ARTS

The passionate polymath

John Parry on the astonishing achievements of Sir George Grove

Aa centenary celebration, a recent concert at the Royal College of Music was a comparatively ordinary affair for an abso- lutely extraordinary figure. In the concert hall, one of London's hidden musical glo- ries, the RCM was hosting the event to mark the 100th anniversary of the death of its founding director, Sir George Grove, a man whose life was astonishing — even by the standards of all those other high achievers of Victorian times.

Most famously, he created and gave his name to the internationally respected Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. The first of the four volumes in that first edition was published in 1879 by Macmil- lan. Later this year, Macmillan publishes the seventh edition, although it is now called (a sign of the times) the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. He would be hugely proud of this 29-volume descendant which will be available elec- tronically on the Internet as well. Grove has become a multimillion-pound industry for Macmillan.

. For someone who created such an Impressive work, his academic beginnings were unpromising. He grew up in a com- fortable middle-class family in Clapham, then a village on the outskirts of London. He left school at 15 to start a civil engi- neering apprenticeship. Towards the end of his life, Grove looked back over those early years regretting both the curtailed school- ing and the limited musical experience.

'I began music,' he wrote,

by my mother playing the Messiah to us out of an old vocal score (voices and figured bass). Then came Bach's 48 and the Sacred Harmonic Society Concerts to which we used to walk from home, returning on our feet! But neither I nor my brother could ever play more than a 'psalm tune quick' like Punch's Italian. We were to be engineers and get too soon into the world.

Grove worked for 15 years on a series of projects which had nothing to do with music. He had graduated at the Institution of Civil Engineers. He built lighthouses in Jamaica and Bermuda and then worked on the burgeoning railway system in Britain. By the time he had returned from the West Indies in 1848, Britain was involved in a huge rail-building programme to which the government had committed £500 million. He joined Robert Stephenson, who, with his father George, had built the famous locomotive 'Rocket' for the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, the prototype for all future steam locomotives.

They built Chester General Station where he was the supervising site engineer, and the massive Britannia tubular bridge across the Menai Straits in Wales. Strange- ly, it was this episode in his career which got him into print for the first time, in the pages of an illustrious magazine called — The Spectator!

The bridge had been difficult to erect and involved floating four huge wrought- iron tubes into position. Two attempts in June, 1849, had failed very publicly in front of crowds of sightseers. The third was suc- cessful and, of course, The Spectator was on top of events. The story had the modest sub-heading: 'A correspondent supplies us with the following as a strictly accurate account of this interesting operation.'

At this point in his career, Grove knew his life had to change. His love of culture, of literature and poetry, and especially of music had begun to dominate his thinking. Throughout his engineering years, he had spent all his spare time going to concerts, reading, sitting in the British library or Nov- ello's music shop in Soho, copying music into his own notebooks: Handel, Pergolesi, Palestrina, Mozart, Bach. He had joined a new group called the Musical Antiquarian Society. The London offices of the engi- neering firm to which he was apprenticed were not far from Westminster Abbey and in later years he remembered his experi- ences of Evensong with great nostalgia.

He wrote:

Many an entrancing hour have I spent there

in the winter months at afternoon service with the dim candles below and the impene- trable gloom above, when I thought my heart must have come out of me with emotion and longing.

He suffered no Victorian inhibitions about expressing his feelings.

On the Britannia Bridge he had worked alongside his friends the engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel as well as Robert Stephenson and the architect Sir Charles Barry. Indeed, he always attributed the suc- cess of his future life in cultural society in London to them. They had heard that the job of secretary to the Society of Arts (later to become today's Royal Society of Arts) was about to become vacant and persuaded him to apply. It was perfect casting for a man with his gregarious nature, administra- tive skills and love of the arts. He never looked back.

Even so he did not stay long. He had been involved in the planning of the 1851 Great Exhibition in the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park. After the exhibition closed, he became secretary to the Crystal Palace Company with plans to re-erect the Palace in Sydenham. However, with his vibrant intellectual energy, one job was never enough. He was commissioned to write a translation of Francois Guizot's 'Etudes sur les Beaux-Arts en Gdn6ral' and the illustra- tor was George Scharf who was to design the Greek, Roman and Pompeian courts for his new Crystal Palace. It was at this time also that he first met Alexander Macmillan, head of the publishing firm, who was to have a huge influence on his future career.

He also took to advising the British Museum on which of Bach's printed works it should hold, and his passion for Bach brought him into print in The Spectator again. He protested about a critic who claimed that Bach was, for the most part, an intellectual composer. 'Bach's learning was a very subordinate thing,' he wrote assertively, dismissing the critic. 'Feeling, sentiment, a burning genius and a prodi- gious flow and march of ideas are his char- acteristics.'

Queen Victoria and Prince Albert opened the Crystal Palace in Sydenham in 1854. Grove appointed the German conduc- tor August Manns as conductor of the Crys- tal Palace Orchestra and the two of them were to prove a potent combination in sup- porting and encouraging British music. Indeed the Saturday concerts were part of the credo that probably brought more music to ordinary people than any other British institution. When Manns eventually retired, his place was taken by a certain Henry Wood — but that's another story. 110. While he stayed at the Crystal Palace for 20 years, Grove also joined Macmillan to become its editor, general literary advisor and editor of Macmillan's Magazine. He travelled widely, getting himself involved in archeological work in the Middle East through the Palestine Exploration Fund. He was an editor of a biblical travelogue 'Sinai and Palestine', a dictionary of the Bible, another of Christian antiquities and an Atlas of Ancient Geography. The breadth of his activities was astonishing. He was knighted on his appointment as the first director of the Royal College of Music in 1883 where he stayed, firmly establishing its authority, until his retirement 11 years later. Sir Hubert Parry succeeded him.

Although he died in 1900, the Grove jug- gernaut is still building up its momentum and widening its influence.