William Henry Fry (1813 – 1864): Macbeth Overture
William Henry Fry had a low opinion of American music and a correspondingly high one of himself. “Music is at a miserably low ebb in the theatre and concert room,” he once said of his homeland. He bemoaned America’s general musical illiteracy, claiming there were “not twelve persons in the twenty four millions in the United States who can read a full score.” Any composer seeking publication of an orchestral work could simply forget it, while performing opportunities were scarcer still: “how are Americans to win their way in composition unless their compositions are played?”
A man of bold, impetuous visions, William Henry Fry wanted to be the saviour of American music and to an extent he was. As a prominent music critic for the New York Tribune, he often wrote best when on the offensive, and he suffered few fools. “I must see wrongs stripped of their disguise”, he once said, “and give them the hell-scorchings they deserve.”
Although not quite in the league of some of his more celebrated successors, Fry was still interesting and innovative as a composer. His ambition for his country was twofold – he wanted aspiring American composers to absorb and assimilate the very best from contemporary European music. But he also expected them to add an authentically American voice to what they had learned, and to build an artistic credo around their country’s native music.
It was precisely because classical music was relatively backwards in the US that Fry regarded it as a near blank state – and one to be developed in any way American musicians saw fit. He would nominate himself as one of chief standard-bearers, namely through the tone poem-like symphonies which he wrote in the second half of his career.
Although Fry now takes the considerable honour of being the first American to write for a full-scale symphony orchestra (the first such ensemble, the New York Philharmonic, having only been created in 1842), while also writing the first American opera and being the first composer anywhere to make use of the newly-invented saxophone, he was not of course the first American composer. There had been several significant figures before him, such as William Billings (1746 – 1800, a specialist in late eighteenth century choral music), the French-American Leopold Meignen (1793 – 1873, a one-time band-leader in Napoleon’s army, latterly director of an amateur orchestra in Philadelphia and Fry’s first teacher of note), and Anthony Philip Heinrich (1781 – 1861, a former businessman from Bohemia, who eventually emigrated to America and did not start writing music until middle age). But Fry was certainly the most singular and individualistic composer his country had yet seen.
He was fortunate in having a certain freedom to do things his own way, not least because he never had to earn money from his own compositions. Hailing from a wealthy native American family, his father, William Fry, was a notable printer and journalist who in 1820 co-founded the Philadelphia National Gazette, a paper soon renowned for its reliable news coverage, fine literary writing and for pioneering a whole new field of music criticism in America.
William’s son William Henry duly received an excellent education, although it was a long time before anyone took his musical talent seriously. He later claimed that he first learned to play the piano by eavesdropping on lessons given to an older brother. Although he had started to write his own orchestral music by his teens (mainly concert overtures), there was still no question of him entering into a professional musical career. At the age of 23, his father found him a journalistic role at the National Gazette, where Fry was able to learn his trade, before eventually moving on to become editor of the Philadelphia Public Ledger in 1844. Although he worked in a more general capacity to begin with, he slowly carved out a niche for himself as a music critic, something that allowed him to travel across much of America attending concerts. “As a musical reviewer [Fry] was a determined, honest partisan, an acute analyst, and trenchant writer,” according to one of his biographers. And the more concerts he heard, the more he wanted to start writing works of his own.
Fry particularly wanted to compose operas in the grand Parisian style, and after initially flopping with Aurelia the Vestal in 1841 (the work remains unperformed to this day), he fared somewhat better with his 1845 Leonaro (based on a British romantic melodrama by Baron Edward Bulwer-Lytton, the Lady of Lyons) which was given a 12-night run in Philadelphia, not bad by contemporary American standards.
Fry was so buoyed by the relative success of Leonora that, as a dramatic next step, he jumped on a transatlantic steamer and sailed across the ocean to Paris. Unlike a few of his European contemporaries, Fry did not arrive in the French capital in a state of Bohemian disorder, determined to make his fortune but with barely a sou to his name. For one thing he had already secured his livelihood as a roaming foreign correspondent, not only for the Ledger but also the prestigious New York Tribune. He was to spend much of the next five years living in Paris, travelling extensively around Europe and residing a further year in London.
Feeling like he had landed in a kind of cultural Eden, he soon began comparing his homeland (and indeed everywhere else) unfavourably with the French capital. Paris was a “great center of beauty, art, and bold thinking” and that nothing ever written had given Americans a proper sense of the “magnitude and majesty of modern Paris”:
Every city is a failure in comparison with Paris. London is vulgar; and you marvel at the eclipse of understanding which could plan the insipidities and inconveniences of New York [which elsewhere he calls a “Dutch monstrocity”] or Philadelphia [a “Quaker abortion”]… Perhaps if the Tuileries Gardens were in Philadelphia some money grub would vote for cutting it up to admit vehicles through, or worse even, for city lots…
Fry was never of course in a position of having to fight for his cultural or financial identity in a city that could be cruel to outsiders, and for that reason it was always easier for him to idolize Paris and some of the artists he met there. Perhaps his most significant encounter was with Hector Berlioz, whose innovative symphonies and ground-breaking orchestration would have a genuine influence on the American. Elsewhere on his European travels, he took note of the musical experiments of the likes of Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner, and not least the more colourful, “programmatic” elements to their compositions, as a breakaway from the old classical symphonists such as Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Schumann.
So well did the Paris suit him that Fry must have been tempted to settle there permanently. But he was eventually lured back to the US in 1852, partly by a lucrative offer to become music editor of the New York Tribune. In fairness, he was also desperate to return to his homeland and lecture his fellow countrymen on where their music was going wrong. In doing so, Fry would push himself to the vanguard of American music, not only as a prominent journalist, but as a spirited public speaker and innovative composer of programmatic symphonies.
The eleven lectures that Fry delivered at the New York Metropolitan Hall in the spring of 1853 were something of a national phenomenon: all were completely sold out well in advance. Fry made full use of his soapbox to lay into his fellow countrymen for their artistic complacency, their lazy preference for foreign music and their complete indifference towards nurturing home-grown composers.
Not that his impassioned evangelising worked with everyone. Thomas Butler Gunn, a British writer and diarist then residing in New York, felt there was a hit-and-miss quality to Fry’s lecturing, describing it as “digressive, jerky and not very satisfactory, the man could have done much better had he cared to think over what he was going to say.” Gunn did at least make mention of Fry’s “witticisms”, with one of the latter’s jokes having made his companion laugh “with a strong suggestion of asinine he-hawing in it.”
Something of Fry’s haphazard side was also evident in the huge deficit (thought to be around $4000) he ran up, quite against the odds, from his sell-out lectures. This was largely attributed to his habit of hiring a ruinously expensive orchestra for each talk, in order to provide musical illustrations. But by this point nothing could stand in the way of Fry and his mission.
He then allowed his own music to do some of the talking, unveiling two major new compositions over the following twelve months. The first was the piece for which he is now best remembered – “the longest instrumental composition [yet] written on a single subject, with unbroken continuity” (his own words, probably true), his Santa Claus Symphony. Not really a symphony at all, the work was something of a cross between a Lisztian tone poem and pantomime music, qualities that thoroughly confused the critics but appeared to delight audiences.
But Fry was also a man who did not care to have any of his intentions misunderstood, musical or otherwise, and he duly provided a 1500-word programme note for the symphony’s Christmas Eve premiere in New York. His lengthy commentary was nothing less than an exhaustive run-down of every orchestral shift and nuance contained within the music:
The first movement, which is slow, opens with a single musical measure of Trumpet solo, being the celestial precursor to the announcement of the glad tidings of the Saviour s coming birth. This is followed by some tender notes on the horns, suggestive that the Messiah s advent is to be one of love. This phrase is repeated in a fresh key. It is then taken up by the whole orchestra as though the assembled hosts of heaven joined in the declaration. This is followed by some soft music, the first violins having a volant trill, accompanied variously by the other stringed instruments in a singing strain, while the Flute, Clarionet, Hautboy [oboe] and Bassoon fly seraph-like through different regions of musical space. After a momentary pause, M. Koenig on his Cornet, discourses in an Adagio-Cantabile, on the impending advent of the Saviour…
And so on – and this is only the first paragraph. At a later point in the symphony, we learn that “the composer, after an earnest study of the music of nature, has here essayed to imitate the mournful and sublime tones of the Deity the howling and whistling of the winds and other winter signs. This is effected, as he believes, by new and true combinations…SANTA GLAUS then retakes his sleigh as the flutes mount up, and the retreating music of pattering hoofs and tinkling bells dies away…” After this comes a rendition of the famous Christmas hymn, Adeste Fideles (better known as O Come All Ye Faithful), initially on high tremolo strings, later as a climactic tutti that brings the music to a rousing conclusion.
With its bombastic flourishes (a little reminiscent of early Berlioz), cheerful, folksy manner and inventive orchestration (the string and woodwind glissandi depicting howling winds are particularly impressive), Fry had certainly created a work that was both family-friendly and educational. Where he perhaps erred was in insisting that Santa Claus carried an artistic gravitas equal to that of the finest works of Liszt or Wagner. Indeed, this largely innocent, inoffensive work would provoke one of the most bitter public rows of Fry’s life, as several New York newspaper critics laid into him for his seemingly muddled intentions. Fry would reveal much of himself in response, his unbudging vision sometimes giving way to outbursts of pedantry and outright pretentiousness.
He did at least have little problem brushing off accusations that writing a one-movement symphonic work, with little in the way of classical structuring or thematic development, was musical sacrilege. The customary four-movement form for a symphony was a “mere matter of fashion”, he said, “and fashion sanctifies any stupidity.” He latter added, “If I thought the classic models perfect and unalterable, I would not write at all.”
But another critic clearly touched a nerve when he suggested “Mr. Fry’s Santa Glaus we consider a good Christmas piece but hardly a composition to be gravely criticized like an earnest work of Art. It is a kind of extravaganza which moves the audience to laughter, entertaining them seasonably with imitated snow storms, trotting horses, sleighbells, cracking whips, etc…” Even worse was the critic’s presumption that Santa Claus was a “children’s symphony”. “Santa Claus’ is not a work for children!” Fry thundered in response, before imperiously claiming it had been conceived as a quasi-oratorio (despite its lack of singers). In all, his innovations in both Santa Claus and his earlier opera Leonora, “will be found to have worked a revolution in the lyrical and musico‐dramatic capabilities of the English Grand Operatic Stage, having achieved what for one hundred years English critics have pronounced impossible.”
Such grandiose statements however failed to win over his critics. “Your compositions lack sequence, connectedness, logical arrangement, musical coherence”, one of them told Fry a little unkindly. And later critics of Santa Claus have not changed their tune a good deal. The twentieth century American musicologist, Harold C Schonberg, felt that the symphony failed on a technical level, notwithstanding its attractive attributes: “there is something very, very American about the ‘Santa Claus’ Symphony, even if it is the worst piece of symphonic music ever written. So bad is it that it turns out charming: vintage Americana, reflecting an innocent and naive age, a musical Grandma Moses [a famous American folk artist] in 1853.”
Fry eventually found a way to move on from his unexpectedly contentious Christmas work by starting work on his next major composition, a Niagara Symphony (evoking the sights and sounds of the famous Niagara falls), which he completed the following year. This was not quite the same hit with audiences, although it was probably a superior work, with Fry demonstrating an even greater flair and originality over its scoring. At one point, he employs no less than eleven timpani to suggest the thundering waters, snare drums to depict the hiss of spray and (building on his “winter gale” glissandi in Santa Claus) a remarkable series of wild, chromatically descending scales to evoke falling water crashing onto rocks.
Fry’s art was still developing – not entirely predictably it has to be said, but still in ways that would have proved interesting had he lived longer. He continued to compose, more tone-poem “symphonies”, while also branching out into other forms, including sacred (a Stabat Mater from 1855) and chamber music, although sadly much of his later output has since been lost. He still wrote his pieces for the Tribune, while managing to turn out books on various unlikely subjects, such as his guide to artificial fish-breeding (1858).
His creative inspiration showed no signs of tailing off, and among his final compositions, the Macbeth Overture is undoubtedly one of his finest. Now entirely shorn of the minor technical shortcomings that had laid Santa Claus open to rebuke, the overture is the work of a first-rate artist. Based upon the famous Shakespeare tragedy and still taking the Lisztian tone-poem as its starting point, Macbeth demonstrates an impressive dramatic range, while its various themes and motifs are integrated with great skill. The motifs themselves are richly varied: from a frenetic, demonic melody heard several times in the violins, to the slightly ironic, Verdi-esque march that keeps turning up in various instrumental combinations.
But the most impressive feature of the Macbeth Overture is a sinister brass motif, first heard above scurrying lower strings at the start of the piece, which spells out, in syllabic cadence, the famous witches’ chant: “double, double, toil and trouble; fire burn and cauldron bubble.” Appearing several times in all, this motif skilfully underscores the entire work.
Undoubtedly William Henry Fry’s early death from tuberculosis, aged just 50, was a tragic loss for American music. And although the illness eventually left him bedridden, his mind remained active to the last. It is said that he asked to have a “lover’s telephone” installed at his flat, a primitive device that connected him with the nearby New York Academy of Music. Sitting up in bed, he would listen to their operatic productions, telephone in one hand, a copy of the libretto in the other. No doubt he still critiqued each and every one of their performances with his usual trenchant wit.