Gauntlett, Henry John

(b Wellington, Shropshire, 9 July 1805; d London, 21 Feb 1876). English organist, composer and critic. He was the son of a well-known evangelical clergyman, Henry Gauntlett, who was curate of Olney, Buckinghamshire, from 1811 and vicar from 1815. The vicar appointed his son organist at the age of ten, and he held the post for ten years. But in spite of the boy's remarkable talent and Attwood's wish to take him as a pupil, his father had him articled to a London solicitor in 1826. He became a solicitor in 1831, and practised law successfully for 15 years. Meanwhile he became organist of St Olave's, Southwark, in 1827, and took further lessons from Samuel Wesley. He soon became recognized as a brilliant organist. From about 1836 he began his ultimately successful campaign to introduce the C organ compass long preferred on the Continent; at Christ Church Newgate Street, where he was evening organist, the transformation was made in time to allow Mendelssohn to play some of Bach's larger organ works in autumn 1837. In 1846 he was chosen by Mendelssohn to play the organ part in the production of Elijah at Birmingham, which he did from the full score, to the composer's entire satisfaction.

Thistlethwaite lists 20 organs designed by Gauntlett between 1838 and 1849, mostly built by William Hill, which ‘may be said to have delineated the principal features of the mature Victorian organ’. It was Gauntlett's imagination and energy that established the ‘German’ organ design and compass that made possible both the accompaniment of a reformed style of congregational singing and the effective performance of the works of Bach. Gauntlett also took out a patent for electric action in 1852. After resigning his post at St Olave's in 1846, he later held other organists' posts, notably at the Union Chapel, Islington, from 1853 to 1861: while there, he collaborated with the minister, the Rev. Dr Henry Allon, in the production of the influential Congregational Psalmist (1858). In 1842 he had been given the degree of Doctor of Music by the Archbishop of Canterbury.

From 1839 until the end of his life Gauntlett was constantly engaged in the compilation of hymnbooks and in the composition of hymn tunes and chants; his own tunes probably exceed 1000 in number. They are generally of the plainer type, free from the sensuous chromatics of Dykes and Barnby; many have remained popular, above all ‘Irby’ (1849), which, linked with Mrs Cecil Frances Alexander's carol Once in royal David’s city, is a permanent part of Christmas to millions of people. Gauntlett's musical tastes were wide-ranging, from the popular vein of melody found in many of his hymn tunes to the choral music and organ fugues of Bach. He was an enthusiastic advocate of Gregorian plainsong, though he did not necessarily hold Tractarian views in other matters.

Although his work as performer and composer was concerned with church music alone, as a lecturer and critic he revealed wider musical sympathies. Much of his literary work is hidden away in musical periodicals and in the prefaces to unsuccessful hymnbooks. He was a frequent contributor to, and for a time editor of, the Musical World in 1836–7; an article by him on the ‘Characteristics of Beethoven’, treating the composer's late style sympathetically, attained a more than temporary celebrity. He also contributed articles to the Sun, Morning Post, Morning Chronicle, Christian Remembrancer, Notes and Queries, Orchestra (intermittently, 1864–73), and British Quarterly Review (on Rossini, 1869), and in 1850–51 he founded and edited a monthly called the Church Musician. (An earlier attempt at founding a serious music journal, said by Gauntlett to have secured promised contributions from Moscheles, Klingemann, A.B. Marx, Schumann and Chorley among others, failed in 1840.) In the last year of his life he was writing articles for the newly founded Concordia. He was also a notable collector of early music: his library, which he sold as early as 1847 and in 1849, included some extremely rare early theory books (Diruta, Gaffurius and Salinas among them) and two large 16th-century manuscripts of organ music. Gauntlett's outspoken views and theories, however, and his eagerness to achieve recognition, disaffected some of his fellow critics. Holmes and Davison, for example, considered him pretentious and pedantic. But Mendelssohn had a more positive opinion, according to an obituary in The Athenaeum:

His literary attainments, his knowledge of the history of music, his acquaintance with acoustical laws, his marvellous memory, his philosophical turn of mind, as well as practical experience, render him one of the most remarkable professors [i.e. professional musicians] of the age.

WORKS

WRITINGS

ed., with others: The Comprehensive Tune Book (1846)

Notes, Queries and Exercises in the Science and Practice of Music (London, 1859)

Articles in British Quarterly Review, Christian Remembrancer, Church Musician, Concordia, Morning Chronicle, Morning Post, Musical World, Notes and Queries, Orchestra, Sun

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DNB (J.A. Fuller Maitland)

Grove1 (W.H. Husk) [with list of publications]

MGG1 (A. Niland)

H. Gauntlett: Sermons (London, 1835) [with a memoir by his daughter]

Correspondence: H.J. Gauntlett with W. Ayrton, 25 July 1840 (GB-Lbl Add.52339, item 53)

Obituaries, The Athenaeum (1876), pt.1, no.2522, p.305–6; Musical Standard, x (1876), 134

Royal Literary Fund, case file 1988 (March 1876) [application of his widow, Mrs Henrietta Gipps Gauntlett, for financial assistance]

M.B. Foster: Anthems and Anthem Composers (London, 1901/R)

‘Dr. Gauntlett: his Centenary’, MT, xlvi (1905), 455–6

A.H. King: Some British Collectors of Music c.1600–1960 (Cambridge, 1963), 45–6

L. Langley: The English Musical Journal in the Early Nineteenth Century (diss., U. of North Carolina, 1983)

N. Thistlethwaite: The Making of the Victorian Organ (Cambridge, 1990), 185–95

N. Thistlethwaite: ‘The Hill-Gauntlett Revolution: an Epitaph?’, JBIOS, xvi (1992), 50–59

NICHOLAS TEMPERLEY