In his series on the Twentieth century Concerto Matthew is devoting one lecture to three concertos by the French composer Francis Poulenc to represent the 1920’s and 30’s, Concert Champêtre, a harpsichord concerto written for Wanda Landowska (1929), the double piano concerto (1932) and the concerto for organ timpani and strings (1938). Poulenc is an undervalued composer demonstrated by the fact that in 2013, big years for Verdi (200th anniversary) and Britten’s centenary, there was little on show to commemorate the death fifty years previously of probably the most entertaining and most melodic of composers since Mozart.
To begin with let’s get the name right. It is not, as often pronounced, Pool (as in puddle) ONK (as in klaxon horn) but Pull (as in pullover) and ANC (as in Anchor). His father was one of the founders of the pharmaceutical company Poulenc Frères, later to become the industrial giant Rhône Poulenc. Now I do not know whether Sir Thomas Beecham ever conducted anything by Poulenc. He should have done so, as much of Poulenc, Les Biches for example, could have turned out to be first rate Beecham lollipops. The interesting connection is that Beecham too had a father who also founded a pharmaceutical giant, in his case with pills to relieve constipation.
Francis Poulenc was born in Paris in 1899 and was educated at the lycée Condorcet. There wasn’t anything spectacular about his musical beginnings. His mother first taught him the piano from the age of 5. His uncle introduced him to vaudeville and other popular aspects of Parisian theatre. From 1915 he took piano lessons from Ricardo Viñes through whom he got to meet Satie, Debussy and Ravel. He was 18 when he gained his first success, his Rapsodie Nègre, a bluesy work for solo baritone voice, string quartet, piano, flute, clarinet and piano. This was enough to block any entrance to the conservatoire but its success came to the attention of Stravinsky who had it published in London, something for which Poulenc remained grateful. This connection would lead in 1924 to Poulenc meeting Diaghilev which led to the commission for the ballet, Les Biches.
Meantime back in 1917 Satie had formed around him the small group including Honegger, Milhaud and Auric called Les Nouveaux Jeunes which would metamorphose into a new group led by Jean Cocteau with the name of Les Six. It included also Germaine Tailleferre and Louis Durey and Poulenc is said to have been included without being consulted. At the time he was serving on military duty from 1918 to 1921 and had remained young enough just to miss the war. Satie had dropped out, may be because Cocteau had taken over. The ideal of Groupe de Six was to re-act against German romanticism (Wagner) and French impressionism (Debussy and Ravel) although the later Ravel was moving into much the same spirit. That spirit was that of Chabrier and a back to Français basics as developed by Satie as in his Parade of 1917. Another inspiration was the poet Guillaume Appolinaire, who invented the concept and name of surrealism. Poulenc had first met him at a leftist bookshop in 1916 and would set to song a number of his works as well as the opera Les Mamelles de Tiresias. Apollinaire who suffered head wounds on the Western Front died on 9th November 1918 not from war wounds but the Spanish flu. The name of Les Six was chosen by the critic Henri Collet based on the name of the Russian nationalist Groupe de Cinq. Like them it had one who slipped below the horizon. For the Russians it was Cui. For the French it was Durey. The French had an extra man, or rather a woman, Germaine Tailleferre whose harp concerto is a delight. The fact is that the group had very little cohesion and it was less a school than a publicity stunt to attract attention with each going his/her separate ways. The six collaborated twice, first with an Album of piano pieces and then in a ballet, Les Mariés (« the bridal couples ») de la Tour Eiffel, devised by Cocteau with music by five of them. Durey had dropped out to pursue his socialist ideals. The ballet is a surreal wedding party on the Eiffel Tower where appear a cyclist, someone chasing an ostrich, a lion and a sea bather.
Poulenc was largely self taught and described his music as instinctive. He was aware that something more was needed. He took lessons from 1921 to 1924 with Charles Koechlin, an eccentric composer proud of his Alsace origins but who did not acquire the fame of that of Arsene Wenger. Koechlin settled in Villers sur Mer in Normandy. His output was enormous and included orchestral settings of Kipling’s Jungle Book – I have to say I prefer the Kipling – and, as well as watching all the films at his local cinema, writing also music suitable to accompany Greta Garbo, Ginger Rogers and Douglas Fairbanks.
Now in 1924 Diaghiliev’s attention had been drawn to Poulenc. Diaghilev sought from Poulenc a new ballet for the Ballets Russes’ Monte Carlo season as a modern sequence to Les Sylphides by Glazunov. The subject did not appeal to Poulenc who came up with the proposal for Les Biches, not an easily translatable title. A biche is a doe, the female deer, a slang term also for certain coquettish women. Poulenc chose to base his work on paintings of Watteau that depicted Louis XV and various women in his deer park, “Parc aux biches”. He described the work as a “contemporary drawing room party suffused with an atmosphere of wantonness”. It represented a 1920’s contemporary house party – the bright young things – with the sexual identity of its characters intended to be ambiguous. This was right up Diaghilev’s street. It was choreographed by Nijinska. It was also Poulenc’s entry into neo-classicism. Stravinsky had previously introduced this movement with Pulcinella based on pieces by Pergolesi but here Poulenc went further, plus royaliste que le roi, quoting and dressing up several composers in the same work including Scarlatti, Rossini Tchaikovsky and Mozart, so fast that before you can think, where have I heard that before?, you are fast plunged into the next quote, and to cap it all Poulenc quotes from Stravinsky’s own Soldier’s Tale. What chutzpah indeed! Les Biches remains Poulenc’s best known work, fun, catchy and always tasteful.
In 1926, Poulenc would meet Pierre Bernac, a fine baritone and teacher. He gave the first performances of the Chansons gaillardes in 1926. The two began appearing in recital and recording with Poulenc as the accompanist in 1934 and they continued performing together until Bernac withdrew from performing in public in 1960. Poulenc wrote the majority of his songs for Bernac. Their musical relationship might be compared to Britten and Pears but whilst Poulenc himself was openly gay their relationship does not seem to have encompassed this side of Poulenc’s life.
In 1927 Poulenc had met Wanda Landowska, famous for her playing of the modern harpsichord at a time before the baroque revival and period instruments. Landowska was responsible for the composition of several other new pieces of music for the instrument, notably the harpsichord concerto of Manuel da Falla and his puppet theatre play “El Retablo de Maese Pedro” at the first performance of which she and Poulenc met. She demanded of him a concerto for her. She was a dominant woman to whom one could not say no. The Concert Champêtre (the Pastoral Concerto) was the result. This is the first of three concertos which Matthew will be dealing with in his lectures. Landowska said she “adored” playing it as it made her “insouciant and gay!” It is typically maverick of Poulenc that he pits the harpsichord against the combined resources of a full orchestra whilst in his later organ concerto he balances the much more powerful organ against only timpani and strings. The work is in three movements and as usual includes typical Poulenc cheeky chappie tunes. It is interspersed with reveille horn calls said to have been heard by Poulenc from the barracks at the nearby Chateau de Vincennes. Why pastoral? Chateau de Vincennes, where Landowska was living, is at the end of Line 1 of the Paris Métro and about as near as Poulenc would get to be a rustic. The work itself is a skittish combination of the baroque and Stravinsky.
The concerto for two pianos was written in 1932 and played (and later recorded) by Poulenc with his childhood friend Jacques Février. It was written in two months and first played at an ISCM festival at Venice. It contains both high spirits and thoughtfulness. There is an especial section where there is a clear Balinese influence. Poulenc had heard Balinese music in the Paris Expo of 1931 and, like Debussy before him and Britten after him, the introduction was revelatory. Its neoclassical tag derives from the second movement which is a loving tribute to Mozart. One feels the tune to be a slow movement taken from one of Mozart’s own concertos but I had to play all 27 of them before realizing it was pure Poulenc.
The organ concerto, like the double piano concerto, was commissioned by Princess Polignac in 1934, as a chamber orchestra piece with an easy organ part that she could manage herself. However Poulenc abandoned this idea for something much more grandiose and ambitious. He wrote to Jean Françaix, “The concerto is not the amusing Poulenc of the Concerto for two pianos, but more like a Poulenc en route for the cloister.” Following the death of his friend and composer, Ferroud, in 1936 Poulenc went on a pilgrimage to the Black Virgin of Rocamadour where he would rediscover his father’s Christian faith. This reconversion added a religious dimension to much of the music he would write including also his incomplete organ concerto. Poulenc never having composed for the organ before would study works of Bach and Buxtehude which reflect in the work’s neo-baroque leanings. The darker hues of the organ concerto clearly reflect the new religiosity, a serious side to Poulenc’s personality but having been completed in 1938, the year of the Munich crisis, I just wonder if, like Martinu’s double concerto, it reflects also the gathering storm.
From now on there will be the Janus side of Poulenc’s character. Alongside the fun and games of the twenties and thirties with Poulenc sharing friendships and associations with the likes of Jean Gabin, Edith Piaf and Maurice Chevalier he was able to release a number of devotional works including a Stabat Mater, his Gloria, his Litanies à la Vièrge Noire. It made him a more complete composer. One saw the same with his friend of the period, Sergei Prokofiev who could also switch between buffoonery and deep seriousness. Yet with Poulenc there remains in his most spiritual of works a touch or brushstroke somewhere of the other Poulenc who can still display the humour of his alter ego.
The war years did not interrupt his activities. In 1941with Durey and Auric he joined the national Front of Musicians organized by the French communist party. The following year he wrote a humorous ballet, Les Animaux Modèles, based on fables by La Fontaine in which he included the tune of an old popular song “You’ll Never Have Alsace and Lorraine”, an act of defiance unrecognized by the Germans. On the other hand he wrote “Figure Humaine” in 1943 but, with its conclusion called Liberté, it had to wait till 1945 for its first performance in London. At the end of the war he wrote Babar the Elephant, every bit as popular as Paddington Bear and, orchestrated by Jean Françaix, worthy of a place alongside Peter and The Wolf and The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra.
With the post-war years it was back to Apollinaire with the surrealist opera-ballet Les Mamelles de Tiresias urging women to make babies – women’s lib was more than a decade away – and this put the mockers on it for the first two sopranos cast for the role who each became pregnant!. This was old Poulenc of the profane variety. In stark contrast there followed his opera The Carmelites concerning nuns of that order during the French Revolution, each of whom is guillotined in a chilling sequence. You takes your choice. Poulenc and Bernac embarked on several American tours. For his second visit to the States Poulenc wrote his delightful piano concerto although it was not what American audiences expected despite his slipping in “Way Down Upon the Swanee River”. Poulenc never wrote a symphony but he did write his sinfonietta on a commission from the BBC to celebrate the first anniversary of the Third Programme in 1947. It is a little back to Les Biches and a work played far too little.
Throughout his career Poulenc wrote chamber music, not your common or garden string quartets or sonatas but usually music for one or two wind instruments accompanied always by piano with works dedicated to Prokofiev and Honegger.
Francis Poulenc died from a sudden heart attack aged 64. For him fun had been a way of life. What Constant Lambert said of Chabrier would have been more appropriate for Poulenc, “He was the first important composer since Mozart to show that seriousness is not the same as solemnity, that profundity is not dependent upon length, that wit is not always the same as buffoonery, and that frivolity and beauty are not necessarily enemies” . One could add that no-one in modern times could write a better melody than Francis Poulenc. He, more than anyone else, was the tunesmith of the twentieth century.
Lastly, apart from his wit and charm many of the critiques and programme notes I have read refer to Poulenc being so Gallic. I have to question this adjective particularly since my dear French wife once commented “What is Gallic when it’s at home? No-one in France would know what you are talking about”. It is true. It happens only with music, not painting. The impressionist painters were French but for some reason composers, like Fauré and Ravel amongst others, are attributed with a Gallic quality. There is Gallic wit, Gallic esprit, Gallic verve and Gallic élan. We don’t refer to Britten as ever so Anglo Saxon nor Hamish McCunn’s Land of the Mountain and Flood as being so Celtic. The only object of culture which can lay claim to the term Gallic is the Asterix Theme Park. I did Caesar’s Gallic Wars for my ‘O’ levels and I can tell you that old Julius never attributed wit, esprit, verve or élan to the Gauls. The next time I read yet another programme note referring to Gallic I will send it back to its author marked “Gallic, mon cul”.
RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS O.M – (Knighthood Declined) (1872-1958)
Ralph (pronounced Raif) Vaughan Williams (RVW) is a completely different barrel of English cider than the other composers I have written about. All composers are different but some have traits in common; others are just more different. Everything is different about him apart from his musical training which was bog standard orthodox. Yet here is a composer who is regarded as quintessentially rustic English. Little wonder for someone born in a Gloucestershire village called Down Ampney. His father, Arthur, was the rector; his mother, Margaret, a suitable subject for TV’s “Who do You Think You Are?”, was an offspring from two famous families, the Wedgwoods and the Darwins, who had frequently previously intermarried. She was a direct descendant of Josiah Wedgwood whilst Charles Darwin was a great uncle who frequently visited.
If during the course of musical succession the relay baton got handed down from Haydn and Mozart to Beethoven, Brahms through to Dvorak and was about to be taken up by Elgar, this did not apply to RVW. At the end of the nineteenth century musical nationalism was sweeping through Europe, intermingling folk dances with classical structures. Others were content to write their trepaks and mazurkas, their polkas, Slavonic Dances and Hungarian Rhapsodies, their Ma Vlasts and Patries, and all at a time when England was being bashed as “Das Land Ohne Musik” with no sign of any emergent English national movement. And RVW assumed this mantle by quite different albeit artificial means. After Charterhouse he had studied at the Royal College of Music under Parry absorbing the English choral tradition and Beethoven quartets; he had gone up to Cambridge to read history and music whilst continuing weekly studies under Parry; after graduating he returned to the College where he studied under another giant pillar of Victorian establishment, Stanford. During this second period he met fellow student, Gustav Holst with whom he would always remain close. The two of them developed an interest in the English folksong, travelling the country and recording down on paper old songs that had been passed down, much as Kodaly and Bartok would do in Hungary. The English folk song and its particular musical modes would interest and absorb RVW for the rest of his life.
In 1897 he married Adeline Fisher, a talented cellist and pianist and cousin of Virginia Woolf, but they never would have any children. She suffered from arthritis and their relationship was at times strained. He briefly studied with Max Bruch in Berlin. His first appointment was no great shakes, organist at St. Barnabas Church in Lambeth. However this turned out to be greatly influential upon his later output as RVW was commissioned to edit and rewrite the English Hymnal. What is more surprising is that RVW was all his life a firm committed atheist but not only did he write the new hymnal but added four new hymns of his own as well as a number of religious works, not just masses but also what he described as mystic works. Throughout his creative life his works and style would be inseminated with religious forms or folk song or ancient modes in which he clothed much of his output so as to affect a kind of olde Englishe dialect.
It was in writing the English hymnal that he came to study hymns ancient. I do not subscribe to there being hymns modern but RVW was much absorbed with Tudor writing, particularly Thomas Tallis, and again the modes of the times well before the adoption of tonic sol fa. Now don’t get worried. I am not going technical upon you but put in simple terms each mode is the way a scale has its notes separated from each other. We have all learned Do-Re-Mi which is what is called the major scale. There is also the minor scale which is correctly the Aeolian mode. But there have been other modes used in olden times where the distance between notes is positioned differently. To name a few, there are Lydian, Phrygian and pentatonic . There are more modern modes like the Blues mode. There is also a bebop mode which RVW didn’t adopt.. Now it was one thing for RVW to reproduce music written four centuries earlier in some mediaeval mode, like Greensleeves. He would go on to adapt such modes into his own compositions which would create an impression of perceived old England whether it be period sound or clodhopping rustic or again to evoke a particular musical landscape, a sort of Constable in sound. Was it English or phoney Englishness? Now a listener of Mussorgsky’s time would recognize a Russian folk song in Boris Godunov and might even sing it. RVW’s folk songs were simply curiosities but not part of the musical DNA of Joe Public. In the early 1900’s their taste in Tudor music would have been “I’m Henry the Eighth, I am, I am”, sung at the Kings Head or the local Palace of Varieties down the Old Kent Road.
Moving into the first decade of the twentieth century RVW was becoming a musical master chef. A folk tune here coupled with a hymn there, a touch of the Old Hundreth or a modal sprinkle of Thomas Tallis. Blend it all together and you have Vaughan Williams on your platter. One of his earliest works was in 1909 when he was engaged to write incidental music for the annual Greek play at Cambridge, in this case “The Wasps” by Aristophanes. Wasps was the name given to those Athenian citizens who queued up to volunteer to be jurors and give someone a sting. The music is best known for its overture and suite. What immediately strikes home is that though it is an Aristophanic comedy the music is not exactly up the Parthenon, more like like Stow on the Wold. By now RVW had completed a long apprenticeship. Perhaps he thought his music was becoming too narrowly English and that he needed to learn something of what was going on across the Manche. So late in 1907 he decided to go to Paris to take lessons from Ravel who was actually three years his junior. This turned out to be particularly fruitful, with RVW learning “to orchestrate in points of colour rather than in lines”. He returned a few months later to write his very English song cycle “On Wenlock Edge”, to poems by A.E. Housman but Ravel’s brand of impressionism would be found in RVW’s later London Symphony of 1913.
RVW’s researches had led him to an earlier rich vein of Elizabethan music, hitherto unknown, to which he could leapfrog back over the classical and baroque periods and from which he derived his inspiration. In 1906 RVW had included in his English hymnal a psalm by Tallis for Archbishop Parker’s hymnal of 1567. Now in 1910 RVW took up the Elizabethan name of ‘Fantasy’ using the Tallis in its Phrygian mode as the theme. It is not just written for a string orchestra but for a double string orchestra, one larger, the other consisting of nine players set apart from the first, and including also a string quartet. RVW configured it so as to resemble the sound of an organ with the first orchestra the great choir and the second the small choir. The spacing between them emphasises the stereophonic effect in the way that the small orchestra echoes the large. This is a true masterwork, a tapestry of Elizabethan sound with the music moving seamlessly from one section to another. RVW was an early music neo-classical but no-one would have used that term. It was of course later used in the 1920’s by Stravinsky and his followers. They dressed up old masters in new clothes with added lipstick and make up in order to create a novelty in their own image. The Tallis Fantasia is neo-Elizabethan written more in homage to the original. RVW had anticipated his more fashionable successors in reaching across the intervening centuries. The one comparable work which does come to mind is Elgar’s Introduction and Allegro for Strings written in 1905 also with string quartet. The combination is similar but the Elgar has its roots in the 19th century and, pleasant as it is, it does not have the intensity and spirituality of the Tallis Fantasia.
RVW was well into his thirties by the time he got going. His first main body of works was effectively from 1906 till the Great War. I do not propose to go through each one but it is worth perhaps looking at his life viewed from alongside his cycle of nine symphonies, a fateful number alongside those of Beethoven, Schubert (except he had a missing seventh), Bruckner, Mahler and Dvorak . Writing a symphony was perhaps a natural aim of any young man seeking to emulate the feats of the nineteenth century colossi. As early as 1903 RVW was working on a large scale choral symphony in four movements à la Beethoven, to become the Sea Symphony. It was finished in 1910, lasts 70 minutes and unlike the Beethoven the chorus is at work from the start. He had discovered the poetry of Walt Whitman for his texts and to whom he would later return. It was a great success. The second symphony was called “A London Symphony” or, as RVW put it, a symphony by a Londoner. It has a prelude and a postlude each containing the Big Ben chimes on the harp. Its original version was very long and later given a haircut. It depicts the sounds of Edwardian London, the chirpy cockney, the flower girl in Piccadilly selling violets, a nocturne-scherzo with orchestral imitations of mouth organs and accordions in a Cockney pub followed by a majestic finale, a tad pomp and circumstance. The original score got lost in Berlin after a performance there just before the balloon went up and RVW had to rewrite it from memory after the war ended. The suggestion for the symphony came from his friend and fellow composer, George Butterworth whose own music conjures up much the same rural landscapes as that of RVW. The other well known work from this time, is The Lark Ascending, top of the charts on Classic FM, originally written for violin and piano and orchestrated in 1920, It is not a concerto but could have made the most wonderful rhapsodic slow movement of a violin concerto. Like the London Symphony it is impressionist in a very English way. For many it symbolizes the lost world of Innocence of the pre-war years except that this is a myth that belies the very turbulent period leading up to the First World War.
On New Year’s Eve 1914 RVW who was living in Chelsea enlisted at Duke of York’s Barracks as a private in an ambulance unit. Enlistment at that time was voluntary and he only was doing what thousands of others were all doing notwithstanding he was 42 and had flat feet. He conducted a military band till 1916 when he was posted to the Western Front. 1916 saw the first battle of the Somme in which his friend George Butterworth died in surrounds which in no way could be likened to the banks of green willow. One feels Butterworth would, had he lived, have been a twin figure of equal stature to RVW. One might imagine RVW driving around in a white ambulance with a red cross. Surprisingly the army may not have mastered military strategy but it knew its Latin and the verb “ambulo-ambulare” which means to walk. RVW’s duties included walking the trenches where he attended the wounded on the spot. In short he was in the front line in appalling conditions. I find a striking similarity between RVW and the artist Stanley Spencer. Both were products of rural England; both influenced by religious subjects and both were members of ambulance units in the war. Spencer managed to depict this in his contemporary painting whilst RVW stored up his ideas but his composition was on hold. He resumed his activities once demobbed including finishing his opera “Hugh The Drover” and resuming his activities with the Leith Hill Festival which he had founded in 1905. In 1922 he wrote his Pastoral Symphony (No 3). For many it was typical rustic VW, a work without climaxes, as flat as a steamy fresh cow pat or as Peter Warlock famously said of it “too much like a cow looking over a gate”. The criticism was of its particular English grey landscape. However it was not an English landscape that RVW had in mind. The Pastoral Symphony was an aspect of the war. He wrote “It’s really wartime music — a great deal of it incubated when I used to go up night after night with the ambulance wagon at Ecoivres and we went up a steep hill and there was a wonderful Corot-like landscape in the sunset – it’s not really lambkins frisking at all as most people take for granted.” So, Corot, not Constable. The initial inspiration came after RVW heard a bugler playing a wrong note which RVW reproduced in the second movement of his symphony..
In 1930 RVW was asked to write a ballet for the newly launched Camargo Society whose musical director was his brilliant former pupil, Constant Lambert. The ballet was straight away different from all others. First of all, RVW did not call it a ballet. He was in his sixteenth century mode and called it a “Masque for Dancing”. There would be no dancing “sur les points”. The subject matter was biblical, “Job”, and it is of symphonic proportions, what might be called a a “Jobsworth”. Something was clearly happening to RVW and the answer exploded forth in 1934 with his fourth symphony. Early in that year Elgar, Holst and Delius had died within three months of each other. There appeared no natural successor although Arnold Bax attempted to claim the crown. At that time RVW was seen as a respectable composer of what Matthew Taylor would describe as the second division, known and respected but much in the same league as say George Dyson or Herbert Howells – for them I’d say 3rd Divison. And there he would have stayed if his fourth symphony had not appeared. It is notorious for an opening double discord which immediately says that RVW is a modernist after all and not everything comes out of The Woodes So Gaye or stems from the Morris Dance. This is as violent an opening as you will hear. RVW famously said “I don’t know if I like it but I meant it”. Commentators have attributed all manner of explanations including the depression and the rise of Hitler. This only made RVW even more mad when he commented “It never seems to occur to people that a man might just want to write a piece of music.” Suddenly the sixty year plus old RVW, composer of Greensleeves and Old King Cole, was being projected as England’s Number One symphonist, but not for long. William Walton had laboriously written three movements of his symphony and with its completion the following year a new leader was crowned.
If anything the anger expressed in the fourth symphony was not from Herr Hitler but from the home front. His wife Adeline was getting worse and because of her arthritis confined to a wheel chair. She wanted to leave London where RVW was happily living and move back to Dorking. It has been suggested that his anger stemmed from the strains taking place. RVW’s fourth symphony contrasts remarkably with his cantata “Dona Nobis Pacem” written in 1936. Its title is religious; its content is based on poems written again by Walt Whitman especially the two veteran soldiers from the American Civil War; it is played regularly in concerts of Amnesty International. The first performance of “Five Tudor Portraits” took place also in 1936 at the Norwich Triennial Festival. It also saw the first performance of “Our Hunting Fathers” by the 22 year old Benjamin Britten. The orchestra was particularly mocking in respect of the latter. RVW told them in no uncertain words that they were “in the presence of greatness” and that if they did not want to play Britten’s work they would not play his. Peace and tranquillity were to return in RVW’s beautiful Serenade to Music specially written as a golden jubilee present for the conductor, Sir Henry Wood, in 1938 written for him and sixteen of his favourite singers as soloists.
At about this time a young aspiring actress from the Old Vic who had taken part in a production of Job, Ursula Wood, already married to a gunnery officer, took a shy to RVW and asked to meet him. She was 27; he was 66. According to her he took her to dinner and grabbed hold of her in the back of the taxi and kissed her passionately. There was clearly going to be more of where that came from. She was soon referred to euphemistically as his secretary. Moreover it was an open relationship if not talked about with his wife whom he clearly was not going to leave. In 1944 towards the end of the war Ursula was staying with the VW’s at Dorking when the threat from enemy V1’s (doodle bugs) was at its height. Ursula could not get back to London and stayed the night. It has been described as a ménage à trois although in fact RVW slept in his bed, Adeline slept in hers and Ursula occupied the floor space between. That’s hardly erotic in my book. What is more important about Ursula is that a degree of calm seems to have resulted in RVW’s music. This is particularly so in his fifth symphony which appeared in 1942. He had been writing an opera, “The Pilgrim’s Progress”, after Bunyan, over a period of twenty years and used much of the music intended for that in the symphony. Whilst the fourth was vitriolic the fifth, written in the middle of the war years, was a paragon of peace and tranquillity. It harps back to the Pastoral but one senses a spirituality and calm which, having regard to the bleakness of the time, came as just a shock considering that only a further cluster of high explosives could be expected.
High explosive there was however with the advent of the sixth symphony in 1946 – said by some, but not by RVW, to be his reaction to Hiroshima. For RVW the end of the war did was not about you do the hoky coky and you turn around. Its opening is the same VW who wrote Job and the fourth symphony. The second movement contains an insistent repetitive tattoo of three taps on the side drum, a warning of disaster which eventually gets thundered out by the whole orchestra – a reminder here of Mars from Holst’s Planet Suite. Some, because of the side drum, see a likeness to Nielsen’s fifth symphony; others because of its repetition liken it to Shostakovich’s Leningrad symphony. Just to compare RVW to those two was to suggest he had moved to another planet. The most incredible movement is the last. It is an evocation of space without development or shape. Its co-sanguinity is again Holst, this time Neptune. RVW admitted to that when interviewed. This symphony contains no finale, just a disappearance into a black hole.
Now RVW was well into his seventies and the grand old man of English music. Following the sixth symphony he wrote the music for the film Scott of the Antarctic which came out in 1948. The film was about heroism, shooting the mules, broken down snow tractors, brave intrepid Englishmen man-hauling their equipment and never countenancing the use of dogs – so unEnglish – and of course the most valiant of persons after Scott himself, John Mills. I loved it and RVW wrote the music. Moreover the music was too good not to be re-used, much like Prokofiev with his opera the Prodigal Son. The ideas were recycled to make his Symphony No 7, the Sinfonia Antarctica with full orchestra, a wordless soprano and a wind machine. But I have always encountered one difficulty. When I hear the music my inner eye sees the cold wastes of the Beardmore Glacier. Yet, when I see the film which appears almost as regularly on TV as Midsummer Murders my attention gets diverted from the events on the screen on hearing the somewhat faded sounds of Vaughan-Williams Sinfornia Antarctica in the background.
In 1951 Adeline Vaughan Williams died. Ursula Wood and RVW’s relationship had continued. Her husband had died of a heart attack in 1942. RVW had remained married, if not conventionally loyal, to Adelina who was fully aware of what was going on. He was now over eighty. RVW and Ursula married in February 1953 to the shock of the press.. One presumes there was no more hanky panky in the back of taxi cabs. (Ladies and gentlemen, we have a young French lady who has joined our class and for her I suggest for hanky panky – galipettes).
Of concertos RVW wrote few but was prepared to try anything once. For Harriet Cohen he wrote a piano concerto in return for 10,000 kisses. In the fifties he wrote a tuba concerto for Philip Catalinet, lead tuba player of the Philharmonia and a harmonica concerto for that greatest of mouth organ players, Larry Adler who had taken up asylum in Britain to escape the McCarthy UnAmerican Activities Committee. Larry Adler might have described a spade as a spade but he would never describe a harmonica as anything but a mouth organ.
Well now the journey seemed over but RVW wanted to go on. And on. His concise eighth symphony with a cornet and vibraphone was written in the USA and dedicated to Glorious John (Barbirolli). It was followed by the ninth first performed in April 1958 under Sargent. At 86 he had produced a symphony which generated enormous power and included in its orchestration three saxophones (two tenor and one alto) and the strange wide bore flugelhorn. Its battery includes timpani, side drums, bass drum cymbals, triangle, gong, tam-tam, bells, glockenspiel, xylophone and celesta. Thomas Tallis would not have just turned but would have risen from his grave. RVW’s original intention was going to be a programme symphony based on Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Though he dropped the idea his sketches indicated movements relating to people and events in the novel with the first movement headed “Wessex Prelude”. Being wise after the event the last movement could well describe the bleak landscape of Egdon Heath. As with his good friend, Gustav Holst before him, he had kept the faith in reproducing Hardy’s rural England. But no-one could any longer refer to the Country Bumpkin School of Composers. If RVW’s physical powers were failing him his inner ear remained as sharp and powerful as it had ever been. There remained something of his old self but mystifying at the same time.
On 5th August 1958 the ninth symphony was due to be recorded under Boult, the day when Ralph Vaughan Williams died. That evening I was at a Promenade Concert with the Halle under Barbirolli. The programme was changed and Johann Strauss or whatever was replaced by the Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis. Glorious John wept as he conducted.
RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS – ARTHUR BLISS – WILLIAM WALTON – MICHAEL TIPPETT
Matthew Taylor has chosen the above four composers for one lecture on British composers and the Concerto (1900- 1950). For those of you familiar with Who Wants To Be A Millionaire this list sounds like fastest finger first: Starting with the earliest, name these British composers in the order they were born. As it happens Matthew is spot on which could put him on the way to a million pounds. This note will differ from those I usually prepare as it will encompass two of the four composers.
SIR WILLIAM WALTON (1902-1983)
William Walton is one of those rare composers who emerged out of nowhere with little or no formal training and just became a composer. As a fact he was born in Oldham, a fact he did his best to forget. His parents were local musicians, his father having been to the Northern College of Music and a local organist. It became clear that William was not going to be very good at the violin or the piano but he had a voice and at ten he won a place for six years as a chorister at Christ College, Oxford choir. There he wrote his first juvenile works. He went on to university where he failed his Greek and algebra examinations and got sent down. It was at Oxford that he met Sacheverell Sitwell, brother of Osbert and Edith Sitwell, and he was invited to their London home. He was the man who came to dinner and stayed 10 years with an attic room in their house. He became part of their circle meeting various society figures and others from the world of the arts including Constant Lambert and Siegfried Sassoon. He was introduced to Ernest Ansermet who gave him some lessons as did the composer, Busoni. In 1920 he wrote a string quartet in the style of the Second Viennese School which came to the notice of Schoenberg and Alban Berg. On the other side of the coin he also met George Gershwin and went to listen to the Savoy Orpheans. From all of this emerged Façade, an entertainment with nonsense rhythmic poems written by Edith Sitwell and recited by her behind a curtain through a megaphone to music for six instrumentalists written by Walton. The first performance at the Aeolian Hall was a scandal although it is now seen as fun and harmless. Still the ragtime “See Me Dance the Polka” would shock. The evergreen “Popular Song”, a slow tap dance à la Fred Astaire, later became the signature tune to the BBC music quiz “Face The Music”. Still everybody that was anybody was there at the time and Noel Coward who was certainly somebody walked out in the middle of it all.
Façade showed Walton to be a master of rhythm which was clearly demonstrated in his next work, Portsmouth Point, a concert overture first performed in 1926 and dedicated to Siegfried Sassoon who helped get it published. It is a depiction of an etching by Thomas Rowlandson of British 18th century sailors, jigging a rumbustious hornpipe. Its Stravinskyan dissonant syncopations give it a salty tangy taste. A year later Walton set out to write a concerto for piano but settled with the title of Sinfonia Concertante, in other words an orchestral work with a prominent part for piano. What is noticeable are neo-romantic touches with one principal theme which sounds very similar to Pohjola’s Daughter by Sibelius. This romantic leaning was no blip. He followed this within two years with his viola concerto commissioned by the most famous player of the day, Lionel Tertis. The first notes give out a haunting subjective tune which returns at the end of the work. It is a new aspect of Walton, warm and sorrowful with revisits to the jagged rhythms and the dissonances of yore. Tertis to his later chagrin rejected it and it was premiered instead by Paul Hindemith with Tertis sitting in the audience. Tertis to his credit took up the work and played it at the Three Choirs Festival in the presence of Elgar. It turned out that Walton for all his youthful fun and acerbity was a keen admirer of Elgar although Elgar was not as reciprocative when it came to the viola concerto. It is said to be the first major work for the viola since Berlioz’s Harold in Italy although there are others. Walton has moved further still from the naughtiness of Facade and the flapper school to a new expression of romanticism he had not previously eschewed. It was at this time that he began a long affair was with Imma von Doernberg, widow of a German baron.
All eyes were now on Walton and little wonder the BBC commissioned a “small scale?” work for the wireless, Belshazzar’s Feast, which growed like Topsy. This was an oratorio to be performed at the Leeds Festival in 1931 and conducted by Malcolm Sargent. It was written for solo baritone, large orchestra and large chorus in the English tradition of Handel. It was based on the fall of the Babylonian king with verses arranged by Osbert Sitwell taken from Daniel and Psalms. Sir Thomas Beecham, the Festival director is reputed to have said “As you’ll never hear the thing again, my boy, why not throw in a couple of brass bands as well?”. So Walton did. It is the most electrifying work. Walton knew how to write for a chorus – after all he had been a chorister for six years – and he could now apply all the rhythmic skills he had acquired especially for a paean by Belshazzar to the Babylonian gods, the gods of gold, silver, wood, iron, stones and brass in respect of each of which Walton created an appropriate orchestral sound to match. The extra brass enters for the god of brass. The church establishment was horrified and some bishops forbade performance of such pagan praise in their cathedrals.
Now more was awaited, a symphony. And Walton made them wait. It was a slow and difficult birth. It went over its perform-by date and with only three of its four movements completed after three years Sir Hamilton Harty conducted a first performance in 1934. It took another year for Walton to add a fourth movement. It was a full length heroic symphony with a first movement set to a constant repetitive jagged rhythm; the second movement spitting out the most vituperative expressions of malice; the third movement, con malinconia, building to a climax where one could have possibly considered the work complete. It could be thought to pre-echo the gathering storm but this was actually about hate and love. The hate came from a bitter split with Baroness von Doemberg which left Walton creatively frozen and which only got unblocked by his new love affair with Alice, Viscountess Wimborne. Our Willie from Lancashire could choose his aristocrats when he wanted. Now at last came the fourth movement of the symphony which starts in a mood of happy ennoblement, owing something to Elgar, includes a jazzy fugue and builds to the climax it needs with a second set of timpani joining together with a last post perhaps for the life he had now left behind including the Sitwells from whom he broke away.
The remaining years of the thirties were as fruitful as they were different. George V died and was succeeded by Edward VIII for whose coronation Walton was commissioned to write a coronation march. Of course we all know his coronation did not take place but the planned event went ahead with George VI being substituted for the recipient of Crown Imperial. It follows the Elgar tradition with added jagged rhythms and one can detect a relationship to the fourth movement of the symphony. Walton would go on to write a coronation march “Orb and Sceptre” for Elizabeth II and also a Coronation Te Deum but to his relief he was not made Master of the King’s or Queen’s Musick because he could never have turned out music to patronage except when commissioned with a fee to go with it. At this time he began a unique partnership with Lawrence Olivier writing the music for “As You Like It” in 1936. His genius as a film composer would later come to the fore in Olivier’s film of Henry V in 1944. The timing could not have been more apt. The embarking to Harfleur and Agincourt was a foretaste for the D Day landings awaited by a public hungry for good news and victory. The music still leaves one with a tingle especially the Battle of Agincourt which owes a lot to Prokofiev’s Battle on Ice in the Eisenstein film of Alexander Nevsky written in 1938. The Walton/Olivier team would later produce Hamlet and Richard III. Later in 1969 Walton had written the music for “The Battle of Britain” but when Harry Salzman was made producer he had Walton removed and replaced by Ron Goodwin who had reached the top of his form as a fifth rate platitudinous hack composer. Olivier, playing Air Marshall Dowding, asked for his name to be removed from the credits. Walton vowed never write film music again although he did, for Olivier in The Three Sisters..
Returning to the close of the thirties, Walton received a commission from Jascha Heifetz for a violin concerto which he completed in 1939. It is a bigger work than the earlier viola concerto. At the same time it is more emollient with a new tendency towards mellow with a taste of honey as opposed to his earlier saccharine. He includes a presto “alla napolitana” introducing a taste for the Italianate. One will soon meet with other titles such as Siesta, Siciliana and Burlesca. In fact the violin concerto was followed in 1940 with Scapino, a comedy overture based on a character from the commedia dell’arte, involving a scoundrel whose need to escape gives rise to the nickname.
In 1948, Alice Wimborne, with whom Walton had been living, died of cancer. They had been together for fourteen years living in her stately pile after Walton’s Belgravia home had been bombed damaged. Walton who had after all spent ten years living off the Sitwells developed a reputation as a sponger best not invited in if he turned up. Now with the death of Lady Wimborne he was at a loss. It was felt that he had not turned out much in the 1940’s which was a bit unfair as he had done his bit for the war in film work and had produced a first rate string quartet. He felt perhaps overtaken by the rising star of Benjamin Britten following that composer’s return from America in 1942 and the impact of Peter Grimes. To take Walton’s mind off his grief, it was suggested he become the British delegate for a conference on copyright in Buenos Aires. There he was assigned a PA, Susana Gil Passo to look after him. Things happened as they do. At first she rejected his advances but he persisted. It wasn’t exactly “Oh Susana, don’t you cry for me” but, without a banjo on his knee, he got his woman in the end, by December 1948 in fact. He was conscious that she probably might feel out of place in Britain and so they spent half the year on the isle of Ischia which had more in common with her Argentinean roots. Within a few years they moved there permanently. La Mortella was the house they built and despite its rough terrain Susana developed a renowned and acclaimed garden. William had made it absolutely clear that he did not want children and that was that. He did however get a knighthood in 1950.
Having got back his life he reverted to an opera that had been commissioned 1947, Troilus and Cresida, after Chaucer, not Shakespeare. He had encountered considerable difficulty in writing it and had to call in Christopher Hassall as a librettist. The Sitwells were rather put out. His life was not made any easier by the shenanigans of Sir Malcolm Sargent, engaged to conduct it and who in customary style had taken over. This opera did suffer in comparison with those of Britten and it ought to find its way back into the regular repertoire. Walton had shown his Italian leanings since holidaying with Osbert Sitwell in Amalfi back in the late twenties. Now his music develops a more warm and sensuous manner. This would throw many of his adherents. It is hard to explain this sense of Italianate but it bears no resemblance to any Italian composer I can name. Walton has imbued his music in part with the sounds and perfumes of Southern Italy, not a hint of O Sole Mio or Walls ice cream. I say Italianate in part. It is still the same Walton with bursts of the old fire but a more mature Walton. His music, like him, has put on weight round the hips and waste. It can perhaps be likened to the differences between late Beethoven and his earlier incarnation. They differ but they are the same Beethoven. The cello concerto written for Piatigorsky in 1956 is in this mould and is said to be inspired by Susana’s garden. Walton rarely repeated himself but in 1959 he produced a second symphony. It disappointed as everyone expected a repeat of the 1935 symphony which owed more to Sibelius than anyone else. The first was structured and angular. The second was more a work of colours from his palette. It was seen as eccentric and conservative despite the introduction of a twelve note series in the final movement.
Walton continued to write to commission which he was always on watch to receive. He looked out for performances of his works. He was slow at the best of times and towards the end he found composition, not inspiration, more difficult. He was later championed particularly by Andre Previn who certainly had the wavelength for Walton. Karajan conducted Belshazzar’s Feast just the once and thought it the greatest choral work of the twentieth century. William was treated as the squire of Ischia by the locals who knew him to be an undoubted great composer even though they probably never heard a note of his music. He was visited by friends, particularly Malcolm Arnold, who had the facility to write and, between you and me, produce very quickly and more than once helped out by adding a thing or two of his own to a Walton score.
One cannot deal with all his works in this summary but there is one which stands out for me although rarely played. Walton and Britten had a mutual respect of sorts but were still a little distanced, not surprisingly when it got to Britten’s ears that his opera adaptation of Gay’s Beggars Opera in 1947 was dubbed by Walton as the Buggers’ Opera. In 1969 Walton wrote an orchestral piece entitled “Improvisations on an Impromptu of Benjamin Britten”. The theme he chose as his homage was that of the slow movement from Britten’s 1939 piano concerto. It is as different from the cello concerto as the North Sea is from the Bay of Naples. The Britten theme is expressed in glacial sounds. Walton has managed to absorb Britten’s Suffolk intonation and produced an even more steely East Anglian cold. It is not a Rory Bremner type impression but, like Delius with his North Country Sketches over 50 years earlier, this is Walton’s own English character re-emergent.
Walton lived on and wrote on until his death in 1983. A great composer, warts and all and a bit of a grump to boot. A bit like Brahms. Self taught; no pupils, no school. No statue in Oldham either and, you know what, I don’t suppose he would have cared.
