Denis
ApIvor
Denis
ApIvor was the perpetual outsider in
British musical life, a composer who
ploughed a lonely but determined furrow
in the teeth of sixty years of near-complete
indifference from the Establishment.
The neglect was partly of his own making:
in the mid-1950s, disgusted by the cavalier
dismissal by Sadler’s Wells of what
may be his masterpiece, the opera Yerma,
he turned his back on ‘all musical,
social and political contacts’ for some
three decades and concentrated on composition,
without making the slightest effort
to bring his works to the attention
of performers.
Yet
the few musicians who are familiar with
his music regard it – as they did the
composer – with a respect that borders
on reverence. ApIvor himself realised
that, despite a catalogue of over 100
works, a full assessment of his worth
lies some distance in the future. Four
of his five symphonies, for example,
and three of his four operas have yet
to be performed. There’s not a note
of his music currently available on
CD, although most of his works – some
80 songs, works for piano, guitar (he
wrote the first British guitar concerto,
in 1954, premiered by Julian Bream)
and various chamber combinations – don’t
demand large forces.
Though
Irish-born, ApIvor, as the name suggests,
came from solidly Welsh stock. His clergyman
father, Elwy ApIvor, had a parish in
the centre of Ireland; Denis was born
during the April Revolution and returned
with his family to his ancestral Wales
during the Civil War in 1921.
His
interest in music was evident from an
early age, and so in 1925 his grandmother
arranged for Denis, then nine and already
a chorister in the local church, to
sit the scholarship which allowed him
to join the choir of Christ Church,
Oxford. The new surroundings provided
an immediate stimulus: Denis was composing
by the time he was 10. Before he transferred
(after a tuberculosis scare) to the
choir of Hereford Cathedral, where his
father was now a chaplain, he sang at
the christening of the son of Noel Ponsonby,
the Master of Choristers at Christ Church;
the infant, Robert, grew to become the
Controller, Music at the BBC (and thus
planner of the Proms), doubtless unaware
that he had a long-standing debt to
repay – the last Proms performance of
an ApIvor work was of his Piano Concerto
in 1958.
At
Hereford ApIvor’s musical education
continued: he taught himself the clarinet
and learned piano and organ – and kept
composing, mainly songs. But his parents
wouldn’t consider a career in music,
and so in 1934 he reluctantly took up
a medical course at University College,
London.
In
London he made contact with a circle
of musicians with whom he was probably
the last living link, an irreverent
band of boozy Bohemian intellectuals
which had initially formed around the
composer Peter Warlock, who committed
suicide in 1930: Constant Lambert, Bernard
van Dieren, Cecil Gray, Alan Rawsthorne.
ApIvor hoped to have lessons from Herbert
Howells but put his foot in it by revealing
an enthusiasm for the music of Howells’
bête noire, van Dieren,
then ‘dying by the day’ from kidney
disease.
The
composer who did agree to teach
me at this time, at Gray’s request,
was Patrick Hadley …. Paddy Hadley,
later Professor at Cambridge, was
no stranger to the bottle, and …
was happy to teach, provided there
was a bottle of sherry between the
piano pedals. Later the task devolved
upon Alan Rawsthorne ….
ApIvor’s
circle of friends also included two
notable poets, Dylan Thomas and Roy
Campbell:
The
best cartoonist in the world would
be strained by the sight of a short,
fat Thomas and huge, bush-hatted
Roy, making a noisy entrance to
the pub and ripe for trouble, when
on what used to be termed a "bender".
Hugo Manning once maintained that
he and Roy became stuck belly to
belly on his narrow staircase in
Hampstead.
During
his studies with Rawsthorne ApIvor composed
The Hollow Men for baritone,
chorus and orchestra, to words by Eliot,
much admired when it was finally premiered
in 1950 under Lambert’s baton (also
its last performance to date). But the
outbreak of the Second World War forced
him to concentrate on his medical work,
as he wrote in a third-person autobiographical
note:
the
end of 1939 saw the composer already
installed in London hospitals as
a war doctor, a year or so later
involved in casualty treatment in
Hitler’s "blitzkrieg"
on London.
War
service took him also to hospitals in
India; he returned when hostilities
ended. His urge for composition was
undimmed, though, and he began an opera
buffa, She Stoops to Conquer,
to his own Goldsmith-based libretto
(1942–47); it remains unperformed. Before
that, in 1940, he had set about an orchestration
of Busoni’s monumental Fantasia contrappuntistica,
performed to general acclaim 12 years
later.
ApIvor’s
friendship with Constant Lambert led
to his sole run of public successes.
Shortly before his drink-driven death
in 1951, Lambert recommended ApIvor
to the choreographer Andrée Howard,
resulting in commissions for five ballets,
among them A Goodman of Paris,
A Mirror for Witches (based on
the Salem Witch-hunt that would soon
stir Arthur Miller) and, the most successful
of all, the Lorca-inspired Blood
Wedding, which took the stage in
countries from Turkey to Chile.
ApIvor
felt an especial sympathy with Lorca
(he eventually translated his complete
poetry, over a thousand pages), and
the impact of Blood Wedding brought
a further commission for the opera Yerma.
ApIvor moved to Trinidad, where he had
taken a part-time medical post (he was
now qualified as an anaesthetist) to
carry him through the composition of
Yerma; he completed the orchestration
back in Britain, in a cottage near Sudbury.
He
never understood why – despite the international
success of Blood Wedding and
the support of some major musicians,
among them Sir Arthur Bliss – the Sadler’s
Wells board then turned their teeth
against Yerma; he suspected a
resentment of the left-wing librettist,
Montagu Slater. Profoundly disillusioned,
he began his self-imposed exile from
the musical world. (He was, though,
deeply moved when, ‘miraculously’, the
BBC brought Yerma into the studios
and broadcast it in 1961, conducted
by Sir Eugene Goossens.)
Under
the influence of Warlock and van Dieren,
of whose works he generously prepared
a number of performing editions, ApIvor’s
earliest style had been a kind of chromatically
inflected diatonicism; he admitted that
Stravinsky, too, had had a bearing on
his ballets. In the late 1950s his music
began to move towards serialism, reinforced
from 1960 by an acquaintance with recordings
of Webern – though his vocal music always
remained lyrical. Even when serialism
became the dominant dogma of the day,
it aided ApIvor not a whit: William
Glock at the BBC turned down his major
work of the 1960s, the Dylan Thomas
cantata Altarwise by Owl-Light
(1961).
From
the late 1980s, though, and independently
of similar stylistic shifts by other
recalcitrant modernists such as the
Estonian Arvo Pärt and Pole Henryk
Górecki, ApIvor began composing
small works with a deliberate intention
to restrict the material to a few tones
in each piece, and avoiding harmonic
complexity or aggressive modulation,
to concentrate on a continuous melodic
approach, and significant and clear
emotional content.
The
‘continuous melodic approach’ he described
produced music that was directly expressive
– for the Canadian composer-pianist
Gordon Rumson, his Eliot setting Eyes
that Last I Saw in Tears (1994)
is ‘one of the most beautiful songs
ever composed’; Rumson compares its
‘tragic undercurrent expressed without
exaggeration’ to the lament in Purcell’s
Dido and Aeneas.
After
a short period in Wales, ApIvor and
his third wife, the choreographer Rima
Austin, settled at Telscome, on the
English Channel, in 1990. When blindness
made letter-writing impossible, ApIvor
communicated by cassette, incidentally
preserving a trove of reminiscences
that await their transcriber-editor.
Young performers would come and consult
him about his music. A study of his
music has been completed, and a biography
is underway. Recordings are being discussed,
and the Kingfisher Quartet premiered
the Second and Third String Quartets
in Brighton at the end of April. He
may have taken some consolation in the
evidence that the tide at last was turning.
Martin
Anderson
Denis
ApIvor, composer and doctor; born Collinstown,
West Meath, Ireland, 14 April 1916;
m. (1) 1942 Grace O’Brien (died 1945),
(2) 1947 Irene Russell (marriage dissolved
1954), (3) 1962 Rima Austin (died 1997),
1 s., 1 d., (4) 2002 Sue … ; died Robertsbridge,
East Sussex, 27 May 2004.
A
shorter version of this article was
first published in The Independent on
3 June 2004
MusicWeb
ApIvor Web pages
