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
In the early fifties as a young rebel aged 17 I found myself on defaulters in the school cadet force and refusing the punishment. This led to a bare headed court martial and my being cashiered. The head of English, Doctor Giles, a pacifist sympathiser immediately offered me the position of school librarian which was a cushy number in comparison and it was in those pleasant surrounds that I found on the shelves a book which further fuelled my recently discovered passion for classical music. It was entitled “Music Ho” and written in 1934 by Constant Lambert. It became and remains a testament from my youth, my Leviticus and Deuteronomy from which I can still quote sections by heart. Music Ho, sub-titled by Lambert as “A Study Of Music In Decline”, is a somewhat pessimistic overview of the contemporary musical scene distinguishing between pre-WW1 pioneers, still perceived as modern, Debussy, Stravinsky and Schoenberg and post war pasticheurs, later Stravinsky and Les Six. There followed nationalism and the modern scene; the exotic; jazz and the low life; the over popularization of music; the psychological cul de sac of the Schoenberg school; and ending with Sibelius to lead the way into the future with the exception that Lambert realized by the second edition that there had been an inexplicable silence coming from that quarter. His writing style remained witty and sardonic, pillorying some who it turned out were his favourites at heart, particularly the Russian school and the neo-classical composers. He might have criticised Poulenc and Les Six but in style he himself could have been described as the seventh member of Les Six. He much admired Vaughan Williams, his teacher, yet giving him a hard time in summing up the English country bumpkin school as both unbearably precious and unbearably hearty. This was all written by a 29 year old with an obvious deep knowledge and insight into the music of others and whose appreciation of art and literature revealed him to be the great all rounder of the arts.
Constant Lambert has been largely known for just one work, The Rio Grande, an evergreen exciting work for choruses and audiences alike, its bluesy and jazzy intonations and rhythms owing more to Duke Ellington than to Vaughan Williams. Yet in the twenties he was seen as leading the way to recognize the jazz influence in classical music. He was said to be Britain’s answer to George Gershwin although the comparison is way off the mark. Gershwin was a songsmith who had the ability to upgrade popular song and theatre and clothe it into classical forms whilst Lambert had the foresight to imbue jazz methods into his classical creations. He was not the first. Milhaud had been there using jazz for his Ballet La Création Du Monde whilst Bohuslav Martinu was pitching in with charlestons in his ballet, La Revue de la Cuisine. From 1923 to 1930 Constant Lambert was pouring out one work after another and then the tap turned off. He did continue to write but it was only a drip here and there. His career led him to become musical director in the ballet and much of Lambert’s time was taken up with that medium including touring out in the styx and consuming volumes of alcohol that the time available for composition became a diminishing factor.
Constant Lambert was born in Fulham, not that far from the Chelsea Arts Club where, I am reliably informed, he was a prominent member. His father, George Washington Lambert, was born in St Petersburg but emigrated at a young age to Australia. He married in 1902 and with his wife came to Europe, first to Paris and then London. He was a none too successful artist and sculptor living a fashionable Bohemian life. Constant, their second son, was born in 1905 to a backdrop of debts and visiting bailiffs. Well known artistes frequently gathered at the house but Constant on the whole was a lonely, frequently sickly child. Still he gained entrance in 1918 to Christ’s Hospital school where he contracted a virulent combination of rubella with septic arthritis that very nearly killed him. After a number of operations, he finally emerged with one leg slightly shorter than the other, leaving him with a permanent limp, and a shattered right eardrum, leaving him permanently deaf in one ear, and a horror of doctors. At 17, he won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music where he studied composition under Vaughan-Williams to whom he warmed and George Dyson, composer of the Pilgrim’s Progress, whom he detested. This was 1922, the year that Walton wrote Façade. Lambert was to become the most celebrated recite of the Edith Sitwell poems alongside her. In 1923 he also set Two Songs to poems by Sacheverell Sitwell written for soprano, flute and harp.
Walton and Lambert were linked. They came together through the Sitwells. They were not exactly Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee. Constant went firing off like a shooting star; Willie took everything so slowly that even his first symphony got first performed with only three of its movements before he had finished it. Constant was all things to all men and all ladies. Willie concentrated his career on one thing only, composing. When he did conduct it would be his own works only at which he was top rate. It was the classic tale of the tortoise and the hare and as in the tale, it was the tortoise which came out on top..
Another important contact for Constant was Arthur Bliss, then perceived as a firebrand, who had just completed his Colour Symphony.. The two always remained close. It was Bliss who introduced Lambert to the poems of Li Po leading to Lambert’s own song cycle written between 1927 and 1930. Lambert’s earliest work, though not published, was a ballet entitled “Prize Fight” lasting some nine minutes. It depicts a bare knuckle boxing contest. It has been suggested that it owes something to Milhaud without the sambas. It contains a touch of ragtime and a well known tune of Sousa played fugally. Other unpublished works which have only relatively recently come to light followed in1924. Another ballet, “Mr Bear Squash-you-all-flat”, is a Russian child’s tale learned from his father. The inspiration for this work with narrator may have come from Facade. The concerto for piano, two trumpets, timpani and strings followed. His better known piano concerto is that for piano and nine instruments but this earlier one had been left unknown in short score and edited and brought to life by Giles Easterby.
What brought Constant Lambert to notice, nationally and internationally, was his Romeo and Juliet, a ballet he wrote for Diaghilev when he was 20 whilst still at the Royal College. Here was the youngest composer to be commissioned by Diaghilev, younger than Poulenc who wrote Les Biches at much the same time when he was all of 25 years old. It was performed at Monte Carlo before its Paris production where it received its mandatory riot.
The works were pouring out. In 1926 he commenced his cycle, Songs of Li Po (also known as Li Bai – you can take your choice), an 8th century Chinese poet from the mid-Tang dynasty whose verses celebrated the pleasures of friendship, the depth of nature, solitude, and the joys of drinking wine. This last would have appealed to the Fitzrovian Constant Lambert` who frequented most of the pubs from Langham Place to Soho. As an habitué of Soho pubs and an infatuation for the Chinese-American silent movie queen Anna May Wong to whom he dedicated the Songs of Li Po, Gerrard Street as it is today would have appealed to him. The songs are lightly scored and there is something slightly pre-Britten about the vocal line. Li Po was also the source for the poems used by Mahler in Das Lied von der Erde.
1927 saw the first performance of The Rio Grande. It is one of those works with a bit of this and a bit of that and a bit of everything, somewhat a hybrid like the Beethoven Choral Fantasy. Best perhaps played on the move in a hybrid car. Solo piano, solo singer, solo violin, orchestra and chorus. It evokes a swampy Ellington atmosphere with an accent a tad like that of Delius in his Florida Suite.
The concerto for piano and nine instruments was the first work of Lambert’s I heard in the concert hall. It is a chamber music concerto but instead of conventional percussion it has a twenties dance band drum kit. It starts off flapper like, a kind of shimmy like my sister Kate, but this is a deception. It moves into dark colours. Its second movement seems to anticipate the sounds of Ravel who would have been writing his two concertos at much the same time. The last movement is more Stravinsky, reminiscent more of the second part of the Rite of Spring than his neo-classical works. This work more than any other starts out as unmistakably syncopated but its colouring now seems to reflect a growing sense of dark happenings following perhaps the emerging depression of coalition politics in England. Or was this the beginning of a black side within the mind of Constant Lambert? Of course, black moods do not necessarily result in tragic music. Music which is composed is more manufactured than subjective and one only has to look to Mozart to see what seemingly happy diversions he produced during his black moments for the proof of this. In relation to Constant Lambert this caused me to do some devilling and in my researches on his son Kit I came across an article that Constant had been sexually ambivalent and drawn to self-destruction. At the time of writing this concerto he had been in a relationship with Christopher Wood who in 1930 was killed falling under a train. The effect on Constant can only be imagined. Does this account for those dark moments in this concerto? There was also the suicide of his close friend, Philip Heseltine, the critic, who composed under the pen name of Peter Warlock, best known for his Capriol Suite, and to whose memory Lambert dedicated this concerto.
Another important game changer was the death in 1929 of Diaghilev and the collapse of the Ballets Russes. The ballet world without Diaghilev was like Hamlet without the Prince. Its successor company had not yet been formed. Pavlova’s company was to die with Pavlova herself in January 1931. One suggestion mooted was for Constant Lambert to take over the Ballets Russes but it was already bankrupt. In England there was no home grown ballet. Marie Rambert was just starting up a small ballet club with its first performance in 1931; Ninette de Valois was to found the Vic Wells Ballet with just six dancers. Against this background The Camargo Society was conceived by ballet critic and historian, Arnold Haskell. Its aim was to perpetuate the principles on which Diaghilev had run the Ballets Russes, and to encourage British talent. The committee included Constant Lambert as resident conductor, the semi-retired ballerina Lydia Lopokova as choreographic adviser and her husband John Maynard Keynes as treasurer. Its first and most successful production by Frederick Ashton was Pomona composed and conducted by Constant Lambert. Its repertoire included the orchestrated version of Walton’s Façade. It produced 16 one act new ballets in three years before merging with the Vic Wells Ballet. Constant remained on as director of music in the merged outfit. Thus it came about that by 1933 Constant Lambert had moved into the position he would hold more or less for the remainder of his life.
It was in this period that he wrote Music Ho and married Florence (Flo) Kaye, a photographer’s model of Lascar descent. In 1935 their son, Christopher (Kit), was born but it did not turn out to be a happy marriage. The world of ballet and touring exacted an absence from home and there were other distractions. He was a workhorse conductor, not an international star. It was the world of the Vic Wells Ballet, mounting productions of newly commissioned music by composers such as Bliss, Walton and Lambert himself, new dancers such as the Australian, Robert Helpman who arrived in 1933 and the fifteen year old Margot Fonteyn who joined in 1934. The lead dancers besides Ashton were Anton Dolin and Alicia Markova with design of scenery and costumes by the likes of Rex Whistler. Included in a brilliant literary and intellectual circle were Michael Ayrton, Sacheverell Sitwell and Anthony Powell. It has been said that Constant Lambert was the prototype for Hugh Moreland in “A Dance to the Music of Time”. Included in the Fitzrovian pub crawls were Jacob Epstein, the classical music writer and dance band leader, Spike Hughes (named as such after the spike of his double bass) and Dylan Thomas, newly arrived in London from Swansea to seek his fortune. These characters lit up the thirties, still the bright young things. Overseeing all from the rostrum was Constant Lambert, not a remote drop-in stick-waving front man but one of the boys both in the pit and the saloon bar, one who knew and understood both the ballet and the music better than anyone. He would himself describe being a conductor as ending up at the age of 80 with a fur coat and a fourth wife. As Stephen Boyd commented, Lambert barely made it half way, dying after a short life of prodigious achievement aged 45, worn out, hard up, chronically overworked, and still only on the second wife.
One begins to appreciate that his lifestyle left little time to compose throughout the thirties and beyond. The mid thirties saw the composition of what some consider to be his greatest work, Summer’s Last Will and Testament, based on a poem of that name by Thomas Nashe depicting death by plague in the 1590’s. It’s not very cheerful and it did not help having its first performance five days after the death of George V in 1936. Much warmer and traditional was the music for his ballet, Horoscope, written in 1938 for Margot Fonteyn. Constant had fallen in love with her watching her from the rostrum and a secret passion ensued in other places. It was to Fonteyn’s long regret that they did not marry. Horoscope is more in the ballet tradition of Tchaikovsky than Stravinsky. Its theme is astrological with crossed lovers (Lambert and Fonteyn?) who have the sun in one sign of the Zodiac and the moon in another with the man having his sun in Leo and the woman with her sun in Gemini with opposed signs—sorry I have lost the plot, but the music is beautiful.
The world of Sadlers Wells, as it had become, like so much else ended with the 1939 war when the company was on tour in Holland. Whilst German paratroopers were dropping from the skies the company had to make its way back to England. Sadlers Wells was able to continue throughout the war despite its theatre in Roseberry Avenue having to close. It was a hand to mouth time involving much touring to and from cold theatres which were as bleak as the boarding houses, air raids and rationing. Lambert wrote music for a documentary on the merchant fleet which sounds typical of one of those Pathé Gazette black and white films called “The March of Time”. In 1942, two years after the debacle in Holland and the hurried escape of the Sadlers Wells company, Lambert wrote an orchestral piece in remembrance entitled “Aubade Héroique”. It is one of his least known compositions. In my view this six minute piece is the most pastoral work he composed. It is clearly influenced both in title and style by Debussy with a nod towards Vaughan Williams here and there. Debussy had written his Berceuse Héroique in 1914 dedicated to the King of the Belgians at the time of the collapse to the Kaiser’s advancing forces. Now in similar mood, including adopting Debussy’s whole tone scale, was Lambert’s melancholy reminiscence of his own retreat in 1940. The work was dedicated to Vaughan Williams on the occasion of his seventieth birthday.
Further conducting opportunities arose following the death of Henry Wood in 1944 and Constant Lambert becoming an assistant conductor at the Promenade concerts. He was a great favourite and thrived with a more professional orchestra than he was accustomed to directing. He was a burly Churchillian figure who had a strange manner of turning his head to one side when conducting. Few would have known he was deaf in one ear. Still he was left with an ear for music!
With the war coming to an end, Kit was sent to boarding school where Constant would visit him but Kit had been missing out on a father figure. Constant’s troubled broken down marriage with Flo was to end in divorce in 1947 but, instead of marrying Margot Fonteyn as she expected, that relationship too came to an end and she was particularly hurt. Their relationship was doubtless tempestuous, the dance company being no place for monogamy. Instead Constant married painter, Isabel Delmer. After his death Isabel was to marry Constant’s friend and fellow cat lover, composer Alan Rawsthorne. Margot Fonteyn made only two references to Constant Lambert in her biography. He had been written out of her life. Kit too carved out a musical career for himself, discovering, re-inventing and managing the pop group whom he renamed as “The Who”.
With the end of the war further conducting opportunities arose. In 1946 the BBC founded the Third Programme (now Radio 3) and Constant Lambert was a regular conductor. He was also called upon by Walter Legge to be one of those who would conduct the newly founded Philharmonia Orchestra.
As time moved on, the Sadlers Well Ballet was taken over by Covent Garden opera under its new director, David Webster. This led to Lambert being dropped as music director to his sadness but he went on conducting till the end. It was then that he returned to a long cherished idea to write a ballet called Tiresias set in Ancient Crete. It was one of three commissioned for the Festival of Britain in 1951. This was his first ballet since Horoscope in 1938. The scenario and music were by Lambert; it was the fourth Lambert/Ashton collaboration and it went down with the critics like a lump of lead. Without going into the convoluted story because most ballet plots are convoluted anyway, everything about it was other than a Covent Garden audience would expect. With the then Queen (later Queen Mother) attending, it was seen as a gala performance leading to the same expectations and disappointment that Britten would have in coronation year two years later with his opera, Gloriana. The music had none of the warm romanticism of Horoscope but owed more to the Concerto for piano and nine instruments with piano and plenty of drum kit interventions but omitting upper range strings. The plot involved the lead players changing sex and then exploring which of the sexes obtained more sexual enjoyment. This went down with shock and horror with its 1951 audience. The critics slated it and after four weeks and eight performances Constant Lambert was dead. It was a shock for all. It turned out that he had undetected diabetes which bore out his lack of confidence in doctors. It is also suggested that this condition gave rise to a perpetual thirst which was satisfied in his case by more and more beer. Osbert Sitwell in his obituary blamed the critics claiming “He would be alive today had it not been for the savage onslaught of the critics”.
So ended the life and career of a bright star which suddenly extinguished. What would have become of him had he gone on? Would he have got his fur coat and fourth wife? Would he have had more time for composition or had he simply gone the same way as his drinking companion, Dylan Thomas, would do two years later? How would he have fared with the BBC establishment which took over at the end of that decade under the proscribing black listing pen of William Glock? One doubts that that gentleman would have been invited to join Connie and his gang in one of the nearby pubs to the BBC. The problem with Constant Lambert was that he undertook too much, a jack of all trades, expert in all for all that but with no single direction with the exception of that of the musical leadership of Sadlers Wells. To say he was unorthodox would be an understatement as a man or a musician, as a painter or a critic, as an author or a conductor devoting as much time to these as also to being an excellent writer of limericks and of over a hundred poems in English and French and never forgetting his having made his home a shelter for numerous refugee cats. On top of all else he had been chief conductor of Camargo/Vic-Wells/Sadlers Wells ballets for twenty five years and equally uniquely president of the Kensington Kitten and Neuter Cats Society of which he was justly proud.
