This is, rather surprisingly, the first ‘life and works’
book to be published about Roger Quilter, and it appears on the eve
of the composer’s death fifty years ago. (This anniversary will be celebrated,
together with Lennox Berkeley’s centenary, at a concert following next
year’s British Music Society Annual General Meeting, at Trinity College,
London, on 25 October 2003.)
And splendid it is. Handsomely produced by an enterprising
publisher relatively new on the music scene, the book has in Valerie
Langfield an author fully capable of the demands of her subject.
Quilter’s life, on the outside at least, was uneventful,
remarkable only to those less privileged: quasi-aristocratic background
(his father, William Cuthbert, became a baronet during Queen Victoria’s
Diamond Jubilee celebrations in 1897; and the family home is Bawdsey
Manor, near Felixstowe in Suffolk), a private income, and a lifestyle
which took for granted the presence and attention of domestic servants.
On the inside, things were rather different: an artistic temperament
raised in a Philistine, landed upper-middle-class environment; constant
health problems (and a stammer), a homosexual temperament which courted
rejection by his father and over-identification with his mother. He
was a kind, generous man rather too over-protected by circumstance of
birth, perhaps, for his own artistic good.
For artist he was, with a limited yet exquisite musical
furrow to plough: that of the song-writer. His European predecessors
in this tradition were men like Hugo Wolf and Henri Duparc, and his
English successor was Peter Warlock: all four, in concentrating almost
exclusively on solo song, produced a group of works for voice and piano
whose pregnant beauty lingers in the mind for a lifetime.
After his student years studying music in Frankfurt
along with his lifelong friend Percy Grainger and other English members
of what became known as the Frankfurt Group, Quilter appeared as a song-writer
virtually fully formed. He published over one hundred songs, the last
in 1952, but the major part of his output appeared between 1904 and
1929. The lyric poetry he set was drawn from two broad bands: seventeenth
century Elizabethan and Jacobean (most frequently Shakespeare and Herrick),
and nineteenth-century and contemporary poetry. He also set verses of
William Blake, and some of his own verse. Throughout the range of his
songs there is little variation or growth in either quality or style;
but there are one or two masterpieces, which stand out against the general
accomplishment - songs such as Go, Lovely Rose, Dream Valley,
The Fuchsia Tree, and the powerfully emotional arrangement of
Barbara Allen, which ranks with the best of Percy Grainger’s
traditional arrangements.
Quilter’s songs and choral works (there is a substantial
group of the latter) are covered by Langfield in two lengthy chapters
which follow the opening biographical section of the book. There follow
chapters on Where the Rainbow Ends - the children’s fairy play
by Clifford Mills, with incidental music by Quilter, which ran virtually
every Christmas in London from 1911 until 1959, rivalling Peter Pan
in popularity; on Quilter’s piano music - a small group of delightful,
descriptive pieces in the romantic-impressionist manner of the period;
on his light orchestral music (the Three English Dances and A
Children’s Overture are still occasionally heard); and his light
opera Julia, produced with only moderate success at Covent Garden
in 1936 and later reworked and published as Love at the Inn.
There are also sixteen pages of photographs, and six Appendices, including
a Catalogue of Works, a Bibliography and substantial Discography.
In addition, and most valuably, there is included with
the book a CD containing long-unavailable recordings of seventeen songs
recorded by Quilter and baritone Mark Raphael in 1934; a recording from
1923 of To Julia, in the version for tenor (Hubert Eisdell),
string quartet and piano (Quilter); an orchestral selection from Where
the Rainbow Ends, recorded in 1930; and a recital of six songs recorded
by baritone Frederick Harvey and Quilter for the BBC in 1945.
This volume, meticulously researched and finely written, is surely
definitive. It is one of the most distinguished books of its type to
appear in recent years and deserves to be widely read.
John Talbot
This review appears courtesy of the BMS
Details of membership of the British
Music Society from
Stephen Trowell, 7 Tudor Gardens, Upminster, Essex RM14 3DE (
01708 224795
ROGER
QUILTER: His Life and Music by Valerie Langfield, Boydell Press, 2002:
xviii, 375pp, plus CD ISBN 0-85115-871-4 £40 hardback