Chadwick, George Whitefield

(b Lowell, MA, 13 Nov 1854; d Boston, MA, 4 April 1931). American composer, teacher, conductor, pianist and organist. He was a leading figure of the Second School of New England composers. Highly regarded in his lifetime as a composer, he was also largely responsible for the effective reorganization of the New England Conservatory and was one of the most influential teachers in American music.

1. Early years up to 1880.

2. 1880–97.

3. 1897–1931.

4. Style.

WORKS

WRITINGS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

STEVEN LEDBETTER (text and work-list), VICTOR FELL YELLIN (text)

Chadwick, George Whitefield

1. Early years up to 1880.

Because of his mother’s early death and his father’s remarriage, Chadwick was left to his own resources at an early age. He thus developed the self-reliance and independence that were to characterize his music as well as his academic life. He learned music from his older brother and by the age of 15 was active as an organist. From this time on he had to pay for his own musical instruction, as his father, a businessman, was opposed to his pursuing a career in music. He did not complete high school, but went to work as a clerk in his father's insurance office. By 1872 he had become the regular organist of a Congregational church, while continuing his studies as a special student at the New England Conservatory, where his organ teachers were Dudley Buck and Eugene Thayer.

In 1876 Chadwick accepted a temporary post as professor of music at Olivet College in Michigan. While at Olivet he became a founding member of the Music Teachers National Association and read a paper on popular music at its first convention. Determined to receive a more systematic musical education, Chadwick travelled in the autumn of 1877 to Leipzig where, after three months of private study with Jadassohn, he enrolled at the conservatory. His success as a composer was as surprising as it was rapid. The first two movements of his String Quartet no.1 were played in a concert of student works in May and favourably received. In the spring of 1879 his String Quartet no.2 and the concert overture Rip Van Winkle were judged the best compositions at the annual conservatory concerts. Rip Van Winkle quickly received further performances in Dresden and Boston. Greatly encouraged, Chadwick decided to gain additional training in Munich with Rheinberger; but before studying with him he joined a group of young, vagabond American painters under the informal tutelage of Frank Duveneck (1848–1919). He journeyed with the ‘Duveneck boys’ to Giverny, France, and in the autumn he entered the Königliche Musikschule, Munich. The impromptu excursion contributed to the francophile attitudes which are noticeable in his later compositions.

Chadwick, George Whitefield

2. 1880–97.

Chadwick returned to Boston in May 1880; he began a career as an organist, teacher and conductor, and quickly made his mark as a composer in virtually every genre. He was not a virtuoso keyboard performer, and though he held organ posts for many years, they were secondary to his other interests.

In Boston there were many active choral organizations; Chadwick composed a number of choral works, including The Viking’s Last Voyage for the Apollo Club, and directed the Arlington Club men's chorus. He also directed an amateur orchestral ensemble, the Boston Orchestral Club, for several years. The presence of such major orchestras as the Boston SO and the Philharmonic Society during the 1880s spurred Chadwick’s contributions to the orchestral medium, in which he felt especially at home. The Philharmonic Society played his waltz Beautiful Munich (1881), the Harvard Musical Association orchestra performed the Symphony no.1 (1882), and the Boston SO played the ‘overture to an imaginary comedy’ Thalia (1883). This opened the way for the first performance of the Scherzo from the as yet incomplete Symphony no.2 in March 1884; the audience demanded an immediate repetition, the first ever granted in the history of the Boston SO. By the time the symphony received its first complete performance in 1886, Chadwick was regarded especially as a masterly composer of lighter movements. But the piece most often performed, the ‘overture to an imaginary tragedy’ Melpomene (1887), was considered finer simply because the composer was at last writing music deemed entirely ‘serious’.

Chadwick‘s earliest works for the theatre were composed for private clubs to which he belonged. They were strongly influenced by the Gilbert and Sullivan operettas then making their first appearance in the USA. Tabasco (1893–4), commissioned by an amateur troupe for a fund-raising benefit, was sufficiently popular to justify a professional revival by the Seabrooke Opera Co., and it toured extensively.

Immediately after his return from Munich in 1881 Chadwick had set himself up as a private teacher. By the spring of the following year he had joined the faculty of the New England Conservatory, with which he remained affiliated until his death, becoming director in 1897. His leadership brought the growth and modernization of the conservatory from its original form (essentially a school of piano playing for training teachers) to a fully-fledged conservatory on the European model. Chadwick’s innovations included an opera workshop, a student repertory orchestra, and courses in orchestration and harmony based on the study of actual music rather than abstract principles. His textbook Harmony: a Course of Study (1897/R) was printed in many editions and became a standard text.

Chadwick had become a prominent figure in American music by the early 1890s; in 1892 he was commissioned to compose an ode for the opening festivities of the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. His grandiose score in three movements, for large chorus and orchestra with three additional brass bands, was performed by a chorus of 5000 and an orchestra of 500. Two years later, Chadwick’s third symphony was awarded a prize by the National Conservatory of Music, during the directorship of Dvořák, a composer with whom Chadwick shared a remarkable similarity of musical outlook. Dvořák’s String Quartet in F op.96 (‘The American’), which received its first performance by the Kneisel Quartet in Boston in 1894, seems to have directly inspired Chadwick’s Fourth Quartet, first performed by the same ensemble in 1896.

For some years Chadwick was the director and conductor of the Springfield Festival (1890–99) and the Worcester Festival (1897–1901). As well as championing such composers as Berlioz, Glazunov and Saint-Saëns, these festivals led to his own cantata Phoenix expirans, a colourful setting of Scott’s Lochinvar for baritone and orchestra (for Springfield) and his largest score, the lyric drama Judith, based on his own scenario adapted from the Apocrypha (for Worcester). The dramatic action and some of the orchestral sonorities are clearly inspired by Samson et Dalila (which Chadwick had conducted a year before beginning his own score), though the influence of Mendelssohn’s choral writing is also evident. The central scene of seduction and murder is one of the most expertly constructed and tautly lyrical passages in American dramatic music, though the work has never been staged. Sections emphasizing the chorus, on the other hand, are more like oratorio scenes.

Chadwick, George Whitefield

3. 1897–1931.

After Chadwick assumed the directorship of the New England Conservatory in 1897 he found that the demands of the institution forced him to limit his composing largely to the summer months, which he usually spent on Martha’s Vineyard. He took his responsibilities as an administrator and teacher seriously; conservatory students remembered his close attention to their progress and somewhat daunting presence at every recital. He also developed the conservatory’s orchestra, which he himself usually directed. Much of his teaching was given over to advanced composition students, among them Horatio Parker, who became a lifelong friend, Converse, Edward Burlingame Hill, Daniel Gregory Mason, Farwell, Arthur Shepherd and William Grant Still.

After the turn of the century Chadwick’s multi-movement orchestral works, the abstract Sinfonietta for example, were generally lighter in character. He also continued to produce works with programmatic features, such as concert overtures, symphonic poems, the Symphonic Sketches and Suite symphonique. Chadwick indeed indicated that each of the Sketches could be performed independently, they quickly became established as among the brightest and most ‘American’ orchestral compositions of the time. The Suite Symphonique, cast in four movements, was an attempt to repeat the success of the Sketches, but though it won a National Federation of Women’s Clubs prize, it did not make so consistently strong an impression as the earlier score, despite a clever ‘Intermezzo and humoresque’ movement containing a cakewalk in 5/4 and a parody of Debussy. One other abstract score of this period, the smaller-scale Theme, Variations, and Fugue for organ and orchestra, exhibits a successful blending of the solo instrument with the orchestra, which recommended it to many organists.

Chadwick continued to write orchestral works with titles that in some way reflect classical antiquity: Euterpe (1903), Cleopatra (1904) and Aphrodite (1910–11) continue in the path of Thalia and Melpomene, though only Euterpe, an abstract concert overture, can be linked to the earlier scores (and its ebullient syncopations sound anything but classically European). Aphrodite was inspired by a classical head of the goddess in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Chadwick’s last large orchestral score, Angel of Death, was similarly inspired by sculpture – in this case a work of Daniel Chester French. Chadwick also wrote two orchestral tributes to deceased friends: Adonais (1899), a richly sombre, somewhat Wagnerian score for the pianist Frank Fay Marshall, and Elegy for Horatio Parker (1920).

There is little doubt that the work on which Chadwick pinned his greatest hopes was his verismo opera The Padrone. Set in an unnamed city on the American east coast (presumably Boston), the opera tells a realistic story of poor Italian immigrants whose lives are ruined by a small-time mafioso figure who controls them. The composer originally intended that the immigrants should sing in Italian and the ‘Americans’ in English, though this plan was not carried out; the entire opera is in English. It is colourfully scored and fast-paced, reflecting careful study of late Verdi and of Puccini. It is rare among American operas in that it avoids both the mythological or distant historical settings and the exotic themes of American Indians found in others of the time. The Padrone is an opera of modern life, reflecting the current social situation. Had it been produced, it might well have pointed the way to a new manner of operatic composition in the USA, one making the most of Americans’ traditional directness and realistic outlook. Instead the score was turned down by the Metropolitan Opera and a possible production in Chicago fell through when the impresario there suddenly died. The Padrone was performed, fittingly, by the New England Conservatory Opera Theater under the direction of John Moriarty (Boston, 11 April 1997).

Aside from The Padrone, most of Chadwick’s major works in the decade 1909–18 were composed for the Norfolk Festival; these include his Christmas oratorio Noël (1907–8), the symphonic fantasy Aphrodite (1910–11), Tam O’Shanter (1914–15) and Anniversary Overture (1922). Chadwick was so delighted with the rehearsal conditions and the quality of the performances of Noel and Aphrodite that he offered Tam O’Shanter as a gift to the festival in appreciation of its work. Noel was popular with choral societies for some years, and Aphrodite obtained several performances with American orchestras (including the Chicago SO conducted by Frederick Stock). But it is Tam O’Shanter that has so far showed the greatest staying power; a kind of American Till Eulenspiegel, it is Chadwick’s homage to his own Celtic heritage, lovingly evoking the Robert Burns poem with warmth and humour.

Chadwick’s creativity declined in his last years. He suffered regularly from gout, and a shipboard injury received in 1898 never healed properly, forcing him to use a cane in his later years. In the 1920s he wrote little, though he did rework Rip Van Winkle for publication, and his monograph on Horatio Parker appeared (1921/R). Chadwick received many honours; in addition to prizes for his compositions, he was a member of the National Institute and the American Academy of Arts and Letters (elected in 1898 and 1909, respectively); the latter awarded him a gold medal in 1928. In his later years there were occasional all-Chadwick concerts and Chadwick's contribution to the creation of an American musical language was recognized.

Chadwick, George Whitefield

4. Style.

Although Chadwick has sometimes been called a ‘Boston classicist’, with all of its connotations of stuffiness, both his life and his music indicate the contrary. His music and his personality had indeed an academic flavour; but as an American of rural stock, a high-school dropout, and vagabond scholar he was hardly a stereotype. Numerous anecdotes testify to his sense of humour and his outspokenness, which often gave the impression of gruffness. His best works show him to have been a pioneer in freeing American musical expression from German conservatory style. Very early in his career commentators noted ‘American’ traits in his music, as in the String Quartet no.2 and the scherzos of his first two symphonies. Some works, such as the lyric drama Judith, show an interest in French sonorities, while The Padrone, for all its evocation of American urban life, draws on the techniques of verismo opera. In the scherzo of the Second Symphony he uses a pentatonic melody resembling black American song nine years before Dvořák included the better-known example in his Symphony no.9 (‘From the New World’). Most movements of Chadwick’s symphony use a variant of the introductory horn call, another pentatonic idea. Some melodies are related to hymnody and folksong. Chadwick’s most representative works – the Symphony no.2, String Quartet no.4, The Padrone, Symphonic Sketches, Tam O’Shanter, and many of the songs – illustrate a recognizable American style characterized by the unique rhythms of Anglo-American psalmody, Afro-Caribbean dance syncopations, parallel voice-leading (4ths and 5ths), and virtuoso orchestration. His vocal works frequently display a sensitivity, unusual for the time, to characteristic syncopated or sprung rhythms of the English language, though there are also passages that could just as easily be settings of German or Latin.

The vagaries of Chadwick’s reputation have paralleled that of the Second New England School in general. From a zenith of popularity achieved only after years of struggle for acceptance before World War I, it fell to a nadir of neglect during the postwar years. Then, after scholarly research into the roots of the present American musical establishment was begun after World War II, interest in Chadwick was again aroused, the conflict of the generations having been forgotten.

Chadwick, George Whitefield

WORKS

(selective list)

MS in US-Bc, NYyellin

Principal publishers: Birchard, Boston, Church, Day & Hunter, Ditson, Gray, Harms, G. Schirmer, Schmidt, Wood

stage

choral-orchestal

instrumental

songs

Chadwick, George Whitefield

WRITINGS

Harmony: a Course of Study (Boston, MA, 1897/R)

Chadwick, George Whitefield

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Grove2, Amer. suppl.

F.O. Jones: ‘Chadwick, George W.’, A Handbook of American Music and Musicians (Canaseraga, NY, 1886/R)

J. Tiersot: Musiques pittoresques: promenades musicales à l’Exposition de 1889 (Paris, 1889), 55

R. Hughes: Contemporary American Composers (Boston, 1900)

L.C. Elson: ‘American Tone-Masters’, The History of American Music (New York, 1904, enlarged 2/1915, enlarged 3/1925/R by A. Elson), 165–90, esp. 170–76

C. Engel: ‘George W. Chadwick’, MQ, x (1924), 438–57

J.T. Howard: Our American Music (New York, 1931, 4/1965)

A.L. Langley: ‘Chadwick and the New England Conservatory of Music’, MQ, xxi (1935), 39–52

G. Chase: America’s Music (New York, 1955, 2/1966/R)

V.F. Yellin: The Life and Operatic Works of George Whitefield Chadwick (diss., Harvard U., 1957) [incl. details of stage works]

H.W. Hitchcock: Music in the United States: a Historical Introduction (New York, 1969, 2/1974)

V.F Yellin: ‘Chadwick, American Musical Realist’, MQ, lxi (1975), 77–97

S. Ledbetter: Introduction to George W. Chadwick: Songs to Poems by Arlo Bates (New York, 1980)

S. Ledbetter: ‘George W. Chadwick: a Sourcebook’ (1984, MS, US-Bc)

G. Gladden: The Organ Works of George Whitefield Chadwick (diss., U. of Louisiana, 1985)

A. McKinley: ‘Music for the Dedication Ceremonies of the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, 1892’, American Music, iii/1 (1985), 42–51

S. Ledbetter: ‘Two Seductresses: Saint-Saëns's Delilah and Chadwick's Judith’, A Celebration of American Music: Words and Music in Honour of H. Wiley Hitchcock (Ann Arbor, 1990), 281–331

V.F. Yellin: Chadwick, Yankee Composer (Washington DC, 1990)