George Onslow George Onslow

André George(s) Louis Onslow (27 July 1784 – 3 October 1853) was a French composer of English descent. His wealth, position and personal tastes allowed him to pursue a path unfamiliar to most of his French contemporaries, more similar to that of his contemporary German romantic composers; his music also had a strong following in Germany and in England. His principal output was chamber music but he also wrote four symphonies and four operas. Esteemed by many of the critics of his time, his reputation declined swiftly after his death and has only been revived in recent years.

Music

Onslow was a prolific composer of chamber music (including 36 string quartets and 34 string quintets). He also wrote 10 piano trios, three performed operas (an early opera, Les deux oncles, remains in manuscript) and four symphonies, apart from various works for solo piano, piano duet, and sonatas for solo strings and piano. Of his string quintets, the first three (Op. 1) were written for two violins, two violas and cello, as with the quintets of Mozart. The remainder were nearly all written for two violins, one viola, and two cellos. After hearing the virtuoso double-bassist Domenico Dragonetti step in to play in a performance of his tenth quintet, Onslow began to provide in his subsequent quintets the option of replacing one of the cellos with a double-bass.

Onslow's emphasis on instrumental music, and his base in Clermont-Ferrand, set him apart from many French composers of his era, for whom opera was a principal aspiration – the period after 1830, in particular, was a time when Paris led the world in grand opera. His interest in chamber ensembles and forms seemed to align him more closely with German musical traditions. Moreover, being possessed of an independent fortune, he could write for himself rather than needing to pander to the desires of audiences or impresarios. Fétis complained in 1830 "Nature worked in vain to have a Haydn or a Beethoven born in France; such talent was better concealed in the capital than are diamonds deep in the earth. It was the same with chamber music such as quartets and quintets. If M. Onslow has been able to establish a fine reputation in this genre, it is because his social position renders him independent...he is still better known abroad than in France. The lack of encouragement for instrumental music, a taste for futilities, and other secondary causes which it would be too tedious to detail, have left us insensible to anything but fantasies, variations and other trivia."

Such comments enabled Onslow's publisher Camille Pleyel, in the same year, to promote the composer as "notre Beethoven français" ("our French Beethoven"), an epithet which was to be frequently repeated by critics, and was also a trigger for rebuttal by those not so convinced of the similarity; as for example Paul Scudo who wrote in 1854 that to compare Onslow with Beethoven was like comparing Casimir Delavigne (a popular librettist of the time) with Shakespeare. Indeed Onslow himself would have disowned comparison with Beethoven's late style, according to his conversation as recorded by the music journalist Joseph d'Ortigue: "The last quartets of Beethoven are mistakes, absurdities, the reveries of a sick genius....I would burn everything I have composed if I someday wrote anything resembling such chaos." However Onslow's interest in classical forms and counterpoint, and the styles of emotional expressiveness in his music, place his music close to the works of his teacher Reicha, and to Onslow's German and Austrian contemporaries of early Romantic music, such as Moscheles, Hummel, and Schubert. In the opinion of Robert Schumann, only Onslow and Mendelssohn approached Beethoven's mastery of the quartet form.

In the years after his death, Onslow's reputation progressively declined; conducting the overture to the opera L'Alcalde de la Vega in London for the Philharmonic Society in 1855, Richard Wagner found it "trivial" and threatened to quit his contract for the rest of the Society's concert series. However, from the late twentieth century onwards, commercial recordings of his music began to appear.