ABSTRACT
Mendelssohnian references indeed abound in the score, beginning with the opening instrumental Introduction, an A minor Andante serioso in triple time against which the chorus asserts in C major and duple time the chorale 'Ye Christian people now rejoice'. William Sterndale Bennett as one of several nineteenth-century English composers who adopted a comfortable style safely tethered to the elegant, refined romanticism of Mendelssohn. Bennett's art of allusion, like that of Robert Schumann (and indeed that of Mendelssohn and his sister) reminds us that the mystery of much nineteenth-century music lay in its intertextuality, its ability to reach beyond the printed page to a common musical language. In approaching the genre of the piano sonata, Bennett had at his disposal few models from his friend. Conventional wisdom might impel to dismiss the Romanza as a derivative work that foreshadowed the ardent Mendelssohn worship that took hold in England after the composer's death in 1847.
