James Hamilton Clarke (1840-1912)

[albion]

Having just bashed though Hamlet, The Lady of Lyons and The Merchant of Venice with a fellow pianist, I think that the quality of Clarke's music (in spite of the fistfuls of sight-read wrong notes) is really very impressive, making it is easy to see why he was a such a successful composer for the Lyceum: extremely well constructed, harmonically sophisticated in the late-Romantic style, with a few memorable and varied themes used in each, these Overtures (and presumably the rest of his incidental music) would have served their purpose admirably - the average duration seemed to be around 7 or 8 minutes.



Given the general idiom it would be good to hear them orchestrated a la Sullivan (it appears that only The Merchant of Venice survives in band parts), but in the meantime they certainly afford a valuable glimpse into a largely forgotten genre.

[albion]

The Theatre Museum at the V & A have some material (describing each as sheets of manuscript music bound in a decorated leather cover with the title on the front under which is printed 'Henry Irving Esq.') for the following Lyceum productions -

Incidental music for Iolanthe, produced at the Lyceum Theatre on 20 May 1880 - Hamilton Clarke (S.600)
Incidental music for The Cup at the Lyceum Theatre on 3 January 1881 - Hamilton Clarke (S.599)
Entr'acte and incidental music for the play The Belle's Stratagem, produced at the Lyceum on 16 April 1881 - composer? [including the Gavotte from Handel's Otho] (S.601)
Incidental music for an unspecified production of Othello - composer? (S.602)

Exactly what these volumes contain is not detailed, but it is nevertheless encouraging.

[pcc]

Because of the high quality of the Irving overtures recently posted - many thanks indeed for such generosity and hard work!! - I've been looking into Clarke myself and found a few things.  The BL has a set of parts for his incidental music to THE ONLY WAY (of which I'm trying to obtain copies for a Dickens conference this April), there are five works in manuscript in the RCM's Novello collection, including a "Sinfonia da camera [symphony no. 3]", and a friend of mine has examined some of the full scores for the incidental music he wrote for Irving, which are now at the University of Texas.  I think the opus no. listing may be reasonably truthful; if he wrote that much music, more's got to exist somewhere, and _some's_ got to be good.  I'd be really interested to see his First Symphony, if it still exists, as it got such good notices at its performances; barring that, what does the "Sinfonia da camera" consist of?  And what's the string quartet like?  (It might make a nice CD pairing with Julius Benedict's.)

[Mark Thomas]

some's_ got to be good. 

Umm, I'm not sure that that follows, though it would be good if it was.

[pcc]

Well, if he kept getting published, unless he was blackmailing someone, his music probably satisfied somebody. I realize "good" is a relative term, and there is more than one Baroque composer whose fecundity is not matched by equal imagination.  (Hence Peter Schickele's little bit on "Arcangelo Spumoni" on one of his P. D. Q. Bach albums.) As it is, one of Clarke's flute sonatas is being performed publicly this month in Australia, according to my recent search on him, and playing through his overtures to THE CUP and HAMLET I was rather impressed.  Any of the Lyceum overtures seem better to me than his overtures to THE MIKADO and RUDDIGORE.

[eschiss1]

One of his flute sonatas has now appeared at Sibley.