Return of the Muse
It’s October 1895 and the spirit of Music has been absent from Britain for exactly 200 years. Why she fled, and why she should return now — specifically, to the Leeds Festival — is not clear. Undaunted, Charles Hubert Hastings Parry, the poet Robert Bridges and the massed choral and orchestral forces of the West Riding send up a prayer to the exiled ‘Myriad voicèd Queen’: ‘Thy many-hearted grace restore/ Unto our isle, our own to be’. You read that correctly: the composer whom Edward Elgar would call ‘the head of our art in this country’ begins his Invocation to Music by swallowing whole the Germanic libel that 19th-century Britain
