Samuel Sebastian Wesley: A Life.

Marini, Stephen A.

Samuel Sebastian Wesley: A Life. By Peter Horton. Oxford Studies in British Church Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. xx + 385 pp. $165.00 cloth.

Samuel Sebastian Wesley (1810-74) was the last of "the musical Wesleys," as Erik Routley called them in his book of the same title (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1968). Illegitimate son of organist and composer Samuel Wesley, and grandson of Methodist founder and hymn writer Charles Wesley, Sebastian was celebrated in his lifetime as an organ virtuoso and gifted composer of sacred music. Wesley's reputation suffered during the twentieth century, however, as Victorian church music did generally. He is best known today as the composer of the hymn tune AURELIA (1868), used in many denominational hymnals as the musical setting for Samuel J. Stone's hymn "The Church's One Foundation" (1866). Recently Wesley has begun to attract renewed scholarly attention. Paul Chappell's Dr. S. S. Wesley, Portrait of a Victorian Musician (Great Wakering, U.K.: Mayhew-McCrimmon, 1977) provided his first detailed biography, while Nicholas Temperley's The Romantic Age, 1800-1914 (London: Athlone, 1981) and William Gatens's Victorian Church Music in Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) gave significant attention to his compositions.

Now Peter Horton has produced the definitive study of Samuel Sebastian Wesley, combining for the first time an exhaustive account of his life, based on correspondence and printed sources, with incisive technical analysis and assessment of his compositions. For music researchers, Horton's complete work-list for Wesley constitutes a major contribution. The first such comprehensive catalogue for the composer, it identifies 39 anthems and introits, 12 service settings, 182 hymn tunes, and more than 75 other solo, choral, and instrumental works, along with 10 writings and compilations. While historians of Christianity may not be equipped to grasp Horton's many technical treatments of these works, they will learn much from his careful placement of Wesley's oeuvre in the contested professional, artistic, and ecclesiastical environment of Anglican Church music in the Victorian era.

Horton organizes his biography around Wesley's successive residencies in London, Hereford, Exeter, Leeds, Winchester, and Gloucester. Sebastian was the first of seven children born of the common law marriage of Samuel Wesley (1766-1837) and his housemaid Sarah Suter. Young Sebastian faced the opprobrium of polite society, including the rest of the Wesley clan, but managed to acquire a basic education in London. His native musical talent, however, provided his career. Trained primarily by his father and influenced by the London stage and opera scene, young Wesley developed quickly into a brilliant organist, noted especially for his pedal work and improvisational skills. Horton sketches this background succinctly as preparation for the substantive episodes of his story: Wesley's five appointments as cathedral organist, beginning with Hereford where he commenced his professional career at the age of just twenty-two.

At Hereford Wesley manifested the conflicting characteristics that would mark the rest of his career. His playing drew universal praise, while his inauguration of Hereford's new organ in 1832 led to a life-long advocacy of the traditional English "Insular" design and registration of cathedral instruments. Above all, Wesley embarked on "the re-invention of the multi-movement anthem in a new romantic guise" (40). "The Wilderness" (1832), his early masterpiece in this genre, featured experimental dissonant harmonies as well as a biblical text carefully compiled and edited by the composer. A burst of works in other genres followed--songs, glees, psalm-tune settings--as did Wesley's debut as a conductor at the 1834 Three Choirs Festival of cathedral musicians from Hereford, Gloucester, and Winchester. Despite these successes, Wesley also engaged in acrimonious public debates over the critical reception of his compositions in the London music press, and he gradually alienated the Dean and Chapter at Hereford by refusing to train the choristers, offering private lessons for additional income, and taking lengthy fishing trips unannounced. Cathedral authorities regarded these behaviors as dereliction, while Wesley justified them as legitimate perquisites for an underpaid and underappreciated artist. Not surprisingly, Wesley's situation at Hereford soon deteriorated, and after just three years he took another appointment as organist at Exeter Cathedral.

This pattern of initial acclaim and musical creativity followed by growing professional antagonism followed Wesley wherever he was employed. Each appointment, however, also produced important musical or professional milestones in his career, which Horton recounts in meticulous detail. At Exeter Wesley composed avant-garde anthems including "O Lord, thou art my God" (ca. 1836). At Leeds he completed his innovative "Service in E" (1844) and published A Few Words on Cathedral Music (1849), his "celebrated pamphlet" advocating more artistic autonomy and institutional support for cathedral organists (163). At Winchester he published his long-delayed collection of Anthems (1853), another church music reform pamphlet titled Reply to the Inquiries of the Cathedral Commissioners (1854), and A Selection of Psalms and Hymns (1864), while developing a late compositional style featuring simpler formal structures and diatonic harmonies. Wesley marked his final tenure at Gloucester with a triumphal return as conductor of the Three Choirs Festival (1865), the publication of his hymn tune AURELIA in the 1868 edition of Hymns Ancient and Modern, and the appearance of The European Psalmodist (1872), which included 142 original hymn tunes. In 1873, about three years before his death, Wesley was offered a knighthood by his admirer Prime Minister William Gladstone, but chose a Civil List pension instead to provide permanent income for his wife.

Peter Horton's book offers a rare glimpse into the working life of a major nineteenth-century English church musician. Some problematic aspects of Wesley's musical world endure today, most notably the continuing institutional tensions between clergy and music professionals in the church, and it is refreshing if not encouraging to read about them from the distance of a century and a half. More surprising is the highly public character of Wesley's activities. His performances, compositions, writings, and even his recommendations for the construction of new organs were subjected to close critical scrutiny by national periodicals like The Musical World. Church music and organ building were newsworthy activities in nineteenth-century England, as they were on the Continent and in the United States as well. Horton's research should remind historians that musical writings and periodicals can provide rich resources for Christian institutional and ritual history.

On two counts, however, Horton could profitably have extended his interpretation. He pays very little attention to Tractarianism and Evangelicalism, opposing theological movements in Victorian Anglicanism that significantly shaped worship and church music. Placement of Wesley and his cathedral deans, critics, and publishers in the context of these movements would have provided a richer historical and intellectual setting, especially for nonspecialists. In the end, however, this is a biography, but by the interpretive standards of that genre the reader does not gain much insight or explanation regarding Wesley's "irascible" character and its relationship to his work (275). Forays into this dimension can be risky, and Horton would be on solid ground if he chose not to pursue one here. But his interpretation does address these matters, and his rather wooden efforts to account for Wesley's erratic qualities as clinical depression, hereditary insanity, family stress, or Romantic temperament do not suffice. One approach might have been to invoke the intense discussion of artistic genius, a quality Wesley himself claimed, that engaged his nineteenth-century contemporary English cultural commentators from Coleridge to Ruskin.

These caveats aside, however, Peter Horton has admirably achieved his stated goal of presenting an authoritative account of Samuel Sebastian Wesley's life and musical activities. Should Wesley's sacred music not be revived in the twenty-first century, it will not be for lack of a careful and complete biography, which Horton has at long last supplied.

Stephen A. Marini

Wellesley College