Background
Frederick Grant Gleason was born on 18 December 1848, in Middletown, Connecticut. He was the son of Frederic L. Gleason, a banker and an excellent amateur flutist, and Martha Willard.
Frederick Grant Gleason was born on 18 December 1848, in Middletown, Connecticut. He was the son of Frederic L. Gleason, a banker and an excellent amateur flutist, and Martha Willard.
Gleason showed a talent for music early in life and at sixteen attempted to write a Christmas oratorio. It was his father’s wish that he enter a theological seminary and study for the Congregational ministry, but he offered some resistance, and was finally allowed to turn to music instead.
After studying with Dudley Buck in Hartford, Connecticut, Gleason went to Europe in 1869, and there studied with Moscheles, Richter, Plaidy, Lobe, Loeschhorn, Weitzmann, and Haupt. He did not return until, at the age of twenty-seven, he felt that he was thoroughly equipped for the career he had chosen.
The record of Gleason's subsequent activities is one of consistent hard work as an organist and composer. After acting as organist in churches in Hartford and New Britain, Connecticut, he was appointed in 1877, teacher of piano, organ, composition, and orchestration at the Hershey School of Music in Chicago.
He was elected examiner, director, and fellow of the American College of Musicians in 1884, president of the Chicago Manuscript Society in 1896, president-general of the American Patriotic Musical League in 1897, and from 1900 until his death, he was director of the Chicago Auditorium concerts. In addition to these various musical activities he found time to act as a music-critic for Chicago papers, notably the Tribune.
When he died, Frederick left several scores in manuscript, with the proviso that they were not to be publicly performed until a half-century after his decease.
Gleason ranks among the nineteenth-century creators of American music who played a worthy minor part in the development of American composition. His outstanding works are a setting of “The Culprit Fay” for soli, chorus, and orchestra; two symphonic poems, “Edris” and “The Song of Life”; and the text and music of two grand operas, Otho Visconti, and Montezuma. Gleason was a valuable pioneer of good music in the West but, aside from scholarly quality, his works, like those of other American composers of his generation, are now somewhat outmoded. The overture to Otho Visconti was performed in the Gewandhaus, Leipzig, in 1892, and at the World’s Fair in Chicago by Theodore Thomas’s orchestra. His lesser works include a number of songs, sacred and secular choral numbers, piano pieces, a sonata, theme, and variations for organ, and a piano concerto.
In both of his dramatic works, Gleason tried “to combine the melodic element of Italian opera with the richness of harmonization characteristic of the modern German school and the leitmotif idea of Richard Wagner combining the lyric and dramatic elements in due proportion”.
He also employed the same scheme in his cantata, “The Culprit Fay. ”
Gleason's creative processes were intellectual rather than inspirational. He wrote at a time when the most distinguished of German composers were slavishly imitating Wagner in every detail of his creative procedure, and when the Wagnerian road seemed the only one to take in operatic composition.
Despite his conscientiousness and industry, his mastery of counterpoint, and his very considerable technical skill, his operas, and symphonic works may be said to deserve the verdict that they were “too deep and dry for the general hearer. ”
Hamilton, in his mention of Gleason, lays the stress on his symphonic, not his operatic compositions.
On October 19, 1887, Gleason was married to Mabel Blanche Kennicott of Chicago.
