JOHN FOULDS by Malcolm
Macdonald
The following two-part piece comprises
the text of two pre-concert talks given
earlier this year by the leading Foulds
authority, Malcolm Macdonald, at Birmingham’s
Symphony Hall. Later this year Warner’s
will be issuing a CD of the Foulds works
performed there together with the Apotheosis
for violin and orchestra. This talk
was given by Malcolm Macdonald with
illustrations played to the audience
from recordings. Although this is an
element we cannot at this stage provide
over the internet it is felt that the
value of this lecture, including vivid
descriptions of the music itself, remains
substantial without the audio element.
RB
CBSO First Foulds
Talk 10 and 12 Feb 2004
The name of John Foulds
was once almost a household one, and
you could find it in the music programmes
of the Radio Times pretty well
any day of the week. But I’m talking
about the Radio Times of the
1920s. It’s a very long time since John
Foulds was a familiar presence on our
concert programmes. Yet over the past
couple of decades he has been emerging
from the shadows, there are quite a
few CD recordings of his music, and
at least some of his works are once
again – or in many cases for the first
time – being heard in concert. Birmingham
can take pride, I think, that in recent
years there have been more live performances
of Foulds here than anywhere else. This
is due of course to the fact that Sakari
Oramo considers that Foulds wrote great
music which deserves to be in the repertoire
– and who am I to dissent from that;
he’s absolutely right.
Now there are thousands
of neglected composers, and many whom
enthusiasts and sometimes critics believe
to be unjustly neglected. But it’s really
very rare for a conductor at the head
of a leading orchestra to say: ‘Yes,
this is amazing music. People should
be listening to it. I will play it –
and not just once but again and again.’
Tonight’s performance of John Foulds’s
Three Mantras is NOT the first
time this extraordinary work has been
heard in Symphony Hall. It’s I think
the third, and Thursday night’s performance
will be the fourth. Now the Mantras
are (or is) one of Foulds’s most striking,
most exploratory, most visionary works,
written at various points during the
1920s by a composer who was totally
au fait with the leading modern
music movements of his time, but had
his own spin on things and his own bold
statements to make in his own way. Here
he is in full flood in Mantra I,
the Mantra of Action -
[EXAMPLE] (about 1’50")
Mantra I
Part of the First
Mantra. There’s a composer who knows
exactly what he’s doing, and for whom
his contemporaries like Stravinsky and
Bartók and Prokofiev had better
look out. Now a week or so ago a very
different Foulds work was heard here:
the Keltic Lament, which started
life as the slow movement of a three-movement
Keltic Suite for light orchestra.
This was the sort of piece that kept
his name in the Radio Times in the 1920s:
you could almost call it Foulds’s Greatest
Hit. And here’s a bit of it:
[EXAMPLE] (about 1’40") Keltic
Lament
I think it’s fair to
say that if you only knew Foulds because
you’d heard one of the previous performances
of the Mantras, you’d find the
Keltic Lament something of a
surprise. And if you only knew him by
the Keltic Lament, you’d find
the Mantras an even bigger surprise.
Do they even sound as if they’re remotely
by the same composer? One of the difficulties
in assessing Foulds’s achievement is
that he viewed his art as his craft
and he worked with ease on different,
indeed on many different levels of style
and sophistication. He was an eclectic,
he was a musical mimic, he was a jack-of-all
trades and he could turn his hand to
anything and he was proud of it. Does
this mean he was merely a chameleon?
No, because in so many of his works
– not only the Mantras – there
is music that nobody else could have
written, that nobody else did write.
Anyway, under all the changes of colouring,
the chameleon is a real, solid and fascinating
lizard.
In any case this is
not in any sense an unusual situation.
In the 19th and early 20th
centuries it was well understood that
a composer could make a good career
writing light, uncomplicated, though
often artful music for domestic consumption,
for dancing, for lowbrow tastes – and
that major composers might also be called
upon to do so, or turn their hand to
it for a bit of extra cash. Brahms did
so – his fortune was founded not on
his symphonies and concertos but on
the runaway sales of the Hungarian dances
and the Liebeslieder Walzer,
which are by no stretch of the imagination
big serious musical utterances. Sibelius,
right through his career, wrote a great
many morceaux and potboilers alongside
his symphonic output, some of it touched
with his characteristic genius, some
of it quite trivial. And the great example
in British music is of course Elgar:
the composer of Gerontius and
the Symphonies is also the composer
of Chanson du Matin, Salut d’Amour
and many other modest, tuneful light-music
pieces composed right through tot he
end of his life.
So there’s really no
surprise in the fact that John Foulds
wrote light music and ambitious concert
works. What’s different in his case
is that his concert works became ever
more exploratory, unlike what his British
contemporaries were writing, and so
the gulf between the two kinds widened
– and as a result mostly the concert
works didn’t get played or indeed published.
And he went off in other directions
also – notably in his interest in the
music of Eastern cultures, especially
India – and that too was so unorthodox
that THAT didn’t get much exposure.
Meanwhile his light music and theatre
music DID get played and published,
so that in the end he found himself
type-cast as a composer of popular pot-boilers,
though works of that kind only accounted
perhaps 20-25% of his output. And he
found it on the whole very difficult
to get a hearing for the other parts
of his output. For instance, there’s
a letter that he wrote in 1933 to Adrian
Boult at the BBC complaining that all
the major, serious works he’d submitted
for broadcast in the previous two years
(this would include the Three Mantras)
had been turned down by the BBC’s Selection
Committee, whereas his light music,
his pot-boilers, were being continually
broadcast. ‘This state of affairs’,
he concludes in the letter, ‘is rather
a galling one for a serious artist’.
There were other factors
apart from musical content at play here.
He was something of an outsider in the
social fabric of the day. He didn’t
have a training at any of the big music
colleges, he was a musician from a family
of musicians who became an orchestral
player and later a conductor and teacher,
a theatre musician. He was self-taught,
in the best school, which was that of
experience. After his early years in
Manchester he led a fairly wandering
life-style. The only examples of his
most serious and sophisticated compositions
that he managed to get published in
his own lifetime were published in France.
And of course towards the end of his
life he went to India, where he died
suddenly and unexpectedly shortly before
the outbreak of World War 2 at the age
of 58. By the end of the war he was
all but forgotten, his manuscripts dispersed,
some works irretrievably lost, other
works eaten by white ants, and of course
the taste for pieces like the Keltic
Lament that had kept his name alive
– that taste, too, was changing; those
pieces too ceased to be played.
So there you have it;
what needs to be done is to reconstruct
the image, the identity, the personality
of John Foulds – and you can only do
it by playing, by listening to his music:
and you have to listen to a lot of it,
because it’s very diverse, before you
can identify what makes a piece of Foulds
as unmistakable as a piece of Elgar
or Holst or Vaughan Williams or Britten.
And the diversity is very neatly encapsulated
by the examples of the Keltic Lament
on one hand and the Three Mantras
on the other.
As I think you know,
the Mantras is not the only Foulds
work being played by the CBSO this month.
Of course the Mantras is going
to be repeated the day after tomorrow,
and I’ll be here again – I do hope some
of you will think it worth coming to
both performances, but I’ll be saying
very much what I’m saying tonight. But
then on Wednesday the 25th, we’ll be
hearing the premieres of two very different
Foulds works, his early symphonic poem
Mirage and the vocal concerto
Lyra Celtica. And I’ll be back
here – and I do hope some of you will
be coming to that talk, because I’m
spreading what I want to say over these
two occasions.
Foulds had been composing
since childhood. During his years as
a cellist in the Hallé at the
beginning of the 20th century
he wrote piano music, string quartets,
symphonic poems and a vast 3-part ‘concert
opera’ for soloists, chorus and orchestra
called The Vision of Dante, based
on The Divine Comedy. Only a
few of these actually got played. As
early as the 1890s he’d experimented
with quarter-tones as a kind of intensification
of chromaticism, but the general style
of Foulds’s early works descends very
much from the German Romantics such
as Brahms and Wagner, though with features
that suggest from his cello desk in
the Hallé he was absorbing much
from contemporaries such as Elgar, Sibelius
and Richard Strauss. His relative lack
of success with such pieces, striking
though they seem to us today (when they
get played), was one reason Foulds turned
his hand to lighter music and theatre
scores to keep the wolf from the door.
On the other hand, it’s clear he had
a spontaneous musicality, an ear for
a good tune and a great sense of fun,
so the light music might well have come
naturally to him anyway.
But he never, at any
time, stopped writing ‘serious’, thoughtful,
exploratory music, and in fact over
the next decades, through World War
I and into the Twenties, his musical
language expanded radically into something
much more recognizably ‘modernistic’.
This wasn’t an isolated development
among British composers of the time
– you need only think of Frank Bridge,
Gustav Holst, even Vaughan Williams.
Foulds knew them all, and his music
has some affinities with them, especially
with Holst – but his range of
development was even wider and more
varied.
The 1890s and the early
years of the 20th century
were something of an age of spiritual
ferment in Western Europe. The old religious
and rationalist certainties were being
broken down, and many people were turning
away from the established churches to
partake in some of the many more esoteric
philosophical and religious movements
that were gaining ground – movements
such as Theosophy, which claimed to
bring new enlightenment based on ancient
wisdom from the East, especially India.
This isn’t an aspect of the arts especially
that tends to get much serious discussion
these days, but you’re continually bumping
up against it in the biographies of
poets, musicians, artists of the time.
Scriabin was inspired by Theosophy to
create his own religion, of which his
music was meant to be the revelation.
Satie in Paris, was inspired to some
of his most radical works of the 1890s
by the tenets of Rosicrucianism. Debussy
was deeply interested in Alchemy and
for a time was the head of a mystical
order called the Priory of Sion. Nearer
to home, W.B. Yeats, fascinated by Celtic
mysticism and automatic writing, creates
his own religio-philosophical system;
Gustav Holst deeply interested in Theosophy,
Indian mysticism, Gnostic Christianity,
Astrology; Edwin Lutyens, the great
architect, deeply into Theosophy also.
I mention Yeats, Holst, Lutyens specifically
because John Foulds knew them all. In
Foulds too there is this mystical, esoteric
element, and through it a wish to penetrate
to spiritual realities that seemed obfuscated
by Christian ritual and liturgy, which
artistically came out as a wish to penetrate
back to the real essence of music, which
he felt might be found in its purest
form outside the systematizations of
the Western Tradition, that there were
boundless possibilities that non-Western
music could point him towards.
For instance, just
before and during the War he started
writing pieces based on strict application
of the ancient Greek modes; here’s part
of one of them – a ‘Solemn Temple Dance’
in the Lydian Mode – in the version
he eventually made for strings, harp
and percussion – the dancers are obviously
to be thought of as clashing cymbals
in their movements.
[EXAMPLE] (nearly 1’00")
Hellas I
As well as Ancient
Greece, he began to take a strong interest
in the music of the East, especially
India. This is reflected in his settings
of Rabindranath Tagore, his music for
Indian plays staged in London by the
Union of East and West, and in speculative
compositions like the piano piece Gandharva-Music.
Its haze of shimmering figuration and
elusive melody over a ground bass make
it a true forerunner of today’s Minimalism.
Foulds said he’d tried to capture in
it the actual sound of the Gandharvas
– in Hindu mythology, the nature-spirits
or devas ‘whose being is music’. This
strong interest in India was partly
a result of his esoteric spiritual interests.
And he made no secret of the fact that
he felt some of his music, like Ghandarva
Music had been dictated to him from
other spheres, or at least wafted from
other times and places. I’ll play you
just a few bars of Ghandarva-Music:
it’s just a sort of endless ripple of
notes over a ground bass.
[EXAMPLE] (about 40
seconds) Ghandarva-Music
Now in this little
piano composition we find the first
germ of the idea of the second of the
Three Mantras, the Mantra
of Bliss. The idea of nature-sprits,
of angelic voices in the air, this is
very much what the second Mantra
is about. Maybe you can hear in this
short extract from Mantra II how
the basically very simple ideas of Ghandarva-Music
have been transformed into a shimmering,
orchestral canvas, once again over a
ground bass.
[EXAMPLE] (about 1
minute 40 seconds) Mantra II
It’s possible that
Foulds’s very openness about his spiritual
sources of inspiration, which he talked
about for instance in his immensely
stimulating book on modern music called
Music To-day, was one reason
why some of his contemporaries tended
to look askance at his work. Perhaps
another reason was his passionately-proclaimed
conviction that Indian music – the music
of a subject race of the British Empire
– had much to teach composers in the
West. Theosophy had looked to India
as a source of spiritual enlightenment
and renewal, but Foulds’s belief in
Indian music was based on more than
just mystical enthusiasm. In 1915 he’d
met the violinist Maud MacCarthy, who
became his second wife, and was at that
time one of the leading Western authorities
on Indian music. She’d been close to
one of the leaders of the Theosophical
movement, Annie Besant, and had actually
studied Indian music on the subcontinent,
noted down folk music in the villages
and collected Indian instruments. Through
Maud MacCarthy, Foulds gained a knowledge
of oriental music, unusually detailed
for the time and not particularly romanticized.
One of the fruits of
this knowledge was a very original cycle
of piano pieces, the Essays in the
Modes, published in Paris in 1928.
These studies aren’t based on the traditional
major and minor diatonic modes, but
on scales derived from the 72 ragas
of southern India. Here’s part of one
of these remarkable pieces:
[EXAMPLE] (about 1’
30") Prismic
As with the pieces
on Ancient Greek Modes, Foulds’s idea
was that the seven notes of his chosen
modal scale furnished him with everything
he needed – each was a complete world
of sound in itself. In the piece you’ve
just heard, only the seven tones of
the mode are used, the other five tones
of the chromatic scale are completely
excluded, and yet he gets a tremendous
variety of colour and harmony out of
those seven – he was trying to demonstrate
that these modes had just as much potential
as the familiar major or minor scales.
Foulds only completed seven of these
piano pieces, the Essays in the Modes,
but he began many more, and one of those
rapidly metamorphosed into the first
movement of a major 3-movement work
for piano and orchestra – a Piano Concerto
in fact, though he didn’t call it that:
he called it Dynamic Triptych,
and the three movements are a study
in a mode, a study in timbre, and a
study in rhythm. I’ll play the beginning
of it: this was the first music by Foulds
I ever saw, years before I heard it
played. So here’s another piece in a
mode deriving from India but put through
dazzling paces as the music seems to
spread its wings and take flight. Again,
throughout this entire very virtuosic
movement only the seven tones of its
mode are to be heard. Nobody’s asking
me but I think this is probably the
next piece of Foulds for the CBSO to
tackle:
[EXAMPLE] (I minute
45 secs) Dynamic Triptych
From there it’s but
a short step to the Third Mantra,
the Mantra of Will, composed
very shortly after Dynamic Triptych.
This is perhaps the most extreme of
Foulds’s works inspired by the idea
of working with Indian modes. He takes
the seven notes of an aggressively exotic
mode and builds a huge dissonant teeming
vision out of it. He yokes the seven
tones to a baleful, convulsive 7/4 rhythm.
This rhythm, and all the seven tones,
sound in every bar – even the silent
bars, where the conductor is directed
to go on beating that particular rhythm.
And around this juddering, angry basis
the whole orchestra goes wild. It is
some of Foulds’s most extreme and his
most visceral music.
[EXAMPLE] (About 1’
15") Mantra III
At the time he wrote
that Foulds had never yet visited India.
That came later, at the end of his life,
and of course, he became in some ways
even more involved in seeking to understand
and to use Indian music – but other
aspects of it as well as modal composition.
He became involved in working with traditional
Indian instruments, such as the sitar
and the sarod and the vina, and also
with the reality of current Indian music
– not just the classical music, the
playing of raga, but popular songs and
ballads, even music one might hear in
the street. A lot of his last works
evoke an India of markets and dancing
and songs in the fields and the bustle
of towns, and of course to do that they’re
less sophisticated in many ways than
pieces like the Mantras or the
Essays in the Modes. Here again
is Foulds the composer who can work
on many levels. A mystic he may have
been, but he was also an intensely practical
musician. And so I’m just going to end
with another musical vision of India
by John Foulds – it’s from his Indian
Suite for orchestra, a work based
on authentic Indian melodies, collected
by his wife and some of them he’d heard
himself. It’s not exactly a light-music
work but there’s nothing solemn or spiritually
elevated about it either. I’ll play
the second movement, it’s very short,
and he calls it ‘Da Ta Sé
– Prelude to a Play’, and its based
on a theatre song from Bombay. In music
like this he surely depicts a land and
people of life and colour and humour
– another flip-side, as it were, of
the creative impulse that produced the
Mantras. And that’s all I’m going
to say, but I’ll be back on the 25th
to talk some more about this most unusual
of English composers, John Foulds. Let’s
just end with this little movement from
his Indian Suite.
[EXAMPLE] Indian
Suite II
CBSO Second Foulds
Talk 25 Feb 2004
I was here 2 weeks
ago before the performance of John Foulds’s
Three Mantras to talk about the
music and its composer – John Foulds,
who was born in Manchester in 1880 and
died in Calcutta in 1939: dates and
places that somehow sum up his personal
odyssey - from being a cellist in the
Hallé Orchestra under Hans Richter,
very much brought up in the European
mainstream traditions, to someone exploring
other worlds of music, collaborating
with Indian musicians and even writing
for their instruments. I said something
then about his interest in non-European,
oriental scales and modes as a way of
enlarging the tonal language of Western
music, and how this tied in with his
interest in Indian philosophical and
mystical traditions. I drew a parallel
here with Gustav Holst. And I indicated
something of the astonishing range
of Foulds’s music, from big, highly
sophisticated, visionary pieces like
the Mantras to melodious salon
pieces and light-music suites for popular
consumption, such as his once-famous
Keltic Lament, which was also
heard here just a few weeks ago.
Tonight we’re going
to be hearing two very different works
by Foulds: his comparatively early symphonic
poem Mirage and the concerto
for wordless solo voice and orchestra
entitled Lyra Celtica. You may
already suspect that Lyra Celtica
belongs to the same general ambience
as the Keltic Lament and in a
sense you would be right, but this is
a work on an entirely different level.
I should say that both these works in
tonight’s concert are billed as world
premieres: this is true in the case
of Lyra Celtica and essentially
true in the case of Mirage: in
fact there does exist a recording of
Mirage made in Luxembourg in
the 1980s (which is why I can play you
some extracts from this work), but tonight
will be its first proper performance
in this country and the first time it’s
been played in public anywhere. That’s
Mirage; Lyra Celtica is
a work that Foulds didn’t quite finish,
but he left two of the three movements
complete, and it’s these two that are
being premiered tonight: the music is
so fascinating that it most certainly
deserves to be performed.
a
page of the score of Mirage
a
page of the score of Lyra Celtica
So, two very different
works – Mirage rather grand and
philosophical, Lyra Celtica essentially
lyrical, melodic, impressionistic, sometimes
playful. To attempt to say what I think
Foulds was trying to do in these works
requires me to say more about his very
varied musical, poetic, philosophical
leanings. They confirm him as essentially
a musical poet and a great explorer
of new musical territory, both within
the mind and outside the central Anglo-Germanic,
post-Brahmsian, post-Wagnerian traditions
in which he grew up.
There was a sense in
which Foulds was always an explorer,
both musically and spiritually. Like
many musicians around the turn of the
19th and 20th
centuries he was dissatisfied with the
limitations, as they seemed to him,
of the tempered scale, the 12 semitones
to every octave in which music had to
be written, when within those semitones
– as he knew as a string player – there
were infinite possible smaller gradations
with their own possible expressive effect.
As early as the 1890s, in his teens,
he was composing works which made his
first tentative use, at least in passing
or for decoration, of quarter-tones:
intervals of one half of a semitone.
A lot of his music from the 1890s is
in fact lost, and the earliest pieces
by Foulds using quarter-tones that survive
date from about 1905. One of them is
a piece called The Waters of Babylon,
which he much later incorporated into
a suite of Aquarelles for string
quartet. I’m going to play you a couple
of passages from this, for its date,
very remarkable little work.
It’s one of what Foulds
called his ‘Music-Pictures’, the idea
being to render the equivalent of a
visual impression into sound. And The
Waters of Babylon is all about reflections
– the temples and the hanging gardens
of Babylon being glimpsed by moonlight
reflected upside down in the waters
of the River Tigris. It’s a picture
of calm and mystery, nothing like recent
events in the vicinity of Babylon. He
uses musical reflections to portray
this: contrary motion – as the top line
goes down the bottom line comes up,
as the top goes up the bottom goes down
and so on. And the main theme of the
piece is a very distinctive one, an
idea he was almost obsessed by because
he used it again and again in many works
– but this is its first appearance as
far as I know. It’s a kind of wedge-shaped
chorale, it’s wide-spaced at the beginning
and simultaneously rises from the bottom
and descends from the top to a narrow
central point or neck and then it opens
out again in reverse.
[EXAMPLE]
This theme rises and
falls by semitones – but eventually
Foulds inserts the quarter-tones into
the gap of the semitones to produce
this strange, intensified form of the
theme which seems to be trying to grope
further into the meaning of this collection
of sounds that we call a theme. You
may not find this pleasant, but it’s
certainly very distinctive – no-one
else in Britain was writing things like
this in 1905.
[EXAMPLE]
Now in the third section
of Mirage, which we hear in tonight’s
concert, Foulds uses that same
wedge-like theme; and he also uses quarter-tones
(this is now in 1910) but this time
they are two separate phenomena – there’s
no ‘quarter-tone version’ of the wedge
theme, instead quarter-tones are used
as part of a different theme. But Foulds
conveniently used them close together,
so that I can include them in the same
music example. So this is a passage
from Mirage in the Luxembourg
recording I mentioned; the music has
previously, in the second section of
the work, been very ardent and aspiring
and romantic, and here it’s suddenly
cut short by several statements of the
wedge theme, which here appears as something
unexpected, a kind of immovable object,
and then when the strings attempt to
take flight again they can only decline,
with the quarter-tones making their
line into a kind of sigh or even a wail.
[EXAMPLE]
I’ve said Foulds used
this wedge-shape theme in many contexts,
in many different works. Between The
Waters of Babylon in 1905 and Mirage
in 1910 it had appeared in a huge
ambitious work for soloists and chorus
and orchestra, a work that has never
been performed, called The Vision
of Dante, based on Dante’s Divine
Comedy. And in the first part of
this ‘concert opera’, as Foulds called
it, the ‘Inferno’ that wedge theme is
set to the famous words engraved above
the gates of Hell: ‘Abandon Hope All
Ye Who Enter Here’. I don’t maintain
that it has exactly the same baleful
significance in Mirage. In each
work that Foulds used it, its essence
is the same, apart from different transpositions.
But each time the different scoring
and the different contexts give it a
different sense of meaning. It does
however seem to stand in his imagination
for something both enigmatic and, as
I say, immovable.
As for the quarter-tones,
which Foulds developed in later works
- Lyra Celtica is one of them
– I think these had both a technical
and a spiritual relevance for him. Foulds
was a practical musician, these things
were comparatively easy to play on string
instruments anyway, they made an interesting
way of linking tones by something precise
that wasn’t just a slide or glissando.
But I feel they have a sort of occult
significance as well. If you can get
between the semitones, if you can slip
through between the fixed intervals
of the tempered scale on which western
music was based, maybe you can get at
what lies behind the music, the spiritual
emanation as it were of which the music
is only the outer semblance.
The idea of stripping
away a veil is a very powerful one in
Foulds’s music – a later theatre piece
is actually called Veils – and
perhaps because he was so adept at surfaces,
at writing in many different styles,
he had a fascination with what lay beneath
the surface, what it was that unified
music whatever its language and instrumentation
and level of popular appeal. And that’s
what Mirage is trying to convey
in music: the Mirage of the title
is meant to be illusion, the
baubles that men chase after – success,
fame, power, ambition.
So it’s not a symphonic
poem that tells or re-enacts a story
from literature, like Strauss’s Till
Eulenspiegel of Elgar’s Falstaff.
It’s a philosophical tone poem,
embodying psychological states or ideas
about the human condition in music:
this is the tradition begun by Liszt’s
tone poems Das Ideale (The Ideal)
and From the Cradle to the Grave;
other examples are Parry’s From Death
to Life and the best known of all
examples of this genre, Richard Strauss’s
Also Sprach Zarathustra. Now
I’m sure … I’m convinced … that Foulds
had Strauss’s Zarathustra in
mind when he composed Mirage,
so I must say I was astonished at Sakari
Oramo’s boldness in putting these two
works into the same programme. Clearly
he believes Foulds’s music is strong
enough to face the direct comparison.
And I should also say that, ‘philosophical’
tone poem or no, the philosophy is not
the point of the music. It's the excuse
for the music, music which is very enjoyable
without thinking too much about its
meaning, gorgeous music poised on the
very cusp of the late Romantic period
and the Modern Age.
Perhaps the most original
music in Mirage occurs at the
centre, in the fourth section, to which
Foulds also gives the subtitle ‘Mirage’
– so this is as it were the essence
of the piece, the Mirage or the world
of Illusion itself to which the rest
of the symphonic poem is a reaction.
This ‘Mirage’ section is a strange wispy,
slithering, sparkling scherzo in which
the various themes of the work up to
that point just seem to flicker, to
dissolve away, to melt into one another:
everything that once seemed solid has
become insubstantial.
[EXAMPLE?]
But this central ‘Mirage’,
this music of illusion, is contrasted
with one idea that does remain rock-solid,
because it’s there at the start of the
work, and it’s there unchanged, only
made more impressive, at the end. This
is a majestic idea, again like a chorale,
which Foulds says stands for ‘Immutable
Nature’. This is as it were the very
ground of reality, that which exists
eternally while human life – as the
‘Mirage’ section suggests - shimmers
and struggles and passes like the Mayfly.
This is Foulds’s ‘Immutable Nature’
theme:
[EXAMPLE]
I’ve already mentioned
that Foulds tended to re-use salient
ideas, like the wedge theme, in different
works. And this chorale, which as far
as I know appears first in Mirage,
was an idea he re-used about ten years
later in one of his most important,
and perhaps most notorious, pieces:
the World Requiem, a gigantic
work for soloists, choruses and orchestra
in memory of the dead of all those who
had died on all sides and all races
in the First World War. This is a work
in two parts, 20 movements in all, texts
drawn from various sources including
the Requiem Mass but also passages from
John Bunyan and the 16th-century
Hindu religious poet Kabir. It was composed
from 1919 to 1921 and it was performed
annually in the Royal Albert Hall in
London under the auspices of the British
Legion by up to 1200 singers and instrumentalists,
conducted by Foulds, the orchestra led
by his wife, the violinist Maud MacCarthy.
This very big piece has not been heard,
apart from a few extracts, since the
1920s – there are a number of obstacles
in the way to a revival, though ultimately
it could be said that they all come
down to money. However there is periodic
interest in a revival from several quarters,
including obviously the BBC, so I believe
it will eventually happen, though I
advise you not to hold your breath.
Anyway the theme of ‘Immutable nature’
that I’ve just played, which is the
opening of Mirage, becomes in
even grander orchestration the opening
of the World Requiem, to the
words ‘Requiem Aeternam dona eis
Domine’.
It was probably while
he was writing the World Requiem
that Foulds was working on at least
part of his other work that’s being
premiered tonight: Lyra Celtica.
I say probably because it’s not entirely
clear when he had the first ideas for
this work and when he actually wrote
it down – in fact it’s very likely that
it was composed in stages at different
times. As I’ve already mentioned the
work isn’t in fact finished, but we
have the two complete movements that
are being played in tonight’s concert.
Let me say something quickly about Foulds
and ‘Celtic’ music – I can’t audibly
put inverted commas round this term
‘Celtic’, often spelt with a K, but
I’m trying to suggest music that conjures
up something of a received image of
the music and culture of Britain’s Gaelic-speaking
regions, Western Ireland, the Western
Highlands and Islands of Scotland –
rather than, perhaps being closely based
on the actual folk music of those regions.
There was a period
vogue for music of this kind, as there
was for anything exotic, both in the
concert hall and in the salon in the
late 19th and early 20th
centuries. It was part of a wider fascination
for all things Celtic or Gaelic, which
perhaps started with the Pre-Raphaelites
and continued in the ‘Celtic Twilight’
of such poets as Yeats, Fiona MacLeod,
painters like … Duncan. Musically its
manifestations – which of course begin
more or less with Wagner, Tristan
und Isolde - include operas like
Rutland Boughton’s The Immortal Hour,
the symphonic poems of Bax, the Irish
Rhapsodies of Stanford, Percy Grainger’s
Irish Tune from County Derry,
the Hebridean Symphony of Granville
Bantock, and of course the ongoing production
of volumes of Songs from the Hebrides
collected and arranged and bowdlerised
by Marjorie Kennedy-Fraser. It was one
of the current modes of the early decades
of the 20th-century, a longing
expressed in different kinds of art
and at more popular or more rarefied
levels for, perhaps, a simpler, more
elemental life of croft and sea and
mountain and mysterious forest, for
clan loyalty and heroism and peasant
warmth and tinkers and fiddlers and
fluters and magic and the fairy-folk
and silver shoals of fishes and seals
that sing and change into mermaids,
and an ancient, tragic, almost forgotten
history losing itself in the mists of
time. Foulds himself wrote of (and I
quote) the "‘old, unhappy, far-off
things’ with which everything Keltic
(physical, emotional and mental) seems
to be impregnated". Certainly many
different legends, images and ideas
went into a generalized and certainly
romanticized picture of ‘the Celtic’,
the other culture clinging on to the
mysterious western fringes of the British,
Anglo-Norman-Hanoverian mainland. And
it’s worth noting that most of the occult,
esoteric movements of the time, within
whose orbit Foulds certainly moved,
were fascinated with Celtic mystical
traditions.
Foulds tapped into
this vogue in many works and on several
different artistic levels. He was best
known for light music in the ‘Keltic’
vein, and his most-performed piece by
far was the Keltic Lament of
1911 which I played some of in my talk
a fortnight ago. That particular piece
was originally for string orchestra
and harp, and was so popular that I
know of upward of a dozen arrangements
of it – as a piano piece, cello solo,
violin solo, trio for violin cello and
harp, full orchestra, brass band, as
a solo song, as a chorus with words
‘From the Ancient Erse’ and so on. The
Keltic Lament originated in a
set of pieces for strings and harp called
Keltic Melodies and it then moved
over to become the slow movement of
a Keltic Suite for orchestra
before becoming so successful on its
own. Rather than playing the Lament
again I’m going to play a bit of
another movement from the Keltic
Melodies for strings and harp. This
is called ‘The Clan’ – it also went
into the orchestral suite in a somewhat
changed form – and here you have the
light music Celtic style pretty well
established: [pentatonic tunes], Scotch
snap rhythms, bagpipe basses etcetera.
And it’s perfectly enjoyable stuff.
[EXAMPLE]
Foulds wrote a lot
of other pieces in that vein – titles
like Keltic Overture, Gaelic Melodies,
Fiddler’s Fancy, Merry MacDoon, A Dream
of Morvern, A Gaelic Dream-Song
and so on.
When we come to consider
tonight’s work, Lyra Celtica,
we’re obviously moving onto quite another
level, though there are some features
that connect it subliminally with the
light music pieces. I’ve never
heard Lyra Celtica, though I’ve
studied the score: nobody has until
tonight, it’s a new experience for all
of us. So I have no musical examples
to play you, and since Foulds himself
wrote nothing about his reasons for
writing this work, all I can say at
the moment is partly speculation.
It belongs to a highly
unusual genre – a full-fledged Concerto,
with cadenzas and ritornellos and so
on, for female voice without words and
orchestra. This isn’t unique – there
are a few other such works, some of
you may know the so-called Coloratura
Concerto by the Russian composer
Glière, but it’s extremely rare,
and on the face of it a very strange
thing to want to do. I think Foulds
had in his mind and ear the image of
the lone Celtic singer, the bard, the
singer of lullabies, of croons, of spells,
of songs to the seals, of songs by the
seashore and on the shieling – and decided
to distil this image to its essence
and make a concert work out of it.
It’s also clear he
had a specific voice, a specific singer
in mind: his wife, Maud MacCarthy, whom
I mentioned a few minutes ago. She was
a remarkable musician, Irish by birth,
whose early career was as a virtuoso
violinist and then, when her playing
was restricted by neuritis, she developed
as a singer, especially in oriental
music. So she was adept at chants and
vocalizations as well as western songs,
and I believe she sang Irish and Scottish
songs in the home. And she was one of
the leading Western authorities on Indian
music in the early part of the 20th
century, having collected folksongs
in person on the subcontinent and studied
its music closely. One of her more unusual
talents was the ability to sing in the
23-tone microtonal scale of classical
Indian music, that’s 23 tones, microtones,
to the octave. The idea that Foulds
had her specifically in mind is reinforced
by the fact that the solo part of Lyra
Celtica includes such scales – there’s
one right at the beginning – and also
that this vocal concerto isn’t written
for a soprano, but for a lower, a mezzo/contralto
range, with some very low-lying passages,
which is the kind of range that Maud
MacCarthy had. And of course she was
Irish – so I would speculate that in
one sense Lyra Celtica (the title
is of course Latin for the Celtic Lyre
or harp) is a portrait of the
woman whom Foulds often considered his
muse, and who he presumably imagined
might be its first singer.
There is, by the way,
quite an important part for the harp
in Foulds’s concerto. But Lyra Celtica
is also the title of a once well-known
anthology of Irish and Scottish Gaelic
poetry from ancient to comparatively
modern times, edited and published in
1896 by the Scottish poet William Sharp
and his wife Elizabeth. We know Foulds
possessed this anthology, and just as
Sharp hoped to fix the genius and special
nature of the Gael in it, perhaps he
aimed to do the same in Lyra Celtica.
Sharp wrote his poetry under the female
pseudonym of Fiona MacLeod. Those of
you who know Rutland Boughton’s opera
The Immortal Hour – a close contemporary
of Lyra Celtica – will remember
that the libretto is a play by Fiona
MacLeod interspersed with some of Sharp’s
poetic lyrics. Foulds also set some
of Fiona MacLeod’s poetry in a song-cycle
called Mood-Pictures that he
composed in 1917, probably around the
same time as he was having the first
ideas for Lyra Celtica. And this
song-cycle too is for a voice of Maud
MacCarthy’s range. There’s no direct
musical connexion between Lyra Celtica
and these songs, but there is a
certain community of expression, and
for my last example I’m going to play
part of one song which is perhaps a
parallel to passages in the second
movement of Lyra Celtica. It’s
called ‘Orchil’, and it speaks of a
mysterious spirit under the earth who
is weaving beauty on her loom, and her
loom is both life and death, eternity
and time.
[EXAMPLE]
That music as I said
was not re-used in Lyra Celtica.
It does reappear, with a different
text, in the World Requiem, which
I was mentioning earlier. But I think
it’s a good piece of music to have in
our ears as we go to hear Mirage
and Lyra Celtica, for if
Foulds was an explorer, a philosopher,
an entertainer, a sophisticate, a mystic,
he was in all these roles, and is pre-eminently
in the works we hear tonight, a seeker
after Beauty. And for Foulds, true beauty
was never a mirage. © 2004
Malcolm MacDonald
Reprinted
with permission
see also
S
& H Concert Review
Foulds,
Prokofiev, Stravinsky; Akiko
Suwanai (violin) Leon McCawley (piano),
City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra,
Sakari Oramo, Symphony Hall, Birmingham,
10th February 2004 (Chris Thomas)
RECORDINGS
John
FOULDS (1880-1939)
Le
Cabaret, Op. 72a (1921) [3’31].
April – England, Op. 48 No. 1.
Hellas, A Suite of Ancient Greece,
Op. 45 (1932) [18’03]. Three Mantras,
Op. 61b (1919-1930) [25’49]. 
London Philharmonic Orchestra/Barry
Wordsworth. No rec. information given.
DDD
LYRITA SRCD212 [61’07] [CC]
A
remarkable disc, and an essential introduction
to a composer whose music cries out
for greater recognition … For the Mantras
alone, this disc deserves the highest
recommendation possible. … see Full
Review
Ralph
VAUGHAN WILLIAMS (1872-1958)
Piano Concerto in C (1926-33 with revised
1946 ending) [27’45]. John
FOULDS (1880-1939) Dynamic
Triptych, Op. 88 (1929) [29’16].
Howard Shelley (piano); Royal Philharmonic
Orchestra/Vernon Handley. No rec. info.
DDD
LYRITA RECORDED EDITION SRCD211
[57’05]
If
you are buying this for the Vaughan
Williams, you will not be disappointed.
And you may just find your mouth agape
at the marvels of the Foulds. … see
Full
Review
English
Cello Sonatas: Première Recordings
John FOULDS (1880-1939)
Sonata
for cello and piano, Op.6 (1905, rev.
1927) Ernest
WALKER (1870-1949) Sonata
in F minor for cello and piano, Op.41
(1914) York
BOWEN (1884-1961) Sonata
in A major for cello and piano, Op.64
(1921)
Jo Cole (cello) John Talbot (piano)
Rec. Bishopsgate Hall, London, 25 Oct,
29 Nov, 6 Dec 1997. DDD
BRITISH MUSIC SOCIETY BMS423CD [81.10]
[MC]
Collectors
of English chamber works are urged to
hear these interesting works; especially
the Bowen. … see
Full Review
BOOK REVIEW
Conversations
of a cellist-composer Selected
and annotated by Malcolm MacDonald
Music of today [3] By John Foulds (Ivor
Nicholson & Watson) 10s 6d [53p]
net
WARNERS RECORDING
PROJECT - FOULDS
Those of you fortunate
enough to have attended the February
2004 CBSO/Oramo concerts (Birmingham's
Symphony Hall) that included FOULDS'
Three Mantras, Mirage and Lyra
Celtica will be pleased to hear that
this orchestra and conductor will be
recording a full Foulds orchestral;
CD for issue later this year: Sept/Oct.
It will include: Three Mantras;
Mirage; Lyra Celtica for
mezzo and orch (mezzo Susan Bickley);
Apotheosis for violin and orch
(soloist: Daniel Hope). Mirage and
Lyra Celtica were broadcast on
26 February by BBC Radio 3. Oramo and
the CBSO's Three Mantras was
broadcast not so long ago. RB
BBC INTERVIEW WITH
MAJOR PATRICK FOULDS
This interview with
Major Patrick Foulds, the son of John
Foulds, now 87, was broadcast on 26
February 2004. Major Foulds recalls
hearing his mother and father performing
Lyra Celtica in his family drawing
room in the 1920s:-
"Well, I was very
small when my father was composing this
work. He often used to sit at the piano
and my mother used to sing. He had two
pianos in the house: one of them was
always working; one was his Bechstein
which he composed at and the other was
in the drawing room and I use the word
advisedly because it was enormously
high, about 12 or 15 feet. One wall
[…] entirely consisted of bay windows
and had original William Morris window
curtains. You wouldn’t get them cheaply
these days. The other wall opposite
had, placed lengthways, a beautiful
tie-and-die indian sari. And so often
in that room the East and the West met
in song. My father learnt from my mother
about Indian music, wrote on it, lectured
on it as well as my mother did and used
in his works … quite often used things
which he had learnt from her."
