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Edgar Stillman Kelley (April 14, 1857-November 12, 1944)
Edgar Stillman Kelley grew up among the pioneers from New England and New York who founded Sparta, Wisconsin. His parents were proud of their forebears, colonists in New England as early as 1630; Kelley was a direct descendant of Plymouth Colony Governor William Bradford, of Mayflower fame.
Sparta was no ordinary frontier village; its Yankee settlers were lovers of music and literature. As a boy, Kelley took every opportunity to steep himself in both. The attic at home housed the church library, presided over by his mother, a writer and musician. The secular library was kept in the office of his father, an editor and newspaper publisher. Young Ed thrived on the best romances and historical accounts of the day, forming literary friendships that would last a lifetime and influence all his later creative work. Here he had encountered John Bunyan's engrossing The Pilgrim's Progress and embraced the works of William Shakespeare by age eight, the year he began piano study with his mother (herself a pupil of one of the first native American composers, Asahel Abbot).
Though perhaps equally adept as an artist and writer, Kelley decided early that what drew him to music was its superior potential for dramatic expression. He would later write that music seemed to form a bridge with a spiritual world, and that beautiful fables were real in the realms of tone. A number of his best ideas, he would say with a quiet modesty, came to him in dreams.
As a boy he began to imagine the tales he read in terms of sound and scene. He strengthened these pleasant reveries by filling notebooks with their narrative and tonal charms; he would draw on these favorite themes many times in years to come. His mature skills would never conflict with the freshness of his boyish outlook. His genius was to be in discovering the means of conveying to an audience an intimate impression of the soul's experience.
Hearing a local musician play Liszt's transcription of Mendelssohn's Midsummer Night's Dream was a revelation — justifying his hope of achieving musically every nuance of mood and feeling. This was a kind of magic, and composers, as he would often remark in later life, must believe in fairies.
Germany was very much the center of the music world in those days; the best American musicians were expected to study there. Kelley's first glimpse of this world came at thirteen, when his parents engaged as his tutor the young Farwell W. Merriam, just back from Leipzig, where Wagner was in full gear. Merriam, enthusiastically pro-Wagner, introduced Kelley to the controversial works of the composer who was to have the greatest influence on his style.
Kelley went to Chicago at seventeen, taking two years of instruction with Clarence Eddy and Napoleon Ledochowski while boarding with a German family in order to learn the language before going abroad to the Stuttgart Conservatory. He developed his scholarly work habits under Eddy; Ledochowski, a disciple of Chopin, passed on the mantle.
Thanks to Eddy, he was accepted in the highest circles. Kelley's relaxed poise as a performer, his original talent for composition, and his remarkably good nature won him many influential friends, as they would throughout his life.
Kelley wholly escaped the conformist regimentation inherent in German conservatories of the day; studying composition and orchestration with Max Seifriz, director at the Royal Opera in Stuttgart, a man who hobnobbed with Wagner, Liszt and Berlioz, he was encouraged to pay attention to his art — beauty must not be shackled by rules. Besides, he had arrived in Germany with his ideals fully formed.
During Kelley's four-year stay he also studied organ with Finck and piano with Schuler, Kruger and Speidel, eventually transferring to Speidel's Conservatory.
Seifriz prompted him to perform and to publish. Among his student compositions were a seminal Polonaise, and Confluentia. Confluentia refers to the flowing together of the Rhine and Mosel rivers; the Roman city at their junction, an outpost on the border of the Empire, was called “Confluentia.” The region, familiar to readers of Tacitus, was a subject dear to the heart of “Hans von Brechnowski” — Kelley's fanciful nom de plume.
Although the Polonaise is enhanced by strains reminiscent of the Renaissance Polish court dance lately boosted by Chopin, the composition was intended to convey the moods Kelley experienced while reading Polish historical adventure novelist Henryk Sienkiewicz's With Fire and Sword. (Sienkiewicz was to win the Nobel prize for literature in 1905.)
Kelley sailed to San Francisco in 1880, beginning his American career humbly as a church organist and by conducting his original compositions for orchestra at society weddings; but he soon made a name for himself. The first American performances of Polonaise and Confluentia in California pleased both audience and critic. Kelley quickly attracted national attention thanks to his incidental music for Macbeth (most of which was written while a student in Germany), for the first time hearing the gratifying sound of an audience on its feet shouting “Encore! Encore!” at the Tivoli Opera House in 1882.
A more important first was his meeting with Jessie Gregg. The young girl, an exceptionally talented pianist and singer, had been invited with her mother to meet the new organist. He was playing Mendelssohn's Wedding March when they entered the church. Afterwards, at her home, Jessie made him a cup of his favorite beverage — hot cocoa. They were soon playing the piano together, and became fast friends.
By 1885 the 28-year-old Kelley was able to pick up a newspaper and read that he was the Wagner of American music — the first American to write really great melodramatic music for the stage.
The theater drew him to New York. Though working hard, he kept in touch with Jessie Gregg, whose career had taken her to Boston. They were married on her 26th birthday in 1891.
Jessie Stillman Kelley would dedicate herself to her more diffident husband, with whom she enjoyed an extraordinary rapport, becoming his manager and publicist, performing at his lectures, performing his works in concert, commenting on compositions-in-progress, keeping an eye on the main chance. She immediately began to teach, and by what she earned in her fifty years as a teacher and by securing for Kelley what was probably the first life composition fellowship in music awarded in this country (presented in 1910 by Western College at Oxford, Ohio), she freed him from financial responsibilities. When she was not traveling on his behalf, she would get up with him, when nighttime inspiration struck, and make him hot cocoa. He was happy to rely on her unfailing instincts and good sense.
In the year in which they were married Kelley published Flower Seekers, written earlier, based on a courtly fragment of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. A portion of Flower Seekers was published in the May, 1896 issue of Godey's, making Kelley's truly a household name even among those unfamiliar with his increasingly successful larger works.
Kelley published his Confluentia and his Headless Horseman in 1891 as well. His skill for dramatization and the graceful humor for which he is remembered may be observed in the latter piece, derived from the denouement of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving, in which Ichabod Crane is first horrified by perceiving the horseman — then frightened out of his wits by the spectacle of the goblin-rider hurling its head — then tumbled ignominiously to the ground!
The young couple spent four years in California composing, conducting, lecturing and teaching, finding time to publish the Lyric Opera Sketches. Both were fond of dancing to lively tunes such as these. Then it was back to Broadway. They stayed in New York six years. Victor Herbert published Album-Leaf in his The World's Best Composers: Famous Compositions for the Piano in 1900. In addition to his other activities, Kelley was prevailed upon to substitute for a professor of musical theory on sabbatical from Yale 1901-1902, even conducting the New Haven Symphony Orchestra.
Following this hectic year the Kelleys accepted several invitations to stay in Europe, visiting, among others, Dvorak in Prague and Schwarwenka in Berlin. That glittering city gave them a homecoming welcome, honoring Kelley as the greatest American composer. Urged to stay on, to lecture and teach, the Kelleys obligingly remained for eight years. They taught a number of brilliant American and British musicians then in Berlin, taking an ongoing interest in their careers. Kelley continued to compose and to conduct performances of his works, receiving a gold medal at the international Wagner Festival in 1903. The Kelleys did much to further the musical prestige of the United States during their stay. But Edgar longed to spend the bulk of his time in composition.
In 1910 they came home, to the peaceful community of Oxford, Ohio. “My God!,” one concerned friend exclaimed, “a hillside in Ohio after Berlin!” “Never mind,” Mrs. Kelley told him, “just watch that hillside!” Beloved by all, Kelley was given the space to do much of his best work here, in the studio built for them by the Western College graduating class of 1916.
The Kelleys led anything but a retired life at Western. And they traveled, Kelley continuing to conduct his works, and his wife to perform them.
Kelley directed the premiere of Alice in Wonderland at the Norfolk Music Festival, June 5, 1919. He had envisioned the highlights of Charles Dodgson's pseudonymous novels Alice's Adventures Under Ground and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There as a group of miniature symphonic poems. His Introduction reflects the genesis of the original tales — Dodgson, an Oxford Don, has been picnicking with several ladies, including the Dean's wife, and their children, including her daughter Alice. While the ladies chat, the children weave daisy chains, and Dodgson weaves his Adventures.
An expanded orchestral version of Alice in Wonderland was presented several times in Cincinnati as a ballet in two acts, magnificently staged with an ensemble of about 350 performers for the Lewis Carroll centenary, with proceeds benefiting the unemployed. There were two repeat productions in 1932.
Edgar Stillman Kelley's contemporaries described him as a gentleman and a scholar. He was by all accounts kind, amiable, optimistic, and full of an infectious youthful spirit of curiosity and enthusiasm. Among the greatest orchestral and choral works of this stellar composer, performed often during his lifetime: the New England Symphony, with its movements based on excerpts from Bradford's Mayflower diary, the comic opera Puritania, Music to Macbeth, The Pilgrim's Progress and the Gulliver Symphony.
Sue Marra Byham
We are indebted to Valerie E. Elliott at The Smith Library of Regional History in Oxford, Ohio.
Brian Kovach
Brian Kovach, the pianist whom Jerome Lowenthal called “an outstanding artist of imagination, intelligence and sensitivity,” and of whom Virgil Thomson has written, “I admire him and believe in him,” is a prominent Philadelphia chamber musician and soloist. He has appeared with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, the Concerto Soloists of Philadelphia and the New Philadelphia Quartet, among others, and is a member of the Philadelphia Orchestra's keyboard pool.
Brian Kovach was born and raised in Pittsburgh, where his first private teacher was Elsa Stockmann. Kovach was one of the accompanists for Pablo Casals' Master Classes in Pittsburgh during Casals' Guest Lectureship. His Master of Fine Arts Degree in Piano Performance was acquired at Carnegie Mellon University, where he studied with Harry Franklin. Additional studies were pursued with Lowenthal, Seymour Lipkin, and Agi Jambor.
Today Kovach is a mentor, with private students of his own. An expert in course development, particularly for ensemble techniques, as Associate Professor of Music he has established and directed student Fine Arts and Baroque Ensembles and Concert Series at the Community College of Philadelphia, where he has been instrumental in establishing a Music Curriculum.
Kovach's enthusiasm for turn-of-the-century composers whose work is too often overlooked has led to prior recordings and his first recording for Albany Records.
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