ARNOLD BAX BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
THE SIR ARNOLD BAX WEB SITE

Last Modified June 22, 2003

Sir Arnold Edward Trevor BAX

by Robert Barnett (c)
mailto:Rob.Barnett1@btinternet.com
Editor of The British Music Society Newsletter

Editor's Note: Robert Barnett is this site's chief contributor. He, along with Ian Lace, has assisted me by providing information on Bax performances and recordings worldwide, by helping me edit the text and by providing articles and interviews such as the biographical sketch below. Rob is the editor of the superb British Music Society Newsletter and a collector of off-air Bax recordings. He is interested in corresponding with anyone interested in trading off-air recordings. Please contact him at his e-mail address listed above.

There is something deadening about that Knighthood (and a Master of the King's Musick). What do we expect from such a composer: acres of choral music, marches, pomp and circumstance? The fact that six of his seven symphonies, in fact the best of his music, were written before he accepted his Knighthood in 1937, should reassure us. Here is a composer whose musical world celebrates the high summer of youth and beauty and mixes with it a razor-edged sense of their passing. Darker, violent moods also storm through the music. Irish Celtic legend, Northern sagas, woodland idylls and the world of faerie weave in and out. There is none of the hackneyed rural element which many people, sometimes unfairly, associate with British music.

Bax was essentially a non-establishment figure liberated from society's conventions by the accident of his birth into an affluent family. He did not have to work or teach to survive. After his teenage years he seems never to have had a conventional home, moving from hotel to hotel and finally living out his last years at the White Horse pub in Storrington in Sussex. He spent much time in the Gaelic far west: at Glencolumcille in Ireland and Morar in Scotland. He was a very fine pianist though not a conductor. He learnt Irish Gaelic and wrote in the language. His two children were named Dermot and Maeve. He began his regular visits to Ireland while at the Academy. He wrote and published various poems one of which, celebrating the martyrs of the Easter Uprising in Ireland, was banned by the British authorities as subversive. His poetry is passionate and vivid to this day. As an author he wrote various articles and short stories under the pseudonym "Dermot O'Byrne". The first volume of an episodic but colourful autobiography was significantly called Farewell My Youth. Sadly there was to be no second volume.

Bax was born of wealthy parents in Streatham, London, on 8 November 1883. Their move to Ivybank in Streatham in 1893 coincided with his father beginning to take him to August Manns' Crystal Palace concerts. By 1896 Bax had begun to compose profusely. This compulsion burnt on a high flame until the mid-1930s. He went to the Royal Academy of Music in September 1900 where he studied with Frederick Corder (whose son Paul - another composer, became a firm friend of Bax and who wrote an orchestral piece Morar and a Violin Concerto). It was during these years that he discovered the early poetry of W.B. Yeats which, as late as 1949, he declared "meant more to me than all the music of the centuries."

Visits to Dresden with Paul Corder gave an opportunity to hear the music of Richard Strauss: Salome and Rosenkavalier. But the dominant influence of these years was Irish legend, particularly Deirdre. Although an opera was projected, this came to nothing, leaving only a cycle of Irish tone poems: Eire (Into the Twilight, In the Faery Hills and Rosc Catha). A romantic visit to Russia in 1910 and the pervasive exotic influence of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes also left their mark. His short-lived marriage to Elsita Sobrino evaporated at the first appearance of the pianist Harriet Cohen for whom he wrote many pieces. In later years she seems to have had an occasionally stultifying effect on his music. At the same time, when their affair was at its height, it also gave birth to his best known work, the orchestral tone poem Tintagel heard to finest advantage in Goossens' pioneering 78s recording (crying out for reissue) dating from the 1920s. This score and performance melds the magic of the North Coast of Cornwall, the gale-tossed glittering Atlantic, the Tristan legend and passion of the two lovers in a score of sweeping drive and urgency.

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