George Onslow

Admired by several notable contemporaries, the man once dubbed 'the French Beethoven' is surely ripe for reappraisal, says Misha Donat

- Misha Donat

A book on the Onslow family published in the 1950s gives the composer George Onslow short shrift. His music, we are told, ‘has a dry and fireless amateur competence; and surely it is remarkable that a musician of any sort could thus have appeared as an offshoot of the Onslow tree’. Certainly, that tree had produced figures of considerable distinction in their own field – preeminent among them Arthur Onslow who was a universally admired Speaker of the House of Commons for more than 30 years, and a close friend of prime minister Robert Walpole. Yet in his own time George Onslow, nephew of the second

Earl of Onslow, was one of the most highly regarded composers in Europe and – born and raised in France – was dubbed on more than one occasion ‘the French Beethoven’.

Berlioz called George Onslow ‘one of France’s finest musical glories’. When Schumann heard Mendelssohn conduct Onslow’s First Symphony at the Leipzig Gewandhaus in 1835, he reported that in the minuet ‘everything glitters with diamonds and pearls’. Cherubini was present at the same work’s Paris premiere some four years earlier, and was so taken with one particular passage that at the end of the concert he went up to the conductor’s stand, searched through the as yet unpublished score for the relevant page, removed it, took it home and copied it out in full. Placing the original in his own album, he instructed his servant to return the copy to Onslow, and to tell him that he had long wanted to have an autograph of his.