Pianist and composer, born in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, N England, UK. He studied at the Royal Academy, London, and at Leipzig, became professor of music at Cambridge (1856), and in 1868 was appointed principal of the Royal Academy of Music. His compositions include piano pieces, songs, and the cantatas The May Queen (1858) and The Women of Samaria (1867).
Sir William Sterndale Bennett (April 13, 1816 - February 1, 1875) was an English musical composer.
Bennett was born at Sheffield, the son of Robert Bennett, an organist. It was during this time that he wrote several of his most appreciated works, in which may be traced influences of the contemporary movement of music in Germany, which country he frequently visited during the years 1836-1842. At one of the Rhenish musical festivals in Düsseldorf he made the personal acquaintance of Mendelssohn, and soon afterwards renewed it at Leipzig, where the talented young Englishman was welcomed by the leading musicians of the rising generation. A laudatory account of the event was written by Robert Schumann, who pronounced Bennett to be the most musikalisch of all Englishmen, and an angel of a musician (copying Gregory's pun on Angli and Angeli).
But it was Mendelssohn's influence that dominated Bennett's mode of utterance. An unpublished concerto in F minor, and the overture to the Naiads, impressed the firm of Broadwood and Sons so favorably in 1836 that they offered the composer a year in Leipzig, where the Naiads overture was performed at a Gewandhaus concert on the 13th of February 1837. Bennett visited Leipzig a second time in 1840-1841, when he composed his Caprice in E for pianoforte and orchestra and his overture The Wood Nymphs.
Owing to his professional duties, his latter years were not creatively fertile, and what he then wrote was scarcely equal to the productions of his youth. The principal charm of Bennett's compositions (not to mention his absolute mastery of the musical form) consists in the tenderness of their conception, rising occasionally to sweetest lyrical intensity.
Except the opera, Bennett tried his hand at almost all the different forms of vocal and instrumental writing. His best works include piano music (his three sketches, The Lake, The Millstream and The Fountain, and his third piano concerto); orchestral music (his Symphony in G minor, and his overture The Naiads); and vocal music (his cantata The May Queen, written for the Leeds Festival in 1858). He also wrote a sacred cantata, The Woman of Samaria, first performed at the Birmingham Musical Festival in 1867. A year later he was knighted, and in 1872 he received a public testimonial before a large audience at St. James Hall, the money subscribed being devoted to the foundation of a scholarship at the Royal Academy of Music.
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