George Alexander Macfarren - Reputation

Reputation

During his lifetime, Macfarren's music met with a mixed reception; "his views were often considered dogmatic and reactionary, but, unlike Grove, his theoretical and analytical expertise was indisputable.". One contemporary called Macfarren "essentially a musical grammarian, engaged all his life long in settling the doctrine of the enclitic de." Those who thought highly of his work praised its originality and its tastefulness. According to a contemporary commentator, Macfarren "had great originality of thought and, as a composer, would probably have had still greater success if his early composition studies had been formed on the more modern lines to which he afterwards became so devotedly attached." Salome's dance in St John the Baptist was praised for its avoidance of the salacious: "The whole of the scene is very cleverly worked out, and the composer has avoided anything inappropriate in the music descriptive of the dance, that might be considered out of place in an oratorio." Others, however, criticized the oratorio, arguing that "with all its very great and solid merit, can be said to be original in style only in virtue of the logical results of certain theories of harmony held by its composer." By the early twentieth century, Macfarren's works were no longer performed, a fact which the Worshipful Company of Musicians attributed to a lack of genius on Macfarren's part: "Never was more earnest composer, more prolific writer; never did man strive more zealously for the art of his country; yet Heaven had endowed him only with talent and not genius."

Modern commentators generally consider Macfarren to be "the most eminent representative" of conservatism in orchestration. His Ajax has been called "professionally composed if uninspiring" and his writing for trumpet singled out as "conventional ... although he does make liberal use of the out-of-tune harmonics, especially b ', he rarely uses notes outside the harmonic series and rarely writes the first trumpet part above the first treble staff." Macfarren's music is "capable of graceful lyricism, what may be a desire to avoid cliches in the songs leads him at times to an unexpected angularity of line that seems more awkward than fresh. However, Macfarren's St John the Baptist has been praised as "an original and imaginative piece in which the shadow of Mendelssohn, so prominent since the appearance of Elijah in 1846, is only occasionally perceptible."