Hamish MacCunn (1868–1916): A Musical Life by Jennifer L. Oates (review)

Like many other people, I came—at an early age—to MacCunn through his one well-known piece, The Land of the Mountain and the Flood, which featured frequently in the Friday evening Scottish National Orchestra concerts at the Usher Hall in Edinburgh; nothing else by him was performed. Scottish Opera neglected to stage his operas, and choral societies rarely explored his cantatas. His countrymen’s attitude to him is perhaps still a benignly patronizing one, putting him unthinkingly on the same level as William MacGonagall, because of his quaint name. And yet here is a composer whose inexhaustible gift for memorable melody, whose harmonic daring, whose musico-dramatic savvy deserve to be brought out of the shadows and celebrated.

MacCunn was born into a well-to-do Greenock ship-owning family in 1868. He was among the first intake of students at the newly founded Royal College of Music in London, and by the time he was 20 had tasted early success when his orchestral overtures were played under August Manns at the Crystal Palace. Commissions for choral works followed, and, as his music embraced dramatic situations in the resulting cantatas, the opera house seemed to beckon. Much of the 1890s was given over to the composition of his two grand operas Jeanie Deans (1894) and Diarmid (1897). A steady stream of songs also flowed from his pen at this time, many of the very highest quality. With the bankruptcy of the family shipping business MacCunn had to focus more on making money to support a wife and son, and to maintain the comfortable standard of living he had got accustomed to in the capital. He had done some teaching, both privately and in conservatoires, but now he turned to conducting for touring opera companies, but mostly for West End shows. There were some large-scale commissions after the turn of the century, and, as it turned out, a final personal project—the Four Traditional Scottish Border Ballads. But when MacCunn died of throat cancer when only 48, effectively, as Maurice Lindsay quipped, ‘the Scottish composer [had] died at 30’.

Jennifer Oates’s study is a chronological account of MacCunn’s life, divided into eight chapters. As biography it gives as full an account as is possible of the man. Oates has been diligent in searching out the composer’s few descendants for interview and in rooting about in various local record offices to fill in details, the most startling of which is perhaps MacCunn’s deathbed conversion to Catholicism—which greatly dismayed his wife Alison. There are large areas of MacCunn’s life in London that are of necessity rather sketchy. He was a notoriously prickly individual who was not a member of any London club, but who enjoyed the occasional round of golf or game of billiards. He spent holidays sailing or fishing back in Scotland, sometimes in the company of his father-in-law, the artist John Pettie. Like many Scots who move south, MacCunn tended to stand on his dignity, which brought him into conflict with Parry, Stanford, and the expatriate Scottish musicians at the Royal Academy of Music.

Oates dwells rather on MacCunn’s Scottishness, particularly when she considers his music: certainly all MacCunn’s major works were inspired to a great extent by the topography, history, and culture of his homeland. Yet the indigenous qualities of the national music are superimposed upon a nationless—and very proficient—technique, honed in South Kensington. In fact, it is in the treatment of MacCunn’s music that Oates’s book falls down somewhat. Early on, when dealing with The Land of the Mountain and the Flood (pp. 52–5), she maintains that the recapitulation of this work starts in B major rather than the exposition’s B minor; it doesn’t. A more detailed examination of the best of the three early overtures, The Ship...