For two decades the teacher, conductor, and composer who established the city’s premier orchestra and the University of Melbourne’s Conservatorium of Music proved a divisive figure. He was revered and reviled in equal measure for bold stances on matters moral and philosophical. In 1900 Outpost suggested that ‘Marshall-Hall is almost an epigram; he is altogether a paradox.’ This notion marks a departure point and locus of return for an essay collection overturning the conspiratorial silence. As a portrait of both man and city, it traces a Melbourne that shaped Marshall-Hall but that was indelibly shaped in return.

In exploring his opera Romeo and Juliet, Thérèse Radic describes a bluff-mannered idealist ‘who believed passionately in Art and in God not at all’. Matthew Lorenzon’s dense but perspicacious unpicking illuminates Marshall-Hall’s blazing, self-destructive trajectory. For Marshall-Hall, music was the apotheosis of life and the musician the true leader and prophet of society, dragging the culture forward – kicking and screaming if required.

Widely read and classically versed, the erudite maestro unwaveringly championed music and undoubtedly elevated the arts in Melbourne society. Early essays draw out Marshall-Hall’s support from the upper echelons of Melbourne society, including figures such as Eduard Scharf, Elise Wiedermann, and Carl Pinschof. Kenneth Morgan’s essay on Marshall-Hall’s ties with James Barrett notes that he was a bohemian progressive. Stephen Mead’s colourful contribution reveals a man cheerfully immersed in the antics of the Cannibal Club, gravitating to friendships with Heidelberg School artists including Streeton, Roberts, and McCubbin. This was the Marshall-Hall conducting lightning from a rooftop, leading ‘Wagnerian rebels’ in booing Puccini’s La Bohème première and joining a ‘pandemoniacal orchestra’ at one Victorian Arts Society dinner, noisily beating on a table with bones stolen from a National Art School skeleton. He shocked Melbourne society by loafing in his front garden in his pyjamas on Sunday mornings and gave ‘needless offence’ by blasphemously titling his flippantly disrespectful 1898 poetry collection Hymns Ancient and Modern.

Such intransigently hostile provocation of the church inevitably rendered untenable Marshall-Hall’s prestigious position at the university. This scandal is at once the crux and Achilles heel of this collection. Earlier essays allude to the episode, but only very late is this dramatic turning point adequately fleshed out. This instils an almost novelistic quality of intrigue, yet remains a niggling question mark when pondering what weight his supposed indiscretions should be granted in reappraisal of his legacy.

Portrait of Marshall-Hall (c.1905). Reproduced with permission of the Arts Centre, Performing Arts Collection, Melbourne.

The publication of Marshall-Hall’s ‘immodest and impious’ poetry collection was the final straw for powerful elements in Melbourne society who were already heartily aggrieved by his ungodly antics. Intended as an ‘affront to the Godly of Melbourne’, one imagines his success with hymns referring to ‘Certain Pious Christians’ and ‘a Back-Biting Parson’. This city of book-banning wowsers was never going to embrace his ‘brazenly blasphemous’ literary pretensions. The Argus accused Marshall-Hall of lewdness, lasciviousness, and anti-clerical atheism: ‘he gives the rein to loose thoughts and a wanton, turgid imagination, pouring out pages of tumid fustian in glorification of mere sensuous passion …’

Marshall-Hall held that there is ‘no toleration and no freedom’ where men must echo conventional views of life, religion, and politics. Whether or not he truly believed that his friends and status would protect him from the church’s power, he inevitably paid for his insistent provocations. Following a concerted campaign from chief antagonist Alexander Leeper of Trinity College, Marshall-Hall was deemed unfit to educate Melbourne’s ‘maidens fair and chaste’ and in 1900 was removed from the Ormond Chair. Such was the esteem in which Marshall-Hall was held that this episode did not prove fatal to his musical career. He established a rival Conservatorium and his orchestra continued, performing 111 concerts until 1912. Musicologist and composer Henry Tate wrote that as a conductor Marshall-Hall ‘was a magician weaving control over the orchestra … turning each instrumentalist into a Beethoven’.

Rhoderick McNeill identifies Marshall-Hall as a pioneering composer whose Symphony in E flat (1903) was the first major landmark within the Australian tradition. Suzanne Robinson convincingly unpacks his 1910 opera Stella as a ‘blistering reproof’ to the censorious and puritanical Melbourne society behind his ultimate downfall.

This broad-ranging collection fittingly closes with Peter Tregear’s generous reassessment of London-born Marshall-Hall as an Australian composer. He discovers in the Symphony in E flat a fine adaptation of heroic Wagnerian musical rhetoric to an explicitly colonial Australian context, rather than as a uniquely ‘Australian’ sound born of onomatopoeic reference to Australian wildlife.

Each essay offers a partial and tangential sketch of Marshall-Hall and his Melbourne. Read in concert, a lucid exploration of his thoughts and deeds emerges, illuminating both the man and his time. Moments of repetition and overlap are minor quibbles in an intriguing, thorough, and commendable reclamation. Ample colour plates featuring music, photographs, and historic paraphernalia are a rich addition to an already meticulous publication. The rarefied academic genesis of the collection is pleasantly tempered by an overt fondness for the man and his peculiar impression on his adopted city.