Ruskin is one of the great Victorian polymaths -- artist, architectural, social, and economic critic, geologist, philanthropist, proto-environmentalist -- what Anthony Lane of The New Yorker once called “an encyclopedia with sideburns.”

What many do not know, however, is that Ruskin was also a talented amateur composer and a lifelong student of music. At Oxford, he studied both piano and voice and, in fact, continued his singing lessons and even some formal lessons in composition into old age.

His secretary, W. G. Collingwood, reports that Ruskin “was a most difficult pupil, wanting at every turn to know why; incredulous of the best authority, impatient of compromises and conventions, and eager to upset everything and start afresh.”

The attitude will not surprise anyone familiar with the Ruskinian manner.

He especially liked to write songs and piano pieces for the long evenings at Brantwood, or for family occasions, often set to favorite poems of Walter Scott or Shakespeare. You will find below a clip from our 2021 Ruskin birthday celebration featuring the USC-based Zelter Quartet playing their own arrangement of Ruskin’s 1881 air “At Marmion’s Grave.” (The sheet music may be downloaded, along with several other Ruskin compositions in manuscript below.) 

Zelter Quartet Performance of At Marmion’s Grave

FOR FURTHER READING, CONSULT:

Ruskin On Music, edited by A. M. Wakefield, George Allen, 1894 (PDF, full text)

Mary Augusta Wakefield (1853-1910) was a British composer, contralto, festival organizer and writer. While in Rome in the 1880s, she socialized with a number of notable composers, among them Edvard Grieg. Author Vernon Lee dedicated her ghost story “A Wicked Voice” to Wakefield in 1887. She corresponded with Ruskin in his later years and published an anthology of passages from his works on the subject of music in 1894. In 2003, a plaque was erected at Wakefield Bank House to honor the 150th anniversary of Wakefield’s birth and commemorate her pioneering work in fostering English music festivals.

Journal article, “Ruskin and Music” by William J. Gatens (Victorian Studies, Vol. 30, #1, 1986)