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.
A few years back I was at the Blackheath Luncheon Club where I found myself sitting next to one of its founding fathers, a well known historian to whom I happened to mention the name of Arthur Bliss. My comments were greeted with scornful derision “Oh Bax and Bliss”. This is a coupling which is frequently made and like many others has no significant justification. Mozart and Haydn; Mahler and Bruckner; Debussy and Ravel are yoked together like Marks and Spencer or Bax and Bliss. There is a psychological test, where the questioner mentions one name to provoke what the automatic response might be. I have omitted Brahms and Liszt where the pairing depends upon one being pickled rather than musical. However these two B’s do possess one particular thing in common which seems to tie them together like Siamese twins. In 1942 Bax was appointed Master of the Kings Music. He died in 1953 and was succeeded by Bliss as the first appointed New Elizabethan Master of the Queen’s Music. Both were acknowledged in British musical circles but neither was particularly known by the general public. Hence their relative anonymity and seamless royal connections would help to confuse the one with the other.
Sir Arthur Edward Drummond Bliss (we’ll just call him Arthur) was without any doubt Britain’s greatest sartorial composer, as erect as a guardsman, and with his dapper moustache and brilliantined hair he would stand equally elegant as the likes of Anthony Eden or Clark Gable. He was born in Barnes, his father an American business man. His mother died when he was four and he and his two brothers were brought up by their father. Arthur was educated at Rugby and then to Cambridge where he studied classics and also took lessons in music. On graduating in 1913 he entered the Royal College of Music where he studied under Stanford but preferred his tuition from Vaughan Williams and Holst. He showed an early interest in the second Viennese School and the trends from Paris. In particular he developed an especial interest in ballet after seeing the Ballet Russes which visited London in 1913. After a year and with the outbreak of the Great War he joined up, was commissioned and posted to the Western Front. He was wounded twice and later gassed but he continued by joining the Grenadiers in 1917. Like so many others the war left a disturbing impact upon him. In particular his younger brother, Kennard was killed on the Somme and it took Arthur years to come to terms with his death.
With the end of the war Arthur resume his musical career. But times had changed although in England many of the musical establishment wanted to carry on from where it had come to a halt in 1914. Elgar, Parry and Stanford were still about. Arthur went off to Paris and was one of the first to realize that the scenery had changed even if the lead actors remained the same. The glitter of pre-war Stravinsky had been whittled down to a sparer new form of expression. The surrealism of Les Six, especially Darius Milhaud, was the new order of the day and this was to influence Arthur. He had written music from when he had been at school but he now jettisoned his juvenilia and he became to be seen as an enfant terrible and his works regarded as avant garde. He felt he had to make up for lost time. He started with music he wrote for the theatre, “As You Like It” for Stratford, The Tempest at The Aldwych. With these and conducting Sunday afternoon concerts his name was becoming known.
His early titles were Madam Noy, his opus 1, a song with a gruesome theme; Rout, a work with five prosaic subjects entitled “Committee Meeting,” “In the Wood,” “In the Ball-room,” “Soliloquy,” and “In the Tube at Oxford Circus” which Arthur himself conducted at a Henry Wood Prom. Mêlée Fantasque and a rhapsody and a double piano concerto would follow. He was leading the way for the emergent composers who were to follow his lead such as Lambert and Walton. Listening to it today we are no longer shaken by what the likes of Elgar and Stanford regarded as modern. Saccharine, acerbic and jagged are adjectives associated with later Walton but it was with Bliss these characteristics were introduced and remained his trademark.
In 1921 Elgar had invited three composer/conductors, to lunch, Eugene Goosens, Anthony Bernard and Arthur Bliss, and sought them all to write a new composition for the Three Choirs Festival for the following year. Arthur received the commission but had difficulty in deciding what to write. He later realised that he needed a plastic stimulus to write rather than to dream up pure musical composition in the abstract – hence his later success with the stage or a particular soloist to have in mind. On this occasion no inspirational ideas would sprout until one day he chanced upon a book about heraldry and the significance of various primary colours. This led him to the idea that four colours, purple, red, blue and green could each represent a movement of a symphony. For many composers a particular sound or a particular key might suggest a colour and conversely Bliss saw colour as invoking sound. He conveyed his ideas to Sir Edward who gave every encouragement. Much of their exchanges are set out in the Bliss Memoirs, “As I Remember”. Their correspondence can only be described as out of the Forsythe Saga or the Savile Club where Sir Edward was a member. “Dear Bliss”, always Dear Bliss; “Dear Sir Edward, I am deeply obliged to you” and so on. I had particular difficulty in finding “As I Remember” as it was no longer in print and Amazon could not locate a second hand copy. Still one day, having arrived early at the Alberry Theatre in St Martins Lane (now called the Noel Coward), I chanced upon a second hand bookshop in Cecil Court and lo(w) and behold the proprietor put his hand on a copy in the basement. It was worth every bit of its £25. What became The Colour Symphony, as it was entitled, was great success with the critics if not its first audience which included Elgar who found it rather too modern. It is exciting with six kettle drums at the end which might well have influenced Walton’s First. It is odd that Elgar was disappointed and I suspect that he imagined that the prospect of a symphony inspired by heraldry might have misled him to believe that it would have been more pomp and circumstantial.
In 1923 Arthur’s father, now remarried, decided to return to America and settle in California. Arthur went too. There he worked as a conductor, lecturer and pianist, obtaining commissions and performances. Whilst there he met Trudy Hoffman and they married in 1925. Soon after, Arthur returned to England with his new wife. They were a good couple. She outlived him by 33 years and died in 2008 aged 104.
By the mid 1920’s there were signs of a slightly less avant garde approach to composition by Arthur which may well be a reflection of his settling down and becoming a family man. Soon there would be two daughters to whom he was devoted, like Matthew Taylor now. Yes there were romantic touches but his general style remained acerbically modern throughout the twenties and continued through the thirties. In 1928 he wrote his Pastoral ‘Lie strewn the white flocks’, a much calmer Arthur Bliss than the man who wrote Rout and Mêlée Fantasque. However, there was something bugging Arthur. The Great War was now more than ten years behind and still he felt the death of Kennard and suffered nightmares. It was something he needed desperately to get out of his system and this he achieved with his “symphony” Morning Heroes first performed at the Norwich Triennial Festival in 1930. It contains various poems set in five movements and written for narrator, chorus and orchestra. It includes extracts from Homer’s Iliad, poems by Li Po and Walt Whitman. The last movement, “Now Trumpeter For Thy Close” is a setting of “Spring Offensive” by Wilfred Owen and “Dawn on the Somme” by Robert Nichols. One can feel sure that the 16 year old Benjamin Britten would have picked up on this. Did it sow a seed for his War Requiem with its Owen poems thirty years later? I cannot say I enjoy a narrator declaiming in Victorian melodramatic tones and for me it is the orchestral background which is more moving. The work as a whole served as cathartic relief for Arthur Bliss.
The 1930’s saw a more serious Bliss but recognizably the same with the same sharp clashes and dissonances as one also would find in William Walton. One must not forget his chamber music. Shortly after Morning Heroes came his clarinet quintet written for Frederick Thurston where there are sounds reminiscent even of Brahms. Internationally Bliss was active and for the Salzburg Festival of 1935 he composed his Music For Strings which was conducted by Sir Adrian Boult.
Bliss was not a household name with the English public but his music came before them en masse in a novel way in 1936. The talkies had been well established since the beginning of the decade and now came the release of the Alexander Korda film, “Things To Come” based on the 1933 book of H G Wells who sketched a screenplay. This was a frightening film – I detest and simply refuse to use the word “scary” and so do please allow for my age and fuddy duddyish vocabulary. Wells described it as “a new story” meant to “display” the “social and political forces and possibilities”. It projected the outbreak of a second world war in December 1940, becoming interplanetary and lasting through to 2036. You people do not know just how lucky you are! Arthur Bliss was the man chosen to do the film score and to hear the three minute march still excites me now as it did when I first heard it. Music often adopts the same labels as other art forms, classical, romantic, impressionist, modernist etc but I have never heard music described as art deco. Well let me tell you something, you do now. You only have to hear the march from Things To Come by Arthur Bliss to recognize art deco when it is at home. The crowds, including my young parents, queued around the monolithic gleaming Gaumonts and Odeons newly built in art deco style to see Korda’s Film spiced up by the music of Bliss sounding reminiscent of “This is the Gaumont British News”. Without having seen and heard Things To Come, Dr Who aficionados don’t know what they have missed out on.
The visual was clearly more inspirational to Arthur than the abstract. Arthur had developed a passion for chess. This gave him an idea for a ballet for the Vic Wells Company in which the chess pieces become animated and act out human emotions. The main conflict of the story concerns the Red Knight’s love for the Black Queen and where the chess players do battle and the players are in gold and black. It was choreographed by Ninette de Valois and first presented at the Théatre de Champs Elysées in May 1937 with Constant Lambert conducting. The idea of a game as a theme for a ballet was co-incidentally being played out in New York in April 1937 with Balanchine’s Jeu de Cartes written by Stravinsky. Checkmate has remained a favourite and is still in the repertoire. Arthur wrote four ballets in all. Adam Zero and Miracle in the Gorbals were choreographed by Robert Helpmann. The fourth is hardly known. It is The Lady of Shalott and, as Arthur stated, is founded on Tennyson’s poem “in which I have taken some, I think, permissible liberties”. Arthur had met David Boyden in Chicago in 1940. In 1957 he commissioned a ballet from Arthur for the rebuilding of the classrooms at the University of California at Berkeley. I am rather lucky to have a disc of this work. There was no commercial recording but happily the BBC decided to issue from their Sound Archive discs their large collection of live recordings including in this instance also the violin concerto.
The four ballets tell you as much about Bliss’s orchestration as any other medium. Apart from his recognizable rhythmic impulses what I find particularly masterful is the skilled use of percussion instruments. For most composers, percussion is to underline the rhythm. Arthur uses it sonorously and for added colour particularly with the use of bells and the other percussion with piquant tonal qualities. You are left with the feeling that he has created a particular sound he has conceived rather than just an added a bang, thump or clash.
In 1938 Arthur had been an adjudicator at the Ysaye International Competition for Pianists. Although impressed with some of the performances he wrote to Trudy that he had heard twenty-two pianists play the same piece by Bach and the same piece by Scarlatti. “Never Again”. Still it left him with wanting to write an extended work of his own for the instrument. In the early 1920’s he had written a double piano concerto and would later in the 1950’s adapt it for three hands for Cyril Smith and Phyllis Sellick after Cyril had suffered a stroke in the Soviet Union and lost the use of one arm. An opportunity now arose with a commission from the British Council for a piano concerto to be performed during British Week at the 1939 New York World Fair. The first performance took place in June 1939 with Solomon as soloist and Sir Adrian Boult conducting. In the programme notes Bliss wrote “It is dedicated to the people of the U.S. So obviously it has to be a concerto in the grand manner and what is loosely called ‘romantic’. Surely the Americans are at heart the most romantic in the world”. That indicates how far Arthur had moved in his outlook. The work is “romantic” but it is muscular and rhythmic owing more to Brahms than Liszt.
With their various American connections the family stayed on and soon found with the outbreak of war they were stuck. Arthur felt his family would be safer remaining in America and he took up lecturing at Berkeley. Still he felt the need to get back and to be helping in the war effort. As we have seen previously with Benjamin Britten this would not be easy but eventually Arthur secured a crossing in 1941.
Arthur was given a position in the BBC’s overseas music service in May 1941, but felt himself under-employed. At the time the BBC Symphony Orchestra had been evacuated to Bedford. Sir Adrian Boult was both chief conductor and the BBC’s director of music which put him under strain. Arthur suggested that Boult should step down as director and Arthur take over. Boult agreed to the proposal, which freed him up to concentrate on conducting. Arthur served as director of music at the BBC from 1942 to 1944, laying the foundations for the launch of the Third Programme. He was also on the music committee of the British Council alongside Vaughan Williams and Walton. He found separation from Trudy excruciating as recorded in the very tender letters they exchanged. She and the two girls were eventually able to return in 1944 and Arthur resigned his position with the BBC. He had written nothing since his string quartet of 1941 but now he was able to start again with more film music and the ballets, Miracle in the Gorbals in 1944 and Adam Zero in 1946.
In 1948, Arthur and J B Priesley who had been friends for many years embarked on a collaboration for an opera called “The Olympians”. It is now little known and some commentators even thought it was written for the London Olympics of 1948. Priestley’s libretto was based on a legend that “the pagan deities, robbed of their divinity, became a troupe of itinerant players, wandering down the centuries”. It sounds to me like a variant on The Good Companions. It opened in the 1949–50 season at Covent Garden. It was directed by Peter Brook. Ernest Newman, the great critic of the day, wrote: “here is a composer with real talent for opera … in Mr. Priestley he has been fortunate enough to find an English Boito”. Other reviews were polite rather than rapturous. Priestley attributed this to the failure of the conductor, Karl Rankl, to learn the music or to co-operate with Brook, and to lack of rehearsal of the last act. Some critics attributed it to Priestley’s inexperience as an opera librettist; others to the lack of there being soaring tunes in Arthur’s music. It closed after ten performances. There has been one BBC performance since, in 1972. Oh dear.
Early in 1953 the BBC approached Arthur and commissioned a violin concerto from him for Alfredo Campoli. He was born in Rome in 1906 but his family moved to England in 1911. In the thirties, Campoli had found it difficult to find work as a soloist and formed his Salon Orchestra and the Welbeck Light Quartet, playing at restaurants in London. He appeared at a prom in 1938. During the war he gave numerous concerts for the troops. Afterwards he continued his work with the BBC, eventually achieving over 1,000 radio broadcasts. Arthur worked closely with Campoli on the concerto and they struck up a warm relationship. It received its first performance in May 1955. It is in three movements and is 38 minutes in length. It is not as big boned as the piano concerto but like all Arthur’s music its themes are, a word I have not used before, catchy.
In October 1953 Sir Arnold Bax, the other guy in the fictitious duo, died and the position of Master of the Queen’s Music went to Sir (as he now had become) Arthur Bliss. He took to it like a duck to the Princess of Wales Pond and I heard his first effort, written for the present Queen on her return, “Welcome The Queen”. It was uninspiring anyway but for me, as an eighteen year old, Sir Arthur Bliss was just a retired guards officer and a typical member of the Establishment.
The years now roll by and I cannot comment on all of his continued output. There would be another opera and a number of works written in variation form, metamorphic he called it, all with masterly orchestration. I doubt there was a weak one amongst them. I will however comment on just one further work, his cello concerto. Benjamin Britten wrote to Arthur on his 75th birthday, “….In my boyhood you, Arthur, were the avant gardist of Rout, Conversations and daring, possibly Parisian, exploits. You were almost a myth”. Little wonder that Britten masterminded Rostropovitch to commission a cello concerto from the 79 year old Arthur, first played at the Aldburgh Festival in 1970. It is a quieter, gentler work than his earlier concerti and may have seemed to have lost some of his earlier fire. Don’t be misled. Cello concertos are often lighter to allow the soloist to be heard, the Elgar for instance. The inspiration is still burnishing. You can almost hear Things To Come in the first movement and am I mistaken in hearing a quote from the piano concerto in the final movement? It is a fitting end.
Arthur Bliss died five years later, aged 84. He had an inspirational touch and an enduring skill and I feel sure that one day there will be a resurrection for an unfairly underappreciated composer.
My historian friend was only of course being provocative as I have been with him. For others who may lump Bax and Bliss together I quote from Gray’s Ode On A Distant Prospect Of Eton College
