MUSIC
Fritz Hart: An English Musical Romantic at the Ends of Empire
Peter Tregear and Anne-Marie Forbes
Lyrebird Press, $55
Fritz Hart, a name today known mostly to academics, was a man staunchly of his time, which expired before he did. Yet for decades he was a seminal figure in Melbourne music, until the brief but powerful musical tangent of atonalism waxed and his career waned.
Peter Tregear and Anne-Marie Forbes, in their new biography, want to right the record on Hart, a fine composer, conductor and educator in the first decades of the 20th century.
He directed the Albert Street Conservatorium, helped consolidate the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, and composed more than 500 songs and 23 operas, plus many other works, mostly in the English pastoralist style. These were inspired by a huge range of literary interests, especially the contemporary Celtic movement. He was also both an English and an Australian nationalist, interested in finding an Australian musical voice, and was ahead of his time in supporting women musicians.
Born in London in 1874, Hart was a gifted singer who began his career as a chorister at Westminster Abbey, which gave him an early aesthetic sensibility and taught him to compose without a piano. He studied at the then new Royal College of Music, where his gift for text led Sir Charles Stanford – who became a long-term mentor – to call him the school’s poet laureate. Hart’s fellow students included Gustav Holst (a lifelong friend), Ralph Vaughan Williams and John Ireland, among other fine composers.
Composer, conductor and critic Fritz Hart.Credit: Trove
Oddly, his professional career began as an actor, and when he came to Australia in 1909 it continued chiefly with staging and conducting popular musicals. Gradually his opportunities widened, especially after he joined the staff of the Albert Street Conservatorium in East Melbourne, which brought the incidental benefit of access to talented students to play his works.
In 1912, he began a stint as music critic for this masthead, continuing the journalism he began when he came to Melbourne, where he had the unusual sideline of being the occasional Australian arts correspondent for a suburban paper, the Norwood News, in his home town. One can only speculate about the readers’ level of interest.
One surviving Hart legacy is the annual free MSO concerts first funded by Sidney Myer which he launched in 1929. That helped the orchestra, then still fragile and largely amateur, to stay alive.
Every story benefits from a villain, and here it is Sir Bernard Heinze, now a luminary of Melbourne’s music history, and long Hart’s main rival in the city. It seems he was considerably inferior to Hart as a conductor and educator, but a far better businessman, politician and cultivator of the influential, and Heinze came out on top in most of their significant rivalries.
In 2007, a forgotten composition by Fritz Hart, String quartet .Op 119 in G major, was found. Credit: Joe Armao
The strong factor in Hart’s favour was the ardent support of Dame Nellie Melba, who involved herself in his Albert Street Conservatorium, but when she died in 1931 the writing was on the wall. That year Hart began to divide his time between Honolulu and Melbourne, increasingly favouring Hawaii as he was frozen out in Melbourne and taking the reins of the Honolulu Symphony Orchestra. Pearl Harbour was a boon for him as the orchestra’s ranks were swelled by soldiers enlisted from the Boston, New York and Philadelphia orchestras.
Hart died in Hawaii in 1949. His second wife, Marvell, outlived him by nearly 50 years, and was a tireless advocate for his music.
Hart seems to have been a pleasant and engaging man, if with a rather roving eye for the ladies which his first wife, Jessie, endured – so far as we know – in silence. He was not jealous of the success of others, or particularly ardent in seeking performances of his own works; his biggest failure was as a ruthless self-promoter.
This meticulously researched and detailed biography is presumably aimed at the professional and academic market, but it is entertaining and accessible to non-specialists.
Hart’s music and his life, conclude Tregear and Forbes, have not just historical value but teach us something about our own. They don’t claim much of his music should be played now, but nevertheless some of it is very fine, such that they hope to encourage more curiosity about it. They have certainly piqued mine.
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