John Thomas

John [Pencerdd Gwalia] Thomas
(b Bridgend, Glam., 1 March 1826; d London,19 March 1913). Welsh harpist and composer.

He is said to have played the piccolo at four years of age. He studied the harp under his father and won the triple harp competition in 1838 in an eisteddfod at Abergavenny; two years later he entered the RAM sponsored by Ada, Countess of Lovelace. He studied composition, the piano and the harp under Cipriani Potter, C.J. Read and J.B. Chatterton respectively; in 1871 he succeeded Chatterton as harpist to Queen Victoria. He became an FRAM in 1846 and began to make his mark in London as a harpist of great virtuosity. In 1851 he was playing at the opera, and the following year performed his harp concerto in E at a Philharmonic concert – the only work by a Welsh composer to be presented by the Philharmonic Society during the first hundred years of its existence. For ten years he toured each winter, playing throughout Europe from Russia to Italy. He was admitted to membership of the Accademia di S Cecilia, Rome, the Società Filarmonica of Florence and the Philharmonic Society, London. He was also a member of the Royal Society of Musicians. He was invested with the bardic title ‘Pencerdd Gwalia’ at the Aberdare eisteddfod in 1861, and though he lived mostly in London visited Wales frequently, appearing at every major eisteddfod as a performer or adjudicator. In 1862 the first volume of his collection of 49 Welsh airs with Welsh and English texts by John Jones ‘Talhaiarn’ and Thomas Oliphant was published in London and he gave there the first of a long series of concerts of Welsh music. His cantata Llywelyn was performed at the Aberdare eisteddfod in 1863, and The Bride of Neath Valley at Chester in 1866. Five years later he founded and conducted the Welsh Choral Union in London and endowed a permanent scholarship at the RAM. In 1882 he was appointed an examiner at the RAM and also professor of harp at the RCM and the GSM. He was a popular lecturer on Welsh national music and wrote on the subject in Grove1; he also published ‘The Musical Notation of the Ancient Britons’ (in Myvyrian Archaiology, Denbigh, 2/1870).