Felix Harold White List of compositions

White was born in London into a Jewish family originally called Weiss. He was the oldest of five children, and initially worked with his coal merchant father and his brothers transporting coal around Surrey. But his mother had taught him piano from the age of five and he made rapid progress, and soon developed a career as a music teacher. Other than that he was largely self taught, though Hubert Parry took an interest in his work and helped secure some early performances. An early success as a composer was a performance of his orchestral overture Shylock under Henry Wood at the Proms on 26 September, 1907. The composer described it as "a little 'Straussy' here and there", but it was well-received by the Proms audience, with White called back to the platform three times. His Romance in D for cello and piano was also performed in December 1907 at the Bechstein Hall alongside pieces by George Dyson, Joseph Holbrooke and Hubert Bath. And the orchestral tone poem Astarte Syriaca, a musical commentary on a sonnet by Rossetti, secured its first performance at a Queen's Hall Patron's Fund concert on 23 January, 1911.

In 1914, White married Marta Scholten, a Swiss-German, and in 1916 he registered as a conscientious objector. For the rest of the war he was sent off away from his family to work on a farm in Cornwall, and then to another farm in Hemel Hempstead. His Fanfare for a Challenge to Accepted Ideas of 1921 was inspired by his resistance to the war and militarism. During the 1920s, White and his family were living at 28, Hilldrop Crescent, London N7.

Further orchestral works followed the ending of the war, including the orchestral Impressions of England (written for the 1918 Proms, but seemingly not performed), a tone poem The Deserted Village (1923, unperformed), and the first performance of Meditation, first planned in 1911, revised in 1920 and given by Dan Godfrey at Bournemouth in 1923. White also contributed a movement to Captions: Five Glimpses of an Anonymous Theme (1923), a suite with other movements by Herbert Bedford, Arthur Bliss, Eugene Goossens and Gerrard Williams. But chamber music and songs were his primary focus after the war. Two chamber works won the Carnegie Trust award and were published in the Carnegie Collection of British Music series, The Nymph's Complaint (1921) and Four Proverbs (1925). His (second?) String Quartet was performed by the Lyra Quartet for the first time in 1935 and broadcast by the BBC. Up to 250 songs and vocal works were composed but only 50 or so published and the rest mostly lost. Between 1933 and 1935 White played with the London Philharmonic Orchestra as piano, harpsichord and celeste player, and as a répétiteur at Covent Garden under Sir Thomas Beecham. There was some renewed attention to White's orchestral output from the BBC in the late 1930s, but then came the Second World War and his composition tailed off. He became somewhat embittered about the lack of interest in his serious works.

Felix Harold White

Compositions for: Tenor