Sir Charles Hubert Parry may have been an unlikely pick for a future composer, but he has left his mark in a field that includes greats from Purcell to Vaughn Williams.
Sir Charles Hubert Parry (1848-1918), an English composer in company with the likes of Henry Purcell and William Byrd (his predecessors) and Edward Elgar and Ralph Vaughn Williams (his successors), was not one of those child prodigies who was born writing music. Rather, the son of a painter and art collector, he went to Oxford to read law and modern history.
He did study music briefly one summer in Stuttgard, but finished his BA at Oxford with no other training and, upon graduation in 1870, took a job at Lloyd’s of London as an underwriter. He started a family with his childhood sweetheart, Margaret Herbert, who also happened to be the sister of the 13th Earl of Pembroke. Parry, his wife, or the pair together appreciated George Eliot immensely, because the couple named their two daughters, Dorothea and Gwendolyn, after characters in her novels.
Yet after a few years, Parry began to seek out more musical instruction. He studied with and then surpassed the capacities of William Sterndale Bennett. Then he tried to study with Brahms, but ended up under the guidance of Edward Dannreuther, a proponent of Wagner. Though Wagner and Brahms themselves differed strongly on ideological and aesthetic grounds, Parry loved the works of both composers and their joint influence can be found in Parry’s own sound.
After seven years at Lloyd’s, Parry quit in order to look for full-time musical employment. He contributed articles as sub-editor to George Grove’s new Dictionary of Music and Musicians, and upon John Stainer’s resignation in 1900, he became the Heather Professor of music at Oxford. For his musical accomplishments, he was knighted in 1898 and made a baronet in 1902.
Though Parry has both composed and written several texts on music, his setting of William Blake’s poem Jerusalem (found in both the soundtrack and title of Chariots of Fire) is perhaps the most memorable legacy he has left.
