1800–1880 · United Kingdom · Romantic
John Goss (1800–1880), an English organist, composer and teacher, was organist of St Paul's Cathedral and gave harmony lessons at the Royal Academy of Music. Most of what he wrote is choral and church music, and he is remembered above all for hymn tunes and anthems. Arthur Sullivan and John Stainer were among his pupils.
Music ran in the family. John's father, Joseph Goss, played the organ at the parish church in Fareham, Hampshire, and some of his forebears had been celebrated singers. The boy was eight when he was packed off to school at Ringwood. At eleven he moved to London to live under the eye of his uncle, John Jeremiah Goss, who sang alto at the Chapel Royal, at St Paul's Cathedral and at Westminster Abbey.
John became one of the boy choristers of the Chapel Royal. The choirmaster was then John Stafford Smith, remembered as the composer of the song To Anacreon in Heaven, whose tune was later adopted for the American national anthem. Smith joined strict discipline to a narrow course of teaching. When he found Goss with a copy of Handel's organ concertos he took it away, holding that the choristers were there to learn singing, not playing. Goss later recalled that playing an instrument and learning thorough bass was something the boys had to manage for themselves.
Goss's voice broke in 1816, which ended his time in the choir, and he moved in with his uncle. The uncle had a name as a teacher and was giving lessons to James Turle, later organist at Westminster Abbey. Young John, though, went to study with Thomas Attwood of St Paul's Cathedral, who had himself been taught by Mozart.
Attwood was a different sort of man from Smith, broad in his musical tastes and kindly by nature. Mendelssohn spoke of him fondly. Goss grew devoted to his master, from whom he learnt how to compose and how to orchestrate.
No organist's post was open to him at first, so Goss earned money as a singer in an opera chorus. Henry Bishop was in charge, and in April 1817 Goss sang in the English premiere of Don Giovanni at the King's Theatre.
Among Goss's early compositions are a song for three voices with small orchestra, written in 1819, and a romance on verses by Walter Scott, Wert thou like me. He dedicated the romance to his fiancée, Lucy Emma, and married her in 1821.
Goss took up a post as organist at Stockwell Chapel, south London, in 1821; the building was afterwards called St Andrew's Church. After four years there he won an open competition for a much grander job, organist of St Luke's Church in Chelsea, in December 1824. It paid £100 a year.
Orchestral music was a small part of his output at this time. He composed two overtures around 1824, one in F minor and one in E flat major; both were played and printed in 1827 to considerable acclaim. Also in 1827 he supplied the music for The Serjeant's Wife, a melodrama by John Banim staged on 24 July at the English Opera House. Afterwards he kept away from the orchestra; when the Philharmonic Society of London asked for another piece in 1833, he said no. Singing was where he made his reputation, since his solo songs and glees were frequently performed and favourably reviewed in the music papers.
Alongside the Chelsea job, in 1827 Goss joined the Royal Academy of Music as its professor of harmony and taught there until 1874. His students included Stephen Kemp, Frederick Bridge, Frederic Cowen and Arthur Sullivan. He gave lessons at St Paul's too; the best known of those pupils was John Stainer, who followed him as the cathedral's organist.
Pianists may like to know that a book of his, The Piano Forte Student's Catechism, was published in London in 1830. In 1833 he submitted the anthem Have mercy upon me, O God for the Gresham Prize Medal, awarded for the finest original piece of sacred vocal music, and took the prize, with S. S. Wesley's The Wilderness placed behind it. Goss dedicated the work to Attwood, and it was sung at the Mansion House in June 1834. The same year produced his textbook An Introduction to Harmony and Thorough-Bass, a standard work that was reissued 14 times.
Goss wanted the St Paul's Cathedral organ post when his teacher Attwood died in 1838. He asked the advice of Canon Sydney Smith, who joked that it paid merely £34 annually. Goss had a family to keep and replied that he might be unable to apply. Smith then explained that the post of organist brought several further sources of income, and Goss changed his mind. He was appointed, and that same year took over from his teacher.
It did not take long to discover that the organist's job was simply to play, with hardly any influence on the cathedral's other music. Canon Beckwith, the Succentor, ran that side, and he quarrelled with Canon Hawes, the Almoner, who looked after the rehearsals of the choirboys. Those in charge showed no interest in better standards, and junior clergy were frequently missing from services.
Goss was known for his piety and gentleness. That mildness made it hard for him to deal with obstinate singers: the tenors and basses held their places for life, were lazy, and did not want to learn new music. According to his biographer Jeremy Dibble, the hostile reception of his 1842 anthem Blessed is the man shook the composer's confidence so much that he wrote no further anthems until 1852.
In 1852 he received a commission for two anthems to be sung at the Duke of Wellington's state funeral, the first called If we believe that Jesus died, the second And the King said. He shaped the latter so that the Dead March from Handel's Saul followed it with no gap. Prince Albert let it be known that the pairing had reduced everyone to tears. For the Nunc dimittis at that service Goss also supplied an Anglican chant, which draws on Beethoven's Symphony No. 7.
A new organ for St Paul's needed funds, and in 1861 Goss arranged and conducted a Messiah to raise them. No oratorio had been heard in the cathedral before. As was usual in Victorian times, the forces were big: 600 performers.
Goss's health started to decline at the beginning of the 1870s, and in 1872 he made up his mind to step down. His last major occasion at St Paul's was the February 1872 national thanksgiving for the Prince of Wales, who had recovered from a grave illness; Goss composed a Te Deum and the anthem The Lord is my strength for it. One month on, he gave up the organist's post to Stainer, his former pupil.
Retirement brought Goss a knighthood. Cambridge University gave him an honorary doctorate in music in 1876, as it did Sullivan. On 10 May 1880 he died at home in Brixton, in south London. His funeral was held at St Paul's, and he lies in Kensal Green cemetery.
St Paul's received a memorial to Goss in 1886. Hamo Thornycroft made the bas-relief, and under it are the first notes of If we believe, the anthem sung at the funeral. One hundred years after the composer died, the Fareham Society fixed a blue plaque to the house where he had lived.
Nearly everything Goss left is for choir or organ. Sacred pieces outnumber the rest, though secular songs are not few. He wrote little for the orchestra; among those pieces are two overtures and a melodrama score. His name was made by vocal works, religious and secular. Two hymn tunes are the ones people recall first: See, Amid the Winter's Snow, dated 1871, and Praise, my soul, the King of heaven, which dates from 1869.
Singers liked his glees for years because the vocal lines lay so well. Recognition as a church composer arrived afterwards, thanks to anthems that date mostly from after 1850. The biographer Judith Blezzard singles out his flexible phrasing, his care in fitting music to text and his sense of balance. The anthem for Wellington's funeral, If we believe that Jesus died, left a profound mark in 1852, and an anthem, Praise the Lord, O my soul, followed in 1854, written for the festival marking two hundred years of the Sons of the Clergy. Some anthems still turn up in English church programmes: from 1861 The Wilderness, from 1863 O taste and see, and from 1869 O Saviour of the World.
Fuller Maitland wrote in 1890 that the best of Goss's work has grace and sweetness resting on a firm basis of theory and counterpoint. He thought part of this blend may have reached Goss from Mozart by way of Attwood, and he picked out the glee Ossian's Hymn to the Sun for special praise. A critic at The Times called Goss the last English composer of a line who stayed almost wholly within church music.
Several of Goss's publications were collections for teaching and church use. Alongside his piano and harmony books of 1830 and 1833 there was Chants, Ancient and Modern, dated 1841. With James Turle he produced a two-volume Cathedral Services Ancient and Modern in 1846, and The Church Psalter and Hymnbook, prepared with William Mercer, in 1855.
The site offers Goss's hymn tune Lauda Anima (hymntune) for mixed four-part choir. It is marked at the level Elementary+.