John Henry Maunder - Compositions

Compositions

Maunder's music goes unmentioned in Baker's and Grove's dictionaries, as well as in the Oxford Companion to Music, probably because he did not emerge from the cathedral tradition. His works are characteristic expressions of the Victorian era – a style replaced by the music of Stanford, Parry, Wood and Noble, among others.

Maunder's many church cantatas were widely performed and admired, but have gone out of fashion. However, there is a revival of interest in his music, notably in The Netherlands, and in parts of the United Kingdom. Many choirs used to sing Maunder’s Olivet to Calvary (words by Shapcott Wensley - pseudonym for H S Bunce) regularly with Stainer’s Crucifixion at Passiontide in alternate years. Other seldom performed cantatas include Bethlehem; Penitence, Pardon and Peace; and one called The Martyrs initially written for men’s voices.

The harvest anthem Praise the Lord, O Jerusalem (1897), perhaps one of his finest, is a typically multi-sectional work of 150 measures (bars). Maunder wrote a number of part-songs, including a piece called Thor’s War Song (from Longfellow's Tales of a Wayside Inn), and a musical setting of the Border Ballad by Sir Walter Scott.

Maunder also wrote operettas. His Daisy Dingle received its first performance in Forest Hill in 1885. Another, a Comic Opera, entitled The Superior Sex, was performed at the Empire Theatre, Southend, in March 1909, and again at the Cripplegate Theatre, London, in February 1910. Set in 2005 A.D., it takes a humorous look at female emancipation by setting an inept army regiment (the 125th Indefencibles) against legendary female-warriors, the Amazons. The balance of power then shifts from one side to the other, and receives much comment, before reverting in a dramatic final scene.