Stories from the Archive William Sterndale Bennett and Helen Johnston: The College’s contribution to the Bach revival in England
sense that made her look older, another attender at rehearsals even asked: “Is that Mrs Bach?” Bennett and Johnston’s hard work was eventually rewarded by a first performance on 6th April 1854 of this monumental and much-loved work, arguably the greatest piece of choral music ever written.
Is that Mrs Bach?
Bennett later became Professor of Music at Cambridge, Principal of the Royal Academy of Music (where he taught both Parry and Sullivan), received a knighthood and was buried at Westminster Abbey. But Helen Johnston’s work also lives on. Opera singer Neil Jenkins comments: “As long as singers continue to sing ‘Commit thy ways to Jesus’ and ‘Jesus, Saviour, I am thine’, they will be honouring the durability of her pioneering translation.” This might have pleased Bennett, who once remarked, “There is no doubt: the only purpose of a good teacher is to see his student becoming better than him.”
W
illiam Sterndale Bennett was born in Sheffield in 1816, orphaned as a toddler, and by the age of ten, was studying at the Royal Academy of Music. There, at seventeen, he was discovered by Mendelssohn, who invited him to Germany, ‘not as my pupil but as my friend’. Accepting this invitation, he was made much of at Leipzig by the Mendelssohn-Schumann circle. In 1848, he helped found Queen’s College, London. He taught at Queen’s, alongside his private teaching and work at the Royal Academy of Music. Clara Schumann noted that Bennett spent too much time giving private lessons to keep up with changing trends in music: “His only chance of learning new music is in the carriage on the way from one lesson to another.” Bennett, however, a rather modest man, was evidently a really gifted educator. He wrote his ‘Thirty Preludes and Lessons’, Op. 33, for his piano students at Queen’s. Published in 1853, they remained in widespread use well into the twentieth century. It was Mendelssohn who had rediscovered Bach’s ‘St Matthew Passion’ in 1829, a work that had been lost for a century. Bennett’s close friendship with Mendelssohn inspired him to introduce the work to a rather sceptical English public. One of the big challenges was to translate the text from German without distorting the biblical words, original music and vowel colours for singing. For this difficult task, he turned to 18-year-old Helen Johnston, a student at Queen’s from 1849-51. She translated Bach’s texts into English (learning German in order to do so), then copied the vocal parts on a lithograph machine that she purchased. With a dress
Grateful thanks to Barry Sterndale-Bennett, the composer’s great-great-grandson, for his contribution to this article. Readers who are interested in how challenging it is to translate words so they are both faithful to the original and can be sung effectively, are recommended to explore Neil Jenkins’ notes (see link below). http://www.neiljenkins.info/prefaces
Bennett in the uniform of a student of the Royal Academy of Music, by James Warren Childe, c. 1832
William Sterndale Bennett - engraving after a portrait by John Everett Millais, 1873 Queen’s Today | 20
