ABSTRACT
For Ernest Walker, the premiere of C. Hubert H. Parry’s Scenes from Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound at the Three Choirs Festival in Gloucester in 1880 inaugurated an “English Renaissance” in music, a view widely embraced in British musical historiography after its publication in 1907.2 Walker’s observation, advanced merely as a rough division, nonetheless astutely identified the moment when English composers radically departed from a Victorian idiom derived from oratorios by Mendelssohn and Spohr-models so timeworn they were ridiculed in The Mikado.3 Instead, young composers revitalized native traditions that had supposedly lain moribund since the seventeenth century, either by cultivating indigenous folk song, Renaissance polyphony, and the Baroque masque, or by adopting contemporary Continental techniques associated with Wagner, Liszt, and Brahms. Marking this development’s onset, however, were premieres of two works by Parry, namely his Piano Concerto in F-sharp major, performed in London on 3 April 1880, and the Scenes, produced five months later.
