William Sterndale Bennett - Music

Music

See also: List of compositions by William Sterndale Bennett

Temperley writes that Bennett is the most distinguished composer of the early Victorian era, "the only plausible rivals being Samuel Sebastian Wesley (1810–76) and Michael William Balfe (1808–70)". Despite his reverence for Mendelssohn, Bennett took Mozart as his model. Hadow asserted that Bennett was incapable of "vehemence and passion", but the composer Geoffrey Bush writes "His best work, like his piano playing, was full of passion none the less powerful for being Mozartian (that is to say, perfectly controlled)." His early biographer W. B. Squire wrote in 1885:

His sense of form was so strong, and his refined nature so abhorred any mere seeking after effect, that his music sometimes gives the impression of being produced under restraint. He seldom, if ever, gave rein to his unbridled fancy; everything is justly proportioned, clearly defined, and kept within the limits which the conscientiousness of his self-criticism would not let him overstep. It is this which makes him, as has been said, so peculiarly a musician's composer: the broad effects and bold contrasts which an uneducated public admires are absent; it takes an educated audience to appreciate to the full the exquisitely refined and delicate nature of his genius.

Firman writes that Bennett's finest works are those for the piano: "Rejecting the superficial virtuosity of many of his contemporaries, he developed a style … peculiarly his own, essentially classical in nature, but with reference to a multiplicity of influences from his own performance repertory." Much of his finest piano music is extremely difficult to play, and in Firman's view many of his most interesting solo piano works were overshadowed by "less demanding and more popular works". Examples of the former are the Sonata Op 13, the Fantasia Op 16, and the Suite de pièces Op 24 (1841); among the latter Firman lists the Three Musical Sketches, Op 10, the Rondo piacevole, Op 25 (1842), and Genevieve (1839).

Of a total of some 80 published compositions, nearly half have been recorded for CD; among the most popular are the overture The Naiades, Op 15, the Chamber Trio Op 26, and the Piano Concerto No. 4, Op 19.