Hamilton Harty: Musical Polymath by Jeremy Dibble (review)

Hamilton Harty: Musical Polymath. By Jeremy Dibble. (Music in Britain, 1600-2000.) Woodbridge, Suffolk, Eng.: Boydell Press, 2013. [xiv, 365 p. ISBN 9781843838586. $80.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, appendices, index.Composer, conductor, and piano accom- panist extraordinaire, Herbert Hamilton Harty (1879-1941) was a central figure of the early-twentieth-century British music scene. Born in County Down in the north of Ireland, Harty was the son of a promi- nent church organist and music teacher. Prodigiously gifted, he obtained church posts in Belfast and Dublin before embark- ing for London, at age twenty-one, to work as a freelance accompanist. Expert sight- reading skills and an ability to transpose on the spot catapulted him into the foremost music circles of the capitol, where he ac- companied some of the best-known artists of the period, including Harry Plunket Greene, John McCormack, Fritz Kreisler, Joseph Szigeti, and Agnes Nicholls (whom Harty married in 1904). Orchestral con- ducting was an inevitable next step, and by 1914 Harty was appearing regularly before the chief English orchestras. His celebrated conductorship, from 1920 to 1933, of the Halle Orchestra produced some of the best orchestral playing of the era and resulted in the British premieres of major works by Gustav Mahler and Dmitrii Shostakovich as well as landmark performances of Hector Berlioz's large-scale works, for which he had a special affinity. A pioneer in the studio, Harty collaborated with Columbia, Decca, and HMV on nearly 200 audio recordings (listed in an appendix). Working freelance after 1933, he enjoyed considerable acclaim in Australia and in the U.S.A. (where he was dubbed the "Irish Toscanini") before he was cut down by can- cer at age sixty-one.Harty was also a composer of distinction. Though he was formally untrained, his pi- anistic abilities and experience as an ac- companist translated well to the writing of solo songs and chamber music, which from the first possessed striking maturity. His earliest orchestral works-An Irish Symphony (1904) and A Comedy Overture (1907)-date from his efforts to establish himself as a conductor and were likewise well received. Success on the podium severely curtailed this early creative work, but he never en- tirely ceased to compose, as the later songs, the Piano Concerto (1922), assorted suites, and occasional pieces, and a late tone poem based on Irish mythology (The Children ofLir [1938]), attest.This last work reminds us of the impor- tance Harty placed on his Irish heritage. He regularly attended the Feis Ceoil (the annual Irish music festival) in Dublin, typi- cally drew on Irish poets in selecting his texts, and brought to his own melodic writ- ing the flexible rhythms and ornamental turns of the sean-nos folk-singing tradition. And yet, because of his Protestant upbring- ing, this passion for Ireland did not include a commitment to Irish independence or an embrace of the political goals of the Gaelic revival. Declaring himself to be a "British musician with an Irish accent" (p. 148), he pointedly championed English music, pre- miering important symphonies by Arnold Bax and William Walton, and loudly protested what he saw as the "discourage- ment of English music" (the title of a 1928 lecture) by society at large. Perhaps his greatest fame as a composer came from his orchestral transcriptions of George Frideric Handel's Water Music and Music for the Royal Fireworks, works with a "national following" (p. xiii) that were a staple of English concert programming until the 1970s.Clearly, Harty's story is complex and many-sided, and Jeremy Dibble, who has published biographies of Hubert Parry, Charles Villiers Stanford, and John Stainer, brings considerable experience to the tricky work of untangling its various strands. Drawing on a large number of pub- lished and unpublished sources-letters and private papers, contemporary mem- oirs, minute books, and published histories of the Halle and other British orchestras, above all a huge array of contemporaneous newspaper articles and reviews-Dibble neatly clarifies the facts outlined above while touching on a wide range of other topics. …