Way We Were: R.T. Jefferies was the founding father of Queensland’s love of live music

Long before The Go-Betweens and Powderfinger, the success of Queensland’s live music was all thanks to a failed farmer who loved the violin, writes Dot Whittington.

When you name your sons Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy and Richard Beethoven, expectations must be high that they will follow your musical footsteps.

But for pioneering violinist and conductor R.T. Jefferies, it would be his daughters Vada and Mary who stepped up to follow his lead in Queensland music history.

Despite images of the rough streets of colonial Brisbane, wild northern mining towns, isolated pastoral holdings of the west and hardships of settlers, there was a genteel side to the new state of Queensland in the 1870s.

Richard Thomas Jefferies. Picture: Supplied

Colonial Treasurer of Queensland Sir Robert Mackenzie had brought the first band of professional musicians to the Moreton Bay Settlement in 1857, but it was Richard Thomas Jefferies who played the lead role in bringing music to the colony.

He is at the roots of the Queensland Symphony Orchestra and the Queensland Choir, arguably the oldest continuously operating musical organisation in Australia.

Small, with a big beard and a squint in his right eye, Jefferies was born in England in 1841, and arrived with plans to become a farmer, despite being an accomplished violinist and conductor in Old Blighty.

He had spent seven years at the choir school of London’s Lincoln’s Inn Chapel and studied violin at the Royal Academy of Music.

He was a member of leading London orchestras, travelled with the Carl Rosa Opera Company and was deputy conductor at the Haymarket Theatre as well as choir master at the Alhambra, a popular theatre and music hall in Leicester Square.

At 27, he founded the Saturday Orchestral Union, an orchestra and choir of 150 members and was a conductor at the Queen’s Concert Rooms in Hanover Square.

But in 1871, Jefferies and his new bride packed up and set sail for Brisbane. Not surprisingly, his farming phase at Gatton was brief and unsuccessful and on February 1, 1872, he made his first professional appearance as a violinist at the Town Hall in Brisbane.

He became conductor for the new South Brisbane Harmonic Society and was instrumental in establishing the Brisbane Musical Union which gave its first concert in December 1872 in the School of Arts Hall.

R.T. Jefferies introduced live music to Brisbane’s St John’s Cathedral. Picture: AAP Image/Attila Csaszar

With determination and patience, Jefferies assembled an orchestra to present the first Brisbane performance of Handel’s Messiah in April 1873, overcoming financial challenges, rehearsal and concert venue difficulties, and the limited number of professional musicians.

“From raw musical amateurism he quickly got a number of willing helpers,” it was reported.

And Brisbane society was introduced to the works of Handel, Mendelssohn and Haydn.

Jefferies conducted the Ipswich Musical Society in 1876 and the Toowoomba Musical Choir in 1884. He was organist at St Mary’s at Kangaroo Point, Brisbane’s oldest Anglican church All Saints, and at St John’s Pro-Cathedral, forerunner of St John’s Anglican Cathedral, where he introduced sung services in the English cathedral tradition.

Jefferies also published an Australian national anthem with the poet James Brunton Stephens who wrote the lyrics: “Maker of earth and sea, What shall we render Thee? … God bless our land always This land of Thine.” It won some acceptance.

However, his great joy in life was chamber music. He formed Brisbane’s first string quartet in 1876.

Jefferies’ influence was continued by his daughters, Vada and Mary, while his sons bearing the names of the great composers were musically undistinguished.

The Brisbane Courier reported in 1889 that the trio for viola and two violins, performed by R. T. Jefferies and his two little daughters (Vada was only 11) had succeeded admirably.

Mary and Vada taught and performed on the cello and violin respectively and in 1910, formed a quartet society that had some influence in the formation of the Brisbane Chamber Music Society in 1921.

The Queensland Chamber Orchestra. Picture: Supplied

When her father retired as the BMU concertmaster in 1906, Vada took over. She also formed the Queensland Strings Orchestra in 1933 and conducted the Brisbane string orchestra.

Jefferies stepped back from public music in his latter years and died in Brisbane in 1920. He was buried in the graveyard at Christ Church, Tingalpa.

The Courier reported that a complete transformation of local musical ideas and prospects had been brought about after his arrival in 1871.

“With the utmost willingness he offered his services freely to all and sundry music lovers who cared to accept same. Perhaps his career in our State may be the more interesting as showing that success in the arduous calling of music is made by lofty ideals and untiring effort.”

His library of chamber music, the envy of many visiting musicians, was the finest in Australia when he died. Much of it was bequeathed to the Queensland Conservatorium.