Francis Edward Bache and his compositions for solo piano - a reassessment

Francis Edward Bache (1833-1858) remains a marginalised figure in discussions of music in nineteenth-century Britain. Although his name has appeared in secondary literature by a range of authors (including Oscar Beringer, John Fuller Maitland and Ernest Walker), the only substantial biography of him is the hagiographic Brother Musicians, published by his sister Constance in 1901.

As Bache was a pianist, described in The Musical World as being ‘in possession of excellent talents’, his compositions for solo piano provide the primary focus, although these are contextualised in terms of his wider oeuvre, and a complete list of works is appended to the thesis. An examination of a range of primary sources (a scrapbook compiled by Bache’s mother Emily housed at the British Library; autograph manuscripts at the Royal Academy of Music; newspapers and journals of the period) enables a clarification and amplification of biographical details and the identification of issues central to Bache’s reception as both a composer and performer, as well as providing opportunity to reassess his compositional development.

A series of case studies (the Three Impromptus; Four Mazurkas; Five Characteristic Pieces; and three separate works entitled Souvenir(s)) not only exemplifies the range of his pianistic output and his continually developing style, but identifies a number of compositional allusions in his work. These are part of his playful approach to genre, which is contextualised using theoretical concepts explored by Jeffrey Kallberg, Jim Samson and others, and which demonstrates that Bache’s music is far more than the salon style into which it has previously been pigeonholed. This thesis therefore has implications not only in terms of how Bache might be understood but in relation to how genre might be utilised as a tool to reassess British pianism of the mid-Victorian period.