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Scan 431
Grove's Dictionary of music and musicians, 1927
18 lines. Read by computer on 5 September 2026. Printed page 371. See the scan on archive.org.
1branches. His first organ appointment was at Pembroke Road Chapel, Liverpool, in 1840; in 1847 he became organist of the church for the blind in that town, and in the following year organist to the Liverpool Philharmonic Society. In 1854 he came to London as organist of the Panopticon of Science and Art in Leicester Square, and was appointed organist of the church of St. Martin's in the Fields, and for a few months in 1855 of Lincoln's Inn Chapel. He returned to Liverpool in 1855 on receiving the appointment of organist to St. George's Hall at a salary of £300 a year, afterwards increased to £400. In 1859 he occasionally played organ solos at the Monday Popular Concerts. In 1860 he became organist of the parish church of Wallasey, Birkenhead, and in 1863 organist of Holy Trinity Church near Liverpool. In 1871 he opened the organ of the Albert Hall and in the same year began his connexion with the Handel Festivals, at which he played organ concertos until 1891 inclusive. In 1868 he was appointed organist of the Musical Society of Liverpool, and in 1872 was reappointed organist to the Liverpool Philharmonic Society. In 1880 he was granted a Civil-List pension of £100 a year; in 1890 he went to Australia to give recitals in the Town Hall, Sydney; in 1894 he retired with a pension from his Liverpool appointment. Best composed several church services, anthems and hymns, many fugues, sonatas and other pieces for the organ; 10 pianoforte pieces, 2 overtures, and a march for orchestra. He was also the author of The Modern School for the Organ, 1853, all the examples and studies in which are original, and The Art of Organ Playing (begun 1869). Best's arrangements for the organ and editions of the organ classics are exceedingly numerous. Among the former two series 'The Organ Student,' a collection of comparatively simple pieces, and 'Arrangements from the Scores of the Great Masters,' an advanced series for recital givers, must be named. Most famous among the later is his edition of Bach's organ works, a standard work which since Best's death has been revised by Dr. Eaglefield Hull (q.v.). W. H. H., with addns.
3The unique position which Best occupied was due partly no doubt to his exceptional powers as an executant, but more to the fact that he alone amongst English organists of his day recognised and developed the secular uses of the instrument. He never held a cathedral appointment; his church work was of quite secondary value; he was pre-eminently a recitalist. His appointment to the organistship of St. George's Hall, Liverpool, in preference to S. S. Wesley, who had opened the organ and whose prestige as composer and cathedral organist seemed to many to entitle him to the appointment if he chose to take it, was an epoch-making event in the history of popular music in England. Best at once grasped the position. His was a civic appointment, and his duty was, by frequent recitals on the organ, to fill as far as possible the place which a municipal orchestra occupies in more artistically advanced communities. Consequently at his Thursday evening and Saturday afternoon recitals his repertory included 'everything worth playing that had ever been written for the organ, and everything in classical music that could suitably be arranged for it.' The policy may sometimes have erred on the side of liberality, and Best often found himself in opposition to musicians of the stricter type, but it was substantially the policy on which Manns's orchestral concerts at the Crystal Palace and at a later time Wood's promenade concerts at Queen's Hall were successfully built up. It succeeded equally in his case. As time went on he was able to abandon the fantasias on opera-tunes in favour of movements from symphonies, overtures, etc., and from the first he always included a fair proportion of solid music in his schemes. The miscellaneous character of his work developed his sensitiveness to subtleties of tone, and his performances, whether of original organ-music or of arrangements, were pre-eminent in their command of effects of organ registration. Statham says:
5'I can remember when he was playing the overture to "Jessonda" how the very sound of the first chord seemed to give a certain oriental tint to the music; the stops had been carefully combined so as to give something different from the ordinary Great Organ tone.'
7The same writer says:
9'The most memorable Bach performance I recall was his playing of the Passacaglia. . . . The treatment of each variation with the exact kind of tone and combination of stops, loud or soft, which its character required was one of the most refined pieces of aestheticism in playing that I ever heard.'
11The Organ and its Position in Musical Art, by H. H. Statham, from which the above quotations are taken, is concluded (p. 215) with a detailed study of Best's art based on close personal knowledge.
13BETTI, ADOLFE (b. Bagni di Lucca, 1875), first violinist in the Flonzaley Quartet; gold medallist at the Liège Conservatoire (1896). After touring Austria, Italy and Germany as soloist, he was chosen assistant professor to César Thomson in his virtuoso class in the Brussels Conservatoire, remaining there till 1903.
15BETTS, EDWARD (d. circa 1830), violin-maker, was a nephew of John Edward Betts, and, like his uncle, a pupil of Richard Duke. He was a good craftsman and maintained the traditions to which he succeeded. E. H. F.
17BETTS, JOHN EDWARD (b. Stamford, Lincolnshire, 1755; d. 1823), violin-maker, became a pupil of Richard Duke. To distinguish him from his nephew, Edward, or Ned, Betts, he was generally known as 'old John Betts.' His
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