William Sterndale Bennett was born in Sheffield on 13 April 1816, the only son of Robert Bennett, organist of the parish church, who named him after his friend the poet William Sterndale. His mother died in 1818 and his father in 1819, and the orphaned boy was raised in Cambridge by his grandfather John Bennett, a professional bass who sang as a lay clerk at King’s, St John’s and Trinity, and who gave him his first lessons. He sang in the King’s College Chapel choir from February 1824, and at ten was admitted to the Royal Academy of Music, where he stayed for a decade. By twenty he had a reputation as a concert pianist; Mendelssohn, impressed by his compositions, invited him to Leipzig, where he spent three winters composing and performing and became a friend of Schumann. He was knighted in 1871, died in London on 1 February 1875, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

He began teaching at the Royal Academy in 1837 and was tied to it for most of the rest of his life, later also teaching at Queen’s College, London; Arthur Sullivan, Hubert Parry and Tobias Matthay were among his pupils. He composed little through the 1840s and 1850s, playing instead, directing the Philharmonic Society for ten years and promoting chamber concerts, and from 1848 his career was shadowed by a running antagonism with the conductor Michael Costa. He returned to composition in 1858, though the later works were thought old-fashioned beside his youthful ones. He was Professor of Music at Cambridge from 1856 and became Principal of the Royal Academy in 1866, saving it from closure. His symphony, the piano concertos, some vocal music and a good deal of the piano music have been recorded in recent years, and his bicentenary in 2016 brought several concerts.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Sterndale_Bennett
• https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q201164