Background
The son of James Davison, of a Northumberland family, and the actress Maria Duncan, he was born in London 5 October 1813.
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James Davison
Edit ProfileEducation
He was educated at University College School and the Royal Academy of Music, where he studied the pianoforte under West. H. Holmes and composition under George Alexander Macfarren.
Career
Originally with ambitions to be a composer, Davison became first a music teacher, and then in the 1830s a music writer and critic. In 1846 he became principal music critic of The Times, where he remained until 1879, exercising substantial influence over British musical taste. He also wrote for other journals, including the Pall Mall Gazette and the Saturday Review.
Davison"s tastes were conservative and he was a strong advocate of the work of Felix Mendelssohn, Louis Spohr and William Sterndale Bennett, the latter of whom he had befriended at the Royal Academy.
He joined Bennett on his first visit to Germany in 1836 where they met Mendelssohn, who had admired Bennett"s work in London. Conversely Davison was strongly against the innovations of the composers of the New German School, including Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner, and even towards more conventional composers such as Johannes Brahms and Robert Schumann, although he was an advocate of the work (and conducting) of Hector Berlioz, whom he described as "a great musical thinker." After the first performance in England of Robert Schumann"s Paradise and the Peri he wrote: "Robert Schumann has had his innings, and been bowled out—like Richard Wagner.
Paradise and the Peri has gone to the tomb of the Lohengrins." In 1860 Davison married Arabella Goddard the pianist, who had been his music pupil. They had two sons, one of whom (Henry) edited Davison"s papers into memoirs which were published in 1912.
Davison died in Margate in 1885.
