I have to thank
you for the introduction to Richter
which led to the first performance of
the work – you may have forgotten this
– but I have not and shd. like you to
understand that I am very grateful to
you for your kindness when I much
needed it….Plenty of people
are kind to me now!
So wrote Edward Elgar
from Malvern in October 1901 of his
Enigma Variations to N. Vert,
the head of the concert agency that
was to become Ibbs and Tillett. Vert,
whose Conradian name also carried a
hint of Conan Doyle, had been born Narcisco
Vertigliano and is one of the foundation
stones of Christopher Fifield’s engrossing
story and whose retrieval here is a
welcome reminder of the powerful base
of musicians Vert established in the
late nineteenth and very early twentieth
centuries.
The leading British
concert agency whilst it lasted Ibbs
and Tillett offer a locus for the association
between artist and concert venue as
mediated by an agent. It is a story
both prosaic and extraordinary; prosaic
for the routine transaction of business
made remarkable by the recorded details
of demands, both overweening and practical,
of fees, both astronomical and paltry,
of venues, both lordly and lowly, and
of artists both international and parochial.
Into the story are woven names steeped
in posthumous glory or else swept away
by the Arnoldian tide. Who now remembers
Vivien Chartres, the nine-year-old violinist
whose performance on stage led to a
summons to Vert for "unlawfully
procuring on stage ... a child under
the age of eleven" without proper
licence. That Vert died shortly after
was a sorry end; that one still finds
postcards of Chartres is a posthumous
relic of a now all-but-forgotten musician.
Fees, negotiations, concert societies,
and letters from artists either disgruntled
or, very occasionally, gruntled are
the recurring features of this monumental
study so richly shot through with archival
documents.
Artists were inclined
to be demanding; Godowsky required star
billing, Nathalia Janotha filled her
dressing room with cats – not just a
few, but several baskets of them which
were carried up to her room and had
to be fed and given milk. From Clara
Butt’s Australasian tours come reports
home from Robert Leigh Ibbs, whose name
was coupled with that of John Tillett;
fascinating ones, of the Nellie Melba
"sing ’em muck, it’s all they understand"
variety. "The Australian people
are not musical, although they
think they are" he writes Beechamesquely,
noting that they’ll listen to Jan Kubelík
but are suspicious of Elman (this was
the 1907 tour), that Plunket Greene
would be a ghastly failure, not even
to bother with the cellist Joseph Hollman
and so on. There are a series of remarkable
letters from Moriz Rosenthal, whose
accelerating demands for legal action
are accompanied by a sharp deterioration
in his command of the English language.
There are so many nuggets
that it seems invidious to pick out
a few but some caught my eye; Weingartner
denying he was German and angling for
a conducting appointment in London:
Suggia demanding a fee of £3-4,000 nett
for her Australasian and American tours
(in 1927); Talich agreeing to conduct
Delius; conductors such as Weingartner
and Monteux agreeing to bring their
own orchestral parts but sometimes demurring
as to the cost involved – how often
does one think of such things?; Benno
Moiseiwitsch’s financial difficulties;
fellow pianist Frederic Lamond’s sneering
anti-Semitism (he didn’t want his name
sent out on a brochure "with a
crowd of Jew pianists, Jew violinists
and Jew singers"; postmarked Berlin,
1935 by the way and Fifield elegantly
skewers him with a deft thrust). Egon
Petri’s marvellous letters act as counter-balance,
so witty and funny, and even timing
his performance of the Hammerklavier
and finding over forty years he now
takes an extra minute and a quarter
over it; very important for broadcasts,
of course, which Ibbs and Tillett facilitated.
Or one can read about the Casals-Tovey
Cello Concerto negotiations and the
jittery Glazunov insisting he be paid
in Dollars or French Francs after scares
over sterling. Festival performances
loom huge here; so did the issue of
Protectionism and Permits in the early
1930s both in Britain and in America.
The hair raising itinerary provided
to shepherd Albert Coates, down to his
cooking demands, pretty simple, and
to ensure he has some cash on him; "he
is too busy with music to think of details"
– and by details they mean everything
that’s not music. More recently we find
that pianist Trevor Barnard "slapped
Miss Lereculey’s face then went straight
to the GLC and reported assault"
What can this be about? We never hear;
it’s straight from Emmie Tillett’s surviving
diary for 1967.
Ibbs and Tillett always
saw itself as more of a "service
industry" to orchestral and other
societies. Vert, the essential founder,
was a figure more in the mould of Lionel
Powell, an impresario, a word Ibbs and
Tillett didn’t take to at all. They
even turned down Yehudi Menuhin, a famous
if logical error, for this reason insisting
they were not personal managers or impresarios
but strictly agents. They didn’t take
conductors but did "place"
them – composer-conductors especially
such as Pierné, for instance,
or Holst, Vaughan Williams, Stravinsky
and Elgar.
The take over of Harold
Holt is here as is the increasing passivity
of the business in the 1960s despite
innovative young staff, whose far-reaching
proposals for reform were spurned. The
miserable final years, as Emmie Tillett
tried to control the business, make
for depressing reading. Much admired
though she was, the loss of music societies,
lowering of fees, and haemorrhaging
of staff and artists hit hard. Though
they took on violinists Repin and Vengerov
in the last days, the foray into Georgian
folly – football teams from that country,
wine and tea importing as a money making
diversification – makes the eyes boggle.
Still, the surviving
Audition Books open up a world where
big names were on the foothills of their
careers. Amongst the talented but ultimately
unstarry names, now lost to us, are
others that leap out. Here in 1921 is
Walter Widdop, praised for his "fine
robust voice, sings with great fervour"
and a few years later we encounter a
tenorial rival in Heddle Nash who sported
"a very good voice [when] singing
upper notes." Then there’s Sophie
Wyss and her "charming voice, excellent
singer." It’s noticeable too how
often auditioners point out physical
details; an awful lot of false eyes
are noted as are excessive girth and
short stature.
Fifield is characteristically
strong on two musicians on whom he has
written; Kathleen Ferrier, whose letters
to the agency are published, and also
Hans Richter, one or two of whose comments
are rather shoe-horned into the text.
The appendices are a remarkable contribution
to scholarship and will provoke endless
comment and speculation. In the earlier
days male and female musicians were
separated, which means a double check
through the instrumentalists. Artists’
Brochures, Chamber Music brochures,
letters from Elgar, the LSO tours of
1940-44, Emmie Tillett’s surviving diary
entries – these are all amongst a phalanx
of material that will be essential reading
for students of the period and the musical
fortunes of singers and instrumentalists
down the century.
Inevitably in a study
of this kind there are some slips. The
proof-reading is generally excellent
and the photographs are evocative and
well printed and reproduced but, in
the hope that more material will emerge
requiring a second edition, I should
note the following, frequently trivial
concerns. Chaminade’s forename is missing
an accent whilst Segovia’s has the wrong
accent; Jan Kubelík’s and Albéniz’s
accents are missing as is that of the
Takács Quartet. The Czech violinist
Ondříček’s name is missing
an accent and a háček as is Janáček’s.
Martinů is bereft of the ů.
Huberman only has one “n” not two. Sarasate
died in 1908 not 1907. Editorial brackets
have incorrectly transformed Salmon
into Salmon[d] in the assumption
that Felix Salmond is correct but when
Casals wrote Salmon he didn’t mean the
English cellist but Joseph Salmon, cellist
and arranger. Edwin Fischer wasn’t German;
he was Swiss. I also find the bracketed
insertion of decimal currency equivalents
of pounds, shillings and pence an absolutely
infuriating, and here inconsistently
applied, practice. It breaks up the
text, rendering it unwieldy and bloated
and is in any case quite pointless;
it doesn’t matter. What should matter
more is a table of current values so
that we can see the value of an artist’s
fee or the price of a concert ticket
in today’s monetary terms – and that
should be tabulated in an appendix.
I’m also dead against the missing comma
in thousands; this modish Continental
practice should be outlawed, as the
eye can’t read the figure quickly; thus
£225000 should be £225,000. The reference
to A5 paper in the 1930s is anachronistic.
The reference to "immigration"
from Germany should read "emigration"
(p.202). Decimal currency was introduced
to Britain in 1971 not 1972. On page
204 it wasn’t Landon Ronald who protected
"his" Hallé players;
it was Hamilton Harty.
The "World in
the 1960s" paragraph on page 321
is very clunky and should really be
excised. Myra Hess’s reference to "dear
Albert" should have the bracketed
name Sammons after it; it’s picked up
in the index but readers need to know
in the body of the text. And her "beloved
Harold" is not, as per editorial
brackets, Harold Bauer but Harold Samuel,
who had just died. There are some repetitions
as well; Fifield twice uses the "usual
promise" line given to hopeful
artists within a few pages (that is,
don’t call us, we’ll call you…); once
is enough. It might have better if a
tighter control had been exercised on
chronological-cum-biographical matters.
We hear of Max Mossel and his tours
repeatedly before we hear who he was.
Similarly it would make more sense if
Fifield had introduced Keith Douglas
before citing his long, amusing and
indiscreet letter. It makes sense to
know he was very wealthy here before
reading it sixteen pages later. Regarding
Woodford Green’s concert-giving I can
assure Christopher Fifield despite his
doubts that, yes, it can still attract
eminent musicians. He cites Cortot’s
1929 visit but Solomon had been earlier.
Tasmin Little has just visited and I
saw Ruggiero Ricci there during his
final British engagements. There’s life
in the suburbs yet – just.
Which is more than
can be said for Ibbs and Tillett. Read
about how and why – and what it stood
for – in this splendidly produced and
acutely written study.
Jonathan Woolf
see also review
by Rob Barnett
