Well Beyond the Stage of Being the Objects of Special Pleading by Enthusiasts and Amateurs

well beyond the stage of being the objects of special pleading by enthusiasts and amateurs. The stakes have for some while been far greater, and Lewis Foreman and Paul Hindmarsh, in very different ways, have recognized their responsibilities and risen to them. Foreman, long acknowledged as the foremost authority on Bax, has produced a biography on a scale that throws those of all Bax's English musical peers except Elgar, Vaughan Williams and Sullivan into the shade. It is clearly presented, accurate and full of carefully marshalled information on Bax's wide circle and musical environment (of which the author has unrivalled knowledge)—hence its title. All Bax's works can now be seen in a reliable biographical perspective. Hindmarsh, faced with very full documentation of the circum- stances surrounding Bridge's later works but considerable patches of darkness where the earlier part of his life and career are concerned, has opted for an exemplary thematic catalogue, with a biographical chronology by way of introduction, engraved incipits of all the works, and files of information on each piece which, when they include the author's Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ml/article/66/2/185/1056024 by guest on 30 September 2021 generous and sharply focused commentaries and the liberally quoted extracts from reviews and from Bridge's many letters, make for a handbook to the composer which is every bit as informative as a biography and easier to handle. Both authors have set new standards for the treatment of hitherto overshadowed British twentieth-century composers, and we can rejoice that those following suit will need to meet similar challenges. One may speculate as to whether the one approach would have worked for die other composer. We needed to be steered firmly and connectedly through Bax's bewilderingly large output, and we needed to be helped to appreciate the not always obvious shifts in style and manner that it encompassed. On the other hand, it remains bewildering if we cannot easily put our finger on the chronology of a work or remember its themes. With Bridge, certain important aspects of the man and his output have to be extrapolated by the reader without help from the author—his lifelong fondness for the waltz and his tendency to push his stylistic frontiers forward first of all in small-scale piano pieces are cases in point. Yet it must be stressed that Hindmarsh succeeds in presenting major items of scholarship through his rather modest medium, such as when he identifies the five fleeting quotations from Bridge's works in the finale of Britten's Bridge Variations and shows us that Britten consciously depicted a different aspect of Bridge's personality in each variation. As I have already suggested, however, there is one hurdle that neither author jumps, and that, without over-simplifying, is the music itself. These are not, fundamentally, critical or technical studies. Whether they should have been cannot be debated here. But it would be interesting to know how many readers have, like me, turned from Foreman "and Hindmarsh to Anthony Payne's brief paragraphs on the nature of both Bax's and Bridge's music in The New Grove, to find there an intellectual stimulation which is missing in these two books but which, once aroused, will not be satisfied until someone has written another book on each of them that gets to the bottom of their compelling and sometimes extraordinarily moving music. STEPHEN BANFIELD H. Balfour Gardiner. By Stephen Lloyd, pp. xvi + 272. (Cambridge University Press, 1984, £27.50.) Little by little we are beginning to uncover the details of the quite extraordinary range of musical activity that has taken place in Great Britain over the past 150 years. While it would be absurd to claim that these activities have necessarily resulted in the highest flights of genius, the fascination and curiosity of it all cannot be denied. No one—and certainly not his biographer—would argue that Balfour Gardiner's talents were in any way outstanding, but this account of his life and times throws an exceptionally valuable light on music-making in this country during the first quarter or more of the present century. Briefly, he was born into wealth and used that wealth in part for his own comfort and in part to promote the cause of British music: through a series of eight concerts in 1912-13 and in support of the Royal Philharmonic Society for several seasons from 1919; and then 185 through generous and timely hand-outs to composer friends, some, like Delius and Hoist, worthy recipients, others palpably less so. Finally, when his own taste for composition ran dry, he turned to the planting of three million trees in Dorset. Which of these charitable acts was ultimately the most beneficial to mankind must remain a matter of opinion. Gardiner had pursued his own musical studies abroad and was one of the so-called Frankfurt Group (not so much a group as a state of mind), to whose members and ideals he remained loyal for the rest of his life. Thanks to an excellent and detailed catalogue in this book it comes as something of a surprise to discover that his musical output was really quite large and even includes two symphonies. Much of this music either has been lost or was deliberately withdrawn and destroyed. What remains, and is still reasonably accessible, is, on the whole, his lighter, small-scale music. It has undeniable charm, but that is all. As for the more substantial pieces, such as the choral works April and Philomela, for which Stephen Lloyd (p. 149) makes an astonishing claim of 'consummate mastery and striking Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ml/article/66/2/185/1056024 by guest on 30 September 2021 individuality', they really do not stand comparison with similar works of his greater contemporaries. The trouble seems to have been that he never established a voice of his own—or, at least, not a voice of any consequence. Even in what he was good at—tunes, tricked out with somewhat over-elaborate and fussy harmonies—there is a quality of inhibition, of being boxed into a tight circle of notes from which it is impossible to escape into genuine musical freedom. No wonder, then, that he gradually abandoned composition. Significantly, with the exception of Delius and to some extent Hoist, it was his minor contemporaries that he admired: he did not care much for the robust Elgar and, in a remarkable moment of self-contradiction, declared Vaughan Williams 'the dullest composer since Dvorak'. Stephen Lloyd has written a plain and purposeful account of a very strange, somewhat creepy and certainly very sad man. If his subject does not quite come alive, it is only partly his fault, for one suspects that Gardiner only allowed himself to be half alive at the best of times. Where we have cause to feel impatient with the author's gentlemanly reticence is on page 203. Here, somewhat late in the day and in a single paragraph, we learn (if we had not known or suspected it already) that Gardiner was homosexual. Now, no good purpose would be served by a prurient catalogue of sexual athletics, even if such existed (and it would seem as if Gardiner seldom got to grips with any of his fancies), but the fact of his inclinations, and evident inhibitions, must surely lie at the root of his weakness and ultimate collapse as a composer and, as such, must deserve more than a passing glance. We are told that his attitude towards women remained 'a private joke amongst his friends' and that although his homosexuality was 'largely repressed' (what, one wonders, does 'largely' mean in this context?) it remained 'an anxiety to his closest friends'. This in itself seems to beg a few questions: what with Roger Quilter himself'gay', Cyril Scott in league with the transcendental and a bosom chum of Stefan George, Percy Grainger in love with Mum and flagellation, and even all-too-normal O'Neill deploying his youthful charms on the notorious Count Eric Stenbock, the Frankfurt Group at least seem to have been in no position to laugh, even in private—though a corporate anxiety is more understandable. In this crucial area Lloyd has somewhat failed both his subject and his readers. Nevertheless, this is an interesting study, important for its carefully researched background detail if not for its penetration into the springs that motivated its strange central character. MICHAEL HURD 186.

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