ (p. 13). It is not clear who the ‘others’ are, but genre designations in the eighteenth century, particularly the first half, were imprecise, and the same work could appear in one manuscript with the title ‘Sinfonia’ and in another with the title of ‘Divertimento’. The statement that he was forced to include cantatas named symphonies or sinfonie (sacre) by the composer is puzzling, but probably refers to works like William Boyce’s Op. 2 (eight Symphonies published in London in 1760) and his 12 Overtures (published in London in 1770), which were originally the opening movements of Boyce’s Odes (i.e., vocal cantatas).

For the post-eighteenth-century repertoire Schaarwächter chose to exclude the Sinfonia concertante but to include choral symphonies. He indicates that he has included symphonies from England, Scotland and Wales, but that he would be ‘unable to deal here with independent Irish music’. (p. 6) However, it is not clear what that music would be, because he does include composers born in Ireland (such as Sir Charles Villiers Stanford and Sir Hamilton Harty). Finally, he opts to include foreign-born, non-British composers who made their careers in England (p. 17). The remainder of Part I proceeds composer by composer in rough chronological order. In the earliest period (‘Early Beginnings in the Eighteenth Century’), he considers provincial composers separately from London composers. Chapters 3 and 4 treat composers from the periods of the founding of the Royal Academy of Music and the Royal College of Music respectively, though that appears to be mostly a rhetorical device, as not all of the composers discussed had connections to those establishments. Chapter 5 concludes with ‘Brian, Harty, Elgar and the End of the Victorian era’, though they are not the only three composers covered.

Part 2 (‘Uniqueness in Diversity’), which spans the two volumes and constitutes the majority of the text, is organized by topics: ‘Traditional Form and Expansion of the “Academically Feasible”’, ‘The Programme Symphony after 1914’, (with a sub-heading of ‘”Exotic” Subjects’), ‘The Tradition of the Choral Symphony, with a Few Remarks on the Solo Vocal Symphony’ and ‘New Directions of Twentieth-Century British Symphonism in the Twenties, Thirties and Early Forties’, which includes the subtopics of jazz influence, Hindemith, symphonies for strings or brass and the ‘new music’ of Schoenberg and Stravinsky. The concluding Chapter 10 addresses ‘The Particularly British in the Evolution of the British Symphony’. Some of these groupings seem arbitrary, and the titles appear to be mostly catchy phrases instead of an indication of content. For example, the first part of Chapter 9 (‘Jazz Influences and Livelier Accents’) includes William Walton, Aynsley Goossens, Arthur Benjamin, Leighton Lucas, Rudolph Dolmetsch, Gustav Holst and Ralph Vaughan Williams, but none of the musical discussions make more than a passing mention of jazz (if that), none point to specific instances of jazz influence, and it is not clear what ‘livelier accents’ might be. While Schaarwächter admits that Vaughan Williams disavowed any influence of jazz in his works, he insists that ‘it is clearly discernible in some of his works, as here [the Fourth Symphony in F Minor] in the rhythmic respects’ (p. 725). However, his description of that work (pp. 728–31) focuses on its thematic relationship to Beethoven’s ninth, chromatic and modal harmony, and the concluding fugue; he does not mention jazz at all. He does describe a touch of syncopation in the slow movement (hardly a convincing sign of jazz influence), but provides no musical example for it.

Whether going (approximately) chronologically or by topic, the text is essentially a string of one composer followed by another, with no discernible reason for the ordering (which is neither by birth nor death dates). Some of the later composers make an appearance in more than one chapter in Part 2, and Havergal Brian pops up in both Part 1 and Part 2 because of his compositional activity throughout his long life (1876–1972). Schaarwächter provides basic biographical information at the first discussion of a composer’s music, then proceeds to a discussion of one or more symphonies. In discussing the nineteenth- and twentieth-century composers, he often quotes extensively from contemporary writers – in part because, as he explains in the introduction, ‘only a fraction of the scores I came across was available in recorded form, forcing me to refer, apart from my own analytical findings, on the comments of others who had either actually heard the music or devoted themselves to it in greater detail than time and space allow me here’ (p. 11). Whether driven by expediency or not, these quotations give a rich texture to the volume, as we hear from reviewers and commentators (including George Bernard Shaw) as well as from the composers themselves. Scholars wishing to delve more deeply into a particular composer or group of composers will benefit from having so many extensive quotations from primary sources at their disposal (as well as indications of likely places to look for additional information).

The discussion of each composer’s works is more descriptive than analytical, despite the occasional mention of sonata form and references to chromatic harmony. For example, Henry David Leslie’s symphony entitled Chivalry (1881) calls forth the following observation about the opening movement:

Sometimes the descriptions are comparative, as in his discussion of the Second Symphony (1936) of Rudolph Dolmetsch (the son of the early-music performance-practice pioneer Arnold Dolmetsch).

In general, the analytical descriptions read a bit like liner notes for a CD, and it would have been helpful if he had provided a concise description of each composer’s overall symphonic style, especially in volumes designated as a preliminary survey.

Appendix I, the ‘Alphabetic Catalogue of British Symphonies up to 1945’, gives information about the symphonies he collected, including information (when available) on

The entries, particularly the ones for eighteenth-century works, which usually appeared in collections of six symphonies, can be difficult to read because he uses Roman numerals for both the works and the movements, as in the first entry, an opus of overtures by Carl Friedrich Abel: ‘M: I in Bb Major: I. Allegro di molto. II. Andante. III. Allegro. II in C major: I. Allegro assai. II. Andantino. III. Allegro. III in D major …’. (p. 801), but that is not an insuperable difficulty. Some of the entries give only the name of the composer and piece – ‘Howard Carr, No. 1 in E minor (before 1912), L: unknown’; Frank Henry Shera, ‘Miniature Symphony (before 1922), L: unknown’; Guy Warrack, ‘The Edinburgh L: unknown’ – without any indication of the source of the information. Though these are the exception and not the rule, it would have made the appendix more valuable as a research tool if the reader had some hint as to how we know these works existed. Nonetheless, this section of the book should be invaluable for scholars wishing to do more in-depth work on a particular composer, as Schaarwächter has done much of the archival footwork for them.

The Bibliography, while extensive and particularly rich in original sources from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, is relatively light on scholarship from the last 15 years or so. For example, there is no entry for A. Peter Brown’s book-length section on Britain in the third volume of his The Symphonic Repertoire, which includes detailed analyses of symphonies by Cipriani Potter, William Sterndale Bennett, Charles Villiers Stanford, C. Hubert H. Parry, and Edward Elgar. Nor does Schaarwächter’s bibliography include two extensive articles by Rohan H. Stewart-MacDonald (one on Clementi and British Symphonism and another on Sir Charles Villiers Stanford’s symphonies), or two articles by J.P.E. Harper-Scott (on Vaughn Williams and William Walton), or Simon McVeigh’s chapter on “The Symphony in Britain” in The Eighteenth-Century Symphony.Footnote ⁷ Several of these scholars address the issue of ‘Britishness’ in music (McVeigh and Stewart-MacDonald), the symphony’s cultural context (Harper-Scott on Walton), or provide in-depth analytical discussions of the music (Brown and Stewart-MacDonald on Stanford), all approaches that could perhaps have enriched the author’s perspective.

Finally, though I realize that the main topic of the book is the music and composers of British symphonies, I found myself wanting to fit them into a framework of Britain’s musical life and culture: its musical institutions, concert series, musical academies, critical press, and so forth. All these things are mentioned here and there, more or less as the occasional short link in the chain of composers, but the reader will have difficulty finding them without reading the entire narrative, particularly as the contents information provided at the beginning of each chapter lists only composers. The index is also composer-centric (admittedly, author-only indices are common in German scholarship) and does not, for example, include an entry for the Bach-Abel concerts, Mrs. Teresa Cornelys Rooms, or the Hanover Square Rooms, the latter two associated with concert series in the late eighteenth century (p. 34) or for the City Amateur Concerts during the early nineteenth century (p. 60). However, as the subtitle indicates, this book is very much a preliminary survey: we are presented with a great deal of information but very little synthesis that might help us to more easily comprehend the overall picture.

In his introductory chapter, Schaarwächter proposes the following definition of British composers:

1. – composers born in Great Britain

2. – composers not born in Great Britain but who spent an essential part of their life in Great Britain; here the degree of the ‘Britishness’ is to be determined individually in each case; and

3. – composers not born in Great Britain but who had their musical evolution in Great Britain and left the British Isles later for professional or other reasons, excluding, however, individuals denying their British influence. (It can thus be explained why the British came to regard Handel as one of their own; it is still difficult with Johann Christian Bach, however) (p. 17).

These criteria made sense to me (with the exception of the last parenthetical comment, as both Handel and Bach died in Britain), but they do not indicate any intrinsic British qualities in the music. Thus, I was looking to the final chapter, ‘The Particularly British in the Evolution of the British Symphony. Final and Summarizing Remarks’, for at least a proposal of what ‘Britishness’ might have entailed. Schaarwächter believes that it is ‘hardly possible to speak of truly British composers before c. 1880’ (p. 796), in part because of the earlier tradition of British composers going to Germany to study. He continues

I assume that by ‘the end’ he means 1945, yet the succeeding paragraphs mostly revisit the issue of Britain being seen as an essentially unmusical land, and after quoting a 1942 comment by Edward Lockspeiser that England was finally abandoning the ‘sort of regressive Anglophilism which took the form of a cult of folk music’ (p. 799), and questioning the possibility of ‘national music’ in an international age, Schaarwächter concludes that ‘Contemporary British music is now as vital and alive as one may hope’ (p. 800). Though I share that opinion, I am still unclear on what – if anything – has created and now creates the Britishness in British music or what the British national musical identity might be. Despite my uncertainty as to the precise message Schaarwächter wishes to deliver, my desire for a greater synthesis of the volumes’ enormous amount of information, and the paucity of recent scholarship included, Schaarwächter’s preliminary survey will have fulfilled its purpose if it can serve as a jumping off point for further research.