ABSTRACT
This chapter examines three composers, G. W. L. Marshall-Hall, Fritz Hart, and Alfred Hill. It focuses particularly on the personal interpretations these three composers made of a Wagnerian-inspired European musical idiom, which in the context of Australian musical culture of the turn of the century is an obvious choice. Hart's encounter with Wagner's music had been, like Marshall-Hall's, a life-altering one. He began his musical life as a chorister at Westminster Abbey in London, but in 1889, at the age of 15, he left school at his father's behest to work as a clerk in a stockbroker's office in the city. By chance he shared a room at this time with an articled clerk who had studied in Germany and already was a committed Wagnerite. The musical signifier for Hart's Celticism was also to be Wagnerian, albeit this time one conditioned by the later style of Wagner that Nietzsche had come so violently to reject.
