William Sterndale Bennett: Imitator or Original?

Sterndale Bennett has often been characterized as an imitator of Mendelssohn. While it is true and unsurprising that there are similarities in the two composers’ musical language, actual imitation is difficult to substantiate. Bennett’s reputation as a composer has passed through several phases in the last 200 years. It was high in his lifetime in Germany as well as in Britain, when resemblance to Mendelssohn was counted as a positive asset, but later assailed by promoters of the ‘English Musical Renaissance’, who needed a preceding dark age and tended to dismiss early Victorians as copiers of Mendelssohn. Recent writers have shown a more positive attitude to the Victorian period in general. Bennett’s individuality has in fact been fully recognized from the first by such widely differing commentators as Mendelssohn himself, Robert Schumann, Henry Heathcote Statham, Frederick Ouseley, Charles Gounod, Charles Stanford, Geoffrey Bush, Peter Horton and Larry Todd. His style was founded on the Austro-German classical tradition and the London Pianoforte School headed by Clementi and Cramer, through his teacher Cipriani Potter, as is confirmed by early sources. This article surveys some of Bennett’s most characteristic piano pieces, and ends by analysing notably original features of his harmonic style that owe nothing to Mendelssohn, such as the inverted pedal note, evaded resolution of dissonance, and harmonic anticipation.