Composer, Conductor, Confidant: A Superb Late-Victorian Rose-Gold Propelling Pencil to Royal Hymnwriter: Sir Joseph Barnby (1838-1896)

“His was a most fruitful pen, contributing both sacred and secular music” 

(Press Association, Obituary, London, 28 January 1896)

Commissioned in gratitude for the visit of Sir Joseph Barnby to a recital of his composition Rebekah on 2 January 1894 at Cleckheaton.

Unsigned and Unmarked. 112mm [Retracted], 143mm [Extended], 24.8g Gross, with screw cap terminal inset with shield-shaped bloodstone.

Neatly Engraved Checkheaton Philharmonic Society. To Sir Joseph Barnby Kt. 1894 in cursive script on floriate-etched and engraven hexagonal rose-gold mounted barrel with screw cap terminal complete with spare leads. A remarkable and historically-significant survivor of this influential 19th Century musician preserved in "time-capsule" state

Smooth slider and original soft lead in nib. Practically as manufactured, in original fitted presentation box with partial delamination to external covering and to gilded bordering.

Sir Joseph Barnby was born at York on 12 August 1838, the youngest of fifteen children. His father, Thomas, played the Church organ as well as running a boot and shoemaking shop on Swinegate. Music was therefore present from birth, and the young Joseph proved an unusually quick study: he began teaching when ten, was an organist at twelve, and a music master at a school when scarcely fourteen.

At 16, Barnby entered the Royal Academy of Music, studying under Cipriani Potter and Charles Lucas. In 1856, he was narrowly defeated by Arthur Sullivan in competition for the first Mendelssohn Scholarship. The two scholars had tied the first test, but Sullivan had prevailed after the second. The closeness of the contest was itself a form of distinction, and the two would remain great friends throughout their lives.

He successively held posts at St. Michael’s, Queenhithe, and St. James the Less, Westminster, before his appointment in 1863 to St. Andrew’s, Wells Street. Here, Barnby made his name as a reformer of Anglican choral worship. The Musical Times noted that the music there “became more than metropolitan in repute — not only performed with uncommon excellence, but distinguished by considerable enterprise.” He made the sacred works of Gounod familiar to London congregations and championed composers regardless of nationality.

In 1864, Barnby and his choir performed two anthems by Alice Mary Smith, believed to be the first time that liturgical music composed by a woman was performed in the Church of England. In 1871, Barnby moved to St. Anne’s, Soho, where he deepened his advocacy for Bach, attracting crowds with his renderings of Bach’s Passion according both to St. Matthew and St. John. He was a key figure in the Victorian rediscovery of Bach’s choral works, proposing to Dean Stanley the 1870 performance of the St. John Passion with full orchestra and a choir of 500 voices.

“Mr. Joseph Barnby’s Choir” was formed in 1867, with the first concert given at St. James’s Hall. From 1869 performances were given under the title “The Oratorio Concerts,” at which great works were revived, notably Handel’s Jephtha, Beethoven’s Mass in D, and Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. At the end of 1872, the choir was amalgamated with that conducted by Gounod, and as the Royal Albert Hall Choral Society (now the Royal Choral Society) began giving concerts in February 1873. For the remaining twenty-three years of his life Barnby conducted this society with conspicuous ability, proving himself, in the words of the Dictionary of National Biography, “a choral conductor of the highest attainment.”

His greatest coup in this role was the British premiere concert performance of Wagner’s Parsifal at the Royal Albert Hall in November 1884. He also gave London audiences the British premieres of Verdi’s Requiem and Dvorák’s Stabat Mater.

In 1875 Barnby was appointed Precentor and Director of Musical Instruction at Eton College, a post he retained for seventeen years and which shaped the musical education of a generation. In 1892, he became Principal of the Guildhall School of Music. He had scarcely accepted the post when he received an intimation from Lord Salisbury that the Queen had notified her desire that he should receive the well-merited reward of knighthood.

“No reward of the kind was ever more fairly earned by devotion to duty.” 

(The Musical Times, February 1896)

Barnby was enormously productive as a Composer, though posterity has tended to value his conducting and organisational work more highly than his output. His catalogue includes forty-six anthems covering nearly the entire round of the Christian year, two cantatas (Rebekah, 1870, and The Lord is King, 1893), twenty-one service settings, nineteen songs, and numerous part-songs and carols. He also edited five hymnals, the most important of which was The Hymnary (1872). His 246 hymn tunes, published posthumously in a single volume in 1897 by Novello & Co, remain his most enduring legacy. Among the best known are his settings of Now the Day Is Over and Sweet and Low (to words by Tennyson), and his tune Laudes Domini for the hymn When Morning Gilds the Skies.  

For the Royal Wedding of Alexander Duff, 1st Duke of Fife and Princess Louise of Wales, daughter of future King Edward VII at the Chapel, Barnby composed a new anthem 'O Perfect Love' - popularising the words of Dorothy Frances Gurney in matrimonial settings ever since. At the National Service of Thanksgiving for the Platinum Jubilee of the late Queen, Elizabeth II, a rendition of Barnby's Psalm 24 was performed.

Barnby held strong views on English music and was not afraid to express them. In an interview with The Strand Musical Magazine, he reflected on the state of English composition:

“Sullivan, of course, has done his work in a straightforward way, and gained all the success he could have hoped for. With regard, however, to men bitten with a desire to produce advanced music, the result so far has been scarcely so satisfactory.” 

(Sir Joseph Barnby, 1895)

A celebrated anecdote illustrates both his authority and his wit. A young contralto at the end of a Handel solo substituted a high note for the less effective one usually sung. Barnby was shocked and asked whether she thought she was right to improve on Handel. “Well, Sir Joseph,” said she, “I’ve got an E and I don’t see why I shouldn’t show it off.” “Miss —,” rejoined Barnby, “I believe you have two knees, but I hope you won’t show them off here.”

"Alike in private life and as a conductor, Sir Joseph Barnby possesses a personal magnetism that draws all hearts towards him. Souvenirs of the esteem and affection in which he is held abound on all sides of Lady Barnby's drawing-room"

Helen C Black, "Pen, Pencil, Baton and Mask" (1896)

Barnby’s death on Tuesday 28 January 1896, at the age of 57, came without warning. The Musical Times reported that, only a few hours before the fatal stroke, he had been presiding at a rehearsal of Judas' Maccabaeus with the Royal Choral Society. After a special service at St. Paul’s Cathedral, he was buried at West Norwood Cemetery.

"The Queen desires me to say she is truly sorry to hear of Sir Joseph Barnby's death, and Her Majesty offers you her deep sympathy in your great bereavement"

Barnby had married Edith Mary Silverthorne in 1878, and they had a daughter, Muriel, born at Eton shortly thereafter. The professional bond between Sir Joseph and Arthur Sullivan — rivals as teenagers for the Mendelssohn Scholarship, and collaborators in later life — deepened into a warm family friendship that extended to Muriel herself.

As the Strand Magazine recorded in 1926, Sullivan “was a frequent visitor to the Barnby home,” and it was in this way that he and Muriel “attained that degree of familiarity which resulted in her invariably referring to him as ‘Uncle Arthur.’” W. S. Gilbert — Sullivan’s librettist and the co-creator of The Pirates of Penzance, H.M.S. Pinafore, and The Mikado — was equally close to the family. The Strand Magazine noted that Gilbert “was on equally friendly terms with the family, and especially with the little girl, who never hesitated to consult him on problems of dress, drama, and similar subjects of mutual interest.”

In 1926, thirty years after her father’s death, Muriel gave an interview to journalist Claude F. Luke, entitled “My Letters from Gilbert and Sullivan.” She produced from a bureau drawer a packet of Victorian letters from both men to members of the Barnby family, which she now published for the first time. The article opened:

“As a child I made it a firm rule to write both to Uncle Arthur and to Mr. Gilbert on their respective birthdays, and was always seriously admonished by one or the other if I happened to allow a birthday to pass without doing so.” 

(Muriel Barnby, The Strand Magazine, 1926)

Gilbert’s letters, reproduced in facsimile in the article, are a delight — witty, self-deprecating, and clearly written with great affection for the child. Whilst busy with the libretto of The Gondoliers (1889), he teased Muriel about her birthday letter:

“I dare say you think I forgot to write and thank you for the very pretty letter you sent me on my birthday. But, if you think this, you are quite wrong, for every morning I have said: ‘I must be sure to write to Muriel to-day,’ and every night I have gone to bed without having had time to do it.”  

(William Schwenck Gilbert to Muriel Barnby, 1889)

By his fifty-ninth birthday in 1895, his advancing age had become a running joke between them: 

“My dear Muriel — Many thanks for kindly remembering my birthday. Personally I should like to forget it. But everyone always seems so glad when I’m a year older that there’s no chance of that. I suppose the general joy will culminate when I die.” 

(William Schwenck Gilbert to Muriel Barnby, 1895)

When Muriel was fourteen, she attended a performance of Parsifal — the very work her father had conducted at its British premiere — and wrote to Gilbert seriously advising him to attempt a work on similar lines. His response was characteristically dry:

“Now that you have put the idea into my head I think I should like to compose just such another work as ‘Parsifal,’ because it would so astonish my friends. It would be the very last thing they would expect of me. How they would abuse it!” 

(William Schwenck Gilbert to Muriel Barnby)

Gilbert accompanied this with a signed portrait of himself, inscribed:

“From W. S. Gilbert. Poor old chap! I am a crumbling ruin — a magnificent ruin, no doubt, but still a ruin — and, like all ruins, I look best by moonlight.” 

This photograph still hung on the wall of Muriel’s drawing room in Smith Square, Westminster, when the journalist called upon her in 1926. Gilbert also helped Muriel practically: when she was invited to the Lord Mayor’s Fancy Dress Ball as a child and chose to appear as Juliet, she wrote to him for advice on her costume. He replied with a detailed, illustrated letter specifying the exact cut, fabric, and construction of a fifteenth-century Juliet gown down to the tabard, underdress, sleeves, and how the knuckles should be covered but not the palm of the hand.

By 1926, Muriel Barnby was one of the last alive with personal memories of both Gilbert and Sullivan in their prime. The Strand article noted that she lived in “a quaint little house in that quiet London backwater, Smith Square, Westminster,” its rooms filled with blue china, signed photographs of musicians and dramatists, and the many tangible links with the Victorian musical world her father had inhabited alongside these giants. The Barnby name lives on today principally through Sir Joseph’s hymn tunes, several of which remain in common use across the Anglican Communion — quiet survivors of an extraordinary musical life.

Provenance
Presented by the Cleckheaton Philharmonic Society to Sir Joseph Barnby following his visit on 2 January 1894

From the Estate of Sir Joseph Barnby (1838-1896)

To his widow, Lady Edith Mary (died 30 June 1915)

Thence to his daughter Ms Muriel Barnby (died 1959)