THE GOLDEN AGE HAS PASSED
A CENTENARY CELEBRATION
OF ARNOLD BAX
written and presented by
Michael Oliver
THE SIR ARNOLD BAX WEB SITE
Last Modified March 21, 1998
At Sherkin Island with Aloys
Fleischmann (Junior) in 1934
Note from Robert Barnett: This
is reproduced here with acknowledgements to the BBC, Michael Oliver
and to all the participants. This documentary was first broadcast on
Music Weekly on BBC Radio 3 in 1983 (Bax Centenary Year). It was
repeated in January 1984. This is broadly a word for word transcript
of the programme. It dates from some fifteen years ago and a number
of the works mentioned here as rarities have since been recorded
largely by Chandos.
The programme opens with the voice of Bax (AB) himself
Arnold Bax (AB)
It has been suggested that all art derives from a sickness of the
soul just as a pearl is generated by a diseased oyster. A completely
happy and healthy person, maintains this pessimist, would have no
need for self-expression and would be content to laze all day in the
sun like an Italian workman. Be that as it may, I think the theory
holds good with regard to much of the romantic and introspective
literature and music of the last 100 years.
The catastrophe of 1914-18 certainly threw a cloud upon the
imaginations of men and bundled away dreams such as those in which I
had hitherto indulged. Yet despite the restless and sombre mood of
the world, or perhaps because of it, many creative artists continued
with their work and even gained in strength. The demon of the times
seized upon us and forced us to his will
[apocalyptic extract from first symphony]
AB
When my first symphony was performed in America I mentioned, in a
programme note, that, as far as I was aware, the harsh and stormy
work was an expression of pure music unassociated with contemporary
events whereupon a New York critic upbraided me as the 'quibbling
Bax' and added 'Of course this music, from beginning to end,
represents the reaction of the composer's mind to the Great War.'
These are deep matters and I must admit that scarcely ever in later
years have I been tempted to return to the ivory tower of my youth
even if I could find my way there.
Michael Oliver (MO)
Typical Bax: 'It has been suggested that art derives from a sickness
of the soul.' He doesn't say clearly whether he agrees. The first
symphony is 'pure music' but to the suggestion that it is about
World War 1 he comments only that 'these are deep matters' and then
in a non-sequitur, or covering his tracks, he must admit, he says
(why 'admit'?) that 'scarcely ever in later years' (not 'never,' you
notice) 'have I been tempted to seek again the ivory tower of my
youth' and why did he add 'even if I could find my way there?'
Bax hadn't always been so defensively reticent. His biographer Lewis
Foreman:
Lewis Foreman (LF)
Bax writes that he was absolutely certain that 'the only music that
can last is music which is the outcome of one's emotional reaction
to the ultimate realities of love and death.' And that is Bax's
credo and you have to read his works in the context of that
statement. Bax went on elsewhere to define 'genius':
AB
The smug clichι has it that genius consists of an infinite capacity
for taking pains. I myself think it probable that all that remains
really vital in the work of artists has been given to the so-called
creator with little or no conscious effort on his part. It may be
true that one must have chaos in the heart to give truth to a
dancing star but no star was ever borne of a struggling intellect.
All that can be said with certainty is that the truly inspired
artist doesn't possess a gift
but is possessed by it as if by a
demon.
[extract from symphony 1 - end of first movement]
MO
And that was written by a 'brazen romantic' as he called himself
with a reputation for lush, richly-coloured music drenched in Celtic
twilight. It is one of many violent contradictions in Bax let us
begin at the beginning. A cultured family background and a very
wealthy one. As a very young child the High Court Judge, Sir Melford
Stevenson was a frequent guest at the Bax family - one of many
frequent guests:
Melford Stevenson (MS)
Mrs Bax had a huge acquaintance among people, I think, mostly of
limited means to whom she was unbelievably generous. She was known
to a wide circle as 'Auntie Nelly' and the other recipients of her
benefactions were known as her 'lame ducks.' I have never seen so
many hungry people as there were under this vast dining room. I
think they all had some artistic interest in common; not necessarily
music. They certainly weren't anything to do with the theatre
because this was a somewhat strict congregational household. I used
to stay at a large house that they had in those days in Hampstead
called Ivybank. It was a house with a lot of grounds and in those
grounds was a music room which had been built for Arnold and one day
Arnold took me into this room and he tried to make me reproduce a
number of notes that he played on his piano ... and ultimately came
to the conclusion that I was tone deaf - quite rightly. I think
Arnold Bax properly, and understandably, regarded me as a crashing
bore.
MO
Bax was rather apt to call people tone deaf. Perhaps by his
standards they were. His musical gifts grew as naturally as his hair
grew or his teeth. Already in his teens he was an excellent pianist
and by all accounts a formidable score reader too. He was capable of
playing the most complicated choral or orchestral pieces, at sight.
He began improvising at the piano at the age of ten and composing
not long after. By the way, another contradiction to ponder over:
After his happy childhood and youth at Ivybank, presided over by the
warm strong character of his mother (I always thought she would have
made a very good queen, Bax said of her)
after Ivybank Bax never
had a home of his own again - a succession of flats and rented rooms
mostly. He never bought a house though he could have afforded
several. He was ready for a full-time musical education by the time
he was sixteen and if he chose his place of study it was a prescient
choice.
LF
The thing to remember is that Bax went to the Royal Academy of Music
and the teaching tradition at the Royal Academy and the composers
who came from there have had a very bad press. Before the First
World War it was thought to be the revolutionary centre of the new
British music and the success
the publicity success
of all
the Stanford/Parry pupils who came from the Royal College of Music
have almost made out that this WAS British music and this isn't the
case.
The pupils of Frederick Corder at the Royal Academy
these
composers were a very real alternative British music. Corder wrote
in his book on orchestration: 'The student finds the idiom of the
past irksome and repellent. It is the vernacular he desires to
learn.'
and then goes on to say
'beauty is our one aim.
Purely scientific composition: the fugue, the canon, the motet and
the madrigal, no longer appeal to the modern mind and the goal of
our ambition is the orchestral tone poem' so that I think Corder may
have been laughed at by some people and his teaching method
certainly seems to have been rather peculiar; not as scientific as
Stanford's but he produced students who had a very individual voice.
MO
He did indeed. Many years after Bax, Alan Bush was a pupil of
Frederick Corder:
A Bush (Alan B)
He was open to any composer who followed the style of Richard
Wagner. Wagner was his god. In fact he had very little interest in
Bach or Beethoven. I mean we were introduced to the works of Brahms
but he didn't encourage us to study Brahms. He taught us, (though he
was not anxious to teach us) but he was obliged to teach us,
academic harmony and counterpoint in order for us to pass our exams.
He was not interested in Palestrina at all. He did mention there was
such a composer but he never had his works out on the piano or any
thing of that kind. He was very allergic to French music since
Gounod. Gounod was one of his very favourite composers
and
Dvorak. Those were the two composers apart from Wagner to whom he
introduced his pupils.
MO
While there is precious little Dvorak or Gounod in Bax there is
rather more of Wagner and another composer, much promoted at the
Academy, Liszt. What the Academy really did for Bax was to make him,
at an impressionable age, open to impressions - open to the
experiences that his comfortable circumstances made him free to
explore and he was passionately eager to explore - perhaps the heart
condition that had already been diagnosed sharpened his eagerness.
He became convinced, he said, that twenty-two was the golden number
in the count of a man's years. 'I longed to be twenty-two and to
remain at that age for ever.' And so during and immediately after
his student years he spent lengthy periods in Germany where he was
at the first production of Strauss's Salome as well as visiting
Norway and Eastern Europe.
In England he struck up friendships with poets and artists as well
as musicians. He met Elgar and mixed with the followers of William
Morris. At the piano he explored new music and old. And there were
the still more important experiences of Ireland and of Russia which
we will come back to. He also fell in love several times and we
shall come back to that too. One of his friends, at that time,
Eleanour Farjeon said 'he was as sensitive as a candle flame.' It is
as though hungrily seeking out experiences as if time were already
running out. He was discovering the philosophy that he expressed
many years later. 'I cant help being a primitive being. I believe in
conditions of ecstasy: physical or spiritual and I get nothing from
anything else. I think all the composers who appeal to me:
Beethoven, Wagner, Delius, Sibelius - were primitive in that they
believed that the secret of the universe was to be solved by
ecstatic intuition rather than by thought. Such a composer perhaps
inevitably divides opinion; perhaps inevitably needed streams of
fame and oblivion; perhaps inevitably wrote music of uneven quality.
Can we justly assess him even now that his centenary year has
passed?
The conductor, Vernon Handley, distinguished interpreter of Bax's
music:
Vernon Handley (VH)
To me the importance of a composer is in his establishing new moods
and reaching out to that language which will eventually gives the
listener a different philosophic concept of life. And Bax does this.
And I think that the difficulty is, not only because people tend
when playing him, or conductors when reading him, to link him with
composers whose language isn't like his at all but has just a few
superficial connections either through orchestration or chromatic
tones but because the moods are remote. For instance if we say
Britten is very influenced by East Anglian mornings, it is not a
criticism. The moment we say 'Celtic Twilight' about Bax - it is.
And that's the nub of the question - that he reached out to moods
that are western and northern and which are not readily accessible
to people who live from the Midlands downwards. Unfortunately we do
the same thing with him that we did with Vaughan Williams and Holst.
Because when we look at Sibelius, because he is a foreign composer,
it is all right for Sibelius to reach out to those northern stark
moods but not for an Englishman.
I think the other great difficulty is that someone said, a long time
ago, that it is very difficult to see the wood for the trees in Bax
because the beautiful melodies, the superb orchestration and the
very searching chromatic harmony tend to clothe the bones in such a
way that we do not appreciate that the bones are there.
[Slow quiet hymn-like section of Symphony No. 5.]
MO
Bax's Fifth Symphony - romantic but scarcely brazen. Not much either
of what one critic shortly after Bax's death called his 'soggy,
shapeless, easy sentiment' nor what has been called, more than once,
his 'chromatic wallowing.'
VH
This is another misunderstanding of him: that because he has a
searching chromatic, harmonic language we tend to link him with
composers whose language we know better. When you first conduct Bax
with an orchestra that has not played any Bax before, they
inevitably play it as a cross between Richard Strauss and
Rachmaninov and it is only after a while that you can draw to their
attention that there is great deal more polyphony in Bax than in
either of those composers and that there are often a lot more
accents; that it is really tough music. The romance of Yeats
it
is not the romance of Wordsworth. One of the characteristic moods of
Bax is something that he achieves better than any other composer, I
think, who has ever lived .. is that extraordinary strength of
melancholy which one does find. And one has to turn to Celtic
folklore and ideas and one does find in the Celtic character the
visionary who is always seeking something and who is never quite
satisfied.
Because he is a romantic composer and because he does deal in moods
and, as he said himself, romantic states - emotional states - he
will, by his unity in any symphony (I think particularly of the 2nd,
3rd and 4th symphonies where all the movements grow out of material
that he gives you very early on in the first pages of the symphony)
he will for that reason create an overall mood for a symphony.
You can characterise the 4th as bluff, and the third as sunny with
clouds and so on. But then these emotional states tend to suggest
their programme. They tend to ask you to enter a world where you
will create your own feelings and stories and he is undoubtedly a
man who is inspired more by the moods of nature than by the moods of
mankind. The first symphony particularly, I think, is weaker because
it is contentious than for instance the sixth symphony which is a
much more universal mood symphony because it is influenced not only
by his experiences up to that point as a countryman but also because
of his grasp for much more universal moods - the kind of moods that
Sibelius grasped in nature. It even makes me think of Sir Fred
Hoyle's latest lecture, the Fremantle lecture, about universal
intelligence and whether composers who have gone through their
romantic states have not reached out for the influence of universal
intelligence drifting down through the atmosphere to us.
[Section from closing pages of symphony no. 6.]
MO
It is moments like that - the epilogue to the sixth symphony - that
one wonders where Bax's reputation as a rhapsodic wallower came
from. From his lesser works, of course, and there are more than a
few of them! There is another source as well, though. The composer
and critic, Anthony Payne:
Anthony Payne (AP)
Bax suffers from bad performances more than many late romantic
composers because of the complexity of his textures. I think
performers sometimes don't realise where, to borrow the
Schoenbergian term,
where the 'hauptstimme' is. You just hear
this wash of sound and they think of it as being texture when in
fact quite often there is a very strong line to be discerned - but
the players don't seem able somehow to find it. I mean there are
contrapuntal elements in Bax. You find it in the first and second
symphonies - these great themes which spring right up from the bass
like some primeval thing. That is quite often a very powerful
element in his scores and it has to be brought out. I mean the
conductor has to be very sympathetic because when you've got a whole
orchestra with all sorts of layers of activity going on you have to
have an extremely sensitive conductor and a lot of rehearsal time to
get these things straight.
VH
He is difficult in the way that Mozart is difficult because as his
themes undergo metamorphosis so you'd have to move as a conductor in
this way. You have to convey to your orchestra very quickly that
something that was, how can we put it, grotesque, two moments ago,
is now extremely delicate and poised. That's hard to do. One thinks
particularly of the third movement before the epilogue of the Third
symphony. The moods are changing by uneven groups of bars as quickly
as he can state the material so it is extremely difficult to get
that across. Orchestras tend to go into the next mood with a
hangover from the one they've just had and because the language is
not familiar to them, it is very very difficult for them to change.
[extract 3rd symphony]
MO
Once the performing difficulties have been negotiated the temptation
to play him like the composers whose scores his superficially
resemble you begin to realise that Bax's best music creates a
sound-world that doesn't at all resemble anyone else's.
AP
I remember, the other day, going to a concert - playing a game, like
I often do, of not looking at the programme to see what I was
actually about to hear. I just like to be surprised sometimes. I was
trying to spot what the music was going to be by looking at the
orchestra as it was assembling. Two harps, I saw, and a big array of
percussion and wind and brass and the conductor came on and he began
to conduct and it was the beginning of Tintagel. [Tintagel begins in
background] Hearing it like that, as a sort of surprise, was an
absolute knockout. I hadn't heard it in the hall for a few years and
I thought: what a fantastic ability to conjure up a whole world with
one texture within a bar. You're being sucked into that music. I
mean
I think that really perhaps is the brazen romantic
the
accuracy, the precision with which he actually embodies his own
emotional world.
[Tintagel plays in foreground]
LF
Bax translated natural sounds into music. I think it was Patrick
Hadley who wrote: 'Bax writes sound; he doesn't write music.' I
certainly think he listened to the sea. The fourth symphony again is
a case in point. There is a lot of sea music in the fourth symphony.
I think it is arguable that there is sea music in the Seventh
Symphony but it may well that this particular method of writing had
become such second nature to him that he just used it without
intending the association.
AP
Visual things come into his music rather a lot. They certainly do in
Fand and, I mean, November Woods, I mean, you get the feeling in
November Woods
of storm-tossed landscape. But this is only
really a metaphor for what is going on in his own mind and heart. It
is all to do with feeling and it is one of those rather complicated
situations where the feeling is reflected in landscape also in the
music.
[November Woods extract]
MO
Bax's November Woods is about what it says it is about - the howling
of wind through leafless trees in winter but it was also written at
a time when he was violently torn between his wife and family and
the woman he had fallen in love with - the pianist, Harriet Cohen.
Just as Tintagel is about the sea, the castle of Tintagel and the
legends surrounding it, of King Arthur and Tristan and Isolde. But
the music was conceived at Tintagel during a blissful holiday there
Harriet; all of which might suggest a wildly instinctive composer
listening to nature and his passions without thought as he rather
providence-temptingly or critic-temptingly put it. Was he, in a
word, a 'slapdash' composer?
LF
Bax was very concerned that his works were formally cogent and there
is not much luscious wallowing in Bax but, by and large, I think the
problem is that they have underlying programmes. Not, some of them,
specific, others of them general - which we don't know. Certainly in
the first two symphonies where he was sublimating particular
personal events in archetypal terms and I personally think that
unless one appreciates the first two symphonies one cannot assess
Bax. The programme notes for the first symphony do give you a bit of
help. Various people have guessed that it was the first world war
which critics of the time came out with. It did just post-date the
general break-up of his family background; him leaving his wife and
his father dying but I, personally, think the civil war in Ireland
is the most persuasive of these various interpretations. And this is
not necessarily Bax either giving a description of events. This is
Bax, the dreamer, throwing up a cry of despair at his dreams having
gone sour.
[extract from Bax symphony no. 2]
AP
His music is certainly inspired from within from his own personal
life, from his emotions. I think there is no doubt about that and I
think that is where the great flaw is in Bax's artistic nature. He
didn't have the ability to grow as a human being. It is interesting
that if you read his letters and the things he was increasingly
preoccupied with during the late 1930s and 1940s they are always
going on about how he was growing old and he would never be young
again. He didn't have the sort of nature of the really great artist
to make a triumph of old age. He could only see the sadness of
growing old. In some of his works this quality is extremely moving -
very poignant - but it is a limiting factor in his music and I think
that is what happened to him. It was a personal failing. There is a
really fantastically uninhibited quality about Bax when something
seems to have touched him off and of course it's usually to do with
his own painful feelings about his own emotional life. He was a very
passionate and wild human being and the sad thing is that when his
own feelings began to give out there was nothing to take their place
artistically. Not for him the late period of a Beethoven or a Bach -
where you get a sort of Olympian detachment - a totally different
way of looking at the world. When the fires burnt low with Bax, I
think he was finished and was a very very sad figure.
LF Yes - I think the fire literally went out of him and
although as I say he did write a number of very fine works, and
perhaps more reasoned works than some of the passionate works of his
earlier years, the power of the first and second symphony was never
regained except perhaps in passing. I mean the climax of the 6th
symphony which is not a triumphal climax at all is a real farewell
to the world.
[climactic section of third movement of 6th symphony]
MO
'A headlong collision between beauty and brutality' was how one Bax
enthusiast, Peter Pirie, described that. Lewis Foreman called it
'Bax's farewell to the world.' Why so despairing a farewell from a
man barely turned fifty? Well just turned fifty is a long way after
the golden number of twenty-two. Bax dreaded growing old. His
daughter Maeve:
Maeve Bax [MB]
No he didn't like it. In 'Farewell My Youth,' if you've read that,
he said: no there's no compensation for growing old. Like he said
once when he was in the train and saw the sunset and thought it can
never be again. I don't know whether you would say a feeling of doom
but a feeling of the passing of things.
MO
I never felt closer to Bax than in his daughter's company. She looks
like him for one thing and talks, I imagine, much as he did. He was
a remarkable pianist who was too shy to play in public. He wrote
music like that savage climax to the sixth symphony and yet she
remembers him with great affection as a very quiet man:
MB
He was so observant, you know. He was very shy. He took in
everything. I remember that my mother said that when they were in
Ireland he used to go for long walks and he always walked looking
down and she saw this wonderful thing and when he came home he could
tell her everything they had seen and passed through yet it didn't
seem as though he was looking. He always seemed to be taking things
in and he liked to observe. I know he said he loved being in
gatherings of people - you know - when people are very happy and
enjoying themselves - he just loved that - but he liked to sort of
stand there and observe. He just sort of stood there looking - you
know, taking in everything - rather like a cat. He hid his feelings.
But he was very shy. He had such a fey kind of atmosphere about him.
Well I'm very inarticulate too, need I say, but he was
he just
sort of drifted into this and that you know and things I asked him
about.
MO
He sounds the sort of person one could be at ease with without
actually needing to talk all the time.
MB
Yes. Yes. That's just it. Now you've hit the nail on the head. That
is a bad way of putting it. Yes that's true. He was very easy to get
on with and a sort of nice presence you know - quiet.
MO
We've said a lot about the possible underlying programmes of Bax's
music and how much of it derived from some inner impulse. We've also
heard Bax maintaining that he wrote 'pure music'. But we've heard
that he hid his feelings. The two most important inner impulses
beneath Bax's music were Ireland and love but you can rarely say
that his music is simply about either. In 1910 suddenly and
passionately in love with a Ukrainian girl, Natalia Skarginski, Bax
followed her to Russia. She was flirtatious but fickle and announced
her engagement to someone else while Bax was still in Russia but the
splendid piano sonata that he wrote there isn't only about that
wounding experience. It is also about the landscape of Russia and
its bells and churches and about the music of Balakirev and
Rachmaninov and Scriabin.
[excerpt from piano sonata no. 1]
MO
Bax endured his loneliness in Russia, he said, by accumulating
impressions 'for future service to my art.' Within six months of his
return he was married. The marriage didn't survive the arrival in
his life, a few years later, of 'the wonderful stray creature of the
faery hills' as he calls her, Harriet Cohen. But the sequence of
works he wrote in his first years with her aren't again simply about
her or their love. They have to do, as well, with Ireland, and the
sea and, what Vernon Handley called, 'moods that are western and
northern.'
About ten years after leaving his wife for Harriet Cohen, Bax had
dinner with an old friend, Grant Oliver, who brought along a young
friend of his, a girl of twenty-three, called Mary Gleaves.
Mary Gleaves (MG)
We sat down to the meal. I was very very shy and could hardly look
up from my meal to either look at them or to hear what they were
saying but they were quite happy talking music amongst themselves
and Grant Oliver suddenly said that 'My friend Mary Gleaves is very
shy so I hope you won't mind if she doesn't have much to say,' and
Arnold promptly said, 'Well I think I'll try not to move too quickly
because if I do she may run away,' and that at the end of the meal
we parted under the underground and as we parted Arnold walked away
and turned around and I simultaneously turned around too and we
waved goodbye to one another.
MO
Bax had always called himself a tireless hunter of dreams. Mary
Gleaves brought him, he told her, the glamour and ecstasy of the
dream world. 'You are the loveliest thing that has happened to me.'
MG
1930 and he came to see me one day and he said 'I've got some idea -
I wonder if you will like it - to go off to a lovely place in the
Highlands of Scotland to orchestrate the work I am doing and I
wonder if you would like to come with me.' So I said I thought that
was a lovely idea and so off we went to that beautiful place in the
North-West of Scotland called Morar. It was about October, I should
say, and the weather was very beautiful - lovely, lovely sunny days
and we had a very happy time there, he doing his work and I reading.
He usually worked in the morning for several hours - 2 or 3 hours
and then we would have lunch and we would go for these long walks
and come back in the evening. It was lovely coming in to the little
sitting room with a huge fire burning up the chimney. We would have
supper in our little sitting room and then he would get back to
working on his music. And it was then that he would ask me to read
aloud. He would just sit down there working away and after some
pages he would look back over what he had written and start
conducting - imagining it being conducted and hearing, of course,
the full scoring that he had written down.
[symphony no. 4 - quiet magical section]
MG
In the summer time we used to go to places on the Thames. Wargrave,
Pangbourne and Marlowe. Marlowe was the first place he ever took me
to on the river and that was quite a beautiful day and he referred
to it ever after as 'the green and gold day' because it was golden
sunlight and beautiful green of the spring countryside and I think
he wrote a little poem about it. Also during these visits to the
river places - usually in fact almost always in the early summer ...
and he had given me the Oxford Pocket Book of Wild Flowers. And we
would be walking along a lane and I would stop by the hedgerow
examining the various parsley families trying to identify them from
my book and after five or ten minutes I would get up in order to
join him and I would see him a long way down the lane walking along
with his head slightly inclined downward and one hand behind his
back: he with his music and I with my wild flowers. So that was one
thing: I knew we were perfectly happy: walking side by side in
absolute silence.
[extract from 4th symphony]
MO
Bax's 4th symphony written in Morar - while Mary Gleaves read to
him with memories of silent green and gold days - but it is,
besides, a symphony. It is entirely characteristic of Bax that
Harriet Cohen didn't learn of Mary Gleaves' existence for twenty
years. Bax would return from Morar to Harriet and pick up another
life - which of them was he living with?
The inner impulses beneath his music, I said, were love and Ireland
or something that Ireland best represented. He was eighteen when he
opened a volume of verse at the words 'Sad to remember, Sick with
years
" and a few lines later 'But the tale, though words be
lighter than air, must live to be old like the wandering moon.' It
was W.B. Yeats' 'The Wanderings of Usheen.'
AB
The poetry and prose of Yeats introduced me to the Irish faery
hierarchy and the magnificent heroic sagas of his land. There were
three different earthly paradises as conceived by the ancient Gael.
One: The Hollow Hill; Two: Hy-Brasil or the Land of Eternal Youth
situated in an enchanted island in the Atlantic said, sometimes,
even now, to be glimpsed in the Western seaboard of Eire; and Three:
Moy Mell - The Pleasant Plain. I wrote tone poems about all these
three pagan places of bliss. In the Faery Hills (the Hollow Hill);
The Garden of Fand (Hy-Brasil), both orchestral works - and Moy Mell,
a piece for two pianos. I think I may claim, in all modesty, that I
was the first to translate the hidden Ireland into musical terms and
all this I owed in the first place to Yeats. His was the key that
opened the gate of the Celtic wonderland and his the finger that
pointed to the Magic Mountain whence I was to dig nearly all that
may be of value in my own art. Neither does my debt to that great
man end there: for his poetry has always meant more to me than all
the music of the centuries. All the days of my life I bless his
name.
MO
Bax soon became, in his imagination, more Irish than English. He
found a magic place in the west of Ireland which he returned to
again and again for the rest of his life: Glencolumcille - The
Valley of the Church of Columba: a village between towering hills
looking out across the western ocean towards Hy-Brasil. The Ireland
of Yeats and of the Republican leader, Patrick Pearse, was part of
the youth that Bax spent his later life achingly remembering. The
sister of Harriet Cohen, Myra Verney:
Myra Verney (MV)
It occurs to me that one could perhaps compare Bax's involvement
with the Irish cause with Wordsworth's involvement with the French
Revolution when to be alive in that age was a wonderful thing. That
it was the romantic being involved in the idea of revolution - of
the readjustment of injustice.
MO
And a friend from Bax's later years in Ireland: Ann Crowley:
Ann Crowley (AC)
Arnold loved Ireland so intensely that when half his holiday was
over he began to be sad and withdrawn. From his earliest days he was
accustomed to visit the West: Connemara, Donegal and probably Kerry
with his sister Evelyn. When I took him to hear famous records of
Irish music he was able to tell the collector from which county,
even townland, they had come - even the name of the fiddler who
played them or the singer who sang them. He had an extraordinary
memory for anything pertaining to Ireland. He tells us again and
again how it influenced his music. About the Garden of Fand he
writes - 'my own favourite among all my works. I was 29 when I wrote
it and it was all literally given to me by Ireland.'
[section of Garden of Fand]
MO
The Garden of Fand. Fand being, in ancient Irish folklore, the
daughter of Mannanan, Lord of the ocean. Her garden is the western
sea that Bax saw from his windows at Glencolumcille. There is so
much of Ireland in Bax that some of him can only be found there. In
Cork especially which he visited every summer for years where he
stayed with the Fleischmann family, I felt a strong presence of Bax
when talking with Aloys Fleischmann, Emeritus Professor of Music at
University College Cork in the College's Bax Memorial Room which
contains, presented by Harriet Cohen, all the published music and
many manuscripts including the piano score of a complete ballet that
was quite unknown to me: Tamara.
Aloys Fleischmann (AF)
That's very interesting because when we got it I wrote to Karsavina
to ask her whether the ballet had been performed because it was
dedicated to her: 'To that divine dancer whose art has inspired this
work.' And her reply was astonishing. She said she had never heard
of it even though she had commissioned Bax to write a work for her
and knew him really well. But he never mentioned that he had written
a work for her so I presume what happened was that he decided he
would write a work for the Diaghilev company that was coming to
London in 1912. When the company made its programme known it
included Thamar by Balakirev. So Bax appears to have decided 'Well
that's that: Balakirev has done it, so there's no point in doing any
more.'
MO
It is very curious that he should have gone to all the trouble to
write this score and then, on learning that something vaguely
similar was being performed he should just have apparently dropped
it without a word.'
AF
Well this was rather typical of him. He was like that.
MO
Did he often just leave works in his bottom drawer - forgotten?
AF
I would say so and that's why out of his enormous output so little
really has ultimately come to light.
MO
So do you have other works in the collection here that are little
known or actually unperformed.
AF
Well Into The Twilight was done once by Sir Thomas Beecham in 1908,
I think and the next performance was with my orchestra in Cork about
ten years ago. We've also got Cathleen Ni-Houlihan. That I think was
done once or twice at the Academy but hardly performed since then.
MO
This room contains not only his printed music and manuscripts but
over there in another glass case a most extraordinary collection of
miscellany. Chessmen - was he an avid chess-player?
AF
Oh yes.
MO
And there are a number of pipes. I've certainly seen photographs of
him smoking pipes.
AF
Yes we have a collection of his pipes.
MO We have here Ordnance Survey maps of Donegal and
Enniskillen. Did he know the countryside of Ireland well?
AF
Well he certainly knew Donegal and he had spent a little time in
Kerry. Then we brought him right around West Cork. Every year he
came we brought him on picnics and he enjoyed these terribly
especially the Irish place-names used to intrigue him because he had
quite a good knowledge of Irish and he used to go round and produce
very fanciful notions as to how these words were derived and
sometimes a motif arising from one of these place names would crop
up right through the day like a fugal motif you see. He was very
witty and a marvellous companion.
AC
During the war I sent Arnold an Irish dictionary, knowing how he
loved the language and to distract him from the bombs and planes
zooming overhead. He wrote that he spent hours poring over it at
night then followed a great attempt to write to me in Irish. When
his mother died I sent him a letter of sympathy in Irish. He wrote:
'I value this letter and your prayers more than I can say. Aoine, I
love your Irish literature. They are more charged with feeling than
anything you could write in English - why I don't know - perhaps
because there is a secret strangeness and intimacy in the old old
language like the scent of the turf smoke on the wind.
AF
There is a manuscript here in that language.
MO
Is that in his hand?
AF
Yes, certainly he started translating Synge's In The Shadow of the
Glen into Irish with the help of a friend - a teacher in Donegal.
And his Irish must have been good because he actually took down the
words of several folk tunes and one of these is written there in his
own hand and it requires considerable knowledge of the language to
understand what a folk-singer is singing and he also there sketched
his own efforts to translate his own name into Irish. He calls it 'Ardgail
Bacs.'
MO
What else do we have here?
AF
Well, the publications - the short stories Wrack, The Sisters and
Green Magic and Children Of The Hills. These are three books of
short stories.
MO
These of course were published under the pseudonym Dermot O'Byrne
and those poems suggest to me somebody not just sympathetic with
Ireland but sympathetic to the Nationalist cause.
AF
That's true but his Dublin Ballad, of course, is a famous poem.
Yeats said, in a Dublin drawing room, that it was the best poem to
come out of the period in Ireland. And he said that gave him, more
pleasure than any praise he had ever got for any of his music.
MO
And were not some of these poems actually suppressed at the time?
AF
Censored - yes.
MO
Oh write it up above your hearth And troll it out to sun and moon To
all true Irishmen on earth Arrest and death come late or soon
And when the devil's made us wise Each in his own peculiar hell With
desert hearts and drunken eyes We're free to sentimentalise By
corners where the martyrs fell.
MO
This is from Bax's poem, A Dublin Ballad, published under the
pseudonym of Dermot O'Byrne and suppressed by the British
authorities in Ireland. Aloys Fleischmann being an authority on
Irish folk music I asked him about the much discussed question of
whether there was a truly Irish element in Bax's music.
AF
Oh yes. No end. For instance there is a very fine rhapsody for viola
and orchestra which is full of Irish material. The only time he
actually seemed to use an Irish folk-tune was in the finale of his G
Major string quartet. There's a rondo there and the second episode
sounds just like an Irish tune. When it was performed in Cork the
audience said: 'Ah at last he has taken a natural tune.' Now in fact
the tune is a hybrid. Bax said, himself, he had not used an Irish
tune. He thought it was a tune rather characteristic of Irish folk
melody and the fact is that one of the phrases is The Foggy Dew but
the other phrases - they're very close to Irish folk music but I
don't think it's possible to place them so what he did was - I think
he constructed a tune which he felt to be typically Irish in the
form ABBA and that's the second episode - that gave great pleasure
to the Cork audience when they heard it:
[Finale of String Quartet No. 1]
MO
Not many books on music in Bax's collection, I noticed. Not many
words about it in his conversation.
AF
He never spoke about his music at all. Well you know that when he
was in Dublin consorting with Yeats and AE Russell they didn't even
know that he was a composer. They thought he was a literary gent. He
never mentioned the fact that he wrote music. He used to produce
some very eccentric notions about other people's music. His notions
about the classical repertoire were very strange: Bach was sewing
machine music; Schumann and
Beethoven even
only wrote good
music when they were forming their styles. After that they repeated
themselves. In old age Schumann petered out and Beethoven went in
for rather sterile experimentation.
MO
That is a curious reflection on his own often stated fear of growing
old.
AF
Well probably that was the reason he feared it so much. He was
afraid that he would not be able to keep up his flow of composition
at the same fluency he had always been able to master. Well I do
feel that his bitterness as a result of what he felt was the neglect
of his music. I think that did, to a certain extent, curb his
creative urge.
MO
He spoke with bitterness of that did he?
AF
Very little but I did hear him say that he ... that most people now
- specially the younger generation - felt that he was past his time
- had become 'Old Hat.'
MO
They were sad - those last years. There were honours, yes: honorary
doctorates, knighthoods, the Mastership of the King's Music - but
Bax was now in fact what he had apprehensively felt himself becoming
- what he'd so terribly feared - he was old; not very old - he never
saw his seventieth birthday. The memory of youth was bitter, not
warmly nostalgic and although he went on composing he was tending
the embers with little hope of a flame rising and he knew it.
Alcohol dulled the pain a little. He came to rely on it more and
more and there were fewer and fewer performances in those last
years. In his last summer Mary Gleaves met him at one of them.
MG
And he said wait for me after the concert which I did do and when I
joined him he walked by my side and said 'were you proud of me?' and
I said 'yes, of course I was.' but I was very unhappy about it
because it was a very unusual thing for Arnold to say because he
would never as it were draw attention to himself and somehow on that
particular occasion he wanted to do so.
MO
And not long after that concert Bax went again to visit Aloys
Fleischmann, and his wife Ann, in Ireland. It was his home if ever
he had a home.
AF
What happened was that he was a visiting examiner to our College and
when the examinations were finished he was taken by a friend of his
to the old Head of Kinsale. It was an evening - a marvellous sunset
and he stood at the very tip of the old Head looking out into the
West - now he says in his autobiography that he would like to think
that upon his death-bed his last vision would be (end of Fand begins
to play in background) the deep, brooding, dove-grey mysterious
Atlantic. I cannot but think that while he was standing there he
must have remembered that the performance of The Garden of Fand
which we had just had in Dublin the previous day - actually which I
conducted with the RTE Symphony Orchestra - and I do feel that when
he looked out into the Atlantic there the whole background of Fand
must have been in his mind because he was lost in thought and
finally he had to be aroused from his reveries and brought home and
within a couple of hours he was dead. Heart failure.
[Fand continues to end]
AC
He went upstairs. He'd take no help anywhere. He undressed and he
washed and he went into bed and I said: 'We'd better get a doctor,
Sir Arnold.' and he said, 'No Ann. Please - you know I hate fuss.
'Well,' I said. 'Still I think you should have one.' and he said.
'No.' so I left him and I went down stairs and telephoned my old
professor of medicine and I told him and I said 'Would you come up
because, to me, he is a dying man.' and he arrived in quarter of an
hour. Sir Arnold was perfectly conscious and the professor injected
whatever you should do for his heart. By that time he was failing
too much that it didn't really get into his circulation and he never
got going properly
and there was no good in having a minister of
any kind because he always said he didn't believe in anything - that
the Muslims were the nearest you could get - which was a rather
shaking experience. Then he just thanked the professor and he
thanked me and he turned to the wall and within twenty minutes he
was gone.
[Epilogue of Symphony 3 plays out to silence]
Announcer
The closing bars of the Third Symphony of Sir Arnold Bax. The Golden
Age Has Passed - a portrait of the composer, was written and
presented by Michael Oliver.
The producer was Graham Sheffield and that programme was first
broadcast last year in Music Weekly.
The text is copyrighted by BBC Radio 3
Back to
Essays and Articles
|
|
Score Information