A Well-Traveled Concerto

Despite the unprecedented opportunities for globe-trotting offered by the development of air travel, it is by no means a twentieth-century phenomenon, and a number of nineteenth-century musicians circumnavigated the globe in the course of some decidedly colorful careers. The Irish composer William Vincent Wallace (1812–1865), for example, emigrated to Australia in the 1830s, subsequently moving to Chile and then gradually travelling north to New York. From there he returned to Germany and Holland, finally arriving back in London some ten years after his departure from Dublin. Thereafter he returned to both North and South America, and eventually retired to France. Two other musical travelers were the pianist Arabella Goddard, who toured America, Australia, and India in the years 1873 to 1876, and the composer Charles Edward Horsley. Horsley (1822–1876), son of the glee composer William Horsley, spent ten years (1861–71) in Australia before returning to England and in 1873 moving to New York, where he died.

During Horsley’s childhood, Mendelssohn was a regular visitor to the family home at Kensington Gravel Pits, and it was on his advice that, after studying with Moscheles in London, Charles went to Kassel in 1839 to work under Moritz Hauptmann. In 1841 he moved to Leipzig and became a pupil of Mendelssohn and a member of his circle, before returning to London in 1843 and establishing himself as an organist, composer and teacher. Like his contemporary William Sterndale Bennett (also a member of the Leipzig musical circle, 1836–37), Horsley’s output was dominated by instrumental music—orchestral, chamber, and piano—but none gained a permanent place in the repertoire. Indeed, a number of works were considered lost, but in fact survived in manuscript in Melbourne. The Violin Concerto in D Minor, whose existence was not even suspected by the authors of the articles on Horsley in Grove Music Online and The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, is one of these, and its survival as a set of orchestral parts copied by Henry John King in 1872 is providential. (If Horsley did indeed leave the country in 1871, as The Australian Dictionary of National Biography states, it seems unlikely that he would have signed parts copied in 1872 as is claimed on p. xi.) The concerto had been completed in January 1849 with a dedication to the Welsh violinist and composer Edward William Thomas, but there is no evidence that it was ever performed: no records of a performance have been discovered, while the set of parts, with just one of each string part, shows no signs of use. On the basis of this edition, however, it deserves a hearing.

Given that Horsley had studied under Mendelssohn, it is not surprising that the prevailing influence on his music is that of the older composer. But the concerto certainly possesses greater interest than one might have expected from Nicholas Temperley’s verdict in Grove Music Online that Horsley’s orchestral and chamber works “show an adequate ability to sustain the larger forms; but they are contrived and without genuine originality” (“Horsley, Charles Edward,” Grove Music Online, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/public/ [accessed 28 May 2009]). And in two respects, his orchestration and his writing for the soloist, no apology is needed. Take, for example, the opening of the work, somberly but distinctively scored for divided violas and cellos, clarinets, high bassoons, and horns. From this quiet beginning Horsley builds a long opening paragraph, culminating in a fortissimo restatement of the opening material by the full orchestra before the mood quietens and the soloist enters to an accompaniment of pianissimo strings. The lyrical second subject likewise reveals a sensitive musical talent, while the agitato into which it leads demonstrates a good feeling for harmonic shape. In terms of formal structure Horsley did not significantly...