Alexander Mackenzie (composer)

Mackenzie was born in Edinburgh, the eldest son of Alexander Mackenzie and his wife, Jessie Watson née Campbell. He was the fourth musician of his family. His great-grandfather was an army bandsman; his grandfather, John Mackenzie, was a violinist in Edinburgh and Aberdeen; his father was also a violinist, the conductor of the orchestra in the Theatre Royal, Edinburgh, and editor of The National Dance Music of Scotland. Mackenzie's musical talent emerged early: at the age of eight he was playing nightly in his father's orchestra. Shortly after starting at the Academy, he was awarded a King's Scholarship, the income from which Mackenzie augmented by playing in theatre and music hall pit-bands, as well as in classical concerts under the leading conductor Michael Costa. This sometimes caused him to neglect his academic work, and on one occasion, having failed to prepare a piece by a classical composer for a piano examination, he improvised, "starting off in A minor and taking care to end in the same key", and convinced the examiners that it was a little-known work by Schubert. Recalling this prank in his old age, he added, "I have never ceased to wonder at my escape, and would certainly not advise any student to run a similar risk today." Mackenzie successfully began composing orchestral music. Bülow conducted his overture Cervantes in 1879, Mackenzie was conductor of the Royal Choral Society and the Philharmonic Society Orchestra between 1892 and 1899, Both at the Academy and elsewhere, he was a popular lecturer. Among his topics were Verdi's opera Falstaff, the text of his lecture on which was later published in translation in Italy. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Mackenzie's professional prominence brought him many honours from universities and learned societies in Britain and abroad. He was knighted in 1895, and created a Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order (KCVO) in 1922, the year of the centenary celebrations of the Royal Academy, in which he was the central figure. On 15 October 1923 the BBC broadcast one of the earliest examples of a one-composer programme, devoting one hour and 45 minutes to performances of Mackenzie's works, conducted by the composer. On his eighty-sixth birthday, over forty distinguished musicians presented him with a silver tray inscribed with facsimiles of their signatures, including Elgar, Delius, Ethel Smyth, Edward German, Henry Wood, and Landon Ronald. He retired from the Academy and from public life in 1924. Mackenzie died in London in 1935 at the age of 87. ==Works==

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography says of Mackenzie's music that it is "cosmopolitan in style and somewhat old-fashioned for its period, displaying influences of French and German composers, including Bizet, Gounod, Schumann, and Wagner." a "Scottish" concerto for piano (1895), a suite, London Day by Day (1902), and a Canadian Rhapsody (1905). He composed incidental music to six dramas, including the Walter Scott adaptation Ravenswood, and J. M. Barrie's The Little Minister. The funeral march from his music for Henry Irving's production of Coriolanus was played at Irving's funeral in 1905 and at Mackenzie's memorial service at St Paul's Cathedral in 1935. He worked on a symphony but did not complete it. Edward Elgar played in the violins at the première and later remarked that meeting Mackenzie was "the event of my musical life". His most famous choral work was the oratorio The Rose of Sharon, written for the Norwich festival of 1884. The words were adapted from the Song of Solomon by Joseph Bennett, music critic of The Daily Telegraph, who later provided Sullivan with the text for The Golden Legend. The Dream of Jubal (1889), is an unusual combination of recitation and choral sections, composed for the jubilee of the Liverpool Philharmonic Society in 1889. Mackenzie's operas began in 1883 with Colomba, first produced by the Carl Rosa Company. It was a success, but his second opera The Troubadour (1886) was not. Francis Hueffer's libretti for both operas were written in an antiquated style that attracted much criticism. Mackenzie's other operas were The Cricket on the Hearth (1914), The Eve of St John (1924), and two almost-complete operas, The Cornish Opera and Le luthier. This even applied to his one excursion into comic opera, His Majesty, a piece in the Gilbert and Sullivan vein, with a libretto by F. C. Burnand and R. C. Lehmann and additional lyrics by Adrian Ross, presented at the Savoy Theatre in 1897. The Times commented, "Mr Burnand's experience as a librettist of comic opera, and Sir Alexander Mackenzie's inexperience in this class of composition might lead the public to expect a brilliant book weighed down by music of too serious and ambitious a type. The exact opposite is the case." Burnand's libretto was judged dull and confused, but Mackenzie's music was "marked by distinction as well as humour." Mackenzie also wrote books on Giuseppe Verdi (1913) and Franz Liszt (1920). In his memoirs ''A Musician's Narrative'' (1927), he described "a lifetime spent, boy and man, in the service of British music". ==Notes==