ABSTRACT
Hubert Parry was an acquaintance of Madame Clara Schumann and her daughters, who obviously related much information first hand. Arguably Schumann is the composer whose inward life and musical imagination Parry was to mirror most closely. Robert Schumann was the first composer who illustrated several thoroughly modern traits of character in his life and work. Schumann had to supply something for his readers constantly, and would never do it without getting something genuine out of himself. In the early part of the history of modern music, the aims of the greatest composers seem easily intelligible to those who come after. The immense accumulation of material which had been organised sufficiently for musicians to work upon by the end of the first quarter of the nineteenth century, produced a very great number of fair composers, who ministered to the average wants of the day.
