Christopher Whiteside MBE is currently chairman of Whitehaven & Workington Conservatives. He writes this blog in a personal capacity. He previously stood for parliament in Copeland and Leeds NE.
He has served as a County, City & District, Borough, Town and Parish councillor, and has also been a school governor and health authority member. He is currently an Egremont Town Councillor.
He lives and works in the North of England, dividing his time between Cumbria and Yorkshire.
Sunday music spot: George Macfarren, overture to "She Stoops to Conquer"
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This is the last in my series of Music spots devoted to British born composers who were composing between the death of Henry Purcell in 1695 and the rise of Elgar which I count as being from the publication date of his first published composition, which was 1899.
Sir George Alexander Macfarren was born in London on 2 March 1813.
His overture "Chevy Chace" was performed on 26 October 1843 by the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra conducted by Felix Mendelssohn.
Mendelssohn had heard it performed in London and wrote to the composer that he "liked it very much". After the Leipzig concert Mendelssohn wrote again to say "Your overture went very well, and was most cordially and unanimously received by the public, the orchestra playing it with true delight and enthusiasm".
Richard Wagner also admired the peculiar and wildly passionate character of the piece.
Macfarren was knighted in 1883.
Here is his overture to "She stoops to conquer"
I have been putting up this series of posts with music by British-born composers working between 1695 and 1889 because two weeks ago I read a post by a lady called Melissa Chen who suggested that Britain produced few native born composers between the death of Henry Purcell and the rise of Elgar.
She described the output of music by native born Bits in that period as "almost nothing."
Now, quite a few of my favourite composers are native born Brits who were composing during that period, and if anyone can write something like that, they clearly deserve to be better known.
So I decided that every day for at least a fortnight I would post a piece by a British born composer who was working between 1695 and 1889.
I've done so, this is the last post in the series and for reference here is a blog post with a link to each of the preceding ones.
And this post is number 16), George Macfarren's overture to "She Stoops to Conquer"
Sixteen pieces from fifteen British-born composers. Seven of the composers listed above were knighted for services to music (as was CV Stanford, see below. Another became an earl, but that title was inherited!)
Also in the past fortnight, if by "British born" you mean born in the British Isles, or born in a place which was part of the the United Kingdom at the time, I have also posted the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis in B Flat by the Irish composer Sir Charles Villiers Stanford.
Please note that the post below was published more than ten years ago on 21st November 2009 Nick Herbert MP, shadow cabinet member for the Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs, was in Cumbria this morning to see the areas affected by the flooding. He writes on Conservative Home about his visit. Here is an extract. I’ve been in Cumbria today to see the areas affected by the floods. I arrived early in Keswick where I met officials from the Environment Agency. Although the river levels had fallen considerably and homes were no longer flooded, the damage to homes had been done. And the water which had got into houses wasn’t just from the river – it was foul water which had risen from the drains. I talked to fire crews who were pumping flood water back into the river, and discovered that they were from Tyne & Wear and Lancashire. They had been called in at an hours’ notice and had been working on the scene ever since, staying at a local hotel. You cannot fail to be impressed by th...
"Wise men profit more from fools than fools from wise men; for the wise men shun the mistakes of fools, but fools do not imitate the successes of the wise." ( Cato the Elder , who lived 234 BC - 149 BC, quoted in "Lives" by Plutarch.) There is a similar saying by Germany's Iron Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck: Benjamin Franklin is supposed to have put the same saying in a more humorous form: "Wise men profit by the mistakes of others, while fools will not learn even from their own blunders." See also this thread on the "Quote Investigator" website . Let us all be wise and learn from the events of the last few days.
I was moved to put the passage below forward as a quote today when I saw a horrible post on twitter from someone writing that it was "excellent" that someone who took a different view from her about Brexit had died. I won't write which way round it was so that all the Remain supporters can assume the post was from a Brexit fanatic welcoming the death of a remainer and all the Leavers can assume it was a Remainiac welcoming one less Brexiteer. There's been plenty of nasty stuff on both sides but if you catch anyone of your own viewpoint posting something like that who might listen to you, please do call them out on it - and point out that they're giving everyone on your side of the argument a bad name. Anyway, here's the quote from John Donne.
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