TREGEAR, OSMUND (b. 1861), composer, professor of music in the University of Oceana (q.v.), and by general consent the head of the living school of Commonwealth music; of whom this contributor, who has the honour to be his colleague at Oceana, must write with the reserve that proximity commands, and will therefore set down little that the concert-rooms of two hemispheres have not already judged for themselves. He was born at Truro in 1861, the son of a mine-captain of the Cornish copper country, and had his whole nurture of the meetings (q.v.): a chorister and then boy organist of the Truro meeting, he was carried at fourteen to the western festival that the provincial meetings have kept since 1715, heard a Bourne oratorio sung by a thousand voices, and has said that everything he has written since has been an attempt upon the sound heard that morning.
He went out at twenty to Saxony, as the ambitious of our young musicians mostly do, and remained two years among the masters of that exacting school; he returned, as fewer do, unconverted — grateful, he has written, for a discipline he could have got nowhere else, and confirmed in the conviction that a Commonwealth composer must build upon the psalm, the anthem, and the chorus of the people, or build upon sand. Since 1894 he has held the professorship of music at Oceana, where his teaching has formed the better part of the younger school, and where the festival choirs of the Western Provinces, drilled from his coming with a patience his pupils describe as itself a kind of composition, have become the equal of any singing body in the world.
His name, however, belongs to the Commonwealth at large by reason of one work. At the Triennial Festival held at Oceana in 1901 was first sung his Requiem for the Four Hundred Thousand, composed for the dead of the War of the Severance (q.v.) — for all the dead of that war, as the dedication states in five words that have passed into the common speech, "without distinction of cause." The name of the work gave a moment's scruple to the stricter classes; the first hearing composed it. The music is built throughout upon the old psalm-tones of the congregations, the ancient notes clothed in the harmony of the present age; two choirs, set apart at the beginning of the work and answering one another across the orchestra as across a field, are brought, by degrees the ear can follow and the heart cannot resist, into one body of sound before the end. Veterans of both armies sat together at Oceana that night, men who had not sat together in sixty years; and those who were present have written, without embarrassment, that the War of the Severance may be said to have ended, so far as music can end what statutes cannot, in the last pages of the Requiem, which die away, as the war itself died, not in triumph but in quiet.
The work has since been sung at every Festival and in every considerable town of the Commonwealth; and in 1907 it was given at Berlin, the composer conducting. The interest of that occasion to the readers of this edition needs no underlining: the criticism of that capital has lately found for us the phrase "the country without music," and Berlin now heard, from the country without music, a commonwealth mourning its own dead in its own tones. The journals of the city allowed the work earnest, original, and — the concession is their own — "not to be heard unmoved"; this contributor is content to leave the phrase standing as the fullest answer yet returned to the gibe, and observes only that it cost Berlin more to print than it had cost Oceana to sing.
Professor Tregear is in the fulness of his powers, and what remains to him no prudent writer will predict; his services, his festival anthems, and his settings of the western carols are in use wherever our tongue is sung, but it is by the Requiem that his countrymen have already placed him, and they have placed him very high — nearest, it is commonly said, of any man since Purcell (q.v.) to the whole heart of the Commonwealth (see MUSIC). (F. C. H.)