(The late 19th century witnessed unprecedented musical gro...)
The late 19th century witnessed unprecedented musical growth in the United States, and it is impossible to imagine a Copland, an Ives or even a Gershwin without the pioneering groundwork of the 'Boston Six', of whom John Knowles Paine was the senior member. Favorite among his own works, Paine's Second Symphony was described on its New York premieere as "a serious, important and totally beautiful work." His Prelude to the tragic play Oedipus Tyrannus was an immediate hit, while An Ocean Fantasy was his last orchestral piece.
John Knowles Paine was an American composer, teacher and organist. He was the first American to win wide recognition as a composer and the first professor of music at an American university.
Background
John Knowles Paine was born on January 9, 1839 in Portland, Maine, United States. He was the son of Jacob Small and Rebecca (Beebe) Downes Paine and was descended from Thomas Payne who emigrated to Yarmouth, in Massachusetts, in the seventeenth century. He came of a musical family. His grandfather, John K. H. Paine, built the first organ in Maine. Of Jacob's five children John Knowles was precociously gifted and was soon destined for a musical career.
Education
John Knowles Paine studied in Portland with an excellent musician, the organist Hermann Kotzschmar. In 1857, at the age of nineteen, he was given the privilege of being sent to Germany for further study in music. Here he became a pupil of Karl August Haupt in Berlin, one of the foremost German organists, and here he gained that power and facility in organ-playing that was his first distinction and that first established his position as a musician. He is said to have studied also theory and composition with Wieprecht and Teschner. He remained in Berlin for three years and there made a name for himself.
Career
In 1861 John Knowles Paine appeared in the city as an organ virtuoso, when his playing was praised by German critics as showing mastery of the instrument and especially a command of the difficulties of Bach's music. He also played with success in other German cities and gave an organ recital in London that won for him commendation. In that year, 1861, he returned to America. His first appearance was at a concert in Portland. It was not long before he made for himself the reputation of one of the leading organists of the United States. The great Walcker organ in the Music Hall, Boston, one of the most notable organs in the country at that time, had been bought in Germany, brought to Boston, and put into that hall largely through Paine's efforts while he was still a student in Germany. On this he gave frequent recitals, heard by large audiences, in which he introduced many works of Bach not then widely known in America, and a source of much fretful complaint in the press. He also became organist of the West Church in Boston.
In 1862 Paine resigned his church position to take the post of director of music at Harvard College, acting as organist and choir-master. The catalogue of the college had offered musical instruction "with special reference to the devotional services in the Chapel, " and extending to the "higher branches of part-singing, " as early as 1856. In the year after his appointment as "instructor of music" Paine added two lecture courses, one on musical form and another on counterpoint and fugue. In 1869 Charles W. Eliot became president of the university, and immediately set about carrying out his revolutionary plans for an elective system and a great increase in the number and variety of courses open to undergraduates. In these Paine had a share. In 1872 he announced a comprehensive elective course in musical theory and in 1873, in the face of strong conservative opposition, he was made an assistant professor and offered three new courses in theory, adding the next year a course in the history of music.
One of the chief opponents of these plans was Francis Parkman, the historian, a member of the Corporation, who is said to have ended every deliberation of that body with the words "musica delenda est", and who, for many subsequent years, when the college was faced with a need of funds, was always ready with a motion to abolish the musical department. Finally, in 1875, Paine was promoted to a full professorship, occupying one of the first chairs in music to be established in any American university. He continued his activity in his Harvard professorship till his resignation at the end of the academic year 1905, a short time before his death. He had begun in his youth in Portland to show his ambition to be a composer.
One of his early elaborate works was a Mass in D, which he went back to Berlin in 1867 to conduct at a concert of the Singakademie. Contemporary reports suggest that it was a highly competent but scarcely inspired composition. In 1873 his oratorio of "St. Peter" was given in Portland, then a year later in Boston by the Handel and Haydn Society. That, too, was found more commendable for its competence than admirable for its depth and beauty. The fact was that Paine had not yet found himself or emancipated himself wholly from the pupillary status. A great progress was noted in his first symphony, in C minor (opus 23), played in 1876 by Theodore Thomas, and much more in his second symphony (opus 34), entitled "Im Frühling" played in 1880. At its first performance in Boston this symphony aroused great enthusiasm.
This approbation extended to numerous other performances in Boston and elsewhere. The next year another and still higher point in his career was reached. In 1881 the classical department of Harvard gave a stage performance, in Greek, of Sophocles' 14dipus Tyrannus, for which Paine composed the music, consisting of a prelude for orchestra and numerous choruses for male voices. The performance attracted widespread attention as the first of such classical revivals in the United States upon such a scale, and made a deep impression not only upon scholars but also upon music-lovers.
After his resignation in 1905 he hoped to devote himself to composition, but the time allotted him was short. At the time of his death he was at work on a symphonic poem, "Lincoln, " left unfinished. Paine's position in American music was recognized by commissions given him to set to music Whittier's hymn for the opening of the Centennial Exposition in 1876; to write a "Columbus March and Hymn" for the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago; and a setting of Stedman's "Hymn of the West" for the St. Louis Exposition in 1904. In 1903 he was the official delegate of Harvard to the Wagner Festival in Berlin, where he received a gold medal, and his prelude was played at an international concert. In his later years he spent much time on an opera, Azara, for which he himself wrote the text, and by which he set great store. The subject is that of Aucassin and Nicolette in the time of the Trouvères in Provence. It was finished and published in English and in a German translation, but it was never produced upon the operatic stage. Concert performances of it were given in Boston several times that disclosed many beauties and certain traits of originality, but it is not clear that any great dramatic power or effectiveness was declared in them.
Paine's allegiance was given more and more unreservedly in his maturer years to the romantic tendencies of the mid-nineteenth century, and the influence of Schumann is unmistakably to be discerned in many of his works. He yielded also to the influence of Wagner, though he never became as close an imitator of his methods as many were tempted to become in the years of Wagner's most potent spell.
Paine's musicianship was purely a product of European influences, as indeed was inevitable in his day and for a good while thereafter. His larger compositions gradually lost their place on orchestral or choral programs.