Archive item of the month – June 2020

William Hayman Cummings

(Sidbury 22 August, 1831 – London 6 June, 1916, RSM Member 00457): performer, collector, composer, academic and administrator

Oil painting of W.H. Cummings in doctoral robes by F.G.A. Butler (active 1900-1918).

Cummings began his musical life as a chorister at St Paul’s Cathedral, London. William Hawes (1785-1846, RSM Member A222), who followed Thomas Attwood (1765-1838, RSM Member A126) as organist in 1838, apparently treated the boys harshly and Cummings’ father soon moved his son to the choir of the Temple Church. Cummings sang alto in the oratorio Elijah under Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847) in its first London performance (16 April, 1847). On the recommendation of his teacher, the organist of the Temple Church, Edward John Hopkins (1818-1901, RSM Member A414), Cummings became the organist of Waltham Abbey, a suburban market town just fifteen miles from central London.

However, singing soon outweighed organ playing and Cummings joined as a tenor in the choir of the Temple Church and, later, the Chapel Royal. He studied singing with John William Hobbs (1799-1877), a lay clerk at Westminster Abbey and married Hobbs’ daughter Clara; Hobbs’ connection with the twenty-one year old singer in the year 1852 is shown in this inscription from a volume of music.

Cummings was a leading oratorio tenor until 1880, the year of his last performance as a soloist at the Philharmonic Society concerts. A portrait of Hobbs was presented to the Royal Academy of Music (RAM) in 1950 by Cummings’ daughter-in-law.
 
Cummings joined the Royal Society of Musicians (RSM) on 7 August, 1864, as a performing musician; his application form noted that he ‘was formerly organist of Waltham Abbey, Essex, and is now engaged in the Choirs of Westminster Abbey and the Chapel Royal, St. James Palace’.

In later years, Cummings played an important part in many English musical institutions: he was professor of singing at the RAM (1879-1896), singing teacher at the Royal Normal College and School for the Blind in London, chorus master and conductor of the Sacred Harmonic Society (1882-1888) and third principal of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama (1896-1910). He was a founder Member of the (Royal) Musical Association, the Purcell Society, the Incorporated Society of Musicians, the (Royal) Philharmonic Society. Cummings was also Treasurer of the RSM for over an astonishing thirty-nine years (1876-1915). In 1900, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by Trinity College, Dublin, and the portrait owned by the RSM shows him in these doctoral robes.

In 1910, at the time of his retirement from the Guildhall School of Music, he donated two oil paintings to the Guildhall Art Gallery, one of the singer Mary Anne Paton (1802-1864) and the other of the violinist Joseph Joachim (1831-1907).

Through his own lifetime as a collector, Cummings acquired a huge library of books, manuscripts, letters and printed music. The editions of his lifetime represent the current research of that period, and the collection of editions of musical highlights from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries was most likely the biggest English private collection amassed. The striking bookplate, in the style of his contemporary William Morris, incorporates his initials.

The title-page of the auction catalogue gives a sense of the many highly desirable and rare items which Cummings owned; “There was hardly any composer, theorist of musical biographer of the first or second rank not represented, in both print and manuscript” (Alec Hyatt King, Some British Collectors of Music, c. 1600-1960, Cambridge University Press, 1963). Cummings’ collecting was voracious and the Sotheby’s catalogue of 1,774 lots (of some 4,500 items) represents an acquisition average of some six items per month over sixty-five years. Sadly, for the executors of Cummings’ estate, the sale did not reach the financial merit it deserved due to the time of war.  “In an article ‘On the Formation of a National Musical Library’ (1877), Cummings had warned against the dispersal of important collections by auction, and it was a cruel mischance that precisely this misfortune befell his own treasures some 40 years later in London” (The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, second edition, Oxford University Press, 2001).

In his autobiography, A Westminster Pilgrim, Novello & Co., 1918, Frederick Bridge (1844-1924) recounts an amusing anecdote (p.68) about Cummings regarding the ‘Jack Wilson’ memorial stone at Westminster Abbey: “The inscription was nearly illegible, and the Dean and Chapter, I suppose at Dr. Cummings’ suggestion, ordered it to be re-cut. While the mason was executing his task Dr. Cummings stood by and told the man a few particulars of Dr. Wilson, how that he was Shakespeare’s Tenor, and Professor of Music in the University of Oxford, and altogether a great musician.  After a while the man paused in his work, and said, “Ah! I wish I had known that when we took that there drain-pipe through him …!””.