The Royal College of Music and its Contexts

Abstract

Assembling the StaffGrove was conspicuously successful in his choice of RCM staff. He was strategic in his selection, and used his many contacts to recruit both star and lesser-known names from among those respected in the profession. 1 There was more need for professors in the popular studies of singing, piano, organ and violin than in the orchestral instruments, because, initially, there were very few brass or woodwind instrumentalists to teach. To the singing staff, he attracted the famous Jenny Lind (under her married name of Lind-Goldschmidt), who came as a favour just to teach scholars, and two other celebrated teachers of the time, Gustave Garcia and Albert Visetti. The piano staff featured several prestigious performers and teachers such as Arabella Goddard, Ernst Pauer, Franklin Taylor and John Francis Barnett, and to these Grove added Algernon Ashton, Herbert Sharpe and Frederic Cliffe, whom he saw as influential teachers of the next generation (Ashton and Barnett had each studied at the Leipzig Conservatoire, while Sharpe and Cliffe were the home-grown products of the NTSM). For his main organ teachers, Grove selected Walter Parratt (who, because of this RCM opportunity, was able to establish a new school of organ playing in Britain) and George Martin, Stainer's successor at St Paul's Cathedral. The violin staff proved more problematic. He had originally hoped to attract Joseph Joachim, a great friend of both Grove and Stanford, but though Joachim would be a frequent visitor to the RCM, working with students and examining, he declined any formal teaching commitment. Instead, Grove chose Henry Holmes, a pupil of Spohr, a well-established teacher and highly regarded British performer, to share the orchestral training with Stanford and the violin teaching with Richard 1 Grove's ploy was to canvass opinion widely (under a guise of uncertainty that he may more or less have deliberately assumed, as seemed advisable) before making his final selection; see Weliver,