ABSTRACT
The advent of an English organ sonata came to pass with the 1858 contributions of William Spark and W. T. Best, and continued along classical lines until the 1880s. In a Victorian quest for higher learning, the beauty, elegance, and poise associated with a classicism imbued with the influences of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Mendelssohn, bore a powerful resonance. Mendelssohn's visits to England from 1829 onwards managed to bring together many of the successes enjoyed by his continental predecessors. Through his association with Leipzig, and his evangelising promotion of Bach, he could bring the works of the master to a level beyond the advocacy already undertaken by Samuel Wesley. The penultimate composer to emerge from the Leipzig tradition was Basil Harwood. It was arguably because of the Leipzig influence and of a more symphonic approach to style, form and gesture that the most significant contribution to the English canon, the Elgar Sonata of 1895, could emerge in the repertoire.
