John Alexander Fuller Maitland

John Alexander Fuller Maitland (7 April 1856 – 30 March 1936) was an influential British music critic and scholar from the 1880s to the 1920s. He encouraged the rediscovery of English music of the 16th and 17th centuries, particularly Henry Purcell's music and English virginal music. He also propounded the notion of an English Musical Renaissance in the second half of the 19th century, particularly praising Charles Villiers Stanford and Hubert Parry.

Fuller Maitland was criticised for his failure to acknowledge the talents of the English composers Arthur Sullivan, Edward Elgar and Frederick Delius, and later it was shown that he had falsified the facts in a critique of Sullivan. He was also slow to recognise the worth of contemporary composers from mainland Europe such as Claude Debussy and Richard Strauss.

Biography Fuller Maitland was born at 90 Gloucester Place, Portman Square, London, the son of John Fuller Maitland and his wife Marianne (née Noble). He attended Westminster School for three terms, but for most of his childhood he was educated privately, including musical instruction. Starting in 1875, he studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was active in the Cambridge University Musical Society. There he became friends with Charles Villiers Stanford and William Barclay Squire, whose sister Charlotte he married in 1885. He had intended to follow a career in the Church of England but decided to instead to pursue a career in music. After leaving Cambridge he studied the piano with Edward Dannreuther and other aspects of music with W. S. Rockstro, who encouraged him to explore early polyphonic music. More than a hundred of his articles survive, in revised form, in the online version of Grove available in 2010.

In pioneering the revival of the virginals, Fuller Maitland published an edition of the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book (1894–99). He was a member of the editorial committee of the Purcell Society, for which he edited several of Purcell's works. With his relative Lucy Broadwood, he edited the collection English County Songs (1893), and he was on the original committee of the Folk Song Society, founded in 1898. He socialized with contralto, composer, and music festival organizer Mary Augusta Wakefield.

Reputation as a critic At a time when music lovers generally admired either Richard Wagner or Johannes Brahms but not both, Fuller Maitland, according to the obituary notice in The Times, "worshipped" both Wagner and Brahms. Fuller Maitland rejected British composers who did not conform to his template. "Sullivan's frequent forays into what was viewed as the questionable realm of operetta removed him from the equation at once. Elgar was never a contender, with his unacademic, lower-middle-class background coupled with progressive tendencies, while "Fritz" Delius was simply not English enough." which Elgar alluded to as "the shady side of musical criticism … this foul, unforgettable episode." Later, it was shown that Fuller Maitland had falsified the facts, inventing a banal lyric, passing it off as genuine and condemning Sullivan for supposedly setting such inanity.

Later years Fuller Maitland gave up journalism in 1911, retiring to Borwick Hall near Carnforth in Lancashire. He continued to write books, including an autobiography, A Door-Keeper of Music (1929), in which he admitted that he had been wrong in earlier years to dismiss Sullivan's comic operas as "ephemeral". His aversion to modern music abated in his later years, and he recognised the importance of composers such as Richard Strauss and Claude Debussy. He received an honorary DLitt from Durham University in 1928.

Fuller Maitland's wife died in 1931. His personal fortune was assessed at £38,477 (equivalent to about £2 million in 2010).

Publications Fuller Maitland published the following books: 1884: Life of Robert Schumann 1889: Grove's Dictionary of Music & Musicians (appendix – ed.) 1893: English County Songs (ed. with Lucy E. Broadwood) 1894: Masters of German Music 1899: The Fitzwilliam Virginal Book (ed. with William Barclay Squire) 1899: The Musician's Pilgrimage 1902: English Music in the XIXth Century 1902: The Age of Bach & Handel (Oxford History of Music) 1904–1910: Grove's Dictionary of Music & Musicians (2nd edition) (ed) 1905: Joseph Joachim 1911: Brahms 1915: The Consort of Music 1921: Arthur Coleridge: Reminiscences 1926: The Spell of Music 1929: A Doorkeeper of Music 1931: John Lucas's History of Warton Parish (ed. with J. Rawlinson Ford) 1934: The Music of Stanford and Parry