Musical legacies, memorials and elegies: commemorating William Sterndale Bennett

The death of William Sterndale Bennett in 1875 prompted a wave of national mourning. In addition to detailed newspaper coverage of the funeral and a range of obituaries and commemorative concerts, there were several discussions of how to mark his passing in the most suitable manner; whilst the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News favoured a biography ‘by some competent hand’ (eventually resulting in the 1907 volume The Life of William Sterndale Bennett, written by Bennett’s son, James Robert Sterndale Bennett), others urged the creation of sculptural memorials in the form of busts, tablets or statues. Particularly striking, however, were attempts to commemorate Bennett through elegiac poetry and music. This paper focuses on two musical tributes to Bennett, inspired by different types of literary model – Thomas Wingham’s Elegy on the Death of Sir Sterndale Bennett and George Macfarren’s Idyll in Memory of Sterndale Bennett (both written in 1875) – highlighting parallels and differences in their compositional strategies. If Wingham’s work can be understood as a refiguring of several of the features of the poetic elegy into musical form, Macfarren’s more ambitious composition aimed to represent not only Bennett’s ‘inborn genius’, but a range of biographical events – from his ‘early orphanhood’ to his ‘gently falling into the everlasting sleep’. Not only is a reappraisal of these relatively neglected works welcome, but such compositions contribute to our understanding of public bereavement, legacy and memorial in Victorian Britain.