Barry Millington, Wagner and the ‘English Musical Renaissance’
Barry Millington, Wagner and the ‘English Musical Renaissance’
March 2024, Volume 18, Number 1, 4–26.
Any account such as this of the interaction of Wagner and his works with the phenomenon known as the ‘English Musical Renaissance’ – the upsurge of music that took place in Britain in the second half of the 19th century – has first to acknowledge the musicological debate around that phenomenon in recent decades.
The conventional historiography of a musical renaissance, initiated circa 1880 by a handful of composers spearheaded by Charles Hubert Hastings Parry and Charles Villiers Stanford, has controversially been challenged by scholars seeking to establish a broader view, taking into account socio-political and cultural influences with regard to the canon. Stimulating as much of the argumentation is, the revisionists’ case hardly undermines the notion of a seismic shift in the country’s musical affairs in the final decades of the century – one moreover crucially precipitated by Wagner.