ABSTRACT
The transformation from Mr Hubert Parry, city underwriter in 1872, to Dr Parry, Director of the Royal College of Music in 1895, required him to make a series of subtle compromises to his natural development as a composer. Orme Square enabled Parry to build up an important range of contacts; and one gave him the key to escape the commercial strait-jacket. George Grove was a generation older and single-handedly he shaped Parry’s academic career and ensured that he succeeded him as Director of the Royal College of Music. As the winter of 1884 set in, Parry’s health deteriorated: ‘Felt desperately tired’, he wrote and his heart condition returned. If Parry had taken his observation as an experience central to his growth as an individual, his music might have avoided the sharp deterioration in quality apparent from 1898 to 1905; this was due primarily to overwork outside the creative realm.
