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Sir Herbert Hamilton Harty (4 December 1879 – 19 February 1941) was an Irish composer, conductor, pianist and organist.
After an early career as a church organist in his native Ireland, Harty moved to London at about age 20, soon becoming a well-known piano accompanist. The Musical Times called him "the prince of accompanists". As a composer he wrote throughout his career, many of his works being well received, though few are regularly performed in the 21st century.
In his career as a conductor, which began in 1904, Harty was particularly noted as an interpreter of the music of Hector Berlioz. From 1920 to 1933 he was the chief conductor of the Hallé Orchestra in Manchester, which he returned to the high standards and critical acclaim that it had enjoyed under its founder, Charles Hallé. His last permanent post was with the London Symphony Orchestra, but it lasted only two years, from 1932 to 1934. During his conducting career, Harty made some recordings with his orchestras. Shortly after his dismissal by the LSO, Harty began to suffer the symptoms of a brain tumour. After surgery, he resumed his career until 1940, but the tumour returned to cause his death at the age of 61.
Among those whom Harty accompanied in his early days in London was the soprano Agnes Nicholls, whom he married on 15 July 1904. In the same year, Harty made his debut as a conductor, in the first performance of his Irish Symphony by the Dublin Orchestral Society, at the Feis Ceoil music festival in Dublin. Reviewing the premiere, The Times called the piece, "a work of much promise ... received with enthusiasm. It has many ideas, always freshly expressed, and the airs are developed with more than common variety and beauty.""Irish Music Festival", The Times, 20 May 1904, p. 8. The following year, Harty's arrangement of Irish songs was included alongside works of Stanford and Vaughan Williams at a recital by Harry Plunket Greene."Mr. Plunket Greene's Recital", The Times, 4 February 1905, p. 9. Among Harty's compositions from these years, Kennedy mentions a setting of John Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale" (1907), a Violin Concerto (1908) dedicated to and premiered by Joseph Szigeti, the tone poem With the Wild Geese (1910) and the cantata The Mystic Trumpeter to words by Walt Whitman (1913).
Through his wife's professional connections, Harty secured his first important conducting engagement in London. He conducted the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO) in a performance of With the Wild Geese in March 1911. The performance was well received, and Harty was engaged to conduct the LSO again during its 1912–13 season. Hoping to repeat his success as a composer-conductor, he gave the first performance of his Variations on a Dublin Air in February 1913. His concerts this time were not successful with the critics or the public, and the orchestra made a loss. Although the LSO did not invite him back for the next season, Harty was invited to conduct Tristan und Isolde and Carmen at Covent Garden in 1913. His performance as an operatic conductor was less than a triumph. After Carmen, the critic of The Times complained that "Mr Harty's rigid beat and inflexible tempi petrified the delicate and fragile phrases, and made them sound like quotations from some forgotten German score"."Mr. Roze's Opera Season – Carmen at Covent Garden", The Times, 1 December 1913, p. 70. Harty later admitted that he was not greatly in sympathy with opera as a genre: "Opera seems to me a form of art in which clumsy attempts are made at defining the indefinable suggestions of music. Or else one in which the author of a plot and his actors are hampered by music which prolongs their gestures and action to absurdity and obscures the sense of their words."
Harty was appointed permanent conductor of the Hallé in 1920. Under his baton, the Hallé recovered the eminence it had previously enjoyed under the conductorship of its founder, Charles Hallé, and his successor, Hans Richter. Kennedy writes that under Harty it was probably the best orchestra in England. Harty's skill as a piano accompanist developed into a similar talent for conducting concertos. Writing of his skill as in accompanying either as a pianist or as a conductor, John F. Russell wrote in 1941, "Anybody who heard Harty in his capacity as accompanist could never forget his extraordinary grasp of every nuance and expressive device. There was no question of a solo with accompaniment: unless the soloist was a very great artist the chances were that he would be submerged by the artistry of the accompanist."Russell, John F. "Hamilton Harty", Music & Letters, vol. 22, no. 3 (July 1941), pp. 216-224 Wilhelm Backhaus and others wished they could take the Hallé with them on their international travels.Hutchings, Arthur. "Hamilton Harty: His Life and Music", Music & Letters, vol. 61, no. 1 (January 1980), pp. 76–77 . During a Johannes Brahms concerto, Artur Schnabel accidentally skipped two bars, but Harty's rapport with and control of the Hallé was such that he kept up seamlessly with the soloist. Schnabel said afterward that he had never experienced such magnificent accompaniment, but tactlessly added that the Hallé was "almost as good as the Berlin Philharmonic"; Harty corrected him: the Hallé was "better by two bars".
Harty introduced many new works and composers to Hallé audiences. His passion for the music of Hector Berlioz was reflected in his programming, and he regularly performed works by contemporary composers including Arnold Bax, Moeran, Jean Sibelius, Richard Strauss and William Walton. Kennedy numbers among the outstanding occasions of Harty's conductorship the English premieres of Gustav Mahler's Ninth Symphony (1930) and Shostakovich's First Symphony (1932), the Halle's first performances of Mahler's Fourth Symphony (1927) and Das Lied von der Erde (1930); and the first public performance of Constant Lambert's The Rio Grande (1929), with Harty as pianist and the composer conducting. As a composer, Harty's best-known works from this period are his lavish reorchestrations of Handel's Water Music and Music for the Royal Fireworks. Harty was knighted in 1925. In 1926 he commissioned a symphony from Moeran, whose Symphony in G minor (1937) was the result, but Harty was too ill to conduct the premiere.
In 1933, he was conferred an honorary Doctor of Laws by Queens University Belfast. The Northern Whig, 8 July 1933.
The Hallé committee made its decision public in a way that Harty found distressing. He had his revenge by encouraging his new orchestra to poach eight of the Hallé's leading players to replenish the LSO's ranks, which had recently been depleted by defections to Beecham's new London Philharmonic Orchestra.Morrison, p. 84. In London, however, Harty did not prove to be a box-office draw, and according to a historian of the orchestra, Richard Morrison, Harty was "brutally and hurtfully" dropped in 1934, as an LSO predecessor, Edward Elgar, had been in 1911.Morrison, p. 34.
In the spring of 1934, Harty sailed for Australia. A fellow passenger on the ocean voyage was a young woman, Lorie Bolland, with whom Harty rapidly fell in love, though there is no evidence of reciprocity on her part. Harty dedicated two piano pieces to her: Spring Fancy, composed for her birthday on 23 April 1934, and Portrait, written at sea and dated 9 July 1934. These pieces commemorate an episode in the composer's life which had remained private until their rediscovery among Bolland's papers in 2010.Blain, Terry. " Classical Review: Clare Hammond " , Culture Northern Ireland, accessed 31 December 2014; and "BBC Radio Ulster Interview", Clare Hammond, accessed 31 December 2014.
In 1935, Harty seems to have still been well, taking part in five concerts at the British Musicians' Pension Society convalescent home in Holmwood, possibly as conductor or pianist, his role being unrecorded. Harty Archives see entries 66 to 72. In 1936 his health began to deteriorate: he was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumour. It was operable, but his right eye had to be removed with the growth. During 1937 and 1938 Harty convalesced in Ireland and Jamaica, using the time to resume composition. He set five Irish songs and wrote his last original composition, the tone poem The Children of Lir. He returned to conducting in May 1938 at the Morecambe Music Festival and in December 1938, he conducted a studio concert with the BBC Symphony Orchestra. He appeared at a London concert for the first time since the operation, in March 1939, conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra in the premiere of The Children of Lir. He conducted extensively during the 1939–40 season, but his health declined once more with a recurrence of the cancer, and his last public appearance was in December 1940.
Harty and his wife had become estranged, and he was nursed through his final illness by his secretary and intimate friend, Olive Elfreda Baguley. He died in Hove at the age of 61. He was cremated, and his ashes were interred in the grounds of Hillsborough parish church.
Hallé Orchestra
Returning to symphonic music, Harty conducted the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra in January 1914, and in April he made his début with the Hallé Orchestra in Manchester. During the First World War he joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve and was posted for duties in the North Sea. He rose to the rank of lieutenant before being demobilised in June 1918. He resumed his association with the Hallé, replacing the indisposed Thomas Beecham for performances of Handel's Messiah in December 1918, Bach's B minor Mass, and Franz Schubert's Great C major Symphony in March 1919."The Halle Concerts", The Manchester Guardian, 24 March 1919, p. 4 In The Manchester Guardian, Samuel Langford wrote, "Mr. Harty has latterly achieved far more immediate control over the orchestra, and his spirit, judgment, and control were … equally admirable."
Last years
In 1932 Harty accepted the post of artistic adviser and conductor in chief of the London Symphony Orchestra."Sir Hamilton Harty: Relinquishing the Conductorship of the Halle Orchestra – Too Much Work Outside Manchester", The Manchester Guardian, 6 February 1933, p. 9; and "The Halle Conductorship: Sir Hamilton Harty and a Terminated Contract", The Manchester Guardian, 7 February 1933, p. 11. The committee of the Hallé felt that this appointment was "not compatible with the whole-hearted devotion to the interests of the Hallé Orchestra", and it decided not to renew Harty's contract when it ended in 1933.
Recordings
According to the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, "Recordings capture the brilliance of Harty's conducting. They include The Rio Grande, Walton's First Symphony, some outstanding Berlioz extracts and Elgar's Enigma Variations and Cello Concerto (with W.H. Squire)." Harty was the conductor of a well-known 1929 recording of Nymphs and Shepherds with the Manchester Children's Choir. It was a frequent radio request for many years, "Victoria Wood recalls a historic day for Manchester music", The Guardian, 30 June 2011. and was awarded a gold disc by EMI Classics in 1989.Warren, Lydia. "Remembering Manchester Children's Choir" , Manchester Evening News, 17 January 2011. Though few of Harty's compositions continue to be regularly programmed in the concert hall and even the once-popular Handel arrangements have fallen from favour in the era of authentic period performance, all of the orchestral works have now been recorded, notably by the Ulster Orchestra. Harty: Complete Orchestral Works, Chandos CD 10194 (2004). Hyperion released recordings of the Piano Quintet and the two String Quartets in 2012, performed by Piers Lane and the Goldner String Quartet. Hamilton Harty: String Quartets, Piano Quintet, Hyperion CDA 67927 (2012), liner notes by Jeremy Dibble. A CD of 25 songs (17 first recordings), performed by Kathryn Rudge and Christopher Glynn, was issued in June 2020. Songs by Sir Hamilton Harty, SOMM CD0616 (2020) with liner notes by Jeremy Dibble.
Selected works
(songs for voice and piano, if not otherwise mentioned)
(arranged for voice and piano)
Notes
Bibliography
Richard Morrison (2025). 057121584X, Faber and Faber. 057121584X
External links
Categories: 1879 Births, 1941 Deaths, 20th-century Irish Classical Composers, 20th-century Composers From Northern Ireland, 20th-century Irish Conductors, 20th-century Irish Male Musicians, 20th-century Musicians From Northern Ireland, Classical Accompanists, Classical Composers From Northern Ireland, Composers Awarded Knighthoods, Conductors Awarded Knighthoods, Conductors From Northern Ireland, Irish Classical Composers, Irish Knights, Knights Bachelor, Male Classical Composers From Northern Ireland, Male Classical Pianists, Male Composers From Northern Ireland, Irish Male Conductors, Musicians Awarded Knighthoods, Musicians From County Down, Orchestra Leaders, People From Hillsborough, County Down, Romantic Composers, Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve Personnel Of World War I, Royal Philharmonic Society Gold Medallists, London Symphony Orchestra Principal Conductors, Principal Conductors Of The Hallé, 1900s In Irish Music, 1910s In Irish Music, 1920s In Irish Music, 1930s In Irish Music
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