ABSTRACT
The English composer Frederick Corder (1852–1932) worshipped Richard Wagner and considered Tristan und Isolde the greatest music of all time. He worked hard to promote Wagner’s music in Britain, while also attempting to establish himself as a composer of serious opera. Corder found the British public uninterested in English “Grand Opera,” however, and for several crucial years in the 1880s, he actually descended to writing Gilbert and Sullivan-style operettas. Corder’s professional struggles led him to take a surprisingly sustained and obsessive interest in his English forbear, Henry Bishop (1786–1855), Britain’s leading composer of theatre music in the 1800–1830 period. Bishop was an exact contemporary of the leading German composer of pre-Wagnerian Romantic opera, Carl Maria von Weber (1786–1826), and in studying Bishop’s career, this essay maintains, Corder was attempting to understand, and critique, the differences between British and German opera in the Romantic period, and the very different artistic legacies they subsequently produced. British opera had been shaped much more by immediate commercial considerations, and compared to his leading German contemporaries, Bishop had very little freedom to create anything new and individual. His obvious heir was Arthur Sullivan, while Weber’s was Wagner.
