William Sterndale Bennett – A Son of Sheffield

We asked Barry Sterndale Bennett to share with us some insights into the life of his great great grandfather whose work, “The Naiades” is featured in our concert on 29th November 2025.

The year 2025 marks the 150th anniversary of the death of William Sterndale Bennett who was born on 13th April 1816 at 7 Howard Street in the centre of Sheffield. His father Robert Bennett was organist of the Parish Church (now the Cathedral). Orphaned at the age of three he was taken into the care of his paternal grandfather in Cambridge, and aged seven accepted into the Chapel Choir of King’s College. Three years later he won a scholarship to the newly formed Royal Academy of Music to study piano, violin and then composition under Cipriani Potter gaining a thorough grounding in the music of Bach, Scarlatti, Clementi and above all Mozart.

His prodigious talents as a pianist-composer soon became evident to the extent that on a visit to London, Felix Mendelssohn heard him play his Piano Concerto No 1 in D minor Op 1 and promptly invited him to Leipzig “not as my pupil but as my friend”. On arrival at the age of 20, being the first of three extended visits, he was warmly welcomed into their musical circles and became close friends with both Mendelssohn and Robert Schumann. He made his debut at the Leipzig Gewandhaus playing his Piano Concerto No 3 in C minor Op 9 with Mendelssohn conducting, followed a few days later by his Overture The Naiades Op 15 which he conducted himself. The impact was to astound the highly critical Leipzig audiences. It was during these early years that he was most prolific as a composer which included six piano concertos, symphonies, chamber, piano and vocal music most of which has since been recorded.

When Bennett finally returned to England in 1842 he struggled with settling from the relative musical freedom in Germany to a prevailing atmosphere of xenophobia among the musical elite, providing little room for his talents, thus his fecundity as a composer began to fade although he was to compose a cello sonata, a further symphony and some choral music in later life. Fortunately he recognised his shortcomings and began to use his energies as a very fine pianist in the concert hall, an endless round of teaching, the forming of a series of Classical Chamber Concerts at the Hanover Square Rooms in London between 1843 and 1855 introducing such important artists as Jenny Lind, Joseph Joachim and Clara Schumann on to the London stage.

He founded the Bach Society to produce the first English performance of the St Matthew Passion in 1854. The opening of the Great Exhibition of 1851 saw him as Music Superintendent. In 1856 he succeeded Wagner as conductor for eleven years of the Philharmonic Society Orchestra having turned down a similar post in Leipzig and in that same year was elected Professor of Music at Cambridge and finally in 1866 became Principal of the Royal Academy of Music which under his leadership he managed to save from insolvency. As an influential educator his many students included Sullivan and Parry. Knighted in 1871, he died in office on 1st February 1875 aged 58 and was laid to rest in Westminster Abbey.

Like so many artists of the Victorian era he soon became relegated to the footnotes of history but a century later a reappraisal recognised the importance of his contribution to British musical culture and that his endeavours helped pave the way to the British musical renaissance of the early 20th century. As a leading educational reformer and musicologist, William Hadow later wrote “Bennett held a most honourable place on the mid-slopes. He found English music a barren land, enriched its soil and developed its cultivation”.

Sterndale Bennett’s Overture The Naiades was first conceived on a trip down the Rhine near Dusseldorf in 1836, completed in Cambridge and first performed at a Philharmonic concert in London on 20th January 1837 conducted by Ignatz Moscheles.

This Overture was one of the first examples of a romantic concert overture by a British composer. It is a work evoking thoughts of the beauties of nature and imbued with Mendelssohn’s enchanted fairyland. Its caressing lines, delicate colouring, gentle dance rhythms, sensitive and tasteful scoring particularly his handling of wind and string textures ensured its popularity in both England and Germany and numerous performances took place during the composers lifetime and more recently revived and recorded.

Sterndale Bennett’s ‘Leipzig diaries’ are at times amusing with disarming candour and self deprecating. His entry for 13th February 1837 reads:

“Yesterday they rehearsed my Overture The Naiades at the Gewandhaus. It did not please me. Too much noise. So next day I dispensed with the trombones and like it all the better. I directed it myself as Mendelssohn wished me to do but did not know what to do with my left hand. I do not think the people understood the work despite all the compliments paid to me.”

This work was originally written for a tenor and bass trombone. It was only the tenor trombone he dispensed with. It remained that way for subsequent publication.

Barry Sterndale Bennett 2025