British Musical Criticism and Intellectual Thought, 1850-1950

INTELLECTUAL THOUGHT BRITISH MUSICAL CRITICISM AND

JEREMY DIBBLE is Professor of Music at Durham University. JULIAN HORTON is Professor of Music at Durham University.

Contributors: KAREN ARRANDALE, British music between the mid-nineteenth and EDITED BY SEAMAS DE BARRA, PHILIP ROSS JEREMY DIBBLE BULLOCK, JONATHAN CLINCH, the mid-twentieth century reflected changes and SARAH COLLINS, JEREMY DIBBLE, developments in society, education, philosophy, AND JULIAN HORTON JULIAN HORTON, PETER HORTON, aesthetics, politics and the upheaval of wars, often CHRISTOPHER MARK, AIDAN J. signifying a distinctively British national history. THOMSON, PAUL WATT, HARRY WHITE, All of these changes informed the published work BENNETT ZON, PATRICK ZUK of contemporary music critics. This collection

Cover design: www.stay-creative.co.uk provides an in-depth look at musical criticism during this period. It focusses on major figures such as Grove, Parry, Shaw, Dent, Newman, Heseltine, Vaughan Williams, Dyson, Lambert and Keller, yet does not neglect less influential but nevertheless significant critics. Sometimes a seminal work forms the subject of investigation; in other chapters, a writer’s particular stance is highlighted. Further contributions closely analyse

1850–1950 BRITISH the now famous polemics by Shaw, Heseltine and Lambert. The book covers a range of themes from the historical, scientific and philosophical to matters MUSICAL of repertoire, taste, interdisciplinary influence, musical democratisation and analysis. It will be of interest to scholars and students of nineteenth- and CRITICISM early twentieth-century British music and music in

Britain as well as to music enthusiasts attracted to AND standard works of popular music criticism. JULIAN HORTON JEREMY DIBBLE

(EDS) INTELLECTUAL

MUSIC IN BRITAIN, 1600–2000 AND

THOUGHT

1850–1950 British Musical Criticism and Intellectual Thought 1850–1950 Music in Britain, 1600–2000 issn 2053-3217

Series Editors: byron adams, rachel cowgill and peter holman

This series provides a forum for the best new work in the field of British music studies, placing music from the early seventeenth to the late twentieth centuries in its social, cultural, and historical contexts. Its approach is deliberately inclusive, covering immigrants and emigrants as well as native musicians, and explores Britain’s musical links both within and beyond Europe. The series celebrates the vitality and diversity of music-making across Britain in whatever form it took and wherever it was found, exploring its aesthetic dimensions alongside its meaning for contemporaries, its place in the global market, and its use in the promotion of political and social agendas. Proposals or queries should be sent in the first instance to Professors Byron Adams, Rachel Cowgill, Peter Holman or Boydell & Brewer at the addresses shown below. All submissions will receive prompt and informed consideration.

Professor Byron Adams, Department of Music – 061, University of California, Riverside, CA 92521–0325 email: [email protected] Professor Rachel Cowgill, School of Music, Humanities and Media, University of Huddersfield, Queensgate, Huddersfield, HD1 3DH email: [email protected] Professor Peter Holman MBE, 119 Maldon Road, Colchester, Essex, CO3 3AX email: [email protected] Boydell & Brewer, PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk, IP12 3DF email: [email protected]

Previously published volumes in this series are listed at the back of this volume. British Musical Criticism and Intellectual Thought 1850–1950

Edited by Jeremy Dibble and Julian Horton

the boydell press © Contributors 2018

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner

First published 2018 The Boydell Press, Woodbridge

ISBN 978 1 78327 287 7

The Boydell Press is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620–2731, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com

The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This publication is printed on acid-free paper In Memoriam Peter Evans (1929–2018)

❧ Contents

List of Illustrations ix List of Contributors xi Acknowledgements xv

Introduction: Trends in British Musical Thought, 1850–1950 Jeremy Dibble and Julian Horton 1 1 Avoiding ‘Coarse Invective’ and ‘Unseemly Vehemence’: English Music Criticism, 1850–1870 Peter Horton 9 2 Spencer, Sympathy and the Oxford School of Music Criticism Bennett Zon 38 3 Free Thought and the Musician: Ernest Walker, the ‘English Hanslick’ Jeremy Dibble 64 4 Ernest Newman and the Promise of Method in Biography, Criticism and History Paul Watt 84 5 ‘Making Symphony Articulate’: Bernard Shaw’s Sense of Music History Harry White 102 6 Analysis and Value Judgement: Schumann, Bruckner and Tovey’s Essays in Musical Analysis Julian Horton 123 7 The Scholar as Critic: Edward J. Dent Karen Arrandale 154 8 Russia and Eastern Europe Philip Ross Bullock 174

vii viii contents

9 Anti-Intellectualism and the Rhetoric of ‘National Character’ in Music: The Vulgarity of Over-Refinement Sarah Collins 199 10 Chosen Causes: Writings on Music by Bernard van Dieren, Peter Warlock and Cecil Gray Séamas de Barra 235 11 ‘Es klang so alt und war doch so neu’: Vaughan Williams, Aesthetics and History Aidan J. Thomson 255 12 Constant Lambert: A Critic for Today? A Commentary on Music Ho! Christopher Mark 278 13 The Challenge to Goodwill: Herbert Howells, Alban Berg and ‘The Modern Problem’ Jonathan Clinch 304 14 Hans Keller: The Making of an ‘Anti-Critic’ Patrick Zuk 328

Select Bibliography 345 Index 365 Illustrations

1 James William Davison (Royal College of Music/ArenaPAL) 59 2 Henry Chorley (Royal College of Music/ArenaPAL) 60 3 Herbert Spencer 61 4 John Stainer (Royal College of Music/ArenaPAL) 62 5 Hubert Parry (Royal College of Music/ArenaPAL) 63 6 Henry Hadow (Royal College of Music/ArenaPAL) 118 7 Ernest Walker (Ernest Walker Archive, Balliol College, Oxford) 119 8 Ernest Newman (Reproduced by kind permission of the Estate of Ernest Newman) 120 9 George Bernard Shaw (Performing Arts Images/ArenaPAL) 121 10 Donald Francis Tovey (Royal College of Music/ArenaPAL) 122 11 Edward Dent (by kind permission of the Provost and Fellows of King’s College, Cambridge) 194 12 Rosa Newmarch (Royal College of Music/ArenaPAL) 195 13 Philip Heseltine (Boosey & Hawkes/ArenaPAL) 196 14 Cecil Gray (Lewis Foreman Collection) 197 15 Bernard van Dieren (Lewis Foreman Collection) 198 16 Ralph Vaughan Williams (Royal College of Music/ArenaPAL) 274 17 Constant Lambert (Boosey & Hawkes/ArenaPAL) 275 18 Herbert Howells (BBC Photo Archive) 276 19 Hans Keller (Clive Barda/ArenaPAL) 277

The editors, contributors and publishers are grateful to all the institutions and persons listed for permission to reproduce the materials in which they hold copyright. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders; apologies are offered for any omission, and the publishers will be pleased to add any necessary acknowledgement in subsequent editions.

Contributors

Karen Arrandale has recently completed the first substantial biography of Edward J. Dent, a project which took over ten years. She has published several articles and given a number of talks and papers on Dent’s work and his considerable influence on twentieth-century music and culture. Current projects include an edition of Dent’s letters selected from his vast correspondence.

Séamas de Barra is a musicologist and composer. His orchestral music, chamber music and choral music has been performed and broadcast by leading Irish and international ensembles. He has published numerous essays on Irish music and written entries for the second edition of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and the Encyclopaedia of Music in Ireland. Together with Patrick Zuk, he co-edited a series of monographs on Irish composers which were issued by Field Day Publishing in conjunction with the Keogh- Naughton Institute for Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame, and to which he contributed the first volume on Aloys Fleischmann in 2006. A monograph on the composer Ina Boyle, co-authored with Ita Beausang, was published by Cork University Press in 2018, and he is currently completing a study of the Irish symphonist John Kinsella.

Philip Ross Bullock is Professor of Russian Literature and Music at the University of Oxford, and Fellow and Tutor in Russian at Wadham College. His publications include Rosa Newmarch and Russian Music in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century England (2009), The Correspondence of Jean Sibelius and Rosa Newmarch, 1906–1939 (2011), Pyotr Tchaikovksy (2016), and – with Rebecca Beasley – Russia in Britain, 1880–1940: From Melodrama to Modernism (2013).

Jonathan Clinch is Frank Bridge Research Fellow at the Royal College of Music. He read music at Keble College, Oxford, before completing his PhD at Durham University on the compositional development of Herbert Howells. Previous posts include Assistant Organist of Perth Cathedral (Western Australia) and Research Associate at Cambridge University. His publications include two chapters in The Music of Herbert Howells, ed. P. Cooke and D. Maw (2013), and a completed edition of Howells’ unfinished Cello Concerto (2015). He is currently working on a biography of Howells and an edited volume on Frank Bridge. xi xii Contributors

Sarah Collins lectures in musicology at the University of Western Australia. In 2017, she was a Visiting Fellow at Harvard University and a Marie-Skłodowska Curie Research Fellow at Durham University. Sarah is the author of The Aesthetic Life of Cyril Scott (2013) and has articles published in the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Twentieth-Century Music, Music & Letters, Musical Quarterly and elsewhere. She is a co-editor, with Paul Watt and Michael Allis, of the Oxford Handbook of Music and Intellectual Culture in the Nineteenth Century (forthcoming), and is currently the reviews editor of the Journal of the Royal Musical Association and the RMA Research Chronicle. She has also co-edited special issues of the Nineteenth-Century Music Review, Australian Humanities Review and Musical Quarterly.

Jeremy Dibble is a Professor of Music at Durham University. He has published widely in journals and books on British and Irish music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and is the author of monographs on Hubert Parry (1992), Charles Villiers Stanford (2002), John Stainer (2007), Michele Esposito (2010) and Hamilton Harty (2013). An honorary fellow of the Royal School of Church Music and Guild of Church Musicians, he is musical editor of the Canterbury Dictionary of Hymnology.

Julian Horton is Professor of Music at Durham University. He was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he also held a Research Fellowship, and has taught at University College Dublin and King’s College, London. He is author of Bruckner’s Symphonies: Analysis, Reception and Cultural Politics (2004) and Brahms’ Piano Concerto No. 2, Op. 83: Analytical and Contextual Studies (2017), editor of The Cambridge Companion to the Symphony (2013) and co-editor, with Lorraine Byrne Bodley, of Schubert’s Late Music: History, Theory, Style (2016) and Rethinking Schubert (2016). In 2012, he was awarded the Westrup Prize for his work on John Field’s piano concerti; in 2016, he was appointed Music Theorist in Residence to the Netherlands and Flanders. He is currently in his second term as President of the Society for Music Analysis.

Peter Horton recently retired from the Library of the Royal College of Music. He has a particular interest in British music from the early nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries, and his publications include: Samuel Sebastian Wesley: A Life (2004); a three-volume edition of Wesley’s anthems for Musica Britannica; ‘William Sterndale Bennett, Composer and Pianist’, in The Piano in Nineteenth-Century British Culture (2007); and ‘The British Vocal Album and the Struggle for National Music’, in Music and Performance Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2012). Contributors xiii

Christopher Mark is a Senior Lecturer in Musicology at the University of Surrey. He was founding editor-in-chief of the Cambridge journal Twentieth- Century Music and founder of the Biennial International Conference on Music since 1900, which held its first meeting in 1999 at the University of Surrey. He has published three monographs, Early Benjamin Britten (1995), Roger Smalley: A Case Study of Late Twentieth-Century Composition (2012) and Britten: An Extraordinary Life (2013), as well as numerous articles, conference papers and book chapters on Britten, Bridge, Smalley, Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Warlock and Tippett.

Aidan Thomson is Senior Lecturer in Music at the National University of Ireland, Galway. His research is concerned with British and Irish music and its cultural context, particularly its reception and issues of national identity, during the first half of the twentieth century. He has worked extensively on the music of Elgar; more recent work has focused on Smyth, Bax and Vaughan Williams. With Alain Frogley, he co-edited The Cambridge Companion to Vaughan Williams (2013). He wrote and presented a radio programme, ‘Bax, Ireland and 1916’, for RTÉ Lyric fm’s ‘The Lyric Feature’ series to coincide with the Irish premiere of Bax’s commemoration of the Easter Rising, In Memoriam. He is a member of the Council of the Society for Musicology in Ireland.

Paul Watt is Senior Lecturer in Musicology at Monash University. His recent publications include The Regulation and Reform of Music Criticism in Nineteenth-Century England (2018) and Ernest Newman: A Critical Biography (2017). With Derek B. Scott and Patrick Spedding he is editor of Cheap Print and Popular Song in the Nineteenth Century: A Cultural History of the Songster (2018).

Harry White is Professor of Music at University College Dublin, and a Fellow of the Royal Irish Academy of Music. He is general editor (with Gerard Gillen) of Irish Musical Studies (1990–) and general editor (with Barra Boydell) of The Encyclopaedia of Music in Ireland (2013). His other publications include The Progress of Music in Ireland (2005), Music and the Literary Imagination (2008) and The Musical Discourse of Servitude (forthcoming in 2018).

Bennett Zon is Professor of Music at Durham University, Director of the Durham University Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies and a Director of the International Network for Music Theology. He is General Editor of Nineteenth-Century Music Review (Cambridge University Press), the Routledge book series Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the weblist Nineteenth-Century Music JISCmail. Zon is an editor of the Yale Journal of Music and Religion as well as the Routledge book series Congregational Music xiv Contributors

Studies. He researches music from the long nineteenth century to the present, with particular interest in its relationship to British science, theology and cultural history. He has published edited volumes, articles, reviews and dictionary entries, as well as monographs including The English Plainchant Revival (1999), Music and Metaphor in Nineteenth-Century British Musicology (2000) and Representing Non-Western Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2007). Zon recently published Evolution and Victorian Culture (co-edited with Bernard Lightman, 2014) and Evolution and Victorian Musical Culture (2017).

Patrick Zuk is Associate Professor of Musicology at Durham University and a specialist in Russian and Irish music and cultural history. His work has appeared in Music & Letters, the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, the Journal of Musicology and other leading journals. His recent publications include Russian Music Since 1917: Reappraisal and Rediscovery (2017), which he co-edited with Marina Frolova-Walker for the Proceedings of the British Academy series. Acknowledgements

he editors would like to acknowledge the assistance of the Royal College T of Music, the BBC and Lewis Foreman for their help in securing the images reproduced herein. We would also like to extend thanks to Anna Sanders of the Balliol College Special Collections, who helped a good deal in providing access to the Ernest Walker archive. At Boydell & Brewer, a very considerable debt of gratitude is owed to Nick Bingham, Megan Milan and Marianne Fisher, whose work and patience has brought this volume into the world, and to Michael Middeke, for his deep editorial wisdom. At Durham, thanks are due to Dr John Nash of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, for awarding financial support that has proved vital in the latter stages of preparation. We are also indebted to Kelvin Lee for his indexing skills, and to Karen Nichol, for more acts of help and kindness than can reasonably be enumerated. This book is dedicated to the memory of Peter Evans, formerly a Lecturer in Music at Durham University and Professor of Music at Southampton University. Peter had an immense knowledge of British music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries both as a practical musician and as a musicologist, and was a pioneer of studies in this field. It is hoped that this collection of essays stands as a fitting tribute to his work and his generous support of others who have latterly followed his lead. Jeremy Dibble Julian Horton

Durham, May 2018

Introduction Trends in British Musical Thought, 1850–1950

Jeremy Dibble and Julian Horton

he last forty years have undoubtedly witnessed a renaissance of interest T and scholarly activity in British music of the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. Our view of this period, in terms of its musical repertoire and historical context, is now much more richly detailed and our appreciation of its cultural issues, complexities and tensions is that much greater; moreover, our familiarity with the music has been greatly aided by the supporting literature of monographs, essays and articles, by the research evinced at conferences (such as the biennial ‘Music in Nineteenth- Century Britain’ meetings) and by the increasing availability of commercial recordings, live performances and broadcasts. Yet, while we may now have a more thorough understanding of the period in terms of its chronology, its works and composers, its key educational institutions, performing venues, conductors and performers – indeed a more complete picture of British artistic trends, stylistic influences and prevailing aesthetic characteristics – we lack a proper contemporary perspective of the world of criticism and intellectual thought which fruitfully coexisted alongside its creators and music-makers. Certainly, the diversity and individuality of this somewhat neglected facet of British musical life has yet to be fully understood or evaluated. This study, in the form of a series of individual essays, seeks therefore to identify its main participants,1 its key writings and publications, and those central features of an intellectual tradition which developed quite independently of its continental counterparts in Germany, France and Italy. Just as Britain’s geographical ‘separateness’ had determined its own course of intellectual development, so it can be demonstrated that the nation’s understanding and appreciation of music was governed by a set of criteria entirely different from those that informed, for example, Germany’s most prominent musical thinkers (where the emphasis

1 It has been necessary to exclude a number of important figures such as J. A. Fuller Maitland, H. C. Colles, Edwin Evans, Arthur Eaglefield-Hull, Samuel Langford, A. H. Fox Strangways, W. J. Turner and Neville Cardus, in the interests of space and detailed discussion. 1 2 Jeremy Dibble and Julian Horton was essentially on metaphysics, dialectics and aesthetics), even though, as we know, German musical processes of composition deeply influenced British music before the First World War. National musical life was coloured by the lionization of Handel and Mendelssohn, by Anglican liturgical music, choral societies, the popularity of the domestic piano, the ascendancy of the cathedral organist, and the notion that concert music and opera were essentially foreign commodities; as such, British musical criticism at the beginning of the nineteenth century emerged from very particular circumstances and with a set of quite different philosophical precepts, social values and aspirations. While the fourteen essays contained in this volume are ordered to provide an approximate chronology of its focal authors, the essays themselves also set out to define the prevalence and development of several core binary discourses. Perhaps the most fundamental of these is a peculiarly British predilection for empiricism in preference to Hegelian Idealism. An indebtedness to Locke, Hume, the Scottish Enlightenment and the desire for tangible evidence profoundly informed both John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarian Rationalism and the Darwinian revolution during the nineteenth century; as Bennett Zon explores in Chapter 2, Herbert Spencer’s hugely influential ‘Social Darwinism’ shaped a vision of musical history and criticism which many writers, especially those at Oxford such as John Stainer, Hubert Parry and Henry Hadow, adapted and promulgated. The lasting effect of their intellectual precepts was considerable. That is not to say that Idealism passed entirely unnoticed: in Chapters 3, 6 and 7, Jeremy Dibble, Julian Horton and Karen Arrandale examine a counterbalancing Oxford tradition of British Idealism, which undoubtedly left its mark on Ernest Walker, Donald Francis Tovey and Edward Dent; but the force of Parry’s brand of evolutionism is still irresistibly felt in many of the critical processes and conclusions. Furthermore, a powerful symptom of British empiricism, which we can observe in many of the figures featured in this volume, is the tendency to adduce musical evidence and inference from a close scrutiny of the musical texts, an analytical process which has as much to do with practical engagement either as a performer or as a composer as it does with reception. The purple prose of Walker and Tovey, who sought, as a symptom of their fundamentally empirical approach, to find the mot juste in their critical writings, was echoed in style (if not in spirit) by George Bernard Shaw, in whom, as Harry White shows in Chapter 5, the cult of Wagner reached its apogee. For Shaw, the ardent socialist, atheist and reformer, Wagner became the means to lambast the British musical establishment’s obsession with religion, and, even more so, with academicism. Technical brilliance, once the quintessential index of genius (as demonstrated by Mendelssohn, for example), had been superseded by Wagner’s belief in drama, feeling and inspiration. Yet, ironically, Shaw Trends in British Musical Thought, 1850–1950 3

(for much of his life until his famous volte-face) could not see past what he perceived as a similar academic pedanticism in Brahms or in Parry’s, Stanford’s or Tovey’s erroneous admiration of so-called German ‘conservatism’. Wagner also proved to be an important focus for Ernest Newman, whose belief in German music and musicology (which included a high regard for Heinrich Schenker) fuelled not only a general personal disdain for contemporary British criticism but also the yearning for a new, even more empirically generated desire for objectivism. (Newman’s views are extensively documented by Paul Watt in Chapter 4.) Cleaving to a new secular world, inspired by Comtian positivism and the example of German musicological process as shown by writers such as Guido Adler, Newman aspired to a scientific method of biography and musical criticism, which sought to discard the subjective meanderings and bias of his fellow authors and newspaper columnists. A second significant binary discourse which concerns this volume’s essays is the interaction of nationalism and internationalism. The very narrative of nationalism is, of course, an intrinsically fascinating subject; the motivation of this volume is, to a large extent, predicated on a native critical tradition which is distinct from its Continental counterparts. Yet, ironically, the outlook of figures such as Davison, Chorley, Stainer, Parry, Walker, Tovey, Newman and Dent was almost certainly international, though with a strong emphasis on the dominance of the Austro-German axis. Nevertheless, it is possible to perceive a craving for the distinctive, characteristic leader or ‘genius’ in Walker’s need to produce A History of English Music in 1907, appraised by Jeremy Dibble in Chapter 3, and in Shaw’s advocacy of Elgar, although, of course, by the time Vaughan Williams was ready to set out his own compositional agenda, localism and nationalism had become watchwords for a new aesthetic movement in the 1920s and 1930s in which the imperative of folksong and ethnocentrism was never far below the surface. However, while home-grown nationalism was undoubtedly an important factor in British musical criticism of this period, a taste for other nationalisms, particularly those of central Europe and Russia, also gained rapid momentum at the end of the nineteenth century with the popularity of both Dvořák and Tchaikovsky. Russian music, in particular, gained a place in British affections, not only with its conductor advocates such as Thomas Beecham and Henry Wood, but also through critical voices such as Rosa Newmarch and Michel-Dmitri Calvocoressi, who, as Philip Ross Bullock explains in Chapter 8, did much to establish not only the reputation of Tchaikovsky (who ultimately rivalled Wagner for space in concert programmes), but also Glinka, the more exotic accents of ‘The Five’ and Stravinsky. After the 1917 Revolution, Newmarch, who was unimpressed with Bolshevik anti-liberalism, turned her enthusiasms to the nationalist ideals of Leoš Janáček and 4 Jeremy Dibble and Julian Horton

Sibelius, leaving Calvocoressi, somewhat younger, to explore the next generation of Soviet scholarship together with Gerald Abraham. A much more sharply defined British–Continental divide can be identified in a further binary discourse of ‘Intellectualism’ and ‘Anti-intellectualism’, the causes and effects of which are traced in detail by Sarah Collins in Chapter 9. Albeit more esoteric than the issues of empiricism, objectivism and nationalism, it informed a great deal of British critical thought in music during the inter-war period and it helped to shape a response to the European avant- garde and to address questions of modernity in a different fashion. The irony within this discourse, however, is that British music of this period was no less ‘intellectual’ than any other comparable forum of creativity, save that many of its most conspicuous practitioners (who were often critics at the same time) cultivated an aversion to technical nomenclature and the idea of ‘over-thinking’ the process of composition. British composers were ‘doers’ rather than ‘thinkers’, a notion reinforced in one sense by the tradition of composers as Professors of Music in our ancient universities, and in another by the autodidacticism of figures such as Elgar and Delius, who either lacked or renounced formal musical education. Moreover, systems such as dodecaphonicism were considered ‘academic’ (a word which still carries pejorative connotations) and irrelevant to a post-war democratic society for whom musical comprehension and practical involvement were considered urgent; it might be argued that this was also the realization of the imperatives established by Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1878–89), by Parry’s democratic ideal of the composer and his public, and by Percy Scholes’ Oxford Dictionary of Music, to reach out not only to the professional but to the amateur as well. In this sense, Vaughan Williams and Howells were deeply conscious of their legacy. An additional dualism of theory and analysis can be observed as a by-product of these preoccupations. Anti-intellectualism of the kind manifest in the widespread British suspicion of Schoenberg’s dodecaphony married a feeling that composition should be spontaneous rather than mechanical with a marked hostility towards theoretical abstraction. This is most obvious in the ‘common-sense’ compositional aesthetics of Vaughan Williams and Herbert Howells, considered by Aidan Thomson and Jonathan Clinch in Chapters 11 and 13 respectively. It also coloured Bernard Shaw’s complaints of academic sterility in Brahms’ music, and, in a more conservative garb, the discomfort with experimentation for its own sake that is a hallmark of Davison’s and Chorley’s criticisms of ‘progressive’ German music, which Peter Horton examines in Chapter 1. Differently conceived, it also inflected Tovey’s writings, notably in his resistance to the kinds of pedagogical theory developed by Prout, and more generally in the conviction that the essence of a form reveals Trends in British Musical Thought, 1850–1950 5 itself in the sensitive reception of great works, not in any attempt to construct theoretical models or ideal types after the manner of Germanic Formenlehre. Tovey, in brief, favoured analysis over theory, a predilection passed on to the post-war generation via Hans Keller, as Patrick Zuk relates in Chapter 14, and which remains in force today as a major factor differentiating British and North American attitudes. In part, Tovey’s anti-theoretical mentality is a product of his orientation towards the ‘naive’ listener comprising the readership for what became the Essays in Musical Analysis. This lay emphasis connects with a sociological dichotomy between amateur and professional. On the one hand, amateur contributions loom large in the critical and scholarly literature. Peter Horton’s appraisal of mid-nineteenth-century critical writing in Chapter 1 highlights the significance of amateurs such as Charles Gruneisen in this time, a critical lineage finding perhaps its most caustic expression in Bernard Shaw. On the other hand, and doubtless as a consequence, the period is shot through with anxieties about insufficient professionalism, often coupled with concerns about low critical standards. Ernest Newman’s call for a rigorous critical methodology exemplifies this well, as Paul Watt clarifies in Chapter 4; exasperation with lax critical values is likewise a theme in Séamas de Barra’s assessment of Bernard van Dieren, Cecil Gray and Philip Heseltine. The charge of academicism is closely related to this dichotomy: critics of the school of Stanford, Parry and the professionalized musical culture of the Royal College complained of the aesthetic stultification and mediocrity that professional training could produce. In Chapter 9, Sarah Collins explores the clash of aristocratic, entrepreneurial and professional cultures that these debates reflect. Amateurism embraced the aristocratic polymath and the capitalist entrepreneur, professionalism the quasi-Biedermeier values of the bureaucratic middle class. The aesthetic terrain thus staked out broadly polarized ideas of progress and restoration respectively. Other, less obviously dualistic themes can also be traced. Although judgements of taste and value range widely, concerns about vulgarity exercised British critics to an unusual degree. The term’s meaning and connotations changed across the period in question. In the later nineteenth century, it was largely pejorative, conveying the impression of technical refinement pursued as an end in itself at the expense of good taste. Later on, it acquired more positive associations, implying a style unaffected by academic pedantry. This particularly English sensibility found prominent expression in Elgar reception, crystallizing in the furore surrounding Edward Dent’s entry on the composer for the 1930 edition of the Handbuch der Musikgeschichte, variously considered by Karen Arrandale and Sarah Collins in Chapters 7 and 9. In this context, vulgarity serves as an indicator for other key themes. Elgar’s ‘outsider’ status as 6 Jeremy Dibble and Julian Horton a Catholic autodidact roused Anglican professional suspicions, but resonated positively with amateur commentators, most prominently Shaw. Shaw’s polemics on Elgar’s behalf supply one example of the trends towards extremism and what now seems like music-historical eccentricity that wind through these writings. Polemical excess is manifest above all in the lengths to which critics were prepared to go to denigrate music they disliked. The tone is set by Davison’s hostility towards virtually every Austro-German composer he encountered apart from Mendelssohn; it reaches a peak of aggression in Shaw’s open contempt for Brahms and his British admirers, unpacked by Harry White in Chapter 5. This tendency found fresh expression in the inter-war years, aligning, as Séamas de Barra suggests in Chapter 10, with the irrever- ent anti-Victorianism of Lytton Strachey, in which spirit van Dieren rounded on Brahms and Wagner but lionized Busoni; Gray sidelined Mahler, Puccini, Vaughan Williams, Prokofiev, Berg and Webern; and both Gray and Heseltine exalted van Dieren. The convergence of critical trenchancy and eccentricity is nowhere clearer than in Constant Lambert’s Music Ho!, appraised in detail by Christopher Mark in Chapter 12, which elevated Sibelius and viciously attacked Schoenberg and Stravinsky. These attitudes serve to emphasize both the problematic relationship between British musical thought and Continental modernism and the ironies that it engenders. The distinctively British values unearthed in this volume often compel the search for a national voice, but support for this voice is invariably sought in alternative foreign authorities (Nordic or French rather than Germanic modernism, for instance), and the means to these ends often employ manifest critical extremism in the name of aesthetic moderation or common sense. It is worth, finally, reflecting briefly on the afterlife of these tendencies and their implications for our present critical and scholarly musical condition. Many of the factors pressing on British writers on music between 1850 and 1950 have since either alleviated or evaporated. The sense of institutional and infrastructural inadequacy that led to the founding of the Royal College of Music, compelled the establishment of a programme of full-time music education in British universities, and caused so much anxiety about the future path of British composition clearly has no modern equivalent. Present-day music critics do not need to bemoan the lack of an educational infrastructure, at least in the sense of a body of institutions devoted to professional musical tui- tion. The generations of British composers from Walton, Britten and Tippett through Maxwell Davies, Birtwistle, Ferneyhough, Finnissy and Goehr to Thomas Adès have placed Britain firmly within an international community of modern and post-modern composition. And the institutional frameworks for professional music criticism and scholarship are mature and functional, if not always unproblematically so. Trends in British Musical Thought, 1850–1950 7

At the same time, numerous discourses have emerged since 1950 which now command wide attention, but which have no comparably influential equivalent in Britain in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The field of popular-music journalism is most prominent in this respect, reflecting the growth of popular music itself in this time and Britain’s important role in its development. This, in turn, finds a context in the complex relationship between modes of musical reproduction, which have changed beyond all recognition over the last sixty years, and the ways we consume, produce and disseminate music, a paradigm shift that has left scholarly commentators and journalists alike struggling to catch up. Yet in other respects, this volume’s recurrent debates seem all too familiar in the present. The contests between academicism and inspiration, experimentation and communication, which persist from Davison to Keller, map easily onto the current conditions of avant-garde composition, which seems increasingly trapped in a world delineated by universities, music colleges, the state-funded BBC and music festivals, while easily digestible forms of ‘classical’ composition prevail in the wider environment. The fresh travails facing music education, exacerbated by fiscal austerity and Government policies designed to focus attention on core scientific or market-orientated knowledge, recall the cries of philistinism that pepper our critical heritage and require us once again to rebuff the challenge that Britain is a mercantile rather than musical culture, a nation of shopkeepers rather than artists. The anti-intellectualism that drove a wedge between British critics and Brahms and Schoenberg especially finds a new lease of life in the rise of political ‘post-truth’, with its contempt for expertise, specialized knowledge and the burden of evidence. And the 2016 referendum on EU membership and the consequent complexities of ‘Brexit’ have reignited debates about British national identity, which seemed comparatively dormant even five years ago. All of which only reinforces the need for a book of this kind. The renaissance in scholarship on music in Britain, propelled in no small measure by scholarship on the English musical renaissance, has greatly clarified the trajec- tories of British musical culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and their social and aesthetic causes. But the detailed and complex interactions between critical journalism, aesthetics and scholarship that attend this history have their own parallel story to tell, which, to the extent that it charts a lively and often unrestrained body of opinion, if anything resonates even more sympathetically with the critical needs of the British musical present. The literary tools honed by Davison, Chorley, Shaw, Newman, Lambert, Dent and Keller may yet serve us well.

Chapter 1 Avoiding ‘Coarse Invective’ and ‘Unseemly Vehemence’: English Music Criticism, 1850–1870

Peter Horton

We shall endeavour, while encouraging all controversies likely to interest the musical public, to eschew such as cannot be entertained without the manifestation of party feeling, or private animosities. We see no necessity to avoid – as some of our friends advise us – all discussion on musical subjects with contemporary journals, but we shall aim at so conducting our argument, as not to shock our readers by coarse invective, or offend our adversaries by unseemly vehemence.1 When, in December 1844, the music critic and journalist J. W. Davison (b. 1813) penned his apologia, he was well aware that the reputation of The Musical World, whose editor he had been for some eighteen months, was in danger of being sacrificed on an altar of frivolity, ‘violent language and directly personal remarks’.2 He continued:

1 J. W. Davison, ‘Enlargement of the Musical World’, The Musical World 20 (1845), 1. For an overview of music criticism in nineteenth-century Britain see Stephen Banfield, ‘Aesthetics and Criticism’, in Nicholas Temperley, ed., The Romantic Age (London: Athlone Press, 1995), 455–73. The careers of Davison and Henry Chorley are covered by Henry Davison, From Mendelssohn to Wagner, Being the Memoirs of J. W. Davison (London: William Reeves, 1912) and Robert Terrell Bledsoe, Henry Fothergill Chorley: Victorian Journalist (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), and that of Edward Holmes in E. D. Mackerness, ‘Edward Holmes (1797–1859)’, Music and Letters 45 (1964), 213–27. Leanne Langley has written widely on the nineteenth- century musical press in England, in particular ‘The English Musical Journal in the Early Nineteenth Century’ (PhD diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1983), ‘The Musical Press in Nineteenth-Century England’, Notes: Quarterly Journal of the Music Library Association 46 (March 1990), 584–91, and ‘Italian Opera and the English Press, 1836–1856’, Periodica Musica 6 (1988), 2–10. 2 Davison, ‘Enlargement of the Musical World’, 1. 9 10 Peter Horton

We freely confess our faults, and will not attempt to deny that strong personal motives have frequently engaged us in disputes, of which both the matter and the manner were wholly at variance with the due we are so proud to owe to our subscribers and the public. Let us here – while in the act of confession – promise amendment – and let this be an answer before-hand, to all who may think proper to attack us in an unbecoming spirit – that we shall not level ourselves to their standards by emulating their ill taste. That Davison should have felt it necessary to perform such an undertaking says much about the rumbustious nature of early Victorian journalism. At a time when freedom of expression, provided that it was not blasphemous, treasonable, or seditious, was prized, opinions were voiced and reputations traduced with little or no concern for those affected. Davison had himself been far from blameless. With a liking for satire, he had appropriated from Punch the character of ‘Jenkins’, a fictitious journalist supposedly on the staff ofThe Morning Post,3 and grafted his identity onto that of Charles Lewis Gruneisen (b. 1806), the Post’s music critic. To Davison, who had aspirations as both composer and pianist, Gruneisen’s lack of musical expertise and background as a foreign and war correspondent made him quite unqualified to write about music. Indeed, less that than a month earlier he had published, under the title ‘A n Amateur Critic’ [my italics], a ‘memoire’ of ‘Jenkins Greeneyeson, Esq., A.S.S.’:4

Was not he Jenkins – the universally laughed at – the generally looked at – the individually wondered at – not merely jocular himself, but the cause of jocu- larity in others? … At this point of the career of one of the most stupendous intellects on record, we must pause awhile, lest, dazzled by excess of light, we become giddy and incapable of the heavy task we have set ourselves – that is sketching the principal incidents in the life of Jenkins Greeneyeson.5 The discovery that the writer of these words was one of the country’s leading critics might strain credulity, but the episode demonstrates the great variety of writing about music, in newspapers, journals and books, which was on offer in early Victorian England. It was a time when all forms of journalism flourished as never before, encouraged by the removal of the ‘taxes on knowledge’,6

3 Leanne Langley, ‘The English Musical Journal in the Early Nineteenth Century’, 580. Punch itself had been established only in 1840. 4 J. W. D., ‘An Amateur Critic’, The Musical World 19 (1844), 403–5. 5 Ibid. 6 See Langley, op. cit., 31–2. Taxation on newspapers, advertisements and paper was ‘progressively reduced and repealed’ between 1833 and 1836, when newspaper duty was fixed at one penny per copy. English Music Criticism, 1850–1870 11 the growth of a professional middle class, the steady increase in literacy,7 the advent of cheaper printing and the rapid expansion of the railway network. Together they contributed to the appearance of over 800 new journals between 1840 and 1850,8 including a small number which carried reports on musical events. Before examining critical writing on music in the 1850s and 60s more closely, a brief glance at the 1820s and 30s, where the roots of this explosion of writing about music are to be found and several of the leading practitioners began their careers, will help to set the scene.

❧❧ Music Criticism before 1850 Although various attempts had been made to establish specialist musical journals in England from the early eighteenth century onwards, it was not until over 100 years later that any title survived for more than a year or two. The Quarterly Musical Magazine and Review, founded in 1818 by Richard Mackenzie Bacon (b. 1776), however, lasted for over ten years. Bacon had been inspired by his belief that ‘it is rather a matter of wonder we have no periodical work exclusively devoted to the subject’.9 Significantly, he promised that a ‘not … inconsiderable portion of our pages, will be devoted to criticism’ because, he observed, ‘music and musicians are almost entirely abandoned to the meagre, hasty, crude, and but too often partial and personal effusions of the journals of the day’.10 But despite being everything that a serious musical journal should be, the Quarterly Musical Magazine and Review failed to retain enough subscribers and publication ceased in 1830.11 Since 1823 Bacon had also faced competition from The Harmonicon. Edited by the writer, impresario and musical antiquary William Ayrton (b. 1777), who had written for The Morning Chronicle since 1813, each issue combined literary material with a selection of short pieces of music, a number of them newly commissioned. But this also fell victim to commercial pressures and ceased publication in 1833. Almost immediately Clowes and Ayrton began a fresh collaboration with a similar, cheaper and more ‘popular’ journal, the Musical Library, which maintained the same broad coverage as its predecessor, but in less depth. Its lifespan, however, was also short: the literary portion lasted until July 1836 and the musical

7 Having remained at 52% between 1650 and 1820, literacy had increased to 76% by 1870. See https://ourworldindata.org/literacy/(accessed 7 January 2017). 8 Langley, op. cit., 34. 9 ‘Plan of the Work’, Quarterly Musical Magazine and Review 1 (1818), 3. 10 Ibid., 5. 11 Later issues appeared increasingly behind schedule: volume 10, dated 1828, was not published until 1830. 12 Peter Horton supplement until February 1837. Thereafter Ayrton served as music critic for The Examiner (1837–53). It was only a matter of time before a journal would be established whose lifespan would be measured in decades rather than years: that milestone was passed in March 1836 with the issue of the first number of The Musical World; it would run until 1891 and occupy an increasingly influential role in English musical life. The journal was conceived by J. Alfred Novello (b. 1810), pro- prietor of the publishing firm, and was initially edited by his brother-in-law, Charles Cowden Clarke (b. 1787). Its coverage was broad: leading and miscellaneous articles,12 reviews, and lists of new publications. As Clarke was a man of letters, he relied upon the assistance and expertise of the organist and writer H. J. Gauntlett (b. 1805),13 whose trenchant, opinionated writing brought welcome gravity to the new journal but probably narrowed its public appeal. At the end of 1837 Novello sold the venture14 and, after several changes of editor, the appointment in 1843 of J. W. Davison, who held the post until 1885, introduced a long period of stability, during which it occupied pride of place among English musical journals.15 Concurrently Davison was also music critic on The Times (1846–79). Six years later Novello re-entered the periodical-publishing arena when his purchase of Joseph Mainzer’s publishing business brought with it Mainzer’s Musical Times and Singing Circular, which was relaunched in 1844 as The Musical Times and Singing Class Circular. Not until the engagement in 1846 of Edward Holmes (b. 1797), whose contributions ‘gave a literary tone to the publication, which had not been aimed at before’,16 did it offer much criticism, but thereafter its coverage broadened and, alone among nineteenth-century British music periodicals, it is still in existence today. Musical journals were far from the only means of disseminating criticism. In addition to newspapers – principally the Daily News, The Morning

12 The first, by the seventy-year-old Samuel Wesley, was entitled ‘A Sketch of the State of Music in England, from the Year 1778 up to the Present’ and represented a coup for the journal. Unfortunately Wesley’s memory was not always accurate and a second edition had to be accompanied by an errata note. 13 Gauntlett’s series of articles ‘Characteristics of Beethoven’ was particularly noteworthy (The Musical World 1 (1836), 21–5, 53–8, 117–22, and 197–202. 14 See Langley, op. cit., 575. 15 John Ella acted as interim editor (January to October 1838), followed by Edward Holmes and Egerton Webbe (October 1838 to April 1839), Henry Smart (May 1839 to March 1841) and George Macfarren, senior (April 1841 to April 1843). See Langley, op. cit., 574. 16 A Short History of Cheap Music (London and New York: Novello, Ewer & Co., 1887), 35. English Music Criticism, 1850–1870 13

Chronicle, Morning Herald, The Morning Post, The Times and The Sunday Times – a number of mid-nineteenth-century weekly, monthly or quarterly magazines contained regular musical columns, of which The Athenaeum (1808–1921), The Atlas (1826–62), The Examiner (1808–81), Fraser’s Magazine (1813–69), The Illustrated London News (1842–2003), Literary Gazette (1817– 62), and The Spectator (1828–present) were among the most prominent. With so many opportunities, a substantial body of critics had come into existence by the middle of the century. Few were able – or chose – to devote themselves solely to criticism, while several wrote for two or more titles simultaneously.

❧❧ Who was Who: A Selection of Critics Music criticism attracted people from a variety of backgrounds, by no means all musical. Several had a background in journalism, among them Davison’s bête noire, Charles Gruneisen, and George Hogarth (b. 1783). Gruneisen had been appointed foreign editor of The Morning Post in 1833, served as a war correspondent in Spain and, between 1839 and 1844, in Paris, from where he began to send music reviews; on his return to England he succeeded Hogarth as music critic of The Morning Chronicle. Hogarth had likewise moved from general to music journalism, contributing to The Harmonicon and subsequently to The Morning Chronicle (1834–45?), Daily News (1846–66) and The Illustrated London News (1853?–1870). He also provided leading articles for early numbers of The Musical World17 and in 1835 published Musical History, Biography and Criticism.18 Eleven years later he became editor of a new periodical, The Musical Herald, to which we shall return later. The Irishman Desmond Ryan (b. 1816) had turned to music and drama criticism in 1836 on abandoning medical training. In addition to writing for The Morning Post, The Morning Chronicle, the Morning Herald and The Musical World (of which he was sub-editor from 1845 to 1868), he wrote and translated song texts and libretti (including George Macfarren’s King Charles II – see below). In 1866 he took legal action against The Orchestra19 over its insinuation that, by organizing occasional concerts at which the performers gave their services gratis, he would be obliged to review them favourably. The court found in his favour and awarded him £250 damages. Embarrassingly it also emerged that in 1857 he had been ‘double booked’ and, having submitted in advance a review for a performance which never took place, had lost his

17 In its first year of publication Hogarth was responsible for twelve articles or instalments. 18 Musical History, Biography and Criticism (London: J. W. Parker, 1835). 19 ‘Ryan v. Wood’, The Orchestra 124 (10 February 1866), 309–11. 14 Peter Horton job. Edward Holmes was another with a strong literary bent. A school friend of John Keats, he was a member of the literary and musical circle which met at Vincent Novello’s home and included William Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, Keats, Charles and Mary Lamb and many musicians among its number. On the establishment of The Atlas in 1826 he became its music critic and later contributed to The Musical World, The Spectator and, as mentioned earlier, The Musical Times. Unlike some of his colleagues, he remained receptive to new music, not least that of Berlioz (see below), whom he came to know personally, and who commended his work. Holmes was one of several organist-critics, of whom the best-known was Henry Smart (b. 1813), a distinguished recitalist, organ designer and composer who briefly edited The Musical World, succeeded Holmes at The Atlas and later wrote for The Sunday Times. Direct in manner, his musical sympathies were more with Beethoven, Weber and Mendelssohn than with the avant-garde ‘New German School’ of Schumann and Wagner. Gauntlett, who practised as a solicitor before abandoning law, was another who combined criticism with organ playing and design. As mentioned earlier, he contributed a number of articles to The Musical World, but thereafter seems not to have held a regular post as a critic, making his writings difficult to identify. The violinist John Ella (b. 1808), in contrast, turned his back on a performing career in favour of promoting high-class chamber-music concerts under the auspices of the Musical Union. His pioneering introduction of analytical programme notes insured that the performances also had an educative role. In conclusion, we reach the two best-known names in mid-Victorian music criticism, J. W. Davison and Henry Chorley (b. 1808). Their prominence has led to their being regarded as archetypal representatives of their profession, whereas their custom of relying on satire, damning with faint praise or, almost as a matter of principle, criticising anything new, placed them somewhat apart from many of their colleagues. Davison has already been encountered, but Chorley, who wrote for The Athenaeum from 1833 until his retirement in 1868, was no less influential.20 In addition to his weekly column on music, he had wider literary aspirations and wrote several novels and plays. His musical taste was, as he wrote, formed early: ‘It has been my fortune (or misfortune as may be) to undergo very few conversions with regard to Music and its masters. I hope that I know more than I did – but I have not come to like what I disliked ten years ago, or the reverse.’21

20 Among weekly journals The Athenaeum acquired a particular reputation for its coverage of music, not least because of Chorley’s regular contributions. 21 Henry F. Chorley, Modern German Music, 2 Vols, Vol. I (London: Smith, Elder & Co., [1854]), ix. English Music Criticism, 1850–1870 15

In his critical writing he made no secret of these likes and dislikes. The former included Italian opera, as represented by Rossini, French opera by Meyerbeer and Gounod, and the music of Mendelssohn, whom he revered; modern German music – the ‘Music of the Future’ – and, initially, the operas of Verdi were among the latter. He regularly travelled to the Continent and the fruits of these expeditions can be found in both his journalism and his volumes of collected writings.22 For all his idiosyncrasies – the frequent objections to things he did not like can become wearisome – one has to admire his honesty (see below). Of Davison it only remains to say that, while writing remained his main occupation, he was also active as a composer, musical editor and pianist, regularly acting as accompanist at chamber concerts in London. Like Chorley, he numbered Mendelssohn among his friends and at first was equally antagonistic towards the ‘Music of the Future’.23 His writings – and especially the less temperate columns for The Musical World, with their frequent use of satire – are as individual as Chorley’s. But how did these Victorian critics regard themselves and their role in music and society?

❧❧ The Role of the Music Critic Although well established in England by the mid-nineteenth century, music criticism nonetheless remained an activity that was rarely discussed. Indeed, not until the fifth edition (1954) of George Grove’s A Dictionary of Music and Musicians (first published in 1878) did it merit an entry. It is thus fortunate that Chorley and Hogarth both left some thoughts about the role of the music critic and the musical journal. Writing in connection with the Leipzig music fair, Chorley invites admiration for his concern to uphold professional standards:

I should conceive it to be a coarse impertinence were I to attempt to record the good and bad fortunes of the classical and romantic musical journals of Leipsic, – to discuss the knowledge, the style, and the success of any one among the confraternity of writers, great or small … As far as concerns Music, the press, as a patron or a punisher, is, comparatively, a new power … But the demand for what is to pass as criticism, has grown faster than the supply … The persons who can addict themselves to the literature of Art … are, of necessity, few in every country. If artistic criticism be embraced

22 Chorley’s principal writings on music are Music and Manners in France and Germany: A Series of Travelling Sketches of Art and Society (London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green & Longmans, 1841); Modern German Music; and Thirty Years’ Musical Recollections (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1862). 23 Davison, From Mendelssohn to Wagner, 71. 16 Peter Horton

as a trade, it is of all trades the poorest: an ill-remunerated labour, carried on in the midst of a life of apparent show and dissipation.24 In contrast Hogarth’s remarks ‘To the Reader’ in the first number of The Musical Herald reflect the theory, rather than the practice, of criticism:

Music ought to have a journal appropriated to itself – a journal not addressed merely to the limited circle of artists and connoisseurs, but calculated for the instruction and entertainment of The People … and there is thus a desideratum which the present publication is intended to supply … The literary portion will be adapted … to the instruction as well as entertainment of the general reader. It will include articles … on the history of music, and its present state … on the lives and characters of the greatest musicians … on the objects of the art and the best means of their promotion … Brief reviews will be given … together with notices of the principal musical performances, and such other articles … as may be of general interest.25 It was a bold ambition and was immediately followed by an article entitled ‘Musical Education in England’. In both, Hogarth made a strong case for the value of the periodical press in providing musical education. It was a view that other critics would have endorsed. Some, however, believed that their brief included two further elements: to protect readers from unwholesome music, and to reprimand composers who purveyed such unhealthy fare (as did Davison after Wagner’s controversial visit to London in 1855):

we have felt it our duty to warn all who love music and venerate the works of the great masters … against the preaching and practice of Richard Wagner and his followers – sham prophets … dangerous enemies to music, the more dangerous from their subtle intellect and uncompromising bigotry, men, themselves degenerate, envious of those who possess the generating power.26 Such an attitude – and Davison’s outburst was an extreme example – can only be interpreted as a belief that English music was in danger of being infiltrated by ‘degenerative’ foreign influences, from which the critical fraternity was duty-bound to protect it. It also implies the acceptance of an agreed scale of values, which, embracing the concept that everyone and everything had its allotted place, was very much of its time.27 Insofar as music was concerned,

24 Henry Chorley, Modern German Music, II, 64–6. 25 ‘To the Reader’, The Musical Herald 1 (1846), 1. 26 The Musical World 33 (1855), 414. 27 See, for example, Mrs C. F. Alexander’s hymn ‘All things bright and beautiful’, with its lines ‘The rich man in his castle, The poor man at his gate, God made them, high or lowly, And order’d their estate’. English Music Criticism, 1850–1870 17 one of the touchstones for evaluating compositions was by comparing them with those of the most admired contemporary composer, Mendelssohn, whom George Grove would describe as having been ‘long looked upon as half an Englishman’.28 Indeed, Mendelssohn’s popularity was partly due to the fact that his frequent visits, with public appearances in London, Birmingham and elsewhere, had made him such a familiar figure. His music, too, was approach- able: although new, it generally adhered to classical formal structures, which, even if they broke new ground (as in the ‘symphony-cantata’ Lobgesang) did so in an intelligible way. But while critics understood and were receptive to Mendelssohn’s music, most were left bemused by the works of the so-called ‘New German School’, whose principal representatives were Liszt, Schumann and Wagner. As this is an area in which present-day critical judgements differ radically from those of the mid-nineteenth century, this chapter will focus on specific spheres of contemporary music: the ‘New German School’ (or ‘Music of the Future’ – Schumann, Wagner and Berlioz), Gounod, Meyerbeer, Verdi, and present-day English music.

❧❧ ‘Music of the Future’ I: Robert Schumann Unlike Mendelssohn, Schumann neither visited England nor had more than a handful of English acquaintances. As a result, by the time of his death in 1856 his music was still little known,29 and what had been heard had left critics bemused or hostile. Why was this? There are several potential reasons. First, that he, much more than Mendelssohn, was a pioneer who, in extending the boundaries of music, ‘broke’ the rules. Second, that he was ‘not Mendelssohn’, the acceptable face of modern German music. Third, that by never visiting London he remained an anonymous figure. Last, the ignorance and suspicion of his music led to his being tarred by association with the ‘Music of the Future’. It was to counter the pernicious influence of the last that Davison reviewed Schumann’s cantata Das Paradies und die Peri so scathingly on its introduction to London, at a Philharmonic Society concert in June 1856:

Robert Schumann has had his innings, and been bowled out – like Richard Wagner. Paradise and the Peri has gone to the tomb of the Lohengrins.

28 ‘Mendelssohn’, in George Grove, A Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Vol. II (London: Macmillan & Company, 1878–90), 293. 29 It has only been possible to find references to three public performances of Schumann’s music in London before 1850: twice at the Musical Union (Piano Quartet in 1843, Piano Quintet in 1848), and two piano pieces – Arabesque and Nocturne – played by Lindsay Sloper in 1848. 18 Peter Horton

When … is all this trifling to cease? How many times more shall we have to insist that the new school – the school of ‘the Future’ – will never do in England? If the Germans choose to muddle themselves with beer, smoke, and metaphysics, till all things appear to them through a distorted medium, or dimly suggested through a cloud of mist, there is no reason why sane and sober Britons should follow their example … We put it to Professor Bennett, who took such care to introduce the Peri in her best attire, that, but for her moral deformity, she might have passed for something decent and becoming – we put it to Professor Bennett … a musician and composer of genius and attainments, who knew Mendelssohn intimately, and worships John Sebastian with his soul – to Professor Bennett, the champion of English instrumental music among foreigners, and the spoiled child of his own country … we put it to Bennett, whether such a tuneless rhapsody … was fit for those whose delicate ears … have been nourished with the pure, and sweet, and healthy strains of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Spohr, and Mendelssohn? We anticipate his answer – ‘No’. … Imagine – oh, uninitiated reader! … three uninterrupted hours of music ‘without form and void’, three hours of organised sound without a single tune! We are not exaggerating … if Robert Schumann is allowed to represent the school of ‘the Future’… a still greater peril will be incurred – for though Richard is more subtle, uncompromising, arrogant, and fearless, Robert is more specious. His music, at times, more nearly resembles music than the monstrous combinations of Tännhauser [sic] and Lohengrin; yet inasmuch as, in principle, it is just as vicious and bad, for that reason it is all the more dangerous.30 That the conductor, William Sterndale Bennett, was a friend of over twenty years standing seems not to have concerned Davison, who was not alone in accusing Schumann of being unable to produce a melody or write attractive music. Chorley liked it no better and informed his readers that reviewing the cantata had been ‘an ungrateful task’ and that ‘Familiarity … only confirms and increases our disapproval of it’,31 while The Examiner (Ayrton?) complained about ‘loud, complicated and unproductive accompaniments’ and the ‘more or less opaque’ ‘fog … of Neo-Germanic mystifications’ through which the ‘few beauties have to struggle’.32 The Literary Gazette also played the nationalist card, opining that it was ‘not attractive to the English public’, so it was left to Hogarth (?) in Daily News to declare it to be ‘a work of great genius and power,

30 The Musical World 34 (1856), 408. 31 ‘Music and the Drama’, The Athenaeum 1496 (28 June 1856), 816. 32 ‘The Theatrical and Musical Examiner’, The Examiner (28 June 1856), 406. English Music Criticism, 1850–1870 19 of which the beauties will develop themselves more and more as it is oftener heard and better understood’.33 Given such hostility, it was a brave decision by Bennett to begin his final season as conductor of the Philharmonic Society in 1866 with another performance. Chorley simply ignored it, while Davison’s response was oblique: a brief notice (10 March) in The Musical World which observed that despite being ‘received somewhat frigidly’, there was ‘a good deal of applause … and there can be no doubt that [it] … found many admirers’.34 Overshadowing this was a long (planted?) letter from the pseudonymous ‘Shaver Silver’, who declared it to be ‘a work which I simply do not like’.35 A week later Davison reprinted his review from The Times (12 March), in which he acknowledged ‘the persever- ing efforts of some devoted adherents’ who had enabled Schumann to make ‘decided progress in this country’. His own opinion had moderated and had a surprising conclusion: ‘We are inclined to doubt whether ten times ten years would ever make Paradise and the Peri … sound like aught else than a labori- ously complex piece of clever dullness containing many beautiful passages [my italics].’36 In contrast, the critic of the recently established The Reader believed Schumann’s time was coming and had little but praise for the ‘little known but great work’:37 ‘The performance … was heartily enjoyed by at least a considerable minority, and tolerated without overt weariness by the rest of the audience … There is now no doubt that our English prejudice against Schumann’s music is wearing out.’38 Within a few years it had indeed disappeared, but Das Paradies und die Peri never attained the popularity of such works as Elijah or Gounod’s Mors et Vita and, perhaps because of the English preference for sacred choral works, remains a rarity in the concert hall.

❧❧ ‘Music of the Future’ II: Richard Wagner The surprising appointment of Wagner to conduct the Philharmonic Society Concerts in 1856 followed the resignation of Michael Costa at the end of the 1855 season and the decision of the Directors to look overseas for a replacement.

33 Quoted in The Musical Gazette 1 (1856), 280. The editor, George Lake, reprinted a brief extract from Punch which placed the contradictory opinions of the Daily News and The Times alongside each other. 34 ‘Philharmonic Society’, The Musical World 44 (1866), 155. 35 ‘Haydn, Schumann, Rubenstein, Wagner, Berlioz’, The Musical World 44 (1866), 154. 36 ‘The Philharmonic Concerts’, The Musical World 44 (1866), 171–2. 37 ‘Music. Schumann’s “Paradise and the Peri”, at the Philharmonic Society’, The Reader 7 (10 March 1866), 262. 38 Ibid., 261. 20 Peter Horton

After approaches to Berlioz,39 Spohr and Peter Lindpainter had come to nothing, Wagner’s name had been suggested by the leader, Prosper Sainton, who, it later emerged, ‘had no personal cognisance of Wagner’s capacities … but … [considered that] a man who had been so much abused must have something in him’.40 Wagner, short of money, unaware of the working conditions and with virtually no knowledge of English, accepted the engagement.41 His name was not wholly unknown, as the premieres of Rienzi, Der fliegende Holländer and Tannhäuser had been reviewed in the press, while Chorley had seen the last in Dresden in 1845:

in truth, I have never been so blanked, pained, wearied, insulted even (the word is not too strong), by a work of pretension as by this same ‘Tannhäuser’. I could not have conceived it is possible that any clever person could deliberately produce what seems to me so false, paradoxical, and at such fierce variance with true artistic feeling … before I sat through the opera.42 Five years later Chorley was in Weimar for the premiere of Lohengrin, which, he considered, ‘though not a work to be ignored, is still less one to be generally accepted’.43 It was not that nothing pleased him – he considered the Prelude to Act 3 to be ‘one of the most captivating and joyous inspirations we ever heard’ – but his overall impression was ‘of power and perversity perpetually jostling and neutralizing each other’.44 It was the same with Wagner’s conducting which, with its liberal use of rubato, tempo changes, and exaggerated dynamics, he liked no better. Other critics initially gave it the benefit of the doubt. Davison began his typically witty review of the first concert (12 March 1856) with a pen portrait, in which he described his subject as ‘a short spare man, with an eager look and a capacious forehead’ who conducted ‘with great vivacity, and beats “up” and “down” indiscriminately’.45 In his opinion the performance of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony was ‘all “sixes and sevens” – now firm, now “shaky”, now overpower- ingly grand, now threatening to tumble to pieces. To us it was most unsatisfac- tory. To others it was evidently otherwise, since they praised it loudly.’46

39 Berlioz had already been engaged by the New Philharmonic Society for the 1855 season. 40 William Ashton Ellis, Life of Richard Wagner (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1906), 5, 46. 41 Ibid., 46. 42 Chorley, Modern German Music, Vol. I, 360–1. 43 ‘Music at Weimar’, The Athenaeum 1194 (14 September 1850), 980. 44 Ibid., 918. 45 ‘Philharmonic Concerts’, The Musical World 33 (1855), 171. 46 Ibid. English Music Criticism, 1850–1870 21

As ever, opinions differed. While Davison accused Wagner of being unable to make the orchestra play quietly, The Examiner praised him for obtaining ‘what is somewhat rare in England, a subdued instrumental accompaniment’.47 Henry Smart’s initial impression was likewise favourable: ‘Nearly all the points he chose to make were well conceived, and he succeeded in commanding a degree of piano and a variety of colour, to which this orchestra … is by no means too prone.’48 The second concert (26 March) included Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and three excerpts from Lohengrin. While the performance of the symphony’s scherzo impressed Davison – ‘the best we ever heard’ – fluc- tuating and erratic tempi meant that he could find little positive to say about anything else. But it was the introduction of Wagner’s own music which caused the greatest stir. London audiences had first encountered it a year earlier when, on 1 May 1854, the New Philharmonic Society had programmed the overture to Tannhäuser. It did not please. Davison dismissed it as ‘a weak parody of the worst compositions, not of M. Berlioz, but of his imitators’, adding ‘So much fuss about nothing, such a pompous and empty commonplace, has seldom been heard’.49 Not to be outdone, Chorley directed his readers to an earlier notice (18 December 1852) in which he had described it as ‘a work not to be endured to the end without melancholy wonder at the pains which it has cost’.50 On its repetition at the Philharmonic Society on 14 May 1855 it fared little better and even Howard Glover, critic of The Morning Postand more sympathetic than some to the ‘Music of the Future’, was at a loss to understand it:

a succession of the most unhappy experiments we ever listened to. A few bars at the commencement, effectively instrumented for clarionets, bassoons and horns, may be praised; but, after these, we had nothing but ‘confusion worse confounded.’ Destitute of melody, extremely bad in harmony, utterly incoherent in form, and inexpressive of any intelligible ideas whatever.51 News of this strange work must have reached Buckingham Palace, as the overture was repeated at the seventh concert, a command performance in the presence of the queen and Prince Albert. This time (as Hogarth reported) it was ‘admirably executed, and more favourably received than before’.52 What is of particular interest is the queen’s response (as Wagner recollected):

47 ‘The Musical Examiner’, The Examiner 2459 (17 March 1855), 166. 48 The Sunday Times (18 March 1855), quoted in Ellis, op. cit., 188. 49 The Times (3 May 1854), 9. 50 The Athenaeum, 1312 (1854), 1399. 51 The Morning Post (15 May 1855), quoted in Ellis, op. cit., 275–6. 52 The Illustrated London News (16 June 1855), quoted in Ellis, op. cit., 307. 22 Peter Horton

She and Prince Albert sat directly in front of the orchestra, and after the Tannhäuser-overture … they applauded with a kindliness almost amounting to a challenge, whereat the audience broke into the liveliest prolonged applause. During the interval … the Queen sent for me … and received me … with the cordial words, ‘I am delighted to make your acquaintance, your composition has enraptured me!’53 In the knowledge that in September 1860 she would request a performance of Lohengrin at Covent Garden, there seems little reason for us to question her enthusiasm.54 But what could she recognize in the music that the critics could, or would, not? The answer probably reflects musical politics, as a young German champion of Wagner, Ferdinand Praeger (b. 1815), had muddied the critical waters. Praeger had settled in London in 1834 and from 1842 served as the English correspondent of the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. Unhappy about the way the press had pilloried Wagner and his music, he sought to redress the balance in a series of reports for the New York Musical Gazette. Davison reprinted excerpts in The Musical World, but their anti-English bias (including derogatory remarks about Smart’s forthcoming opera Berta – ‘We shall hear it and see whether H. Smart has any more pretensions to fame than that of being a nephew of Sir George’)55 antagonized English critics and, it has been suggested, was responsible for Smart’s move to the anti-Wagner camp.56 ‘Richard Wagner has departed.’ The four words with which Davison opened his editorial in The Musical World for 30 June 1855 must have brought glad- ness to his heart: Wagner’s stay in England had not been comfortable and, with a majority of critics sceptical about his music even before his arrival, he had, to borrow a phrase, been on a ‘losing wicket’. Davison’s relationship with Wagner had been decidedly ambivalent: notwithstanding his dislike of the music, the man fascinated him and he continued to report on his career and devote copious pages to Wagnerian matters, among them the complete libretto for Lohengrin. But as with Schumann, public taste did not align with critical diktat and enthusiasm for ‘Music of the Future’ gathered pace. The first English production of a complete opera, Der fliegende Holländer, took

53 See Ellis, op. cit., 304. 54 Ibid., 305. It is probable that Prince Albert’s death (14 December 1861) led to the cancellation of the proposed performance. 55 The Musical World 33 (1855), 362. 56 See Ellis, op. cit., 212–16. Ellis suggested that Praeger’s comment could have provoked Smart’s highly critical review of ‘Two Songs by Richard Wagner’ (The Musical World 33 (1855), 290–1), which ends thus: ‘we sincerely hope no English harmonist of more than [one] year’s growth could be found sufficiently without ears and education to pen such vile things as we have now had occasion to notice’. English Music Criticism, 1850–1870 23 place (as L’Ollandese dannato at Drury Lane) only in 1870, but seven years later London hosted a Wagner Festival. A year earlier Davison had attended the inaugural Bayreuth Festival, on which he reported at length for The Times. The tone of his articles, with their detailed accounts of the origin of the Ring cycle, could not have been more different from the carping of the 1850s. The old critic had truly been converted:

About the wonderful things contained in the Ring des Nibelungen, its unique poem, derived from sources hitherto unexplored by dramatist or musician, and the many strikingly magnificent passages – sometimes, indeed, entire pieces – that cannot fail to interest, and in a great degree to edify, enough has been written.57 By 1876 Chorley’s long reign at The Athenaeum had come to a close and it was his successor, Davison’s old foe Gruneisen, who reported on events at Bayreuth. Even he admired the staging and ‘magnificent orchestral beauties’58 of the Ring, but still believed that Rienzi and Der fliegende Holländer were ‘Wagner’s finest productions, and will be the means of perpetuating his name as one of the great creators in the lyric drama, long after “Der Ring des Nibelungen” will have been forgotten’.59 Wagner and his music provide an extreme example of a characteristic response of the English when faced with something new and seemingly incomprehensible – if in doubt, reject it. The composer had not helped himself by making little effort to meet the press and, if the events of 1855 do nothing else, they illustrate the restricted vision of much English contemporary criticism. A notable exception was an essay, ‘Liszt, Wagner, and Weimar’, published just after Wagner’s departure in Fraser’s Magazine, a regular source of serious, independent criticism.60 Factual, descriptive and nonpartisan, the article not only offered a respite from the overheated writings of many critics, but also introduced two further names: its anonymous author, the novelist George Eliot, and the first of her protagonists, Franz Liszt.

❧❧ ‘Music of the Future’ III: Liszt, the Forerunner The greatest pianist of his time, Liszt had toured England and Ireland in 1840 and 1841, when his playing and personality had made a profound impression upon Chorley:

57 Quoted in Henry Davison, From Mendelssohn to Wagner, 524. 58 ‘The Bayreuth Festival’, The Athenaeum 2549 (2 September 1876), 315. 59 Ibid., 315. 60 ‘Liszt, Wagner, and Weimar’, Fraser’s Magazine 52 (1855), 48–62. 24 Peter Horton

Last year I was struck dumb by the playing: this year I am almost fascinated by the man: whose winning qualities have been strangely brought out (as the painters say) this season … I cannot believe that he will end his career where he is now, either in Art or in moral principle!61 Chorley’s comments proved to be remarkably percipient as, in 1848, on his appointment as conductor at the grand ducal court at Weimar, Liszt turned his back on life as a travelling virtuoso in order to devote himself to composition and the promotion of the music of like-minded contemporaries. During the 1850s the city became a Mecca for devotees of the ‘Music of the Future’,62 with pioneering performances of major works by Schumann, Wagner and Berlioz. Although these were reported in England, Liszt himself would not return until 1886, and in the late 1840s and 1850s his name featured less frequently in the press than that of the French composer and conductor Hector Berlioz, who visited regularly between 1849 and 1855.

❧❧ ‘Music of the Future’ III: Hector Berlioz When Berlioz arrived in England on 4 November 1847, it was at the invitation of his flamboyant compatriot Louis Jullien to conduct a winter season of opera and four orchestral concerts – at which he could perform his own music – at Drury Lane Theatre.63 Unlike Wagner, he was already acquainted with several musicians and critics, and had travelled from Paris in the company of Gruneisen, who ‘as soon as we got into Folkestone, hurried off the boat in front of me in order to greet me with outstretched hand, and say: “Welcome to British soil!” It was one of those good ideas that the English have … which would never occur to a continental.’64 Berlioz also knew Davison and Morris Barnett (of The Morning Post) and, as a critic himself, appreciated the importance of having the press on his side. After the remarkable success of his first concert on 7 February 1848, he reported to his friend, the critic Joseph d’Ortigue:

You have heard … of the sudden and startling success of my concert at Drury Lane. It disconcerted in a few hours all favourable or hostile anticipations … The whole English Press has expressed its opinion in terms of extraordinary warmth,

61 Letter dated 6 June 1841, quoted in Robert Bledsoe, Henry Fothergill Chorley: Victorian Journalist (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), 127. 62 Liszt first conducted at Weimar in 1844, but only worked there full-time from 1848. 63 Jullien’s financial acumen was not to be trusted and Berlioz only received a fraction of the 20,000 francs he had been promised. See A. W. Ganz, Berlioz in London (London: Quality Press, 1950), 18–19. 64 Ibid., 20. English Music Criticism, 1850–1870 25

and, apart from Davison and Gruneisen, I didn’t know one of the writers. It is different now; the principal ones have come to see me, have written to me, and we often meet in a friendly way.65 Two of the older critics, Hogarth and Holmes, had initially been suspicious of the Frenchman and his music, but were both won over: Holmes, ‘one of the leading musical critics in London … came, I am told, with most hostile ideas’,66 and was ‘convinced that he was going to hear harshness, madness and nonsense, etc.’67 His review, however, was so warm that Berlioz wrote that it was ‘a long while’ since he had ‘felt so lively a satisfaction as when I read the article in the “Atlas”’.68 In another letter he described how ‘Old Hogarth of the “Daily News” was in a most comic state of agitation: “All my blood is on fire”, he said to me, “never in my life have I been so excited by music”.’69 Alone among the critics, Chorley remained sceptical, though even he praised the ‘admirable sonority of his [Berlioz’s] orchestral effects’70 and was captivated by the chorus of Sylphs in The Damnation of Faust:

The embroidery … by which it is adorned is of the richest and most fantastic quality – now a murmur of voices … passing from part to part, while the strain flows mellifluously on – now an airy accompaniment of scales on the stringed instruments muted; until at last the motion subsides, and the harmony swells out into a close of deep and delicious concord.71 His engagement completed, Berlioz returned to Paris in July 1848, but visited England three years later as a member of the jury for the Great Exhibition, and again in 1852 when he was invited to conduct the concerts of the recently established New Philharmonic Society.72 At the first, on 24 March, he introduced his dramatic symphony, Romeo and Juliet, which Davison considered to have been ‘one of the most extraordinary compositions of one of the most extraordinary composers the art has known’.73 Davison was equally impressed by Berlioz’s performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (12 May) – the

65 Ibid., 49–50. 66 Ibid., 46. 67 Ibid., 50. 68 Ibid. 69 Ibid., 42. 70 ‘M. Berlioz’s Concert’, The Athenaeum 1059 (12 February 1848), 170. 71 ‘ F a u s t ’, The Athenaeum 1060 (19 February 1848), 196. 72 Founded by Dr Henry Wylde, the new society was not intended to rival the ‘old’ Philharmonic Society, but ‘to bring forward new or unknown works of merit’ which the former largely neglected (Ganz, op. cit., 120). 73 ‘New Philharmonic Society’, The Times (25 March 1852), 5. 26 Peter Horton highlight of the season to date; for Howard Glover it was the best orchestral performance ever heard in England.74 Ayrton, meanwhile, recalled that Berlioz’s performances all had ‘a meaning beyond the notes, and were instantly comprehended by the audience’.75 Given the novelty of Berlioz’s music and the conservatism of many critics, it may appear surprising that it was so well received. But while his idiosyncratic use of the orchestra had no precedent, his treatment of harmony and dissonance was less controversial than that of either Schumann or Wagner, and this would doubtless account for the evaporation of opposition. Indeed, Davison, with whom Berlioz had a strong rapport, had sprung to the defence of Benvenuto Cellini after its English premiere in 1853 had been ruined by the concerted opposition of a section of the audience. Only Chorley found much to complain about: although prepared to acknowledge Berlioz’s mastery of the orchestra and conceding that he had ‘within him the materials of a great poetical musician’, he nonetheless considered his personality to be ‘musically defective’ and condescendingly suggested: ‘could he recommence his career, with his present experience, we should have that which is incomplete in him completed – that which is crude mellowed – that which is inaccessible simplified’.76 There was, however, one contemporary French composer – a ‘young man of genius’ (he told his readers in January 1850)77 – of whom Chorley did approve: Charles Gounod.78 In promoting Gounod’s music at a time when it was little known, he again revealed his propensity to row against the tide. With this in mind, it is instructive to glance at his other likes and dislikes and see how they compare with those of his fellow critics.

❧❧ Opera According to Chorley I: Gounod When, in August 1851, Gounod’s first opera, Sapho, received a single performance at Covent Garden, Chorley was ecstatic. Fidelio apart, he believed it was the ‘best first opera ever written’,79 and furthermore that ‘within the last eighteen years no new appearance in musical creation has taken place comparable of

74 See Ganz, op. cit., 143. 75 ‘The Music of the Season – Present and Prospective’, Fraser’s Magazine 47 (May 1853), 576. 76 ‘Royal Italian Opera’, The Athenaeum 1340 (2 July 1853), 804. 77 ‘Musical and Dramatic Gossip’, The Athenaeum 1161 (26 January 1850), 107. 78 Ibid. 79 Henry F. Chorley, Thirty Years’ Musical Recollections, Vol. II (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1862), 153. English Music Criticism, 1850–1870 27

M. Gounod’.80 Others were not convinced. Davison, for example, complained that Sapho suffered from ‘want of melody, indecision of style, ineffective treatment of voices, inexperience in the use of instruments, accompanied by an affectation of originality disclosed in strange and unsuccessful experiments, excess of modulation … and a general absence of continuity’81 – just the sort of criticism that might have been expected from Chorley. Why was his response so different? The answer, I believe, lies in the fact that Gounod’s music, like Mendelssohn’s, was ‘comfortable’ to listen to, and posed neither an intellectual nor a musical challenge – qualities that ensured its success with audiences and, for once, brought critic and the public together. Even after an unexplained rift led him to ‘despise [the composer] as heartily, as I admire his music cordially’,82 Chorley continued to champion his works. Indeed, when the highly successful premiere of Faust at Her Majesty’s Theatre in June 1863 finally vindicated his advocacy, he made the bold prediction that the future of opera would lie not with the ‘flimsy violences of Signor Verdi and the shallow obscurities of Herr Wa g n e r ’, 83 but with this ‘most remarkable opera of modern times’.84 Such enthusiasm was not confined to Chorley. It was deemed ‘A thoroughly good work’ (The Examiner),85 ‘one of the most important events of the present musical season, whether considering the merits of the work itself or the efficiency of its performance’ (The London Review),86 while Davison simply declared ‘A more decided success has not been witnessed for some years.’87 However, Davison’s opinion of Gounod’s music, Faust included, quickly dropped. Rumours also began to circulate that he had ‘kept [Gounod] out of England for years by hostile criticism’88 – a claim dismissed by Julius Benedict, who stated that he ‘did not think that any musical critic would have such p o w e r ’. 89 Gounod was not convinced and four years later, during his stay in London, complained to Davison about his ‘persecutions of my music’.90 In

80 ‘Royal Italian Opera’, The Athenaeum 1242 (16 August 1851), 882. 81 ‘M. Gounod’s Sapho’, The Musical World 26 (1851), 518. 82 Undated letter to ‘D....’, quoted in Bledsoe, op. cit., 279. 83 ‘Royal Italian Opera’, The Athenaeum 1863 (11 July 1863), 56. 84 Ibid. 85 ‘The Theatrical and Musical Examiner’, The Examiner (13 June 1863), 376. 86 ‘Music’, The London Review (20 June 1863), 671. 87 ‘Her Majesty’s Theatre’, The Musical World 41 (1863), 374. 88 Spoken during the court case between the critic Desmond Ryan and Mr Wood of Cramer, Beale & Co., The Orchestra 124 (10 February 1866), 309. 89 Ibid. 90 Letter dated 9 May 1874. Translation in Henry Davison, From Mendelssohn to Wagner, 304. 28 Peter Horton retaliation, he picked holes in works by Sterndale Bennett, which the critic had sent him: ‘I, also, had a good laugh, when I read your letter and the second piece of Bennett’s which you sent me, the “Capriccio”! I can assure you that I find this too funny, and that I am not in the least converted!’91 Their correspondence continued for some months but, despite being near neighbours, there is no evidence that they met. Later that year Gounod returned to Paris but, with the English, not least Queen Victoria, continuing to enjoy his music and festivals paying generously for his large-scale choral works, the opposition of certain critics must have mattered little to him.

❧❧ Opera According to Chorley II: Meyerbeer Chorley had first encountered the operas of Giacomo Meyerbeer in Paris in the 1830s. For some fifty or more years they enjoyed near universal success throughout Europe and for Chorley represented the obvious model for the development of the genre: ‘our highest hopes, for the future of the lyric drama, are from French [i.e. those working in France] composers’.92 His particular ‘hopes’ were Rossini, Auber and Meyerbeer,93 and the gradual acceptance of the last in London gave him particular satisfaction. Meyerbeer’s penultimate opera, L’Étoile du nord, was premiered in Paris in 1854 and its production in London the following year aroused considerable excitement. For once the critics were largely in agreement, with Davison considering it ‘one of the most original and admirable [works] of its composer’ and that ‘in no other work has his genius been more plainly declared’.94 Chorley, needless to say, considered that its success ‘was a triumph’95 which vindicated his long championship of the composer:

Very pleasant has been the enthusiasm to ourselves, – in part because we recollect how some eighteen years ago those few among us who wrote in praise of M. Meyerbeer’s ‘Huguenots’ … were criticized … as people whose brains had been disturbed by the desire of running after any outlandish novelty.96 The writer in Fraser’s Magazine (John Hullah?) was another who had ‘watched with keen interest the increase of his [Meyerbeer’s] reputation among our countrymen’,97 but he also sounded a warning:

91 Ibid., 308–9. 92 Review of Memoirs of the Musical Drama. The Athenaeum 557 (30 June 1838), 455. 93 Bledsoe, Henry Fothergill Chorley, 50. 94 ‘Royal Italian Opera’, The Musical World 33 (1855), 469. 95 ‘Music and the Drama’, The Athenaeum 1447 (21 July 1855), 847. 96 ‘Musical and Dramatic Gossip’, The Athenaeum 1450 (11 August 1855), 930. 97 ‘The Opera in 1855’, Fraser’s Magazine 52 (August 1855), 222. English Music Criticism, 1850–1870 29

Indeed, the impossibility of predicating any success for a work of M. Meyerbeer on any but his own conditions, has been, and always must be, a serious obstacle to its production. In this respect … he is sui generis among great masters … No process of mutilation … will altogether destroy … an idea of Handel or Mozart … Not so with M. Meyerbeer; you must take him as he chooses only to present himself … For him these are not adjuncts, but necessities of existence … His productions bear about the same relation to those of a Beethoven, or even of a Rossini, as a fragment of coral to a lump of lava – both beautiful to the eye, and smooth and solid to the touch; the one the tardy accumulation of one thousand efforts and of one thousand years, the other the momentary overflow of an exhaustless source of light and heat.98 With this in mind, one can understand why Meyerbeer’s supervision of rehearsals for L’Étoile at the Royal Italian Opera99 was considered so important, and why his extravagant vocal and production demands ultimately proved to be his undoing. One can see, too, how his music fitted the pattern behind Chorley’s enthusiasms: older composers (Meyerbeer and Rossini) or more conservative figures (Mendelssohn and Gounod), but in both cases people whom posterity has regularly placed in the second rank. This could not, however, be said of the other great mid-nineteenth-century operatic composer, Verdi.

❧❧ Opera According to Chorley III: Italy In addition to Berlioz, Wagner and Meyerbeer, London attracted another distinguished composer in 1855, Giuseppe Verdi, who came to discuss the production of Les Vêpres siciliennes at the Royal Italian Opera.100 The first of his operas to reach England, Ernani, had been staged in March 1845 and, as Desmond Ryan wrote, seemed ‘to please the subscribers’.101 The critics, however, were uncertain. Both Chorley, whose ideal Italian opera composer was Rossini, and Davison gave it a tentative welcome, but within a year the former had changed his mind, obliging him to try and account for the difference between critical and public opinion:

We are led to pay more attention to this newest of Italian maestri than his merits demand, from the circumstances that, bad or good, his Operas contain certain

98 Ibid., 221–2. 99 See The Musical World 33 (1855), 519. ‘Meyerbeer came from Berlin to superintend the rehearsals, which profited greatly by his experience.’ 100 ‘Verdi’s Visit to London’, The Musical World 33 (1855), 479. 101 The Musical World 20 (1845), 140. 30 Peter Horton

elements of popularity; and the critic of stage music, however select and sober in his personal tastes, is not qualified for his office if he does not recognise a success before the public as worthy of examination. A theatrical audience is of necessity miscellaneous – made up of intelligences of every order; and the conditions of triumph … necessarily embrace effect to a degree which would be a degrading concession in music appealing to a more severe and select audience … How long [Verdi’s] … reputation will last, seems to us very questionable.102 The Examiner, in an interesting analysis, was less begrudging, admiring Verdi’s ‘feeling for the drama which his music is to illustrate’.103 By 1855, when Il Trovatore was produced at the Royal Italian Opera, Chorley’s opposition had softened and, praising (among other things) the ‘Miserere’ scene, he described the opera as ‘the work … in which his best qualities are combined’.104 Such a mixture of admiration, tinged with slight disapproval, is typical of Verdi criticism in England. Take, for example, Fraser’s Magazine, which, having described him as a ‘half-taught musician … of but limited acquaintance with classical music’, continued:

But Verdi has something of his own; a feeling for melody, which training may develop and refine but can never give; something which, under more favourable circumstances, might have become sustaining power; fancy in details of instrumentation … and in more force than any of these gifts, a fine feeling for stage effect.105 The production in 1856 ofLa Traviata, however, threw a cat among the pigeons. In a strongly worded denunciation The Examinerobjected to both the ‘detestable’ libretto (from Dumas’ La Dame aux camélias) and the ‘bad music’:106

we must say candidly that it is the worst opera by Verdi that has found its way to England, while his very best is … barely tolerable to the ears of any well-trained London audience … there is [usually] some one thing that, if not good, may pass for good … [but here] there is absolutely nothing … [in] an opera very far inferior in value to the worst of Mr. Balfe’s.107 Only the London debut of Marietta Piccolomini (as Violetta), who ‘con- quers’ the libretto and ‘to a wonderful degree succeeds also in conquering the

102 ‘The Verdi-Mania’, The Athenaeum 951 (17 January 1846), 73. 103 ‘Her Majesty’s Theatre’, The Examiner (16 May 1846), 308. 104 Chorley, Thirty Years’ Music, Vol. II, 219. 105 ‘The Opera in 1855’, Fraser’s Magazine 52 (1855), 220. 106 ‘Her Majesty’s Theatre’, The Examiner 2522 (31 May 1856), 341. 107 Ibid. English Music Criticism, 1850–1870 31 music’, provided some relief.108 Others disagreed. To Chorley, who had firm opinions about singers, Piccolomini was ‘the prettiest prima donna who can not sing’,109 and several reviews noted that her voice was too small for the theatre.110 It was the perceived immorality of the libretto, however, that attracted most attention, including denunciations in leading articles in The Times.111 Over the next decade critical opposition to Verdi, and La Traviata in particular, softened. Although Davison still considered it a ‘notorious opera’, by 1870 he was prepared to acknowledge that it included ‘some remarkably pretty music, and … a very admirable finale (Act 2)’.112 By then further operas by Verdi had been staged in London, among them Don Carlos (1867), which, in Davison’s opinion, contained ‘some of the finest music that Verdi has composed’.113 No less significantly, the finale to Act 2 was deemed to be ‘as bold and imposing as … the finales to several of Meyerbeer’s operas’.114 That Meyerbeer might lose his pre-eminence to Verdi (and Wagner) would doubtless have amazed many critics but, as this episode demonstrates, critics may be no more successful than anyone else in picking ‘winners’. Likewise, as the business of La Traviata had shown, their ability to influence public opinion was small.

❧❧ Opera in English Despite being confined to the fringes, opera in English, by English composers, managed to survive alongside its Italian cousin, and three works – Balfe’s The Bohemian Girl (1843), Benedict’s The Lily of Killarney (1862) and Wallace’s Maritana (1845) – maintained a place in the repertoire for many years. They would be joined, it was hoped, by Berta; or, The Gnome of Hartzberg (1855), the only one of Henry Smart’s three operas to be completed or staged, and a rare English example of an opera by a critic.115 Its chances of success, however, were (as The Musical World noted) severely limited by two things: the ‘absurdity of the libretto [by Edward Fitzball] … [and] verses [which] are still more so’, and the lack of a ‘large and efficient orchestra’.116 Despite these hand- icaps, Smart was judged to have produced music both ‘beautiful and full of

108 Ibid. 109 ‘Musical and Dramatic Gossip’, The Athenaeum 1503 (16 August 1856), 1023. 110 See, for example, The Leader, no. 323 (31 May 1856), 524. 111 See The Times (7 August 1856; 11 August 1856). 112 ‘Royal Italian Opera’, The Times (25 April 1870), 10. 113 ‘Royal Italian Opera’, The Times (10 June 1867), 9. 114 Ibid. 115 Berta has already been mentioned as a victim of Ferdinand Praeger’s pen. 116 ‘Dramatic’, The Musical World 33 (1855), 365. 32 Peter Horton variety’, and it was confidently predicted that the opera would become ‘one of our standard English works for the stage’.117 It was not to be. Berta was never heard again and all that survives are seven individually published numbers. The occasion did, however, reignite the ongoing debate about the lack of support and encouragement for English opera, not least through an article, ‘The Fate of English Opera’, which appeared a few weeks later in the The Sunday Times (whose music critic was Smart) and reviewed the recent Haymarket season. The conundrum was the attitude adopted by the English towards their musicians:

‘We won’t patronise you until you give us performances equal in merit to those of other countries’; and the musicians … reply, ‘It is impossible we should attain the degree of excellence you demand of us in composition, or singing, or fid- dling, unless you patronise – in other words, pay for, a theatre in which we can have the necessary practice [my italics]’.118

❧❧ Encouragement of Native Talent For as long as it could be said that the ‘fashionable Englishman … thinks it beneath him to acknowledge the existence of English music’ and will ‘at best … but confess to have heard of it as something unutterably dull and vulgar’,119 the question of special support for English music would refuse to go away. Indeed, in some ways the outlook was bleaker mid-century than it had been in 1834, when the establishment of the Society of British Musicians for ‘the encouragement and advancement of native talent’ had promised a brighter future.120 Within ten years, however, the Society was losing its momentum and, following an unsuccessful relaunch in 1854, it was finally dissolved in 1865. Its mere existence, however, highlighted differences of opinion about its goals. While members, including Davison and Smart, naturally supported it efforts, other believers in English music – among them Ayrton – had misgivings about such a divisive approach. Ranged against both groups were those like Chorley, Ella, Gruneisen and Holmes, who argued that any positive discrimination was undesirable as it invariably led to a lowering of standards. Chorley, in characteristic fashion, had given the Society a guarded welcome, hoping that it would mark ‘the commencement of a long and brilliant

117 Ibid. 118 ‘The Fate of English Opera’, The Sunday Times (1 July 1855). 119 Ibid. 120 Simon McVeigh, ‘The Society of British Musicians (1834–1865) and the Campaign for Native Talent’, in Christina Bashford and Leanne Langley, eds, Music and British Culture, 1785–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 149–68. English Music Criticism, 1850–1870 33 season of prosperity’ for British music, but also sounding a warning: ‘Enough, and more than enough, encouragement has been extended to native talent … Our composers… have rather stooped to comply with the requisitions and pamper the taste of uninstructed audiences, than led them on to relish what is intrinsically beautiful’.121 Davison viewed the Society’s activities in a more positive light, but by the early 1850s, when it was riven by internal dissent, he had begun to question both its usefulness and, more significantly, the ‘false and fallacious’ philosophy of protectionism that lay behind it:

Based on that system of protection which is going as fast as possible ‘to the dogs’, unhonoured, and unregretted, it could not possibly endure … The innovation [of including non-British works] failing … simply established the fact that the Society was altogether and primitively unnecessary.122 Strong words, but indicative of his belief that, with the success of two former Royal Academy of Music students, William Sterndale Bennett (b. 1816) and George Macfarren (b. 1813), the Society’s purpose had been largely achieved. Both enjoyed much greater acclaim than their meagre presence in today’s programmes might suggest, and responses to Macfarren’s comic opera King Charles II, premiered at the Princess’s Theatre on 27 October 1849, display a remarkable unanimity of opinion: ‘the finest and most complete operatic work of a native musician ever produced on the stage’ (Davison in The Musical World);123 ‘the most able, original, and complete dramatic work of its author, but one of which no composer … need have been ashamed’(Davison in The Times);124 ‘a triumph for English art’ (Hogarth in Daily News);125 ‘beyond all comparison the noblest English operatic effort of the last twenty years’ (Morris Barnett (?) inThe Morning Post);126 ‘[he] has not merely written fragmentary musical illustrations … [but] has taken a grasp of the whole, and constructed a complete work in all its parts consistent’ (Gruneisen in the Morning Chronicle);127 ‘we do not recollect anything comparable to it on the English stage for a long time’ (Coleman (?) in the The Sunday Times);128 ‘his [Macfarren’s] share of the work is little short of a marvel … [his] writing … is masterly throughout’ (Chorley in The Athenaeum).129

121 The Athenaeum 377 (17 January 1835), 58. 122 The Musical World 32 (1854), 825. 123 The Musical World 24 (1849), 691. 124 The Times (29 October 1849), 8. 125 Daily News, quoted in The Musical World 24 (1849), 694. 126 The Morning Post, quoted in ibid., 695. 127 Morning Chronicle, quoted in ibid., 697. 128 The Sunday Times, quoted in ibid., 697. 129 The Athenaeum 1149 (3 November 1849), 1113. 34 Peter Horton

Macfarren’s libretto was the work of his friend and fellow critic Desmond Ryan, and divided opinion. While it was commended by Hogarth (‘an excellent operatic version’ – Daily News),130 Barnett (a ‘task [done] with poetical feeling and dramatic cleverness’ – The Morning Post)131 and Gruneisen (‘Mr. Desmond Ryan … has performed his task with more than average skill and good taste’ – The Morning Chronicle),132 Chorley, a librettist himself, tore into Ryan’s text with a vehemence which suggests either personal animosity or professional jealousy.

Nothing short of a literal reprint of such trash could … convey to the reader a full idea of its trashiness. Yet with specimens like these before their eyes, which composers have to set … simple souls still wonder that we have no English Opera … It is to be wondered that Mr. Macfarren could write any music at all to this rubbish.133 Ryan was not the only person to try Chorley’s patience. Another was William Sterndale Bennett, whose early career he had followed with interest. But when, in the mid-1840s, Bennett had found it increasingly hard to cope with the expectations of others and had retreated into his shell, Chorley’s patience wore thin.134 Matters came to a head after it took Bennett nine years to set a text Chorley had provided: when The May Queen was finally premiered at the 1858 Leeds Festival he took the opportunity to berate the composer over his inactivity:

When the world … is aching for something new to sing and to play, it becomes doubly vexatious when those who could, – will not. If ambition and appeal are left in the hands of the incompetent, if the public becomes reluctant, if the art dwindles, is the fault wholly with the incompetence or the reluctance? – Does it not lie somewhere with the indifference? – It must have been felt by every one who heard the Pastoral, that – be it good or be it bad – Dr. Bennett has almost a style of his own, conciliating English simplicity and German science – certainly, a vein of melody which would yield rich treasure were it more diligently wrought out.135

130 Quoted in The Musical World 24 (1849), 694. 131 Ibid., 695. 132 Ibid., 697. 133 ‘Music and the Drama’, The Athenaeum 1149 (3 November 1849). 134 See Peter Horton, ‘An Obsession with Perfection’, Nineteenth-Century Music Review 22 (2016), 257–87. 135 ‘Leeds Festival’, The Athenaeum 1611 (11 September 1858), 338. English Music Criticism, 1850–1870 35

If, by the 1850s, Bennett represented the great ‘might have been’ of English music, the young Arthur Sullivan, one of his students at the Royal Academy of Music, was a name to watch. Chorley certainly thought so and described the English premiere of his music to Shakespeare’s The Tempest in 1862 as ‘one of those events which mark an epoch in a man’s life; and … may mark an epoch in English music’:

Years on years have elapsed since we have heard a work by so young an artist so full of promise, so full of fancy, showing so much conscientiousness, so much skill, and so few references to any model elect … Mr. Sullivan has already obviously no common power in this branch of his art; he has the faculty of setting-out gracious ideas (there is not a bar of ugly music in this work) in [a] most becoming and ornamental framework … We can imagine no doubt for his future.136 It was not only Chorley who prophesied a bright future for Sullivan. Davison considered that his music ‘exhibits remarkable merits … [including] a decided vein of melody, a strong feeling of dramatic expression, and a happy fancy in the treatment of the orchestra’.137 The writer in The Critic considered him to be ‘a composer of no common order’138 and noted that ‘the critical fraternity hastened to Sydenham [i.e. the Crystal Palace] to catch an idea of [the music’s] … character and to reward its merits’.139 It doubtless gave Chorley particular pleasure to provide two texts for the young composer – a four-act opera, The Sapphire Necklace (1863–7), and the masque Kenilworth, produced at the Birmingham Festival in 1864. How much they were appreciated is another matter: a contemporary profile noted Sullivan’s ‘dislike to the [opera] book’ and his dismissal of the text for Kenilworth as ‘rubbish’.140 Chorley, by now, was at the end of his career. He retired from The Athenaeum in 1868 and died four years later. One can only speculate whether he would have followed Davison in taking ‘Particular interest … in the joint productions of Messrs. Gilbert and Sullivan’,141 or would he have considered this a waste of Sullivan’s talents.

136 ‘Crystal Palace’, The Athenaeum 1798 (12 April 1862), 504–5. 137 The Musical World 40 (1862), 231. 138 The Critic 24 (12 April 1862), 369. 139 Ibid. 140 Kate Field, ‘Arthur Sullivan’, Scribner’s Monthly 18 (1879), 906–7. After the premiere of the opera fell through it was reported that ‘Sullivan’s dislike to the book has prevented later productions’. 141 Davison, From Mendelssohn to Wagner, 332–3. 36 Peter Horton ❧❧ A New Generation Most of Sullivan’s career belongs to the years after 1870, and a new and different era in English music and musical life. It was not only a time of transition for composers and critics, but also a time when some long-held prejudices were laid to rest as music by Schumann, Wagner, and Verdi finally gained critical approval. By 1880 Chorley, Gruneisen, Hogarth, Holmes, Ryan, Smart and Taylor, to name but a few, had all died, leaving Davison (who retired from The Times in 1879 but continued to edit The Musical World until his death) as one of the few remaining senior figures. No less significantly, attitudes among critics towards their calling had also changed. Whereas in the 1850s and before they could be compared with pioneers, advancing across unknown, perhaps dangerous terrain, their successors were more like settlers following in their wake. No longer needing to conquer or fearful of ambush, they were able to adopt a calmer, less aggressive tone. One can recognize such a transformation in Davison’s later writings, and when comparing the exaggerated tone adopted at times by Chorley and Gruneisen with the calmer language of such younger critics as William Barrett (b. 1836) and Joseph Bennett (b. 1831; Davison’s successor at The Times). The present survey has been highly selective in its coverage, concentrating on critical responses to the compositions of a handful of contemporary composers but largely ignoring reviews of performances and performers, more extended critical writings on music, and the type of detailed programme notes introduced by John Ella at the Musical Union in 1845 and widely copied.142 Inevitably, given the widespread suspicion of ‘new’ music, much of the criticism quoted was couched in extravagantly hostile language and this, together with the fact that it was often wide of the mark, can make it difficult for modern readers to take it seriously. But Chorley, Davison, Gruneisen, Hogarth and others expressed themselves as honestly as they could – and Chorley in particular is to be admired for his attempts to be unbiased in his judgements, however much he might have disliked what he heard. While one can understand why the music of Meyerbeer, Gounod and Rossini might have been more readily acceptable than that of Schumann, Verdi and Wagner, it is harder to explain why audiences, ‘voting with their purses’, so frequently found themselves in opposition to the ‘professionals’. Although this doubtless reflects a belief that critics were endowed with insight lacking in ordinary concertgoers, it also serves as a reminder of the folly of such thought: they could pontificate at length, but they had no special access to

142 See Christina Bashford, ‘Not Just “G”: Towards a History of the Programme Note’, in Michael Musgrave, ed., George Grove, Music and Victorian Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 115–42. English Music Criticism, 1850–1870 37

‘the truth’. And a gradual acceptance that this was so can be seen in the met- amorphosis of the discipline between the 1840s and the 1870s. Although it took some years to achieve, Davison’s goal of ‘conducting our argument, so as not to shock our readers by coarse invective, or offend our adversaries by unseemly vehemence’ was finally reached. Music criticism in England had come of age. Chapter 2 Spencer, Sympathy and the Oxford School of Music Criticism

Bennett Zon

❧❧ Introduction

Musical critics often give applause to compositions as being “scientific” – as being meritorious not in respect of the emotions they arouse but as appealing to the cultured intelligence of the musician … I hold these to be perverted beliefs having their roots in the prevailing enormous error respecting the constitution of mind. In that part of life concerned with music, as in other parts of life, the intellect is the minister and the emotions the things ministered to.1 trong words coming from a self-confessed, rank musical amateur. S From anyone else they might be dismissed as the mad ravings of a lunatic. Coming from a Victorian intellectual titan and author of one the first evolutionary studies of musical origins, however, Herbert Spencer’s words carried a great weight of authority. Public intellectual and serial controversialist, Spencer (1820–1903) came from a relatively unmusical family and was unable to play an instrument,2 but he clearly enjoyed music and from the late 1840s he regularly attended opera and concerts in London. Around the same time he began learning how to sing from Hullah’s famous singing manual,3 and although his interest remained more intellectual than practical he retained a love of singing by the piano, later chiding his close friend (and possibly lover) the novelist George Eliot for never joining in.4 Recent work on Spencer reflects an interest in his work-a-day

1 Herbert Spencer, ‘The Purpose of Art’, in Facts and Comments (London: Williams & Norgate, 1902/1907), 32. 2 Walter Troughton, ‘Herbert Spencer’s Last Years: Some Personal Recollections’, Rationalist Annual (1938), 59–65. 3 John Hullah, Wilhem’s Method of Teaching Singing, adapted to English Use, under Supervision of Committee of Council on Education (London: J. W. Parker, 1841). 4 Herbert Spencer, An Autobiography, 2 vols, Vol. II (London: Williams & Norgate, 1904), 73. 38 Spencer, Sympathy and the Oxford School 39 musicality – portraying him as an amateur in the strictest sense, and as a true, ardent lover of music5 – but most work on Spencer and music tends to focus almost exclusively on his evolutionary theory,6 and there is practically nothing on his musical criticism. As John Offer, Charles Brotman and I suggest, so deeply interwoven is evolution within his philosophical programme as a whole that it is difficult, nearly impossible, to disaggregate it from other elements of his thought, especially his music criticism. To do that requires more than simply disentangling the strands in Spencer’s evolutionary thinking; rather, it requires an examination of their relationship to a curiously neglected musicological topic – sympathy. For Spencer and his philosophical descendants in the Oxford School of music criticism, sympathy is at the root of human advancement. At the root of sympathy, however, is music; musical feelings, Spencer opines, ‘are the chief media of sympathy’.7 This essay is the first attempt to unravel the mystery of Victorian musical sympathy and explain its working in music criticism of the time, and in the broadest sense it uses Spencer’s concept of sympathy to test changes in music criticism, and the Oxford School of music criticism to test important changes in a transitional period in the history of science. It fulfils these inter-related purposes by providing: (1) an introduction to Spencer’s musical thought and criticism; (2) an exploration of his concept of sympathy and its relationship to music criticism; (3) a close examination of his influence on the Oxford School of music criticism; and (4) a conclusion speculating on the reasons for critical changes in attitudes toward musical sympathy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

5 John Offer, ‘Understanding Music’, in Herbert Spencer and Social Theory (Houndsmill: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 253–74. 6 See for example John Offer, ‘An Examination of Spencer’s Sociology of Music and its Impact on Music Historiography in Britain’, International Review of Aesthetics and the Sociology of Music 14/1 (1983), 33–52; Charles M. Brotman, ‘The Power of Sound: Evolutionary Naturalism and Music in Anglo-American Victorian Culture’ (PhD diss., University of Rochester, 2005); and Bennett Zon, ‘Overcoming Spencer; Late-Century Theories of the Origin of Music’, Representing Non-Western Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2007), 145–56 and ‘The Non-Darwinian Revolution and the Great Chain of Musical Being’, in Bernard Lightman and Bennett Zon, eds, Evolution and Victorian Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 196–226; and Evolution and Victorian Musical Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 7 Herbert Spencer, ‘The Origin and Function of Music’, Fraser’s Magazine (October 1857), in Herbert Spencer, Literary Style and Music: Including Two Short Essays on Gracefulness and Beauty (New York: Philosophical Library, 1951), 45–106, at 74. 40 Bennett Zon ❧❧ Spencer and Music Criticism The fountainhead of Spencer’s music criticism is his seminal essay ‘On the Origin and Function of Music’ (1857), which draws together and synthesizes a host of complementary influences from the sciences (biology, psychology and sociology) as well as the arts (aesthetics, philosophy and literature). Like all his writings on music, ‘The Origin and Function of Music’ interweaves three complementary – if in some respects contradictory – strands in contemporary evolutionary thought, namely a belief that: (1) all things progress from simplicity to complexity; (2) the growth of the individual recapitulates the evolution of the species; and (3) only the fittest survive. Spencer adapts the first strand from Ernst von Baer’s axiomatic pronouncement on the growth of the embryo; as historian of science Stephen Jay Gould so succinctly puts it: ‘the homogeneous, coarsely structured, general, and potential develops into the heterogeneous, finely built, special and determined … it is the law of all bio- logical development, the single tendency of all change’.8 The second, contradictory, strand comes from the equally famous – if later fabulously discredited – scientist Ernst Haeckel: ontogeny (the individual) recapitulates phylogeny (the species). Von Baer insists, however, that ‘the embryo of a higher animal is never like [the adult of] a lower animal, but only like its embryo’;9 embryos, in other words, never gestate through (or recapitulate) different species. Not all Victorians agreed, Victorian recapitulationist Robert Chambers amongst them. In his sensationally popular pre-Darwinian Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), proto-evolutionist Chambers proclaims that ‘in the reproduction of the higher animals, the new being passes through stages in which it is successively fish-like and reptile-like. But the resemblance is not to the adult fish or the adult reptile, but to the fish and reptile at a certain point in their foetal progress.’10 The third and final, self-explanatory strand comes from Spencer himself, who coined the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’ in the 1850s or 60s.

8 Stephen Jay Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny (Cambridge, MA, and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977), 61. 9 Karl Ernst von Baer, Uber die Entwickelungsgeschichte der Thiere: Beobachtung und Reflexion, Scholium 5: Ueber der Verhältniss der Formen, die das Individuum in den verschiedenen Stufen seiner Entwicklung annimmt (Königsberg: Bornträger, 1828), 224, cited in Alec L. Panchen, Classification, Evolution, and the Nature of Biology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 20. 10 Robert Chambers, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (London: John Churchill, 1844), 212. See also James A. Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000). Spencer, Sympathy and the Oxford School 41

‘On the Origin and Function of Music’ unites these competing evolutionary strands. Following his belief that all things progress from simplicity to complexity, for example, Spencer suggests that music originates in the simplicity of language and through the agency of the emotions progresses to the complexity of music:

as all vocal sounds are produced by muscular action, there is a consequent physiological relation between feeling and vocal sounds; that all the modifications of voice expressive of feeling are direct results of this physiological relation; that music, adopting all these modifications, intensifies them more and more as it ascends to its higher and higher forms; that from the ancient epic poet chanting his verses, down to the modern musical composer, men of unusually strong feelings, prone to express them in extreme forms, have been naturally the agents of these successive intensifications; and that so there has little by little arisen a wide divergence between this idealized language of emotion and its natural language: to which direct evidence we have just added the indirect – that on no other tenable hypothesis can either the expressiveness of music or the genesis of music be explained.11 This feature would later appear in First Principles (1862) and teach readers that each stage in the history of music recapitulates the process through a progression of successively more perfect complexities; indeed, in music as in all life only the very fittest survives:

In music progressive integration is displayed in numerous ways. The simple cadence embracing but a few notes, which in the chants of savages is monot- onously repeated, becomes, among civilized races, a long series of different musical phrases combined into one whole; and so complete is the integration that the melody cannot be broken off in the middle nor shorn of its final note, without giving us a painful sense of incompleteness. When to the air, a bass, a tenor, and an alto are added; and when to the different voice-parts there is joined an accompaniment; we see integration of another order which grows naturally more elaborate. And the process is carried a stage higher when these complex solos, concerted pieces, choruses, and orchestral effects are combined into the vast ensemble of an oratorio or a musical drama.12 Progressive integration informs all of Spencer’s writings, not just his essays on music; it is, arguably, the single force behind his concept of a synthetic

11 Spencer, ‘The Origin and Function of Music’, 69. 12 Herbert Spencer, ‘The Law of Evolution’, First Principles, 2nd edn (London: Williams and Norgate, 1867), IXV/§114. See http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/spencer- first-principles-1867?q=First+Principles#Spencer_0624_4 [accessed 19 May 2016]. 42 Bennett Zon philosophy in which all organic and inorganic matter is unified. In ‘Progress: Its Law and Cause’ (1882), for example, he observes it in positively everything:

this law of organic progress is the law of all progress. Whether it be in the development of the Earth, in the development of Life upon its surface, the development of Society, of Government, of Manufactures, of Commerce, or Language, Literature, Science, Art, this same evolution of the simple into the complex, through a process of continuous differentiation, holds throughout. From the earliest traceable cosmical changes down to the latest results of civilization, we shall find that the transformation of the homogeneous into the heterogeneous, is that in which all Progress essentially consists.13 Progressive integration plays an inevitably important role in defining Spencer’s music criticism. Nigel Skaife calls music criticism ‘one of those port- manteau constructs that does variant and ubiquitous service’,14 but in Spencer’s case, fortunately, it is relatively easy to define because his work divides conveniently between ‘On the Origin and Function of Music’ (and occasional responses to it) and a small but intellectually not insignificant corpus of music criticism focusing on particular compositions and composers. The bulk of his music criticism can be found in three places: in his response to Edmund Gurney’s criticism in the Fortnightly Review (1876);15 a set of essays called Facts and Comments (1902);16 and the posthumously published An Autobiography (1904).17 His critique of Gurney anticipates issues described in Facts and Comments, and An Autobiography provides glimpses into Spencer’s musical life and appreciation. But it is Facts and Comments that provides the most illuminating selection of music criticism, comprising essays which refer indirectly to music (for example, ‘The Purpose of Art’), and those which resemble the standard genre of music criticism, such as ‘Developed Music’, ‘Meyerbeer’ or ‘Some Musical Heresies’. Spencer’s range of musical interest conforms to the generality of contemporary Victorian taste in classical music and concentrates largely on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century composers, including Handel, Gluck, Haydn, Mozart, Cherubini, Beethoven, Paganini, Meyerbeer, Berlioz, Mendelssohn, Chopin

13 Herbert Spencer, ‘Progress: Its Law and Cause’, Humboldt Library of Popular Science Literature 17/1 (1882), 234. 14 Nigel Clifford Scaife, ‘British Music Criticism in a New Era: Studies in Critical Thought 1894–1945’ (PhD diss., University of Oxford, 1994), 3. 15 Herbert Spencer, ‘The Origin and Function of Music’, Fraser’s Magazine (October 1857), in Literary Style and Music: Including Two Short Essays on Gracefulness and Beauty (New York: Philosophical Library, 1951), 88–106. 16 Herbert Spencer, Facts and Comments (London: Williams & Norgate, 1902/1907). 17 Herbert Spencer, An Autobiography, 2 vols (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1904). Spencer, Sympathy and the Oxford School 43 and Wagner. Like all music critics, his treatment of composers is never entirely favourable. While positive about Gluck’s use of melody, for example, Spencer censures his contrapuntal deficit; Handel speaks for him in this regard:

Skilful counterpoint has the general character that it does not repeat in immediate succession similar combinations of tones and similar directions of change; and by thus avoiding temporary over-tax of the nervous structures brought into action, keeps them in better condition for subsequent action. Absence of regard for this requirement characterizes the music of Gluck, of whom Handel said; ‘He knows no more counterpoint than my cook’; and it is this disregard which produces its cloying character.18 On the opposite end of the critical spectrum come Mozart and Beethoven: ‘Only in melodies of high types, such as the Addio of Mozart and Adelaide of Beethoven, do we see the two requirements simultaneously fulfilled. Musical genius is shown in achieving the decorative beauty without losing the beauty of emotional meaning.’19 And somewhere in the middle are the majority of composers, for whom Spencer has both praise and criticism in turn. Even many of Mozart’s sonatas, for instance, are ‘compositions in which there is little beyond a more or less skilful putting together of musical figures that are individually without much interest’.20

❧❧ Music Criticism and Sympathy On the surface, Spencer’s opinions may seem arbitrary, but in fact they stem from a methodical approach to identifying and interpreting those factors that give music its function – sympathy. According to Spencer:

In its bearings upon human happiness, this emotional language which musical culture develops and refines is only second in importance to the language of the intellect; perhaps not even second to it. For these modifications of voice produced by feelings are the means of exciting like feelings in others. Joined with gestures and expressions of face, they give life to the otherwise dead words in which the intellect utters its ideas, and so enable the hearer not only to understand the state of mind they accompany, but to partake of that state. In short they are the chief media of sympathy.21

18 Spencer, ‘The Origin and Function of Music’, 102. 19 Ibid., 101. 20 Spencer, ‘Developed Music’, Facts and Comments, 55. 21 Spencer, ‘The Origin and Function of Music’, 73–4. 44 Bennett Zon

Spencer’s use of the word sympathy needs some unpacking. Although deeply concerned for its emotional undergirding, he characterizes sympathy as a psychological force defining and unifying individual relationality between the musical object and participating subject, and between the participating subject and his or her social context. Rachel Ablow arrives at a not-dissimilar characterization when discussing the Victorian novel concerned with marriage; these create ‘a psychic structure through which the subject is produced, consolidated, or redefined. It is less interested in sympathy as a feeling, in other words, than in sympathy as a mode of relating to others and of defining a s e l f ’. 22 Janice Carlisle, likewise, views reading as ‘a process in which the subject is invited to identify through sympathy with the object of his perception’, developing morally significant ‘imaginative capacities’.23 Spencer treats music as Victorian novelists treat literature. For him, musical sympathy creates social altruism; indeed, musical sympathy generates our ability to repress ‘the antagonistic elements of our characters and to develop the social ones; to curb our purely selfish desires and exercise our unselfish ones; to replace private gratifications by gratifications resulting from or involving the pleasure of others’; it is ‘by this adaptation to the social state that the sympathetic side of our nature is being unfolded’.24 Two related psychological propositions underlie Spencer’s consideration of musical sympathy: sensation and relation, themselves linked by emotion in a relational combination which Christopher Herbert calls ‘Victorian relativity’. Victorian relativity arose from an almost visceral, scientific rejection of the kind of absolutism associated with ‘ideological and cryptotheological intent’.25 In Spencer, relativity not only signals a putative rejection of philosophical and theological absolutes, but, as was common in contemporary association psychology, the belief that the world was gradually constructed by the sensual (sensation) and cognitive/intellectual (relation) experience of each individual. For Spencer and other Victorian relativists, part of that construction involved a psychological contiguity between sensation and the mind which elicits an emotion. Philosopher James Mill defines relativity as ‘two classes of feelings; one, that which exists when the object of sense is present; another, that which exists after the object of sense has ceased to be present. The one class of feelings

22 Rachel Ablow, The Marriage of Minds: Reading Sympathy in the Victorian Marriage Plot (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 2. 23 Janice Carlisle in ibid., 1–2. 24 Spencer, ‘The Origin and Function of Music’, 74. 25 Christopher Herbert, Victorian Relativity: Radical Thought and Scientific Discovery (Chicago, IL, and London: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 21. Spencer, Sympathy and the Oxford School 45

I call SENSATIONS; the other class of feelings I call IDEAS.’26 Victorian psychologist and educational theorist Alexander Bain reiterates these classes as ‘the coalescence of sensations and ideas’.27 Clearly influenced by Helmholtz as much as Spencer, Bain maintains that music is not music unless sensed and identifiably organized as music by the perceiving mind: ‘As the pure muscular feelings, and the sensations of organic life, taste, smell, and touch, do not belong to Art, unless as conceived in idea, we must start from the sense of Hearing. All the pleasant varieties of sounds may enter into the artistic compositions, as in music’, but it is in ‘the co-operation of the Intellect’ that birth is given ‘to the fitting materials of aesthetic emotion’.28 Bain, like Spencer, also considers aesthetic emotion an aid to the social altruism of sympathy – what he calls the reciprocal ‘aim of a well-constituted society’.29 A composition, therefore, is designed to maximize pleasure; it is ‘doubtless nothing more than an adjustment of all those simple effects [e.g. melody, harmony, pulse, time and cadence] in such a way as to yield the highest degree of delight’.30 For Spencer, sympathy serves an evolutionary purpose to maximize fitness, and musical pleasure is an essential ingredient in sociological development. He is therefore adamant that sensation and relation should be equal partners (if not always equal halves), though some musicians he suggests ‘tend to over- value the relational elements. If the relational elements are good they will be apt to condone defects in the sensational elements.’31 In ‘The Purpose of Art’, relationality continues to serve a sympathetic evolutionary purpose, in which increased integration advances emotional depth as music progresses from simple to more complex forms:

Doubtless certain amounts of intellectual perception, implying appropriate culture, are needful for making possible the pleasurable feelings which music is capable of producing. These, however, are but means to an end, and it is a profound mistake to regard them as the end itself. An analogy will help us here. Before there can be sympathy there must have been gained some knowledge of the natural language of the emotions – what tones and changes of voice, what facial expressions, what movements of the body, signify certain states of mind. But the knowledge of this natural language does not constitute sympathy. There

26 James Mill, Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind, 2 vols, 2nd edn, Vol. I (London: Baldwin & Cradick, 1829), 52. 27 Alexander Bain, The Emotions and the Will, 2nd edn (London: Longman’s Green & Co., 1865), 35. 28 Ibid., 216 and 218. 29 Ibid., 83. 30 Bain, The Emotions and the Will, 226. 31 Spencer, ‘Some Musical Heresies’, 173. 46 Bennett Zon

may be clear perception of the meanings of all these traits without any production of fellow feeling. Similarly, then, with the distinction between the knowledge of musical expression in its complex developments, and the experience of those emotions to which the musical expression is instrumental. Only in so far as its cultivated perceptions form a means to that excitement of the feelings which the composer intended to produce, does the intellect properly play a part; and even then, in playing its indispensible part, it is apt to interfere unduly.32 Spencer’s musical ‘anti-intellectualism’ prompts him to construct a rather flimsy syllogism about the relational unity of musical compositions: the fittest pieces of music (i.e. those producing the most enduring emotional response) have similarly fit structural features; those features cause the most powerfully fit (if respectively variable) emotions; and therefore the fittest pieces are the most emotionally refined and ultimately poetical music. Popular tunes like the Marseillaise, Handel’s Largo, Pur Dicesti and Old Trowler provide good examples (Fig. 2.1).33 The more advanced music becomes, however, the more its structures integrate emotional and intellectual content symmetrically, and the more symmetrical the more sympathetic; thus in refined music ‘it is evident that the combinations of tones … may be developed into others which are still more expressive. If, with this idea in mind, Beethoven’s Adelaide, or some of Gluck’s melodies, be contemplated, many of the cadences may be recognized as idealized forms of the appropriate emotional utterances.’34 In poetical music, moreover:

in the highest type of music the phrases, cadences, and larger figures, are appropriate to stronger emotions of the kinds enumerated above. And here beyond the pleasure yielded by an elaborated pattern having forms pleasing by their likenesses and unlikenesses, we have the sympathetic pleasure yielded by these idealized utterances which we can imagine expressing our own emotions, had we the requisite musical genius. In addition to the beauty of the composition, there is the beauty of the components. Of illustrations, that which comes first to mind is Beethoven’s Septet; and I may join with this a piece of another class which is undeservedly neglected – Haydn’s Seven Last Words.35 In Spencer’s music criticism, therefore, symmetry is ultimately a prerequisite for sympathy. To paraphrase Bain, it is a concept of universal relativity in which ‘all objects of knowledge are two-sided, or go in couples’36 – a kind of

32 Spencer, ‘The Purpose of Art’, 32–3. 33 The Figure comes from Spencer, ‘Developed Music’, 46. 34 Ibid., 54. 35 Ibid., 56. 36 Alexander Bain, Logic, 2 vols, 2nd edn, Vol. I (London: Longmans, 1870/1873), 61. Spencer, Sympathy and the Oxford School 47

Fig. 2.1 – Song profiles illustrating length of intervals in vertical lines and length of notes in horizontal lines, Spencer, ‘Developed Music’, 46 relativity in which ‘nothing is just one thing by itself’.37 According to Spencer, although the causes of musical sympathy are often unknown, in some cases they are identifiable:

Symmetry is one. A chief element in melodic effect results from repetitions of phrases which are either identical, or differ only in pitch, or differ only in minor variations; there being in the first case the pleasure derived from perception of complete likeness, and in the other cases the greater pleasure derived from perception of likeness with difference – a perception which is more involved, and therefore exercises a greater number of nervous agents. Next comes, as a source of gratification, the consciousness of pronounced unlikeness or contrast, such as that between passages above the middle tones and passages below, or as that between ascending phrases and descending phrases. And then we rise to larger contrasts; as when, the first theme in a melody having been elaborated, there is introduced another having a certain kinship though in many respects different, after which there is a return to the first theme – a structure which yields more extensive and more complex perceptions of both differences and likenesses.38

37 Herbert, Victorian Relativity, 43. 38 Spencer, ‘The Origin and Function of Music’, 99–100. 48 Bennett Zon ❧❧ Sympathy and the Oxford School of Criticism Symmetry within a composition may not be absolutely prerequisite for creating musical sympathy according to Spencer, but symmetry between sensation and relation certainly is; and it is that kind of symmetry which captured the imagination of early figures in what Frank Howes dubbed the ‘Oxford school of criticism’.39 Oxford academic, composer and critic John Stainer (1840–1901) provides an especially useful illustration. In addition to writing extensively on music as part of academic and societal lecturing, he also wrote specifically on the art of music criticism, and that writing shows how closely he had read – and to some extent resisted – Spencer. ‘The Principles of Music Criticism’ (1880–1) and his more expansive philosophical tract Music in its Relation to the Intellect and the Emotions (1892) provide a compelling, if selective, theoretical comparison with Spencer. Stainer accepts Spencer’s chief ideas: first, the idea that music evolved through progressive integration as an impassioned form of speech. ‘If’, he suggests, ‘music be looked upon as a language in itself, capable of expressing the deepest thoughts and rousing the highest emotions, it may claim to be a higher form of speech – “where speech ends, music begins”’.40 He also readily identifies music criticism with an aspiration to uncover sympathy. ‘Our new critic’, he opines, ‘becomes highly rhetorical, and pleads that “the human heart is one; its highest and purest emotions are as readily attuned for sympathy in the heart of the peasant as of the prince”’.41 Stainer also deprecates an overly intellectual approach to music criticism: ‘The critic who can appreciate only the intellectual side of music – its form, its devices, and workmanship’ is ‘as bad a critic’ as they come.42 Bad critics particularly desensitize listeners to the experience and development of musical sympathy: ‘We professed critics’, he suggests, ‘are sorely tempted to lean too much to the scholastic side of our art; and by doing so we blunt our emotional receptivity’;43 tellingly, Stainer is able to quote Spencer’s close friend George Eliot in corroboration: ‘“In our eagerness to explain impressions, we often lose our hold of the sympathy that comprehends them.”’44 Stainer’s reference to Eliot is meaningful not just because it connects him to Eliot and Spencer, but also because it links him to Eliot’s husband,

39 Frank Howes, The English Musical Renaissance (London: Secker & Warburg, 1966), 355. 40 John Stainer, ‘The Principles of Music Criticism’, Proceedings of the Musical Association (1880–1), 35–52, at 43. 41 Ibid., 45. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid., 46. 44 Ibid. Spencer, Sympathy and the Oxford School 49 the psychologist G. H. Lewes (himself not unlike Alexander Bain in some respects). Lewes, like Eliot, stressed the complexity of activity that constitutes human perception, and especially the way that activity promotes sympathetic understanding.45 For ‘sensation’ and ‘relation’ in Spencer substitute ‘Feeling’ and ‘Science’ in Lewes: ‘Science is no transcript of Reality’, he proffers, ‘but an ideal construction framed out of the analysis of the complex phenomena given synthetically in Feeling, and expressed in abstractions’.46 As Rick Rylance postulates, for Lewes as for Spencer ‘“truth” can exist only in “feeling”, in sensually verifiable, and historically specific ways’.47 For Stainer, this has obvious appli- cability to music criticism, the purpose of which is part of a greater sociological whole designed to educate and therefore create sympathy across the full demographic spectrum of musical listeners. In Stainer’s music criticism, therefore, Beethoven and drawing-room ballads, classical string quartets and Christy’s Minstrels, become metaphorical pawns in the progressive integration of sensation into relation, and feeling into science. Where Lewes believes that ‘the higher faculties are evolved through social needs’,48 Stainer suggests that as education music criticism can promote social development: ‘The emotions and feelings are just as capable of education and training as the intellect itself; and criticism of art, and of the art of music especially, cannot possibly exist unless there is a healthy balance of the two.’49 If for Stainer sensation and relation, feeling and science, can be symmetrically balanced through music criticism, then he also propounds a Spencerian belief in the overarching evolutionary significance of its ability to produce sympathy – something Lewes may well associate with the evolution of morality broadly speaking; for Lewes, ‘Thought and Feeling’ are ‘the real cause of the elevation of Animal Psychology into Human Psychology, the sensible into the ideal worlds, Knowledge into Science, Emotion into Sentiment, and Appetite into Morality.’50 Like Spencer, Lewes subscribes to a relational interpretation of a world inflected by evolution, a world in which ‘Things as groups of Relations’51 – or what Bain describes as ‘two-sidedness’ or ‘going in couples’ – combine in a progression of increasingly integrated complexity. But for Stainer and Spencer,

45 Rick Rylance, Victorian Psychology and British Culture, 1850–1880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 257. 46 George Henry Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind, 5 vols, Vol. II (London: Trübner, 1874–9), 82–3. 47 Rylance, Victorian Psychology, 262. 48 Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind, Vol. IV, 6. 49 Stainer, ‘The Principles of Music Criticism’, 45. 50 Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind, Vol. V, 443. 51 Ibid., Vol. II, 9. 50 Bennett Zon the progression towards sympathy is often fraught because man tends to use his intellect to suppress feeling as he strives to overcome his animal nature. For Stainer, music criticism has a moral obligation to reveal that basic tension and educate its reader towards sympathy. As types of melodic progression, treatment of chords, forms and their musical construction become familiar as ‘idioms in speech’52 they gradually cease to be new: ‘they become incorporated as part of the syntax of music, so do they come within the scope of intellect; in other words, as the Unknown in the Art becomes known and systematized, so in proportion the field of the operations of the Intellect is extended, and the effect on the Emotions is pushed farther back’.53 According to Stainer, this is the challenge to composers of the most highly developed forms of music – to balance the increasingly oppositional forces operating upon compositional design. Spencer recognizes this evolutionary dilemma when describing the predicament of Wagner:

A composer must write [today] to express, not feelings but enlightening ideas, and the listener must seek out and appreciate these ideas. The avowed theory of Wagner was that the purpose of music is to teach … the antagonism between intellectual appreciation and emotional satisfaction, is essentially the same as one which lies at the root of our mental structure – the antagonism between sensation and perception; and it runs up through the whole content of the mind, rising to such partial conflicts between thought and feeling as those which accompany critical judgments of music.54 Stainer did not share Spencer’s hostility to Wagner’s intellectualism, however, and although guarded in praise, his inaugural Oxford address risks describing Wagner as a composer of the very first rank.55 In some respects, Stainer’s attitude signals a more fundamental difference between him and Spencer, especially over what could be called his ‘Origin and Function of Music Criticism’. For although deeply indebted to Spencer’s evolutionary ideas – at the end of Music in its Relation to the Intellect and the Emotions he dubs Spencer a great philosopher and true prophet – Stainer questions the function of music criticism in a way that Spencer only questions the function of music itself. Quoting Weismann, he opines that ‘it is more than ever important that we should seek to make ourselves conversant with this “language of the emotions”, not by abandoning ourselves to “an uncritical love of violent stimula- tion”, but by throwing the searching light of intellect on to its origin, processes,

52 Stainer, Music in its Relation to the Intellect and the Emotions, 16. 53 Ibid. 54 Spencer, ‘The Purpose of Art’, 32–3. 55 John Stainer, The Present State of Music in England (Oxford: Horace Hart, 1889), 7. Spencer, Sympathy and the Oxford School 51 and results’.56 Altogether, these comments hint at a critic tending to favour mind over matter – comments reflected in Jeremy Dibble’s astute observation of Stainer’s predilection for abstract musical forms: ‘[Stainer] endorsed the supremacy of symphonic music, in all its formal involution and abstractness, as the highest achievement of the composer and the aspiration of the sophisticated listener.’57 Between ‘The Principles of Music Criticism’ and Music in its Relation to the Intellect and the Emotions, Stainer provides a representative bibliography of Victorian musical and philosophical reading, including William Carpenter, J. D. Morrell, William Pole, James Mark Baldwin, Avary William Holmes Forbes and Bernard Bosanquet, as well as Schiller, Helmholtz, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Donavan, Locke, Spencer, Sully, Gurney, Herbarth, Hanslick, Véron and entries in more general encyclopaedias and philosophical dictionaries. Stainer’s successor to the Heather Professorship, C. Hubert H. Parry (1848– 1918), would continue this tradition with arguably greater vigour through a succession of important books and articles on music equally immersed in contemporary scientific and philosophical thought. Parry’s devotion to Spencer is, if anything, even stronger than Stainer’s. ‘Parry-phrasing’ Spencer’s theory of musical origins in impassioned speech, he reiterates all its underlying evolutionary propositions: all music evolved from simplicity to complexity; only the fittest musical structures (and composers) survive; and later stages recapitulate earlier ones. The excitement of a mob or the shouting of boys, for example, produces tones of joy, rage and defiance – these utterances are ‘music in the rough, and out of such elements the art of music has grown, just as the elaborate arts of human speech must have grown of the grunts and whining of primeval savages’.58 The fittest music survives only:

by the work of those who went before them; and it will be impossible for us to understand its qualities and characteristics, or to realise justly the light it throws upon the state of music in our own time, without tracing the conditions which led to it, and following the steps from the small and insignificant beginnings to the masterpieces which we regard as triumphs of our art … The study of the steps from elementary simplicity up to our complex condition of art shows how progression after progression became admissible by being made intelligible.59

56 Stainer, Music in its Relation to the Intellect and the Emotions, 64. 57 Jeremy Dibble, John Stainer: A Life in Music (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2007), 264. 58 C. Hubert H. Parry, The Evolution of the Art of Music, 4th edn (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., Ltd., 1904), 6. 59 C. Hubert H. Parry, ‘On Some Bearings of the Historical Method upon Music’, Proceedings of the Musical Association 11 (1884–5), 1–17, at 3–4. 52 Bennett Zon

At the same time a musical apex like Wagner’s recapitulates the history of his art:

The wide sweeps of his sequences, the long and intricate growth toward some supreme climax, the width and clearness of the main contrasts, the immense sweep of his basses, the true grandeur of his poetic conceptions, keep the mind occupied enough with the larger aspects of the matter. And though, as in human life, all the little moments are realities, their prominence is merged in the greater events which form the sum of them.60 It is an indication of the depth of Parry’s devotion to Spencer that a discussion of musical sympathy occupies the full fourteen pages of ‘Preliminaries’ in The Evolution of the Art of Music. He begins by suggesting, like Spencer, that the development of sympathy is a basic component in human individual and corporate societal evolution:

There are probably but few people in the world so morose as to find no pleasure either in the exercise or the receipt of sympathy … Whether it is the higher development of an original instinct which enabled mankind to rise above the rest of the animal world by co-operation and mutual helpfulness, or whether it is the lot of human beings, it is obviously a quality without which society could hardly continue to exist in the complicated state of organisation at which it has arrived.61 Spencer treats sympathy extensively in his Principles of Psychology, directly correlating it to evolutionary fitness. When sympathetic excitations are more frequent, he suggests, they extend to more numerous feelings:

The sympathies become the widest and the strongest where the three forms of sociality coexist [fear, pleasure, family], along with high intelligence, and where there are no conditions which necessitate repression of the sympathies … [moreover] The evolution of those highest social sentiments which have sympathy for their root, has been all along checked by those activities which the struggle for existence between tribes and between nations has necessitated.62 Spencer is a major, if largely unacknowledged, preoccupation in The Evolution of the Art of Music; summing up his preliminary thoughts, for example, Parry suggests that:

60 Parry, Evolution of the Art of Music, 329. 61 Ibid., 1. 62 Herbert Spencer, ‘Principles of Psychology’, in F. Howard Collins, An Epitome of The Synthetic Philosophy (London and Edinburgh: Williams and Norgate, 1889), 329. Spencer, Sympathy and the Oxford School 53

The raw material of music is found in the expressive noises and cries which human beings as well as animals give vent to under excitement of any kind; and their contagious power is shown, even in the incipient stage, by the sympathy which they evoke in other sentient beings. Such cries pass within the range of art when they take any definite form, just as speech begins when vague signals of sound give place to words; and scales begin to be formed when musical figures become definite enough to be remembered.63 Parry, like Stainer, emphasizes Spencerian sympathy in music in the way George Eliot emphasizes it in her novels – not merely as an equal among other moral obligations but as ‘a fundamental mode of understanding’.64 And it is as a fundamental mode of understanding that we can come to understand Parry’s use of sympathy more meaningfully. Parry, like Eliot, uses sympathy as Lewes proposes, ‘as a living again through our own past in a new form’.65 For Parry, Wagner represents an apogee of this recapitulationary framework for sympathy; indeed the leitmotif not only recapitulates in microcosm elements of his music in macrocosm, it also sympathetically vibrates with musical history: ‘The instinctive aim of the most highly gifted composer is to arrive at that articulation of minutiae which makes every part of the organism alive.’66 At first there were vague meanderings in the arias of Hasse and Porpora; then Mozart became more finished; Beethoven progressed still further; and by Schubert ‘accompaniments to songs are often made up of little nuclei which express in the closest terms of the situation, and the way in which he knits them together is a perfect counterpart, in little, of Wagner’s ultimate method’.67 As a form, the leitmotif not only vibrates sympathetically with history, it also instantiates ‘the sympathy which they evoke in other sentient beings’;68 in other words, as ontogenic form, leitmotifs not only recapitulate the phylogenic form of musical history, they also recapitulate the sentient, sympathetically aspirant life embodied in their representation. Perhaps unwittingly, Matthew Bribitzer-Stull captures the leitmotif’s recapitulatory essence:

the reason the Wagnerian leitmotif fits the epic narrative so well is its embodiment of time. Simply by virtue of being developed, thematic statements need time to

63 Parry, Evolution of the Art of Music, 12–13. 64 Brigid Lowe, Victorian Fiction and the Insights of Sympathy: An Alternative to the Hermeneutics of Suspicion (London, New York and Delhi: Anthem Press, 2007), 112. 65 Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind, Vol. 3, 88, cited in Lowe, Victorian Fiction and the Insights of Sympathy, 112. 66 Parry, Evolution of the Art of Music, 322. 67 Ibid., 322–3. 68 Ibid., 13. 54 Bennett Zon

reach the status of the true leitmotif. Moreover, Wagnerian techniques of foreshad- owing and reminiscence can alert the listener consciously (or subconsciously) to the passage of time in the narrative. Finally, an enormity of motivic connections between themes carves out a motivic space that is itself epic in nature.69 Bribitzer-Stull may as well be quoting Spencerian Parry; according to Parry, so seamless was the leitmotif’s evolutionary emergence that even Wagner himself was unaware of it; as he says, ‘Wagner perhaps hardly realized the full significance of his Leitmotive. They were indeed not a device consciously adopted, but coming, like all evolutionary ideas, in the natural sequence of expansion … It is such a musical utterance as expresses something; a unity which can grow and expand.’70 Wagner himself acknowledged this, recognizing in melodic moments the action of presentiment and recollection.71 The verse-melody, for example, is ‘the individual which both bears and is borne, and just as it is conditioned as issuing from an emotional surrounding of its excitement of feeling; or as equally proceeding from other excitements of feeling, whether interwoven or strange, or whether already felt or waiting to become so’.72 Yet the leitmotif is itself a component element in the elicitation of individual and corporate human sympathy – ‘our own sympathy’, Wagner calls it, ‘which has been purposely upheld in its preparedness’.73 Parry picks up on sympathy’s life-affirming dynamic when characteristically ascribing almost redemptive properties to Wagner’s leitmotif. Wagner brought music:

into touch with realities, to express something which is human, to add immeas- urably to the power of great thoughts, and to stir noble emotions. Not to leave the being merely in a pleasant state of indefinite exaltation by abstract beauty and abstract ideas, but to make men feel what is eloquent enhanced by an eloquence which transcends mere speech. To give men trembling on the verge of materialism a new revelation of spiritual possibilities, and extinguish pessimism by giving a new meaning to life.74 Parry ends where he begins, symmetrically, with critical remarks on the sociological (Spencerian) basis of musical sympathy, recapitulating his earlier

69 Matthew Bribitzer-Stull, Understanding the ‘Leitmotiv’: From Wagner to Hollywood Film Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 295. 70 C. Hubert H. Parry, Style in Musical Art (London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd., 1911), 170. 71 Holly Watkins, Metaphors of Depth in German Musical Thought: From E. T. A. Hoffman to Arnold Schoenberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 133. 72 Richard Wagner, Opera and Drama, 2 vols, Vol. 2, trans. Edwin Evans (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons; and London: William Reeves, 1913), 617–18. 73 Wagner, Opera and Drama, Vol. 2, 618. 74 Parry, Style in Musical Art, 170. Spencer, Sympathy and the Oxford School 55 thoughts. The highest moments in art embody the highest ideals and sentiments, and offer us a means of enriching ‘human experience in the noblest manner; and through such sympathies and interests the humanising influences which mankind will hereafter have at its disposal may be infinitely enlarged’.75 But with the last of Howes’s Oxford circle of music critics, Henry Hadow (1859–1937), sympathy for Spencerian sympathy begins to wane, or at least change. ‘The Balance of Expression and Design in Music’ (1923–4), published serially in three parts, reveals the extent of Hadow’s sympathy, or what he calls ‘goodness incarnate’:

The composer lets us hear, not nature, but something behind nature – through his ears. And he has two vehicles by which to do it. He can, on the one hand, raise us through the emotional nature, of which love, beauty, goodness are the highest point. Or he can lead us along the other path which leads through truth up to beauty, because the avenue to all perfect beauty is truth. And when truth, beauty and goodness are all combined together there rises that pyramid of reality of which goodness incarnate in itself is the apex: so that the aesthetic basis of this interrelation between form and design is that in the union of these two Music is further removed from all our every-day apprehension than any other art, or science, or any other form of human learning, or any human apprehension at all.76 Hadow’s reluctance to ethicize goodness into evolutionary sympathy suggests that in his opinion music has less to do with its social function than its origin in the experience of the listener, and in some respects this harks back to the more observational, descriptive music criticism of Spencer’s Facts and Comments, in which sympathy speaks by example. Spencer’s Meyerbeer, for instance, ‘expresses passion without sacrificing beauty of form’.77 Hadow, similarly, claims that music ‘adds the conception, the emotion of beauty, the emotion of wonder to it. And it is because of its completeness, because of the exact balance which in ultimate perfection it holds between emotion and design, between content and form, between truth of feeling and the beauty of line and colour with which that feeling is expressed.’78 But even if in principle Hadow accepts the functionality of Spencer’s evolutionary interpretation of musical sympathy, he also resists using evolution to analogize or phylogenize its social function beyond music itself. While on

75 Ibid., 337. 76 W. Henry Hadow, ‘The Balance of Expression and Design in Music I’, Proceedings of the Musical Association (1923–4), 19–30, at 28. 77 Spencer, ‘Meyerbeer’, Facts and Comments, 82. 78 Hadow, ‘The Balance of Expression and Design in Music I’, 28. 56 Bennett Zon the one hand he treats Wagner, for example, as a Carlylean hero – as an ontogenic force recapitulating the phylogenic totality of his nation and art – on the other hand he is the fittest Spencerian (or even Darwinian) survivor of his own individual experiences of life.79 For Hadow, individual Wagnerian genius is indicative of progress only insofar as artistic progress signals the evolutionary progress of civilization more widely: ‘if opera is to be something more than an idle amusement, if it is to embody a national character and fulfil a national aspiration, if, in one word, it is to take rank as a serious Art, then in the whole range of its record will be found no greater name than that of Wagner’.80 Although, like Spencer, Hadow maintains that ‘the law of organic unity must prevail in every living work’81 – including musical compositions – it is debatable just how far his belief in that unity extends: ‘This law of organic progress is [may not be] the law of all progress.’82 Music must ‘reach through sensation to the mental faculties within’;83 the composer must stand in ‘true relation to his idea’;84 and there must be symmetry between sensation and relation. But the emotion, which for Spencer leads directly to sympathy, should not necessarily be deemed to contribute to the evolution of social altruism. Rather, the appreciation of music is ‘similar in kind, though not similar in source, to our intellectual love of truth or our moral love of goodness’.85 This is an important distinction for Hadow. Whereas Spencer, Parry and Stainer treat musical sympathy as a driving emotional force propelling human development through progressive integration, Hadow limits its power to expression and apprehension. Whereas the scientific laws of music (and by extension music criticism) are themselves transitory – they are governed by change and only ‘tentatively constructed during the gradual development of the musical faculty’86 – there are certain permanent psychological laws, like sympathy, which are ‘coeval with humanity itself’.87 Sympathy, in other words, has no discernible place in the evolutionary function of music, but signals a manifestation of its origin

79 Bennett Zon, ‘From Great Man to Fittest Survivor: Reputation, Recapitulation and Survival in Victorian Concepts of Wagner’s Genius’, Musicae Scientiae 13/2 (2009–10), 415–45, at 434. 80 W. Henry Hadow, Studies in Modern Music: Hector Berlioz, Robert Schumann, Richard Wagner (London: Seeley & Co., Ltd., 1911), 325–6. 81 Ibid., 42. 82 Spencer, ‘Progress: Its Law and Cause’, 234. 83 Hadow, Studies in Modern Music, 47. 84 Ibid., 32. 85 Ibid., 46. 86 Ibid., 13. 87 Ibid. Spencer, Sympathy and the Oxford School 57 deep within the human psyche. Music may be both sensuous and spiritual, Hadow suggests, but its ‘influence on the spiritual side of our nature is remote and secondary’.88

❧❧ Conclusion Although Stainer and Parry were roughly contemporary, Hadow was over twenty years younger than Stainer and expressed a later generational response to evolutionary thought, and so his reluctance to attribute evolutionary properties to music signals a change not only in music criticism but in the intellectual direction of its scientific context. Whereas in the 1880s and 90s Spencer could legitimately claim to be one of the principal spokesmen of the non-Darwinian revolution, by the turn of the century and soon after his death in 1903 the reputation of his ideas had begun to diminish. In part, criticism arose from an increasingly Darwinian ferment, as genetic science gradually began to prove the validity of his theories – what Peter Bowler calls the Mendelian Revolution – named after the founder of modern genetics, Gregor Mendel.89 In British musical contexts of the time, the Mendelian Revolution coincided with a Darwinian rear-guard action against Spencer, embodied, for example, in the work of Cambridge psychologist, music critic and philosopher, spiritualist and anti-Spencerian extremist Edmund Gurney, author of one of the period’s most influential books,The Power of Sound (1880). But would a gradual change from non-Darwinism to Darwinism effect a change in attitudes towards musical sympathy among critics? Perhaps it did. An indicator is found in a change of vocabulary, from the word ‘sympathy’ as used by Spencer to the word ‘empathy’ coined by the philosopher Edward Titchener in 1909. Theorists of musical empathy suggest more than a semantic difference. Felicity Laurence traces the history of empathy back to Adam Smith’s concept of sympathy in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). Sympathy, according to Smith, is a type of ‘fellow feeling’, imagining how it would feel to be someone else and through that feeling producing the foundation for a moral life.90 Empathy, according to Titchener, is a ‘feeling into’ another person [Einfühlung]. As Eric Clarke, Tia DeNora and Jonna Vuoskoski note, ‘The distinction between imagining how one would feel [sympathizing] and simply feeling with another [empathizing] is crucial, since it places Smith’s notion of sympathy in the domain of imaginative reason

88 Ibid., 46. 89 Bowler, Non-Darwinian Revolution, 113–25. 90 Felicity Laurence, ‘Music and Empathy’, in Olivier Urbain, ed., Music and Conflict Transformation: Harmonies and Dissonances in Geopolitics (London: I. B. Tauris, 2008), 13–25. 58 Bennett Zon rather than involuntary affect, and makes clear the role of cultural artefacts (paintings, literature, drama, music) as a means of socially learning that sympathetic attitude.’91 Is empathy, therefore, a more implicitly Darwinian concept than sympathy, and what can the Oxford School of British music criticism tell us about it? According to Paul Ekman, Darwin is acutely concerned for the innately evolutionary properties of human sympathy,92 and like Spencer, he attributes broadly evolutionary value to characteristics of compassion and altruism. But while for Darwin music may signal and elicit memories, habits and even instincts shrouded in the mists of time, for Spencer those memories have a collective, as much as an individual, force. Darwin views music (like birdsong) mainly as a function of sexual selection. For Darwin the quality of a male song catalyses an individual female response, but as a good evolutionary recapitulationist Spencer attributes individual ontogenic characteristics to social phylogenic organisms like culture. Drawing upon a symmetrical framework of sensation and relation Spencer’s synthetic programme accords music and music criticism a higher purpose in the integrated progression of society. Certainly Stainer and Parry give that impression, but Hadow is more reserved. To advance social fitness, Hadow, arguably like Darwin, invests more intensely in the individual empathic response than Spencer, even though Spencer was deeply concerned for music’s emotional effect upon the individual listener. If, as David Howe says, sympathy is me-oriented but empathy is you-oriented,93 Stainer and Parry use music criticism to illustrate the evolutionary benefit of a social ‘me’, whereas Hadow uses it to deepen ‘me’s’ evolutionary sense of ‘you’. The music critic and Anglican priest Reverend Haweis calls music ‘the mother of sympathy’,94 and perhaps in this respect Spencer’s sympathy is the mother of modern musical empathy, as the Oxford School of music criticism suggests. Perhaps, then, British music criticism can illustrate a broader cultural movement than can be observed in musical history alone. It can help illustrate music’s contribution to an essential chapter in the history of science – the evolution of sympathy into empathy, and the evolution of empathy into a modern form of cultural understanding.

91 Eric Clarke, Tia DeNora and Jonna Vuoskoski, ‘Kinds, Mechanisms, Contents and Origins of Musical Empathizing’, reply to comments on ‘Music, Empathy, and Cultural Understanding’, Physics of Life Reviews 15 (2015), 61–88, at 63. 92 Paul Ekman, ‘Darwin’s Compassionate View of Human Nature’, Journal of the American Medical Association 303/6 (2010), 557–8. 93 David Howe, Empathy: What It Is and Why It Matters (Houndsmill: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 12. 94 The Rev. H. R. Haweis, My Musical Life (London, New York and Bombay: Longman, Green & Co., 1898), 118. 1 James William Davison (Royal College of Music/ArenaPAL) 2 Henry Chorley (Royal College of Music/ArenaPAL) 3 Herbert Spencer 4 John Stainer (Royal College of Music/ArenaPAL) 5 Hubert Parry (Royal College of Music/ArenaPAL) Chapter 3 Free Thought and the Musician: Ernest Walker, the ‘English Hanslick’

Jeremy Dibble

ogether with Ernest Newman and Edward Dent, Ernest Walker T (1870–1949) was one of the most prolific critics of his generation. The little we know of Walker’s life is contained in the somewhat sketchy, hagiog- raphical account by his loyal disciple, Margaret Deneke, published by Oxford University Press two years after his death in 1951. A university man through and through, Walker remained wedded to the intellectual world of Oxford and Balliol College for his entire career; Balliol both shaped and nurtured his profession as a writer, commentator, composer and pianist for more than sixty years. Entering the College in 1887, he read Classics before devoting himself to musical study in the 1890s, taking his BMus (1893) and DMus (1898) degrees at the University. After his studies, he was appointed assistant organist at Balliol to the college’s Director of Music, John Farmer, and became organist after Farmer’s death in 1901. Continuing Farmer’s pioneering work of establishing a Sunday Concert series at Balliol (which attracted the ire of strict Sabbatarians in Oxford), Walker raised the Concerts’ profile to a national level, took part in them and featured his own compositions in the programme. Walker held the Directorship of Music at Balliol until 1925, when he gave up the position to devote himself to composition. He resigned the organistship of the chapel in 1913, however, when he clearly underwent a major crisis of religious faith.1 For Walker this event proved to be of major significance, for it steered his attitudes to musicology in a new direction and shaped his views towards music and its relationship to religion with a more radical, vituperative edge. Together with his work as a practitioner, and his participation in the Oxford University Musical Club, Walker was also a teaching member (and for a few years Choragus) of the Music Faculty during the times of Parry, Parratt and Allen.2 His work, consequently, contributed in a significant way to musical

1 Margaret Deneke, Ernest Walker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951), 82–3. 2 Deneke tells us that Stainer ‘put down [Walker’s] name as one of the teachers of the University, but for years this was purely formal’ (Deneke, Ernest Walker, 64). It was, 64 Ernest Walker, the ‘English Hanslick’ 65 life in Oxford, but more importantly to the recognition of music as an academic discipline, an independent faculty of which was founded at the University five years before his death in 1949. At this juncture Walker had contributed hun- dreds of articles, columns and reviews to newspapers and journals (many of them unsigned). Though markedly less prolific in terms of published books (which sets him apart from Newman and Dent), his A History of Music in England, published in 1907, soon established itself as the most important and influential appraisal of English music as a creative art for the best part of the twentieth century. When Walker arrived in Oxford in 1887, evolutionist thought was already exerting its powerful sway in the musical circles of Oxford University, and Parry’s writings, notably Studies of Great Composers (1887) and The Evolution of the Art of Music (1893; rev. 1896), confirmed the influences of Ruskin’s moral aesthetics of art, Stuart Mill’s utilitarianism and, above all, Spencer’s ‘Social Darwinism’. This typically English mindset would remain strong well into the twentieth century, and Parry’s influence on Walker, notably that of the composer-critic, was considerable, not so much in the manner of Parry’s evolutionist thinking, but more fundamentally in the broader domain of empiricism, a philosophical imperative which had dominated the British scene since Locke, Hume and the Scottish Enlightenment. However, another significant sphere of philosophical ideology, also situated in Oxford, had also set itself up, essentially in opposition to Spencer’s ‘Social Darwinism’ and the popular empiricist concepts of Mill. This movement, commonly known as ‘British Idealism’ and derived from the German idealism of Hegelian philosophy, was led by T. H. Green at Balliol and F. H. Bradley at Merton. Concerned about the metaphysical nature of reality, these men rejected Spencer’s materialistic view of the world, asserting that the only access gained to reality was through what was provided by the mind and its contents. It was this rationale that informed Walker’s formative years, largely through the influence of two other Balliol academics, R. L. Nettleship and W. R. Hardie. After T. H. Green’s death in 1882, Nettleship took over his teaching at Balliol and passed on to his students Green’s principles, which he attempted to amplify. In his lectures on logic, otherwise to be understood as the theory of knowledge, he endeavoured to articulate his ideas of epistemology in his Philosophical Lectures and Remains (published posthumously in 1897):

To study the theory of a thing, then, ought to mean to rethink the thing; and in so doing to recreate it for ourselves; which is the only way in which the fact can become really the fact for us. To study the theory of knowledge should mean, accordingly, to realize gradually what the fact called knowledge means. The use

however, only under Parry that his teaching duties commenced. 66 Jeremy Dibble

of language; discovery, observation, experimentation; reasoning, judging, proof; force, space, time; causation, subject, object – these are all facts, parts (to speak roughly) of the great fact called knowledge. For a man to realize something of what is implied in this fact assuredly has its value or ‘use’. It means that he is so far better off, has more in him, is more in contact with reality. And as reality is one, and all truths are ultimately connected, a person who is in a truer state of mind about one part of reality, is so far in a more favourable position for understanding any other part.3 Nettleship was also a classicist at heart, and in tutoring Walker in the same discipline, he also inculcated a strong sense of the Platonic in his pupil. Hence, this combination of Hegelianism and Platonism, so typical of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ‘British Idealism’, drew Walker to the logic, intellectualism and ‘inner life’ of pure instrumental music and to the ideology of ‘absolute music’ of which German art was the pinnacle. As a writer, critic, teacher and performer – and it is important to remember that Walker was a practitioner as well as a theoretician – this background also meant that he brought a forensic disposition to each musical object he encountered, whether it was a problem of performance, an edition, a musical work, a monograph or article, and each was subject to a process of re-examination and reappraisal. Experiencing increasing religious scepticism during the 1890s, he developed an interest in the agnostic writings of Leslie Stephen, notably in Essays on Freethinking and Plainspeaking. Writing to Stephen about the possible reprint of the book in January 1897, Walker declared: ‘I am sure that all who are anxious for clear-headed honesty in religious questions would be grateful for the [new] distribution of a book which enforces lessons so painfully rarely taught, and more than ever needed at the present time.’4 It was this inclination towards agnosticism (and eventually to atheism) and the belief that religious doctrine was deleterious to liberal thought which eventually informed Walker’s desire for a new, free-thinking approach to the art of criticism. Moreover, his emphasis on ‘free thought’ also marked him out as one of a new breed of objective commentators for whom personal regard, bias or partiality had no part to play in the modern business of criticism, even among colleagues and friends. ‘What is often considered as a difficulty in dealing with living or only recently deceased composers’, he insisted, ‘seems to me, I confess, no practical difficulty at all. In his official capacity, no critic of literature or art or anything else recognizes the existence of such a thing as

3 J. L. Nettleship, ‘The Value of Theory’, from Lectures on Logic, in A. C. Bradley and G. R. Benson, eds, Philosophical Lectures and Remains, Vol. I (London: Macmillan & Co., 1897), 125. 4 Letter from Walker to Leslie Stephen, 23 January 1897, GB-Obac. Ernest Walker, the ‘English Hanslick’ 67 personal friendship, past or present; criticism on any other terms is merely a roundabout name for dishonesty.’5 In this regard, his appreciation of Farmer, in an illuminating article for the Musical Gazette in December 1901, suggested that Farmer, for all his unpopularity within the musical profession, inculcated within his protégé a sense of hard-nosed frankness and unapologetic polemi- cism for which Walker soon developed a reputation: ‘Good-natured tolerance of what is known (or ought to be known) to be bad is the crying sin of nine out of ten English musicians; and from this sin Mr John Farmer was, every moment of his life, absolutely free.’6 Walker’s first significant published effort, a paper for the Musical Association on Brahms (April 1899) was both a personal homage and apologia written in the wake of the composer’s death two years earlier. For Walker, Brahms’s music enshrined a cerebral process, which carried traditionally understood termi- nologies to new levels of comprehension and significance. What is more, his Hegelian, idealist background perceived a new ‘secret’ life beyond the surface of musical architecture:

Few words in music technology have been more abused than ‘form’. The orthodox scheme of fugue-form given in many text-books is in its origin a mere academic abstraction, and sonata-form has often been looked upon as simply a piece of ingenious mechanism. It really makes matters clearer if, instead of ‘form’, we speak of ‘organic design’ or ‘organic unity’.7 Echoing the sentiments and judgements of Hanslick’s Vom Musikalisch- Schönen, he challenged those detractors (such as Bernard Shaw) who perceived only academic dullness in Brahms’s Doric classicism, and instead claimed that there was a beauty in the composer’s equilibrium of material, design and expression:

The beauty, no doubt, is quiet, and the passion is sane; but to deny that the beauty and the passion are to be found in Brahms’ work as a whole is, I think, to show oneself either unacquainted with the bulk of that work or incapable of distinguishing between beauty and sensuousness, and between emotion and hysteria.8

5 Ernest Walker, A History of Music in England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1907), 292. 6 Ernest Walker, ‘Mr John Farmer’, in Free Thought and the Musician (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946), 24. 7 Ernest Walker, ‘Brahms’, Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association (1898–9), 118. 8 Ibid. 68 Jeremy Dibble

More quintessential, however, was Walker’s eagerness to point to the very heart of Brahms’s musical thought and to the ‘cardinal principle’ of the composer’s creative aim: ‘[He] knows what the right function of music is, what in its nature it can do, and what it cannot. In other words, he is the great prophet in these latter days of what I consider to be music, so to speak, with a capital M – that is, “absolute music.”’9 This was Walker’s uncompromising ideal and the yardstick by which he judged all music he encountered. In the wake of his first scholarly production for the Musical Association, Walker founded his own edited journal, the Musical Gazette, in 1899, a tri-annual publication whose short, pithy unsigned articles, many of them by its editor, sought to isolate a wide variety of emerging issues in Britain’s proliferat- ing musical profession. They also tended to reflect the author’s personal preoccupations. ‘Some Thought on Recent Music’ (1 January 1900), which criticised the escalation of patriotic music at the height of the Boer War, reflected his liberal politics; ‘The Art of Accompanying’ (1 March 1901) provided early insight into the art of accompaniment when it had yet to be properly considered a legitimate discipline; an article on ‘Hymn Tunes’ (1 July 1901) provided an early defence for the new taste in pre-nineteenth-century hymnody at the expense of the ‘degenerate’ high-Victorian art form; ‘In Defence of English Song’ (1 July 1901) was bold enough to gainsay Ernest Newman, who had denounced the present state of the national repertoire; and in ‘A Suggestion to Folk-Song Singers’ he advocated the performance of folk songs without accompaniment (1 July 1902) at a time when folk-song arrangements were becoming a popular commercial commodity. Walker’s well-known candidness, however, was also the subject of concern for his publisher, Joseph Williams, who felt compelled to act as censor over unflattering comments made about the music of Gounod:

To put it tersely, there are three or more London firms holding valuable copyrights (in point of sale) by the late Charles Gounod. It would be perfectly easy for these people to form a coalition and start a law-suit claiming damages from me for causing a diminution of and an injury in the sale of their copyrights by the article in question. Further on, I take no account of the so called ‘trade spleen’ which this affair would engender. It would not affect you, but it would me very considerably.10 After the cessation of theMusical Gazette in 1902, Walker completed articles for the second edition of Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, edited by Fuller Maitland, the most significant of which were ‘Oratorio’, ‘Debussy’ and ‘Degrees in Music’, but his main project was the completion of two books.

9 Ibid., 121. 10 Letter from Joseph Williams to Walker, 9 November 1900, GB-Obac. Ernest Walker, the ‘English Hanslick’ 69

The first was a small monograph, essentially a companion volume for the music-lover, on Beethoven for the series The Music of the Masters edited by Wakeling Dry. This was Walker’s first foray into the world of more popular musicology, and it is no surprise that Beethoven, who shared the summit of Walker’s musical and intellectual hierarchy with Brahms, was the subject of missionary promulgation. More importantly, however, the book articulated an analytical mindset, a concern for the musical text, which would form a central strand of the author’s particular admixture of cerebral application and practical illumination:

great art is something in connection with which language, which after all is only one of the media for the expression of thought, is both inadequate and irrelevant. We may throw out vague adjectives: but the essence is far too deep and subtle to fix in this clumsy way. Still, beyond our attempts at analysis of externals, it is all we can do: but the last word of any lover of Beethoven who has ventured to write a book about him that touches merely the fringes of the theme must be to send readers to the music itself. To talk about what we do not know is a singularly futile proceeding: our business, if we wish to try to go ever so little on the way to understand Beethoven, is to read or perform or hear his works, remembering always that, for every one who claims to be a musician, to reverence the great composers and to keep oneself artistically alive are the first and last commandments.11 Walker’s preoccupation with the musical content of Beethoven, symptomatic of his philosophical (‘idealist’) predilection for the musical ‘thought process’ and the desire for the musical text to speak for itself, is also confirmed in the somewhat unusual presentation of a select and critical bibliography in the book’s preliminary pages.12 Here, characteristically, he was forthright in expressing his opinions of the literature he had accessed; moreover, his bias was clearly for sound technical judgement and analytical acumen which amounted to scholarly excellence.13 Examples include, Dannreuther’s article on Beethoven for Macmillan’s Magazine (‘of much interest’), Hadow’s chapter on the Viennese Period for the recently published Oxford History of Music (‘contains an excellent chapter on Beethoven’), Parry’s The Art of Music and

11 Ernest Walker, Beethoven (London: John Lane, the Bodley Head, 1905), 186. 12 Ibid., ix–xi. 13 It is perhaps not surprising that Walker’s choice of scholars lay essentially within the familiar domain of Oxford, where a strongly text-based, analytical study of music prevailed. Parry was the Professor of Music; Dannreuther, Parry’s mentor, who died in 1905, had just completed the volume on ‘Romantic Music’ for the Oxford History of Music; Hadow (the editor of the Oxford History) was a colleague and Tovey had been a pupil and mentoree at Balliol. 70 Jeremy Dibble articles on ‘Form’, ‘Sonata’ and ‘Symphony’ in Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians (‘contain many pages of very high value on Beethoven’), Nottebohm’s Beethoveniana (‘indispensable for the study of Beethoven’s methods of composition’) and Tovey’s analytical essays (‘contain many lengthy analyses of works of Beethoven, of exceptional interest and full of the finest scholarly insight’). By comparison, Berlioz’s articles in Voyage musical and A travers chants were considered ‘rhapsodical and unbalanced’, Grove’s article in Grove and his Beethoven and his Nine Symphonies were ‘by no means altogether reliable in matters of technical scholarship’, and Wagner’s essay on Beethoven was ‘frequently rhapsodical almost to the point of incoherence’. The intellectualist predisposition of Beethoven was to set a similar trend for Walker’s much more ambitious book, A History of Music in England, which was published two years later by Oxford University Press. Walker’s venture was by no means the first attempt to rationalize a history of English music. The first edition of Grove’s Dictionary (1878–89) undoubtedly set out to expound a national manifesto, and Fuller Maitland, the second edition’s editor, sought to add to this with his History of English Music in the Nineteenth Century (1902). Walker acknowledged the assistance of this volume, the welcome addition to the literature of Wilibald Nagel’s Geschichte der Musik in England (1894–7) and Stainer’s pioneering Early Bodleian Music (1901), and the assistance of both Hawkins and Burney are also plainly evident. Nagel’s study, however, extended only to the death of Purcell, symbolizing a prevailing view (especially on the Continent) that music had played no part in English culture since the beginning of the eighteenth century, a view Walker clearly sought to remedy as is evident from his condemnation of Naumann’s Musikgeschichte (1880–5).14 He also acknowledged the scholarship of Parry, H. E. Wooldridge and Hadow in their volumes of the Oxford History, and noted Henry Davey’s factually rich but critically weak History of English Music (1895). With regard to Davey’s History, Walker was keen to emphasize that, while Davey’s study had dealt ‘with the complete subject’, in his own work the ‘main authority throughout’ had been ‘the music, printed and manuscript’.15 Indeed, no fewer than three times is this point pressed home in the preface. ‘My primary object’, he stressed, ‘has been to offer aids towards the elucidation of all the music that is of real self-sufficing importance, and to refrain from obscuring this end by the prosecution, to more than a slight extent, of side issues, however interesting.’16 Antiquarian and biographical elements are kept largely to a minimum, but while Walker admitted that a larger study might bring more

14 Walker, A History of Music in England, 348. 15 Ibid., vi. 16 Ibid., iv. Ernest Walker, the ‘English Hanslick’ 71 emphasis to this field of scrutiny, and that he was himself interested and open to what these sub-disciplines could yield in epistemological terms, he cleaved to the belief that analytical evidence of the music was the most fundamental (and trusted) method of illuminating musical truths. Moreover, Walker was conscious that the world of university and college examinations was apt to over-accentuate the learning of musical history without deeper acquaintance of the scores: ‘in an examiner-ridden age we are far too much inclined to attach an altogether ridiculous and harmful importance to parrot-like memorizing of dates and facts, that can never be more than the dry bones of a living art’.17 In this sense, Walker’s approach to history, from the standpoint of a composer (and performer) converged closely with Parry’s, though the vocabulary of his analytical writing is notable for lacking that fusion of evolutionist theory, utilitarianism and Ruskinian morality that so characterized Parry’s literary style. Nevertheless, both men shared a common interest in the primacy of the music itself and in the intellectual processes that propelled it, a view, attitude and methodology which became firmly entrenched within British musicology and academia for much of the twentieth century. Walker’s reliance on the musical text was also partly prompted by necessity, for, besides the few printed books he cited in his preface, the amount of available scholarly commentary on English music was limited; similarly a good many musical sources were only available in manuscript and to much of this Walker gained access only by visits to the British Museum (thanks to the assistance of William Barclay Squire), the Bodleian and to the rich holdings (such as partbooks) of individual cathedral and college libraries such as Christ Church, Oxford. As a result of much private study and self-communion – and this personal factor played a vital role in his methodology – Walker compiled his own evaluation, developing his larger view of English musical history at a time when there was a national appetite for such a study. Indeed, Walker’s conclusions did much to articulate an understanding of an English musical meta-narrative which remained largely unchallenged or modified for decades. Important national cultural landmarks, replete with helpful and extended musical examples (an innovation for the time), were established, such as the thirteenth-century ‘Rota’ ‘Sumer is i-cumen in’, the achievements of John Dunstable and his ‘contenance angloise’, the great flourishing of the Tudor period (in which Tallis was venerated) and the golden era of madrigals, interspersed with terse, economic historical commentary, enough to determine a coherent chronology. Walker’s summation of the sixteenth century encapsulated a fast-growing contemporary adoration for the era, a sentiment which was later enshrined by the editions and writings of scholars

17 Ibid., v. 72 Jeremy Dibble such as Edmund Fellowes and Philip Heseltine in the 1920s, though, as his pupil Westrup reminded us, achieved well before Tudor Church Music or The English Madrigal School were published.18 Nevertheless, Walker was candid enough to declare, particularly to those who seemed to be developing a blind admiration for early music, that a critical eye was always necessary. Of Thomas Whythorne’s Songes for Three, Fower, and Five Voyces (1571) his remarks were damning: ‘These very rare partbooks are worth a cursory glance, as showing (as we are sometimes inclined to forget) that downright bad music could be written in the sixteenth century; Whythorne’s songs are as miserably feeble rubbish as can well be imagined.’19 Walker’s extended critique of Purcell established a number of significant if questionable criteria. One notion, which even today enjoys a certain currency, is that Purcell’s lack of literary discrimination inevitably hampered his musical inspiration;20 this, however, is a fallacy (as the example of Handel shows). Walker expressed a more general reservation about Purcell’s music with the verdict that there was ‘an element of uncertainty about it’, a conclusion based on what he perceived as its varying quality:21

It is not believable that a supreme genius like Purcell could have been personally satisfied with the pottering scrappiness of some of his work: it is obvious that it was written, in as musicianly a style as he could, to satisfy the rather elementary tastes of people who could not bring their minds to grasp organisms of any sort of largeness.22 Moreover, while he acknowledged the greatest of Purcell’s inspirations, especially the odes, he felt the composer sometimes lacked taste.23 But most crucial of all, Walker inculcated the notion that Purcell’s brief life gave rise to a cul- de-sac in the 1690s, and it was ‘no consolation to us to reflect that the work of its great supplanter has turned out to be another’.24 Admiration of Handel and Messiah was mixed with deprecation: ‘No other musical work in the history of the world has won the kind of homage which in England has fallen to The Messiah; and none, in spite of all its genius, has had a more crushing

18 Jack A. Westrup, ‘Stanley Robert Marchant (1883–1949): Ernest Walker (1870–1949)’, Music & Letters 30/3 (1949), 202. 19 Walker, A History of Music in England, 58n. 20 Ibid., 165. 21 Ibid., 181. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid., 181–2. 24 Ibid., 182. Ernest Walker, the ‘English Hanslick’ 73 influence on national artistic individuality.’25 Handel’s national popularity clearly disturbed Walker, largely because of the composer’s association with commercialism. In terms of value, creativity and commerce were mutually exclusive, and the English tendency to the latter was something of which he clearly disapproved:

We cannot help noticing, all through this period [Handel’s contemporaries in the eighteenth century], a great extension of the artistic evils, the beginning of which we have already seen in Purcell’s day. Composers were all too rapidly adopting the idea that they were servants of a public that had to be pleased on the spot; Burney’s complaint that John Sebastian Bach did not ‘extend his fame by simplifying his style more to the level of his judges’ and ‘by writing in a style more popular and generally intelligible and pleasing’ exactly voices the contemporary English attitude towards music, which demanded at all costs that it should not be bored.26 Certainly not shy of expressing his opinions throughout the book, however, he reserved his most damning judgments for the later Victorians, ver- dicts which were to be far-reaching in their influence. While acknowledging Sullivan’s self-evident fame, which he nevertheless doubted would last,27 Walker endorsed the topos, commonly held among his contemporaries, that Sullivan had squandered his talent:

He might, indeed, have gone far, had he been endowed also with anything like steadiness of ideal; his best pages are nearly all comparatively early, but even then he turned out a great deal of inferior music, and in later years the success of operas seems to have blunted his capacity for really vitalized work on independent lines.28 And of the Savoy operettas, he attributed their success more to Gilbert’s librettos than Sullivan’s music, even if, begrudgingly, he recognized the chemistry between the words and music:

With Gilbert, no doubt, Sullivan was completely at home; the humours of the words and of the music fit as if they came from the same hand, the current of facile tune bubbles long gaily, and not infrequently (especially in the concerted music, such as the madrigal in The Mikado), we have something which in its trifling way is the work of a genuine and delicate-handed artist. But still it is nearly always the librettist who is the inspiring talent, though no doubt he could

25 Ibid., 196. 26 Ibid., 214. 27 Ibid., 292. 28 Ibid., 293. 74 Jeremy Dibble

not have found any one else to second him so well; we laugh whole-heartedly at the words and are grateful that the music does not hinder our enjoyment. But while the words can be read by themselves, the music – as regards ninety-nine pages out of hundred – is not self-subsisting.29 While Sullivan may have been ‘a mere popularity-hunting trifler’,30 Walker saved his most savage invective for Stainer, Barnby and Dykes. ‘The tide of sentimentalism’, he affirmed, ‘was very strong while it flowed, and even now that it is ebbing it requires careful watching; but there is no doubt by now that English religious music has come safely through a period on which future historians will look back with the reverse of pride’.31 Indeed, Walker chastised the recently inaugurated Church Music Society for failing to denounce this particular branch of its repertoire.32 A History of English Music, and Walker’s treatment of it, did not pass without some notable controversy. His direct, empirical approach drew praise from practitioners such as the choral conductor Charles Kennedy Scott:

I am really tired of those who discuss learnedly with and about the dates of Wilbye’s death and probably don’t know the beginning of one of Wilbye’s madrigals for sheer love of it. It was for this reason largely that I welcomed your admirable History of Music so much. In it your particular aim is to show the sense and value of the music itself, which is almost the only thing worth showing and not to reiterate the platitudes (in lieu of real criticism) about our fine old English music etc.; which are the false and sterile stock in trade of nine tenths of these people who lecture and talk about the subject. I was delightfully amused at Sir Frederick Bridge’s reference to your book at the Musical Assoc. meeting the other day. Great Truth! If there is to be no criticism, if we are to take everything English as fine whether by Bridge or Sullivan, for fear of fouling our nest, where does criticism and good music come in at all? Such procedure is all very well for the Bridge crew, but rather rough on, say, Wilbye who has to be parcelled up, in consequence, with it. It is precisely such a frame of mind as this (Bridge’s) that, to my thinking, prevents anything like a proper, general appreciation of our old music. How can it be appreciated when there is such an utter lack of the sense of proportion abroad? The only people on the whole who could estimate the thing properly are our very modern younger men. They, at least, have the energy and enthusiasm and the feeling required; but unfortunately they are too occupied

29 Ibid., 292. 30 Ibid. 295, 31 Ibid., 308. 32 Ibid., 308n. Ernest Walker, the ‘English Hanslick’ 75

with their own songs to give the matter its proper consideration. At least this is how it strikes me.33 Others, however, were taken aback by Walker’s lack of reverence for Handel and his prejudice against more recently deceased composers.34 Nevertheless, in spite of the affront caused in some quarters, Walker’s summation of English musical history – essentially optimistic to judge by the positive disposition of his final chapter – was hugely formative, and his evaluation formed an authoritative narrative, bolstered by a second edition of 1925 and a third, published as a posthumous tribute under the aegis of Jack Westrup in 1951, from which few musicians strayed for generations afterwards. And it was not simply his assessments of composers and the nation’s ‘fertile’ and ‘infertile’ periods (the supposedly sterile gap between Purcell and Elgar being a much-quoted dictum) which made their mark; the pragmatic method he employed to reach his conclusions also proved significant, influencing the style of much future English musicological writing. Even before the completion of A History of Music in England, Walker was importuned by Ernest Newman to take on a new book for his series The New Library of Music with Methuen:

Mr Hadow may have spoken to you of a new musical series I am to edit for Methuen. The books are to be about 300 pages each, and to blend biography and criticism something after the style of the ‘English Men of Letters’ series. The object is to treat the great musicians on an adequate scale in studies that are likely to be of permanent value. The books will probably be published at 6/- nett or 7/6 nett. Methuen offers a royalty of 12½% proceeds of any edition sold in quires to America, and 3d per copy if the book is … in his cheap Colonial Library. I should be very glad if you could, and would, undertake a volume. You will, I suppose, be debarred from doing a Beethoven by the fact of your having done one for Welby, so I think of asking Mr Tovey to do the Beethoven. I begin the series with Hugo Wolf, and Mozart and Handel are practically arranged for. Would you like to have Bach, Schumann, Haydn, Schubert, or Chopin? If you do not choose Bach, do you think Sir Hubert Parry could possibly be induced to do it?35 The offer was met with refusal, but Newman was not to be deterred. Two years later he wrote again:

33 Letter from C. Kennedy Scott to Walker, 21 January 1909, GB-Obac. 34 Review of A History of Music in England, unsigned, The Musical Times 49 (January 1908), 28–9. 35 Letter from Ernest Newman to Walker, 19 February 1906, GB-Obac. 76 Jeremy Dibble

Now that you are rid of your History and a lot of the work for Grove, it would give me great pleasure if you could do a volume for ‘The New Library of Music’. On the whole I would prefer, if equally agreeable to you, a non-biographical work, – a history of some period or form, or something of that kind. May I trouble you to let me know your views?36 Again Walker turned down the offer, but for reasons which were to shape the nature of his profession as a critic:

Many thanks for your note of the 17th. I appreciate very highly your kindness in inviting me to write a volume for the ‘New Library of Music’: but I hardly know how to answer. Perhaps I had better put things quite candidly. Shorter literary engagements like analytical programmes, reviews, articles in dictionaries and periodicals and so on I would indeed be grateful to have more of: one can see the end of them at starting, and they have no drawbacks of any kind. But to have a lengthy book hanging over one’s head for an indefinite but … considerable period is to me somehow, I confess, a sheer physical torture that, on grounds which are virtually those of health, I feel bound to fight shy of unless either I have an urgent desire to express some (to my mind!) salutary deadline or else the ‘bread-and-butter’ inducement is of a substantial nature – I am continually, like Io with her gadfly, feeling impelled to add to my already large stock of probably unsalable compositions; as I somehow grudge giving my leisure hours to other things than them or research work that I can do in the Oxford libraries and the scope of which is easily limitable. I feel sincerely honoured by your invitation, and trust you will not in any way misunderstand my reasons for self-excusal. If at any time you were able, and cared, to put in my way any shorter things of the types I have mentioned, I should be delighted to accept!37 Clearly then, it was the desire to pursue a career in composition and an aversion, by dint of a nervous temperament, to large-scale literary projects which determined Walker’s future. Never again did he produce a book, an extended study or a significant scholarly edition.38 Instead, he restyled his career as a reviewer and essayist for journals and national newspapers, and, as a reflection of his analytical mind and practical bent, as the author of astute and well- crafted programme notes.

36 Letter from Newman to Walker, 17 March 1908, GB-Obac. 37 Letter from Walker to Newman, 24 March 1908, GB-Obac. 38 Though invited by W. Barclay Squire to contribute an edition to the Purcell Edition (as a consequence of A History of Music in England), this was also turned down (see letter from Squire to Walker, 16 November 1907, GB-Obac). Ernest Walker, the ‘English Hanslick’ 77

In connexion with the latter, Walker became a much sought-after doyen of festival programmes such as the Leeds, Three Choirs Festivals and the Proms in his ability to encapsulate the salient features of each musical work with appropriate mots justes. It was a skill he demonstrated for years with the Balliol Concerts, and a legacy which was highly influential in the formation of Tovey’s six volumes of Essays in Musical Analysis, published between 1935 and 1939.39 Walker’s work as a reviewer began when he was a local columnist for the Oxford Magazine, writing up new books, visiting lecturers, the Balliol Concerts, and significant larger choral concerts (such as Vaughan Williams conducting A Sea Symphony in the city). But from 1909 onwards, his influence began to reach a national audience with pieces in the Manchester Guardian. After the War, he became a regular reviewer of musical books for The Times Literary Supplement and Times Educational Supplement (supported by the chief music critic of The Times, Henry Cope Colles, who shared his musical values), and he was one of the first to assess the significance of the new musical journal Music & Letters established by A. H. Fox-Strangways in 1920,40 to which he also contributed reviews; from 1929, after the death of Arthur Eaglefield-Hull, he began to write for the Monthly Musical Review under the editorship of Richard Capell. From the mid-1930s his work for TLS began to diminish, though this was replaced by frequent appearances in The Listener, regarded as the intellectual comple- ment to the BBC’s listings magazine, The Radio Times. As a reviewer Walker was incisive if conservative, especially about the trends of new European music (as is evident from his assessment of Gray’s A Survey of Contemporary Music).41 Yet the breadth of his disciplinary eye was unusually broad and catholic, extending not only to historical and analytical literature, but also to the production of new editions and historiography. His review of Guido Adler’s Handbuch der Musikgeschichte is worth scrutiny, not least because of his disapproval of Dent’s well-known denigration of Elgar.42 It would be fatuous to deny that Walker’s bias was essentially towards the Austro- German instrumental tradition (which extended latterly to Mahler, Wolf and Strauss), and the majority of his reviews (and articles) were devoted to the promulgation of this repertoire. Notwithstanding his devotion to the German canon, he was nevertheless conspicuously curious about modern French music,

39 It should be noted that the Balliol Concerts were an important musical focus outside London. The concerts drew performers such as Paderewski, Rudolf Serkin, Casals, Elman, Alfred Cortot, Irene Scharrer, Pachmann, Myra Hess, Jelly d’Aranyi, Jan Kubelik, Sapellnikoff and other major stars. Walker quite often acted as accompanist. Walker reviewed Tovey’s Essays for Music & Letters in September 1941. 40 See Times Literary Supplement (8 April 1920). 41 See Music & Letters 6/1 (1925), 96. 42 See Oxford Magazine (11 February 1926). 78 Jeremy Dibble particularly Berlioz, Debussy, Ravel and Satie; and while the championship of much contemporary English music was taken up more ardently by figures such as Edwin Evans, his interest in its progress was reflected intermittently in reviews of choral works (championed by Hugh Allen and Adrian Boult in Oxford), surveys such as ‘British Music of Today’,43 Eaglefield-Hull’s Cyril Scott: Composer and Philosopher,44 Hadow’s English Music,45 and, like many, he was caught up in the 1930s with the national enthusiasm for Sibelius.46 More studied reviews took the form of ‘review articles’, in which Walker was a pioneer. His admiration of Thayer’s biography of Beethoven, newly translated by Krehbiel, provided an opportunity (as did many of his reviews in general) to proselytize important truths. One, Walker insisted, was that Thayer’s biographical account demythologized Beethoven the idealized ‘god’.47 Another, however, carried a moral imperative: a new, Neo-classical mentality, prevalent in the early 1920s, had, so Walker perceived, encouraged an antagonism to Beethoven among the younger generation. ‘The name of Beethoven’, he argued, ‘symbolizes the beginnings of emotionalism and the nineteenth century and many other things altogether to be anathematized by the elect. But in so far as it is to be taken seriously, it is mainly due to an inevitable reaction against an unintelligent idolatry.’48 Similarly, his thoughtful assessment of Graves’s over-amplified two-volume biography of Parry,49 written through personal acquaintance with the man, argued the case for a composer who had rapidly fallen out of fashion, yet with whose Teutonic values, also equally unfashionable, he sympathized. Walker’s review was almost certainly responsible for planting the still well-established view that Parry’s Gloucester cantata, Scenes from Prometheus Unbound, marked ‘the birthday of modern English music’,50 and his conviction that ‘Jerusalem’ had ‘become something like a national anthem’ has proven prophetic.51 Walker’s true speciality was, as he intimated to Newman, the erudite article, be it for a journal or a national newspaper, intended for a popular yet

43 See The Oxford Review (18 June 1920). 44 See Oxford Magazine (6 December 1918). 45 See Monthly Musical Record (1 December 1931). 46 See ‘Some Music of Sibelius’, The Listener (1 June and 1 July 1936). 47 Ernest Walker, Times Literary Supplement (19 January 1922) and see also Free Thought and the Musician (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946), 98. 48 Ibid., 97. 49 Ernest Walker, Times Literary Supplement (8 April 1926) and see also Free Thought and the Musician, 102–7. 50 Ibid., 105. 51 Ibid., 106n. Ernest Walker, the ‘English Hanslick’ 79 well-educated audience. Here he could exercise his skill in setting out a single issue around which he carefully constructed his line of reasoning in efficient, penetrating prose. A taste for this type of self-contained literary agency had already been nurtured in the Musical Gazette, but this time Walker’s opinions reached a wider readership. Towards the end of Fuller Maitland’s tenancy at The Times, he began to contribute pithy items – in essence mini-essays – on ‘Orchestral balance’,52 ‘Rhythm and Tempo rubato’,53 ‘The snare of memory’54 and ‘Individuality in performance’,55 pieces which emphasized Walker’s interest in practical questions. His palaeographic preoccupations, especially with Oxford manuscripts, gave rise to two articles for the short-lived Musical Antiquary on the Bodleian’s holdings of Maurice Greene,56 and one on the rich collection of Fancies in Christ Church Library copied by Aldrich.57 But chiefly Walker was concerned with the inner exploration of musical life and its interaction with intellectual thought. After Fuller Maitland’s retirement, when Colles took over as the newspaper’s chief music critic, his meditative articles prolifer- ated. After the War his focus was principally the review, but in the late 1920s his appetite for the piquant article was reignited, as can be seen in pieces for Music & Letters, The Listener, The Musical Times and the Monthly Musical Review. Such activity continued until 1946, at which point Walker, perhaps wishing to sum up the critical dimension of his career, chose to publish a selection of articles and article-reviews in a small but representative volume entitled Free Thought and the Musician. In effect, the collection reads like a personal apologia. With the exception of the first eponymous article, the collection of twenty-two items is presented chronologically and epitomizes the nature and character of Walker’s career between 1901 and 1933 as described above. Beginning with his tribute to Farmer in the Musical Gazette, there were seven articles from The Times (1910–26), one from the Manchester Guardian (1909), two articles from Music & Letters, one from The Musical Times, six from the Monthly Musical Record and one previously unpublished item read at a conference in 1919. Walker’s choice of items was careful. His ability for focused argument is well illustrated by those from The Times, notably in ‘The Tyranny of the Dance’, in which his Hanslickian moral stance is expressed in its most extreme and uncompromising form:

52 The Times (18 December 1909). 53 The Times (16 April 1910). 54 The Times (25 June 1910). 55 The Times (17 September 1910). 56 See The Musical Antiquary (31 January 1910), 148–65; ibid. (3 November 1910), 203–14. 57 Musical Antiquary, 65–73. 80 Jeremy Dibble

We may feel as much as we like that most civilized persons have far too little respect for their bodies; but music, as music, has (except in its most rudimen- tary manifestations) nothing whatever to do with bodily movement. Are we to re-fashion Bach and Beethoven and Brahms by arranging gestures and steps to the B minor Mass and the Ninth Symphony and the ‘Schicksalslied’? … To submit a spiritual art to a bodily tyranny is to deny the past that has made us.58 Walker’s Teutonic bias is evident in articles on Schumann,59 Goethe,60 Brahms,61 in his advocacy of Joachim as a neglected composer,62 and in a centenary article, ‘Mendelssohn’,63 in which the current deprecation of the composer was outspokenly condemned: ‘It is plain enough for all who have eyes to see and tongues to speak that it is time to bestir ourselves if we wish to preserve Mendelssohn’s fame as a great composer for those of the coming generation.’64 Such insight showed not only courage and conviction but also that Walker was more than capable of expressing views well ahead of their time. In this regard his belief in the value of Parry’s music forms a quintessential feature of his review-article of Graves’s 1926 biography. The most substantial essay in Walker’s collection, ‘A Generation of Music’, stands apart from the other items not only in length but also because it was devised for a conference. The conference was on recent developments in European thought between 1870 and 1914, held at the Society of Friends’ Woodbrooke Settlement in Birmingham in 1919 and organized by the posi- tivist and educationist Francis Sydney Marvin for his annual ‘Unity History Schools’. These ‘Schools’, aimed at schoolteachers, were begun in 1915 and were designed to explore those fundamental values of Western civilization which, in spite of the European conflagration, could act as a common bond.65 For

58 Ernest Walker, ‘The Tyranny of the Dance’, Free Thought and the Musician, 56. 59 ‘The Broad-Mindedness of Schumann’, The Times (16 November 1929), and Free Thought and the Musician, 124–7. 60 ‘Goethe and some Composers’, The Musical Times (June 1932), and Free Thought and the Musician, 147–61. 61 ‘Brahms and Heine’, Monthly Musical Record (March 1933), and Free Thought and the Musician, 162–6. 62 ‘A Neglected Composer – Joseph Joachim’, Monthly Musical Record, 120–3. 63 Manchester Guardian (3 February 1909); Free Thought and the Musician, 30–4. 64 Ibid., 31. Walker’s continued advocacy of Mendelssohn also found voice thirty years later in ‘The Future of Mendelssohn’ for The Listener (1 January 1939), in an exploration of Mendelssohn’s manuscripts and other memorabilia for Music & Letters (July 1939), 426–8, and in his last critical utterance, ‘Mendelssohn’s “Die einsame Insel”’, published posthumously in Music & Letters 26/3 (1950), 148–50. 65 The proceedings of the first Unity History School appeared in Francis Sydney Marvin, ed., The Unity of Western Civilization (London: Oxford University Press, Ernest Walker, the ‘English Hanslick’ 81

Walker, who took a keen interest in progressive education, Marvin’s cause was a noble venture; more importantly, however, Walker seized the opportunity to articulate his opinions on a range of issues connected with the future of music and the more onerous demands it was imposing on its audiences in terms of interpretation, notably in its relationship to texts and other external factors:

We may consider music as normally involving three persons: the composer, the performer, and the listener. Until the present generation, the role of the listener was normally quite passive. All that he had to do was to keep his ears open to the music, and further, when required, his ears open to words and his eyes to dramatic presentation. The composer and the performers did everything for him. But now they do not. The modern composer urges that, just as vocal music demands from the listener a separate knowledge of the words, so instrumental music may demand, as a condition of full understanding, a separate knowledge of some verbally expressible signification.66 Similarly, in recognizing the significance of national music, and the popularity of nationalism, Walker warned against the possibility of chauvinism. ‘Musical separatism’, he cautioned, ‘is not a natural quality’.67 It was a value he espoused rigorously during the First World War when some suggested that German music be censored, and afterwards, when he detected that some strain of prejudice still lingered, he wrote with some disquiet to The Times:

Sir, We are at peace with the German people: are we also at peace with German music? The question has been brought home to me in reading the first number of a new musical periodical The Chesterian, issued this week by the artistically-minded and enterprising firm whose name it bears. It specifically sets out to be international, but there is no German name in the long list of distinguished contributors, present and future: there are interesting notes of musical doings north and south, east and west, but as to Germany – silence. Is this attitude to be at all general? With all its many shortcomings, English music has been pre-eminent in at least one respect: throughout our musical life we have stood, more firmly than any other nation, for the proud faith of the open door and the open mind. It seems a pity to give away our birthright.68 While these issues were close to Walker’s heart, even closer were his rapidly evolving views of the relationship between religion and music, a subject that constituted the climax of his essay. Here he made clear that the traditional

1915). 66 ‘A Generation of Music’, in Free Thought and the Musician, 61. 67 Ibid., 68. 68 Letter from Walker to The Times (20 September 1919). 82 Jeremy Dibble certainties of religious orthodoxy and musical expression were in decline. He rejected the assertion made by numerous church musicians (some of them his present or former Oxford colleagues) in a letter to the editor of The Times on the question of a Chair of Ecclesiastical Music at King’s College, London, that ‘the church will always be the chief home and school of music for the people’.69 Indeed, Walker argued that genres such as oratorio were ‘dead beyond recall’,70 and that traditionally Judeo-Christian tenets were being superseded by individual heterodoxies. This sentiment had essentially been inspired by the afore- mentioned crisis of faith Walker experienced in 1913, and when accusations of dishonesty were aimed at him in connexion with the proper fulfilment of his duties as college organist, his response was to resign, even though others attempted to reassure him that orthodox belief was not a condition of the post. For Walker, however, it became a matter of conscience, and one that led to a more frank declaration of his outlook in ‘Free Thought and the Musician’ for Music & Letters in July 1921. Such was the personal importance of this article that it was placed at the head of the twenty-two essays and its title used to characterize the nature of intellectual thought within the entire book. ‘Free thought’ to Walker ultimately enshrined the right of the composer to express spiritual convictions without the insistence of theistic belief, and in so doing he expressed a sensibility which several generations of British composers – among them Parry, Vaughan Williams, Holst, Howells and Britten – happily embraced across a broad spectrum. ‘What does it matter’, he argued, ‘if we vis- ualize the Sanctus of the B minor Mass with quite other eyes than Bach’s? The forms change and pass: it is (to quote a phrase from Lord Morley’s great book on Compromise) the feeling for the incommensurable things that remain. And in that feeling the free-thinking musician must, as confidently as anyone else, claim his inalienable share.’71 For Walker the process of appreciation, evaluation and critical appraisal of religious (and even non-religious) music no longer required orthodox faith, and he vilified the pronouncements of Vincent d’Indy, who, in his Cours de composition musicale, postulated that theistic belief was a necessary minimum for ‘the true musician’.72 After this personal declaration, Walker adopted a more penetrating rationalism which brought his critical demeanour closer to the atheistic stance of Newman. It was a standpoint he voiced with an almost obsessive

69 ‘Proposed Chair at King’s College’, The Times (17 April 1919). Among the signatories were Hadow, Allen, Walford Davies, Frederick Bridge, W. H. Frere and Sydney Nicholson. 70 ‘A Generation of Music’, in Free Thought and the Musician, 72. 71 ‘Free Thought and the Musician’, in Free Thought and the Musician, 20. 72 Ibid. Ernest Walker, the ‘English Hanslick’ 83 pugnacity whenever the opportunity presented itself. A letter to the editor of the Westminster Gazette provides an eloquent illustration:

Sir, In your leading article of today you say: Meredith and Hardy were both great pantheists as well as great writers. They should have had the same national sepulchre. England has no national sepulchre. Westminster Abbey is a church of a particular religious community, whose terms of membership are (so long as words are supposed to bear any meaning) plain enough. Until we have, like France, a secularised Pantheon open to all on equal terms, there will be many who dislike the one-sided kind of tolerance which consists in trying to rope all men of genius into the Christian fold, somehow or other, living or dead.73 Nevertheless, as an individual who valued the spiritual, humanistic element of the great nineteenth-century Romantic canon, Walker feared the direction taken by musical modernism in a new, materialist age, and doubted the ability of musical criticism to adapt. ‘All musicians very well recollect their first bewilderment at what has afterwards become as clear as daylight’, he argued; ‘but we must retain our standards of judgement. We have no right to criticize without familiarity, but we must remember that over-familiarity, mere dulled habitual acceptance, means equal incapacity for criticism.’74 And with the post- war arrival of Neo-classicism, he lamented, quoting the German critic Adolf Weissmann, the ‘Entgötterung’ [‘the banishing of the gods’] of music as a tragedy: ‘Its exponents may, no doubt, sometimes indulge in argumentative, not to say dictatorial, assertions of their claims on our attention; but having, as they boast, banished serious feeling from their music, why should they complain if we decline to behave otherwise than lightheartedly towards themselves?’75 By the same token, his deep-rooted idealism provoked a violent reaction towards those who rejected the fundamental tenets of form: ‘The latter-day composers who speak of Form as kind of bogey that they have at last exorcized remind us of those latter-day thinkers who boast that they have abolished metaphysics.’76 In this sense, it would be fair to say that Walker’s attitudes hardened in the last twenty-five years of his life as a critic, as he increasingly found refuge in the German classics. Nevertheless, his ability to express complex musical concepts with a Hanslickian-inspired precision, articulated in polished prose, still remains an example of musical criticism as a poetic art, one which drew the approbation of Tovey (his Balliol protégé), Heseltine and Dent.

73 Letter from Walker to the Editor of the Westminster Gazette, 17 January 1928, GB-Obac. 74 ‘A Generation of Music’, in Free Thought and the Musician, 79–80. 75 Ibid., 81. 76 Ibid., 80. Chapter 4 Ernest Newman and the Promise of Method in Biography, Criticism and History

Paul Watt

rnest Newman (1868–1959) had an extremely long career not only as E a music critic but also as a biographer and historian. His first major article appeared in 1889; his last was published seventy years later, in 1959. His greatest achievements were his thirty-nine years as chief music critic for The Sunday Times (1920–58), in which he wrote some 1,800 articles, and his mag- isterial book The Life of Richard Wagner, published in four volumes between 1934 and 1956. In books, articles, programme notes and translations, Newman wrote on a huge variety of topics ranging from early music to late Schoenberg. He had particular interests in opera and vocal music and music by Edward Elgar, Richard Strauss, Hugo Wolf, Beethoven and Berlioz, and wrote extensively on all of them. He cared little for the music of Liszt, Mozart or anything French. He loved music-hall repertory but loathed jazz and atonal music. He was highly regarded as a fluent, sarcastic and humorous writer, though his pomposity and occasional arrogance were less appreciated. There is a constant thread running through Newman’s works (whether biographical, critical or historical): the need for method. In dozens of publications he argued that method would ensure objectivity and therefore authority, and that it required both theoretical and practical application. Newman’s desire for method came from three sources. First, the domination of positivism in British and European thought, particularly in the second half of the nineteenth century, which sought to create taxonomies into which generalist as well as specialist knowledge could be shoe-horned. Comte’s positivism, for example, provided such a taxonomy, while a schema for music research was proposed by Guido Adler.1 Other specialist schemes included Emile Hennequin’s theory of esthospsychology and Richard Wallaschek’s mapping of a positive musicology

1 For a brief background to Adler’s work, as well as a translation of his purpose and schema for the then new discipline of musicology, see Erica Mugglestone, ‘Adler’s “The Scope, Method, and Aim of Musicology” (1885): An English Translation with an Historico-Analytical Commentary’, Yearbook for Traditional Music 13 (1981), 1–21. 84 Ernest Newman and the Promise of Method 85 in such works as Ästhetik der Tonkunst (1886).2 Second was Newman’s association with a group of leftist intellectuals who dubbed themselves ‘academic freethinkers’ and championed a new order of knowledge that was based on secular rather than religious grounds. Their intellectual heroes, in addition to Comte and Hennequin, included J. S. Mill, Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin. Third was Newman’s intense dissatisfaction with contemporary English musical criticism, biography and history. He thought much of what he read by his contemporaries was impressionistic or self-referential. In order to overcome this culture of dilettantism, reform was needed. Newman’s preoccupation with the grand narratives of the nineteenth-century positivists, his association with the academic freethinkers and their loosely constructed philosophy of rationalism, and his personal contempt for most of the music critics of the nineteenth century provided an energetic and sometimes obsessive concern for method. He carried this obsession right to the grave, decades after such approaches to all kinds of critical writing had long been deemed unworkable and unfashionable. What Newman’s (and others’) legacy has left us, however, is a substantial literature on the promise of method in music criticism, history and biography that illustrates Newman’s reform agenda in advancing a more intellectually rigorous historiography in all kinds of historical writing. In the relentless pursuit of this ideal, Newman was an active agent in the fashioning of early twentieth-century musicology. In the rigorous and sometimes hostile criticism of his peers he identified many problems that set musical scholarship adrift from method. This chapter aims to account for Newman’s interest in method and why it was important for writers on music in his lifetime. It is an avenue of inquiry that investigates little-known by-ways in the history of English musical criticism and its connection to comparative method (in historical writing and journalism) and the bourgeoning field of musicology in the Anglophone world. We see how, in Newman’s hands, ideas of scientific criticism in music jumped disciplinary, generic, linguistic and national borders.

2 Auguste Comte, General View of Positivism [being the Preface to Part III of the Second System, Système de Politique Positive] (Paris: Republic of the West-Order and Progress, 1848); Emile Hennequin, La critique scientifique, ed. Dirk Hoeges (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1982 [1888]); and Richard Wallaschek, Ästhetik der Tonkunst (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1886). See further Sandra McColl, ‘Positivisim in Late Nineteenth-Century Thought about Music: The Case of Richard Wallaschek’, Studies in Music 26 (1992), 34–47. For an account of European positivism more generally see Catherine LeGouis, Positivism and Imagination: Scientism and its Limits in Emile Hennequin, Wilhelm Scherer, and Dmitri Pisarev (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1997). 86 Paul Watt ❧❧ Ernest Newman: A Brief Biography Newman was a Lancastrian, born on 30 November 1868. His father, Seth, was a master tailor; his mother was Harriet Sparks. Nothing is known of his childhood, except that he was the only child but had step-siblings from his parents’ previous marriages. Newman attended St Saviour’s School in Everton, Liverpool, followed by secondary education at the Middle School of Liverpool. In 1885, aged seventeen, he entered University College Liverpool on a scholarship and left the following year, without matriculating.3 Formal institutional instruction was, however, not Newman’s only avenue of learning: he taught himself musical composition until about 1889, aged twenty-one, when his first articles were published.4 He was a voracious reader: by his early twenties he had acquired a good knowledge of literature, philosophy and biology, and a working knowledge of many languages, including German, Russian, Greek, Swedish and Hebrew.5 Newman learned piano as a child and had some instruction in elementary theory and counterpoint, which enabled him to read scores and compose.6 His knowledge of music was vast; he claimed in his teens that:

I had dozens of scores in my head. I knew most of them by heart – all the pianoforte sonatas and the symphonies of Beethoven and the forty-eight preludes of Bach, many of Mozart’s piano sonatas and piano duets, practically the whole of Wagner, Beethoven’s Fidelio, all of Gluck’s operas that are obtainable in modern editions … thirty or forty other operas of all schools … one or two of the oratorios and a few of the clavier works of Handel, a few specimens of the older music … a few old English and Italian madrigals, and a good deal of Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn and Chopin … and a heap of other music of all sorts, all periods, all schools … For years I had been reading music daily, with the ardour with which schoolgirls used to read novelettes, or schoolboys adventure stories.7

3 The scholarship is mentioned in Nigel Scaife, ‘British Music Criticism in a New Era: Studies in Critical Thought, 1894–1945’ (PhD diss., University of Oxford, 1994), 137. I am grateful to Adrian Allan, Archivist at the University of Liverpool, and Richard Temple, archivist at Senate House, University of London, for checking the enrolment records and for providing some additional background information. Personal communication, 4–5 January 2007. 4 Ernest Newman, ‘Morality and Belief’, National Reformer (hereafter NR) (15 September 1889), 170 and (22 September 1889), 188–9; and ‘The Doctrine of Evolution in Modern Poetry’, NR (27 October 1889), 260–2. 5 Ernest Newman, ‘Confessions’, in Herbert Van Thal, ed., Testament of Music: Essays and Papers by Ernest Newman (London: Putnam, 1962), xiii. 6 Newman, ‘Confessions’, 10–11. 7 Ibid., 11. Ernest Newman and the Promise of Method 87

Among his favourite subjects at University College were English literature and art. He also attended lectures in philosophy and studied the work of Kant, Spinoza and Herbert Spencer. During his time at college, Newman joined the local branch of the National Secular Society, which paved the way for him to meet the great reformist advocates and orators Charles Bradlaugh and John M. Robertson, editors of one of the leading secularists newspapers, the National Reformer.8 Robertson was a significant mentor and role model for Newman and provided him with many opportunities to publish articles and books in the freethought press. Robertson was the leader of the academic freethinkers and was a passionate advocate of rationalism. Rationalism is often characterized as a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century school of thought associated with Descartes, Leibniz, Kant and Spinoza, but Robertson’s rationalist ideology was couched in a particular nineteenth-century vein. It was the rationalist ideology of Robertson with which Newman was aligned.9 The rationalist ideology was born of a wide engagement with European liberal thought of the later nineteenth century, and its emphasis was on action not merely reflection.10 In Robertson’s book Letters on Reasoning, he writes of its practical application to criticism, which was achieved through the apparently simple act of reasoning (1902).11 Addressed to ‘My dear Children’, Robertson outlined the process of reasoning:

All argument, every attempt to influence opinion or conduct by presenting a ‘because’, is a process of reasoning […] I want you therefore to grasp first the truth that all attempts to persuade are processes of reasoning. Some, we say, are good or ‘logical’ or ‘valid’; by which we mean that on analysis their parts or stages are consistent. A good reasoner is one who does not contradict himself in the course of his argument, and who further takes intelligent account of all the important facts of the case he is dealing with. A ‘bad reasoner’ is one

8 For more on Bradlaugh and the intellectual milieu of the National Reformer and other publications, see Edward Royle, Radicals, Secularists and Republicans: Popular Freethought in Britain, 1866–1915 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980). For a study of Robertson’s career see Odin Dekkers, J. M. Robertson: Rationalist and Literary Critic (Farnham: Ashgate, 1998). 9 Newman’s early life is described in more detail in Paul Watt, Ernest Newman: A Critical Biography (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2017). 10 John Passmore, A Hundred Years of Philosophy, 2nd edn (London: Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd., 1966). 11 John M. Robertson, Letters on Reasoning (London: Watts & Co., 1902). 88 Paul Watt

who, in seeking to prove or convince, takes up […] contradictory positions, whether or not he has the main facts of his case before him.12 Personal opinion alone held no place in Robertson’s rationalist scheme; rather, he advocated the adoption of method to rid criticism of what was widely referred to as the ‘personal equation’. The scientific method, according to Robertson and a host of writers, would distinguish higher criticism from lower criticism. Scientific method in its nineteenth-century context has been described as an intellectual process that ‘secularised the European mind’, affecting all branches of knowledge; it was also known as the inductive, historical or comparative method.13 Leopold van Ranke’s History of the Popes (1842) and Henry Buckle’s History of Civilization in England (1857) were representative of this new-fashioned history. Modern historiographers consider Ranke the founder of the scientific method of history, for his emphasis on utilizing primary sources. Buckle’s work is also regarded as one of the finest exemplars of scientific history in Britain for its emphasis on social history.14 The idea of history as a science was well established across Europe by the time Robertson and Newman were writing. So fierce was this commitment to scientific method that scholars embraced what the historian Michael Bentley called the ‘cult of objectivity’, in which writers were preoccupied with ‘what

12 Ibid., 4–5. Robertson singles out Benjamin Kidd’s Social Evolution (London: Macmillan & Co., 1894) as an example of bad reasoning. Newman was to take up the case against Kidd in his Pseudo-Philosophy at the end of the Nineteenth Century (London: University Press, 1897). 13 Heinrich Hermelink, Das Christentum in der Menschheitsgeschichte Vol. II (Stuttgart, 1955), ix. A variation of this term is used and cited by Owen Chadwick as the title of his book, The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975). Chadwick quotes Hermelink on page 11. 14 On the contribution of Ranke to the cultivation of scientific method see: G. P. Gooch, History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century (Boston: Beacon Hill, 1965), 72–97; Georg G. Iggers, The German Conception of History (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1966), 64–89 and Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1997), 23–30; and Patrick Bahners, ‘“A Place among the English Classics”: Ranke’s History of the Popes and its British Readers’, in Benedikt Stuchtey and Peter Wende, eds, British and German Historiography, 1750–1950: Traditions, Perceptions, and Transfers (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 123–57. For literature on Buckle see John Kenyon, The History Men: The Historical Profession in England since the Renaissance (London: Weidenfelf & Nicolson, 1983), 97–114; and Ian Hesketh, The Science of History in Victorian Britain: Making the Past Speak (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011), 13–33. Ernest Newman and the Promise of Method 89 really happened’.15 For this new generation of historians, evidence and objectivity were paramount no matter how simplistic some of these narratives seem to us today. Newman devoured books on rationalism and historical method and was to pursue the cause of historical or scientific objectivity with great gusto.

❧❧ Scientific Criticism and the Comparative Method Robertson argued that developing a rational mind and therefore a scientific approach to criticism would cure the ‘random self-expression’ that he believed pervaded all kinds of British criticism at the fin de siècle. To alleviate the personal and parochial element in criticism, the comparative method was required. Newman’s use of the comparative method was first proposed in his book Gluck and the Opera: A Study of Musical History, published in 1895. It was Newman’s first book and the first large-scale biography of Gluck published in English. Gluck and the Opera begins with an introduction in which Newman sets the methodological scene, and this is followed by Part 1, ‘Life’, which comprises six chapters and charts Gluck’s life and times in chronological order. The second part of the book is called ‘Gluck’s Relations to the Intellectual Life of his Epoch’ and contains four numbered, but untitled, chapters (the content of the chapters is given in the running heads). The first chapter deals with the opera in Germany, Italy and France; the second chapter is ‘The Opera and its Critics’. The third chapter covers ‘Gluck’s Manifesto’, ‘Art and Nature’ and ‘Music and the other Arts’, while chapter 4 discusses ‘Gluck’s Theory and Practice’, ‘Music and Poetry’ and ‘Gluck’s Place in Art’. The book was not merely a biography of Gluck but, as its subtitle suggested, ‘A Study in Musical History’. In the preface, Newman described the ‘method and purport of the present volume’:

So far as the biographical portions of it are concerned, I have, of course, been entirely dependent upon the recognised authorities, whose united labours have covered the whole field exhaustively. In the critical portions I have attempted to sum up the measure of Gluck’s achievements in relation to the intellectual life of his day. As the book is meant rather as a tentative contribution to the culture-history from a side hitherto painfully neglected, than as a mere narration of a thrice-told tale, I have thought it well to dispense with the history, in detail, of the technical side of the opera. This can be had in many excellent works, and it were superfluous to devote another volume to the task. I have rather endeavoured to view the subject philosophically, and

15 Michael Bentley, Modern Historiography: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 1999), 39. 90 Paul Watt

to bring the opera of the eighteenth century in general, and Gluck’s work in particular, into line with the whole intellectual tendencies of the time. Thus in the sketches in Part II of the rise and development of the opera in Italy, France, and Germany, I have dealt only with such phases of it as fall within the province of culture-history.16 Newman argued that the originality and value of the book lay in the synthesis of the relation of Gluck’s musical works to the composer’s life, times and works. This synthesis or method he thought not only original but unconventional for its use of the comparative method:

To make a plea in these days for the use of the comparative method in criticism would seem to be a work of supererogation. That method, so distinctive of our century in its purposes and results, has, through the labour of a number of men, raised the historical criticism of literature almost to the rank of science. Apart from the question as to whether the comparative method covers the whole field of criticism; apart, indeed, from the main question as to what the purpose and function really are; it is indisputable that certain forms of literary criticism have, in our own day, attained to something like the certainty and the comprehensiveness of physical science; and even in the minds of those who disclaim the method and deny its validity, there is an underlying conviction of its truth, and an unconscious application of its principles. While, however, the use of the historical method is thus at the present time practically universal in the criticism of literature and of art in general, there is one department which is as yet almost innocent of scientific treatment; we look in vain for any attempt to bring the criticism of music within the scope of method.17 Newman continued to criticise English music critics and criticism: ‘until now, music has known no other criticism than that of personal taste, unaided by reflection and lacking in basic principles.’18 He also complained that, of all the arts, the literature on music was most in need of development:

Even yet we are, for all practical purposes, in the lowest stages of musical culture […] in the criticism of literature and art we have attained to some measure of civilisation; in our judgments on music we are for the most part still untutored barbarians. While in other departments we have progressed beyond the static conditions of previous ages to the dynamic criticism of art and letters, in the musical world we are yet centuries behind the time; we are still with the scholiast, the commentator, the expositor, the pedagogue. Nothing is more disappointing

16 Newman, Gluck and the Opera, xii–xiii. 17 Ibid., 1–2. 18 Ibid., 2. Ernest Newman and the Promise of Method 91

to the general student of culture than the dead stop that is given him as soon as he reaches music.19 He further complained that ‘among liberal-minded men there is no rational criticism of music’, and ‘out of the whole library of English writings on music it would be impossible to name ten works […] that could bear comparison for one moment with good contemporary literary criticism’.20 Newman blamed Wagner for setting a bad example in his pedestrian and self-referential prose works: ‘it is perfectly futile to go on discussing the aesthetic of music in abstracto, without reference to the historical conditions under which the art has lived and by which it has been moulded from century to century’.21 Wagner’s historical method, Newman claimed, is:

used to discover the causes of certain historical changes in the ‘national character’ of this or that people, and endow abstract terms with the qualities of concrete forces, and generally explain everything most learnedly in terms of itself. In the Wagnerian dialectic we still have the metaphysical method in all its pristine glory and all its primitive irresponsibility.22 Newman advocated a scientifically grounded method – the comparative method – and went on to explain what he meant by it. For Newman the real meaning of Gluck’s music ‘can only be estimated by a study of the culture- conditions in which he lived’.23 He ended the introduction with hope for the future:

Some day a real history of music will have to be written; not an anatomical history, merely marking out the lines these forms have taken, but a physiological history, having reference to structure and to function. Here, as in every other department of knowledge, it is synthesis that illuminates; it is the spectacle of one mental phenomenon bound up causally with another that widens knowledge and gives it certainty and coherence. And when this physiological method of musical criticism comes, it will be found that no intellectual matter can sur- pass it in interest or value. Music is just as important a factor in the history of civilisation as poetry or philosophy; and to elucidate it by scientific criticism will be a service to culture as valuable as any other that can be rendered.24

19 Ibid. 20 Ibid., 3. 21 Ibid., 6. 22 Ibid., 7–8. 23 Ibid., 13–14. 24 Ibid. In 1921 Newman expressed plans for such a history to be written: ‘I have been thinking over the matter of the History, and I have decided to begin with 92 Paul Watt

These extracts from Newman’s preface and introduction illustrate the intensity of his views both on the weaknesses of music criticism and on the promise of his comparative or scientific methodology to provide an antidote to studies of works that are disconnected from historical context, as he supposed the prose works of Wagner to be. Apart from historical writing, the comparative method had meanwhile gained traction in journalism during Newman’s formative years. In May 1877, for example, Mark Pattison (1813–84), author, Church-of-England priest and Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford, published an article on the role of comparison in criticism, drawing his readers’ attention to the danger of parochial thought:

But England is not all the world. … By the very nature of things, much of the best that is known and thought in the world cannot be of English growth, must be foreign; in a survey of literature we cannot afford to ignore what is being said and written in the countries near us, any more than in politics we can afford to ignore what is being done by them. At present Germany and France are the two countries with whom we are most closely connected, and whose sayings are the most influential sayings in the world.25 Pattison went on to write about the necessity of wide reading in German and French, arguing that ‘though he [the critic] need not read every book, he must have surveyed literature in its totality. Partial knowledge of literature is no knowledge. It is only by the comparative method that a founded judgment can be reached.’26 A less well-rounded critic – according to another writer, Edmund Gosse – would produce ‘an inferior class of criticism’, for it would be

Beethoven. If I start with Berlioz, or some other volume, I shall have to make it an independent volume or else say that it is the second or third of fourth volume of a History: whereas if I begin with Beethoven I begin at the natural starting- point, and I can say in the preface that this is intended to be the first of a series of volumes covering all the developments of the nineteenth century, and I can bring out the later volumes in almost any order.’ Letter from Ernest Newman to Vera Newman, cited in Vera Newman, Ernest Newman: A Memoir (London: Putnam, 1963), 25. The date of the letter is not given. Newman was later to define in more detail his notion of a physiological history in terms of journalistic criticism in three instalments in The Sunday Times: ‘A “Physiology” of Criticism’ (16 December 1928; 27 January 1929; and 3 February 1929), reproduced in Felix Aprahamian, ed., Essays from the World of Music: Essays from The Sunday Times (London: John Calder, 1956), 13–27. 25 Mark Pattison, ‘Books and Critics’, Fortnightly Review (November 1887), 659–79, at 664. 26 Ibid., 670. Ernest Newman and the Promise of Method 93

‘uncomparative, and it is of necessity a mere indication of fleeting opinion’.27 The comparative critic, as Gosse describes him:

must first of all be intelligent. His mind must act with rapidity. It must be trained to receive a suggestion of delicate impressions promptly and precisely. He must be agile in intellectual movement. If he misunderstands his author for a moment, he must be ready instantly to retrace his steps; he must not push on, obstinately force the sense, and delight in his own robustness. Misplaced vigour of this kind is a very English fault in criticism.28 In concluding the article, Gosse suggests that the purpose of criticism is not merely to praise and blame: rather, ‘it is analysis’.29 And in order for analysis to be successful, he argues, it has to be comparative. Other writers used the term in equally pragmatic and practical ways: for Basil Worsfold, writing in 1902, ‘comparison lies at the root of all our judgments’, and for Colin McAplin – writing on musical criticism in 1917 – the act of comparison was the antidote to dogmatic criticism, which he argued brought on ‘a dangerous habit of mind’.30 Textbooks also provided advice on the comparative method. In 1885, R. D. Blackman’s book Deacon’s Composition and Style: A Handbook for Literary Students emphasized its utility:

The situation in which man is placed, requires some acquaintance with the nature, power, and qualities of those objects by which he is surrounded. For acquiring a branch of knowledge so essential to our happiness and preservation, motives of interest and of reason are not alone sufficient; and nature has providentially super-added curiosity, a vigorous principle which is never at rest. The principle strongly attaches us to those objects which have the recommendation of novelty: it incites us to compare things together, for the purpose of discovering their differences and resemblances.31 The comparative method of which Newman spoke had a long pedigree. Newman would have come across it in a range of historical, scientific and literary scholarship by German, English and French writers. The origin of the term ‘comparative method’ has an uncertain pedigree and multiple roots. It is often

27 Edmund Gosse, ‘The Science of Criticism III’, New Review 6 (1891), 408–11, at 408. 28 Ibid., 409–10. 29 Gosse, ‘The Science of Criticism III’, 411. 30 Basil Worsfold, The Principles of Criticism: An Introduction to the Study of Literature (London: George Allen, 1903), 1; Colin McAlpin, ‘Musical Criticism’, The Musical Times (September 1917), 397–9, at 397. 31 R. D. Blackman, ed., Deacon’s Composition and Style: A Handbook for Literary Students with a Complete Guide to all Matters Connected with Printing and Publishing, 5th edn (London: C. W. Deacon & Co., 1885), 134. 94 Paul Watt attributed to the study ‘comparative literature’ defined by Goethe or Matthew Arnold.32 Scholars have referred to Goethe’s term Weltliteratur to denote the comparative method, because of its implication of studying ‘literature of the world’, although this derivation is debated.33 In English, an extract from Matthew Arnold’s inaugural speech at Oxford signals the birth of comparative literature: ‘Everywhere there is connection, everywhere there is illustration. No single event, no single literature is adequately comprehended except in relation to other events, to other literatures.’34 In French, Ulrich Weisstein attributes the birth of the comparative method to the works of Abel François Villemain and Jean-Jacques Ampère in the 1830s and 1840s.35 As the literary historian Susan Bassnett points out, however, comparative literature (and thus the comparative method) had become widely diffused in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and came to represent a number of different historical and sociological approaches.36 Newman’s preoccupation with the comparative method represented an early interest in music historiography generally. In his 1889 book, A Study of Wagner, he undertook a detailed interrogation of Wagner’s writings on music and other writers’ theories of the evolution and origins of music. But Newman’s discussions on method, authority and value continued well into his career, especially in his work for the Sunday Times, where he wrote extensively at times about the many problems faced by music historians and biographers.

32 For the background and histories of the comparative method see Henry H. Remak, ‘Comparative Literature: Its Definition and Function’, in Newton P. Stallknecht and Horst Frenz, eds, Comparative Literature: Method and Perspective (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 1961), 3–37; and Susan Bassnett, Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993). For a discussion of the comparative method in political discourse see, for example, Stefan Collini, Donald Winch and John Burrow, eds, That Noble Science of Politics: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Intellectual History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 207–75. 33 See, for example, René Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature: A Seminal Study of the Nature and Function of Literature in all its Contexts (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986 [1949]), 48. 34 Matthew Arnold, ‘On the Modern Element in Literature’, inaugural lecture delivered at the University of Oxford, 14 November 1857, cited in Bassnett, Comparative Literature, 1. 35 Abel François Villemain, Cours de littérature française: Tableau de la littérature au moyen âge en France, en Italie, en Espagne et en Angleterre, 2 vols (Paris: Pichon et Didier, 1830); and Jean-Jacques Ampère, Histoire de le littérature française au moyen âge comparée aux littératures étrangères (Paris: Tessier, 1841). See Bassnett, Comparative Literature, 21–2, and Ulrich Weisstein, Comparative Literature and Literary Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973), 170–1. 36 Bassnett, Comparative Literature, 22–3. Ernest Newman and the Promise of Method 95

A study of some of the book reviews he wrote during the years on the Sunday Times sheds light on Newman’s interest in historiography and the advancement of musicology in the early twentieth century.

❧❧ Historical Method and Musicology The announcement of Newman’s appointment to theSunday Times in February 1920 mentioned that he was writing a history of modern music. In 1927, Newman was still working on it, though it was now called History of Music, and he was desperate to finish it.37 But this project, like many projects Newman had intended to write, including a biography of Berlioz and a book on Parsifal, never saw the light of day.38 Still, Newman wrote frequently on music and historical method in some form or another in approximately fifty articles for the Sunday Times. Much of the material for these articles may have come from parts of his unfinished book. Newman’s essays on music history and musicology appeared in a dozen articles published between 1922 and 1934 and concentrated largely on English and French literature. After 1934, however, his attention turned to German-language musicology. Newman wrote frequently that the best vantage point for assessing musical works was two decades after their composition. He also wrote about authority in history and the need for historians of music to know their subject thoroughly. But this point troubled him in relation to his own work. In an article from 6 January 1924 (which was ostensibly a review of Paul Landormy’s Histoire de la musique from 1923), Newman wondered whether it was possible for one author alone to have sufficient grasp of the whole sweep of Western music history, given the great strides music scholarship had taken up to the early 1920s. He argued that with such proliferation of knowledge it would become almost impossible for a single hand to write books on music history. This anxiety may be why Newman’s history of music was never completed. But Newman found hope in the work of Paul Landormy.

37 Vera Newman, Ernest Newman, 69. 38 Plans for the history of music, which appear to have been first raised in 1921, are recorded in Vera Newman’s Ernest Newman, 25. Mention is made of Newman’s planned Parsifal book on page 269. It is well known that Newman planned to write a Berlioz biography; see, for example, Berlioz, Romantic and Classic: Writings by Ernest Newman, ed. Peter Heyworth (London: Gollancz, 1972), 11: ‘He [Newman] did in fact intend to write a full-length study of Berlioz’s music. That even in the last years of his life he had not abandoned this project is clear from the fact that he allowed no articles on Berlioz to be included in the two anthologies of his writings in the Sunday Times, which appeared near the end of his life.’ 96 Paul Watt

Landormy’s Histoire de la musique was a chronological account of Western music from antiquity to the present. It included biographical synopses of composers and was essentially a social and institutional history: it was not a survey of key works and musical style. Landormy expressed his feelings of inadequacy in writing a book in which so much would have to be left out, writing that ‘a work of the kind must necessarily be incomplete, owing to its very nature. In it we can do no more than underline a few salient facts, sketch the outlines of a few great figures, indicate a few important transitions.’39 Despite criticizing the book for its cursory treatment of sixteenth-century music, German music and French music, Newman nevertheless considered it a ‘gallant’ effort and shared Landormy’s anxiety over the difficulty of authority and comprehensiveness when working on a large-scale general history. These issues continued to weigh on Newman’s mind; he devoted another article to them in September 1932:

The twentieth century will probably see the end of many of our old illusions about music, among them the illusion that a general history of music is possible. Historical studies, yes; essays in historical generalisation, yes; but a real history of music, no. And that for three reasons. In the first place, detailed knowledge of all periods of music, all styles, the work of individual composers; the field is far too vast for that. In the second place no human being who has ever lived, or will ever live, can have the same imaginative insight into all the varieties of the musical mind. In the third place, a history is no history without a science or philosophy of history; that is to say, the historian must at all events try to see the whole development as a chain of forces with an inexorable logic of causation between them all and between the successive readjustments of them. The dilemma is a hopeless one.40 In the course of this article Newman reviewed George Dyson’s recently published book The Progress of Music (1932). Like Landormy’s book, Dyson’s volume was an institutional history of music that considered the effect of the church, state, theatre, concert hall and technology on the consumption and politics of music making. Dyson’s work resembled Landormy’s because it was not simply about composers’ lives and works. In the chapter entitled ‘The Stage’, for example, Dyson proposed that the ‘intimate relation between religion,

39 Paul Landormy, A History of Music, trans. Frederick H. Martens (New York: Charles Scribner’s, 1927), vii. 40 Ernest Newman, ‘Generalise in Haste …’, Sunday Times (hereafter ST) (25 September 1932), 7. Ernest Newman and the Promise of Method 97 ritual, and drama is one of the axioms of scholarship’.41 It was, for want of a better term, an early sociology of music. For example, Dyson explored dogma- tism in the historiography of medieval music, the place of song in the identity of slaves, and the effect of war and the rise of the middle class on concert-hall patronage in the classical and romantic periods.42 Despite Newman’s gloomy prognosis for musical history, Dyson’s book showed him that it was possible to construct an objective and authoritative history. Even though Newman criticized Dyson for occasional over-generalization, he yet claimed Dyson as an example ‘of the scientific historian wasting as little of his own time and his readers’ time in the description of his personal reactions to this composer or that, but concentrating on the business of showing the rationale of the connection between one epoch and another, one hidden force and another’.43 Until he encountered the works of Paul Bekker in the late 1920s, Newman’s engagement with German-language musicology and criticism was slight. There is little reference in any of his works to the founders of the discipline from the 1880s, such as Adler and Hanslick.44 It is often claimed that early twentieth-century British historians were influenced by late nineteenth-century German scholarship in the careful marshalling of facts and evidence, the need for scholarly detachment, and in the guarded synthesis of fact with interpretation.45 Newman advocated all of these practices, but he rarely articulated specific sources: it is thus assumed that the ideals of science and method in scholarship adopted in his freethought years were his guiding light. Newman wrote on Paul Bekker’s work in an article entitled ‘Musical History: Towards a Theory’ early in 1928.46 He was taken with Bekker’s idea that musical history can be seen, not in a strictly evolutionary sense, but as ‘the ebb and flow of waves’.47 Yet he also found some chinks in Bekker’s historiography,

41 George Dyson, The Progress of Music (London: Oxford University Press / Humphrey Milford, 1932), 96. 42 Ibid., 15, 46–7 and 183–91 respectively. 43 Newman, ‘Generalise in Haste …’, ST (25 September 1932), 7. 44 For a brief background to Adler’s work see Mugglestone, ‘Adler’s “The Scope, Method, and Aim of Musicology” (1885)’. For a particularly rich and recent exploration of the work of Adler and Hanslick see Kevin C. Karnes, Music, Criticism, and the Challenge of History: Shaping Modern Musical Thought in Late Nineteenth-Century Vienna (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Hanslick’s criticism is discussed in Sandra McColl, Music Criticism in Vienna, 1896–1897: Critically Moving Forms (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). 45 See, for example, Richard J. Evans, Cosmopolitan Islanders: British Historians and the European Continent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 1–58. 46 Ernest Newman, ‘Musical History: Towards a Theory’, ST (12 February 1928), 7. 47 Ibid. 98 Paul Watt especially in his writings on Mozart. He disagreed with Bekker’s view that Mozart was ‘difficult to understand, too serious, too complex and artificial’. Though Newman was far from keen on Mozart’s music, he contested Bekker’s negative appraisal, writing that ‘I know of no evidence to that effect’. Newman also thought that Bekker’s psychologizing of Mozart was clutching at straws: ‘but does not Bekker go too far when he asserts that Mozart is “the first composer whose works directly reflects his personality and his ideas”?’48 Newman also took issue with Bekker’s claim that modern composers expressed their personalities more than previous ones. Yet Bekker’s work in general, and that on Mozart in particular, excited Newman’s mind, and he went on to discuss the difficulty of marrying particular personality traits to musical style. Newman’s interest in German-language musicology gathered pace in the late 1920s and the 1930s. In April and May 1936 he devoted three articles to the subject.49 In the first, ‘Progress in Musicology: Law in Musical History’, Newman began by surveying the state of music criticism in Britain as a point of comparison with things German:

Writing about music still means, for the most part in this country, one or all of three rather antiquated things – ‘criticism’ of composers past and present, i.e., graciously approving or disapproving of them according to whether their minds are like or unlike that of the critic; informing a public palpitating for the information how Miss Smith produced her voice in its upper register last night, or how Herr Geigmörder got on with the octaves in the Beethoven violin concerto; and the laboratory dissection of composition.50 The grass was greener in Germany:

In Germany a scholar, for various reasons rooted in German history and German culture, can devote himself to scholarship […] a Riemann or an Adler is not expected to spend his evenings listening to some young lady struggling through a performance of songs that are completely beyond her intellectual capacity.51 Newman’s point was that Britain lacked a critical mass in musicology, and this was reflected in the type of work that music critics undertook: ‘scholars in Germany can devote themselves to musicology, not to reporting

48 Ibid. 49 Ernest Newman, ‘Progress in Musicology: Law in Musical History’, ST (19 April 1936), 7; ‘Some Aspects of 18th-Century Music: Dr Balet’s Generalisations’, ST (26 April 1936), 7; and ‘The Germans and the “Beggar’s Opera”’, ST (3 May 1936), 7. 50 Newman, ‘Progress in Musicology’, 7. 51 Newman, ‘Progress in Musicology’, 7. Ernest Newman and the Promise of Method 99 music-making by other people; to musicography, not to “musical criticism”’.52 In 1944, Newman would claim that Britain ‘has never yet produced an all- round musical scholar and thinker of the stature of the continental giants’, though he singled out the two people he considered to be closest to this mark: Charles Sanford Terry for his work on Bach; and Frank Arnold for his extensively illustrated book on the thorough bass, the latter described by Newman as ‘the finest piece of musicography ever produced in this country’.53 Newman blamed the poor showing of musicology in Britain on scholars’ lack of engagement with primary sources. Newman also focused his attention on German musicology through various examinations of method. The first such study was Leo Balet’s Die Verbürgerlichung der deutschen Kunst, Literatur und Musik im 18 Jahrhundert, which Newman praised for its specialization in a single period.54 He described it as ‘the first attempt to a totalitarian history of art, literature and music’, and liked its emphasis on parallelism over causation, especially the links the book made to contemporary intellectual currents in politics, literature and philosophy.55 He also highlighted two German books, written twenty years previously, that further favoured this ‘parallelism’ to history: Adler’s Der Stil in der Musik (1912) and Methode der Musikgeschichte (1919).56 Newman’s belittling of British musicology continued. In ‘The Germans and the “Beggar’s Opera”’, he voiced his jealousy of the pianist Eberhard Rebling: ‘happy the student who, like Dr Rebling, is brought up under half-a-dozen masters any one of whom makes even the totality of English musicology look rather small’.57 But in Rebling’s reading of The Beggar’s Opera Newman was amused by the German scholar’s over-thinking of it: ‘the Teutonic passion for categorizing and generalizing, for seeing everything as a “symbol” of something or other’ can be distracting, because the work was, for Newman, just “good fun”’.58 And on this note Newman described what he considered the key markers of national historiographies:

We have to keep a close eye on the German thinkers, then, when they start phi- losophizing: their inborn passion for neat schematisation is so compelling that

52 Ibid. 53 Ernest Newman, ‘A Job for a Dictator’, ST (2 July 1944), 2; and Frank Arnold, The Art of an Accompaniment from a Thorough Bass, 2 vols (London: Oxford University Press, 1931). 54 Newman, ‘Progress in Musicology’, 7. 55 Newman, ‘Some Aspects of 18th-Century Music’, 7. 56 Ibid. 57 Newman, ‘The Germans and the “Beggar’s Opera”’, 7. 58 Ibid. 100 Paul Watt

they will indulge in it on any pretext, or on no pretext at all that is visible to the English, the French or the Italians.59 Given Newman’s interest in music analysis, noted particularly in The Unconscious Beethoven, it comes as no surprise to find that he was especially keen on the work of Heinrich Schenker. Newman’s first article on Schenker was a review of his book on Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, in which Newman commented broadly, and briefly, on what he thought of Schenker’s thorough- going, if dry, approach to analysis.60 In an article published two years later, at the end of 1940, however, he devoted more time to Schenker, who, according to Newman, was ‘unknown in England’. Newman praised him for having ‘a passion for unrelaxing thoroughness and scrupulous exactitude’ and for ‘providing an imaginative insight into the workings of a composer’s mind that is too often lacking in the technical analysis of music’.61 Yet Newman made no attempt to detail Schenker’s analytical methods, only noting his good work in preparing editions of music and consulting historical documents such as manuscripts. Newman would naturally have been drawn to Schenker’s analysis, given that his own Unconscious Beethoven strove to marry analysis with psychology or criticism. It is a pity – and a lost opportunity – that he did not comment on Schenker in more detail. Despite his interest in German-language musicology, Newman was disapproving of it during the Second World War. He accused German scholars, including musicologists, of rewriting history to reflect Nazi propaganda. As Newman wrote in September 1939 in an article entitled ‘Regimentation of German Thought’: ‘only those of us who have kept in touch with the German intellectual world during the last few years know how thoroughly the ideological poison has infiltrated into every layer and every activity of German life’.62 He went on to write how ‘book after book appears in which the history

59 Ibid. 60 Ernest Newman, ‘More about Conducting: Schenker on Notation’, ST (24 October 1937), 5. See Schenker’s Beethovens neunte Sinfonie (Vienna: Universal Edition, 1912). An English translation was made in 1992 by John Rothgeb and published by Yale University Press. Other relevant studies include Karnes, Music, Criticism, and the Challenge of History, 78–108; Nicholas Cook, The Schenker Project: Culture, Race, and Music Theory in fin-de-siècle Vienna (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); and William Drabkin, ‘Heinrich Schenker’, in Thomas Christensen, ed., The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 812–43. 61 Ernest Newman, ‘Schenker and the Composer’, ST (15 December 1940), 3. Newman claimed again in 1954 that Schenker was still barely known in England; ‘Schenkerism’, ST (14 November 1954), 11. 62 Ernest Newman, ‘Regimentation of German Thought’, ST (24 September 1939), 7. Ernest Newman and the Promise of Method 101 of European culture is complacently treated as purely and simply a matter of the history of German culture’.63 Newman omitted to provide a specific case on this occasion, but he did provide one two years later, in 1941, in an article on Ernst Bücken’s Die Musik der Nationen (1937) called ‘The Nations and their Music’.64 He began with the claim that ‘for several years there has been a growing tendency among German musicologists to treat music as a specifically German art, and to claim credit for “the Germanic race” for every vital element in its evolution.’65 Despite praising Bücken’s scholarship in general, Newman was deeply critical of the book’s many gaps, claiming that ‘Dr Bücken’s volume should really be entitled […] “A History of German Music, with an Occasional Condescending Side-Glance at the Surface of the Music of Other Countries”’.66 Writing in a tribute to Ernest Newman published in 1955, Fanfare for Ernest Newman, Neville Cardus (who succeeded Newman on the Manchester Guardian) wrote that ‘Ernest Newman was perhaps the first writer truly to Europeanize our music and our humane responses to music. He quickened our antennae, opened doors for us’.67 Newman’s long championship of method in biography, criticism and history is a reflection of this Europeanization of musical thought in Britain, a trend that had also characterized other spheres of knowledge, especially in the nineteenth century. Newman’s use of the comparative method in Gluck and the Opera (1895) was novel for music if not for other fields, but it was a method that had more than an intellectual application: its use in daily journalism could steer criticism away from bias and personal opinion. Newman’s work in reviewing works of biography and musical history show him becoming gradually interested in music historiography more generally, especially in French and German writers, and promulgating, even if indirectly, the bourgeoning discipline of musicology. As a writer in various forms and genres of music criticism, biography and history, Newman’s regard for method was long, persistent and effective.

63 Ibid. 64 Ernest Newman, ‘The Nations and Their Music’, ST (5 January 1941), 3. 65 Ibid. 66 Ibid. 67 Neville Cardus, ‘Ernest Newman’, in Herbert van Thal, ed., Fanfare for Ernest Newman (London: Arthur Baker, 1955), 29–37, at 31. Chapter 5 ‘Making Symphony Articulate’: Bernard Shaw’s Sense of Music History

Harry White

Wagner was the literary musician par excellence … he produced his own dramatic poems, thus giving dramatic integrity to opera, and making symphony articulate. A Beethoven symphony (except for the articulate part of the ninth) expresses noble feeling, but not thought: it has moods, but no ideas. Wagner added thought and produced the music-drama.1 s a music critic, Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) was nothing if not honest in A his appraisals. He was also scathing, cantankerous and wilfully given to a hectoring and didactic strain of pronouncement which made him the bête noir of Victorian musical culture and – in some respects – its most implacable adversary. Between 1876 and 1898 (when he published The Perfect Wagnerite) he produced numerous columns for the London press (especially The Star, where he wrote from February 1885 under the pseudonym Corno di Bassetto, and The World, where he wrote from May 1890 as ‘GBS’), columns which now amount to an invaluable (if idiosyncratic) record of English musical life at the close of the nineteenth century. Thereafter, as his career as a dramatist took hold and made him famous, Shaw wrote much less frequently on musical matters, but he continued to publish essays and correspondence on music (including two notable exchanges with Ernest Newman) throughout his long lifetime. His last such publication appeared nine days after his death in November 1950. The three stout volumes of Shaw’s collected music criticism published in 1981 as Shaw’s Music (and edited by his indefatigable bibliographer and scholarly advocate, Dan H. Laurence) give due notice of the formative role and abiding presence of music in Shaw’s development as a writer. They also attest a striking and pervasive relationship between Shaw’s perhaps unrivalled experience of British public musical life and his own convictions about musical meaning. Shaw’s journalism extends from reviews of Clara Schumann’s performances in

1 From George Bernard Shaw, ‘The Perfect Wagnerite’ (1898), republished in Dan H. Laurence, ed., Shaw’s Music: The Complete Musical Criticism in Three Volumes (London: The Bodley Head, 1981), Vol. III, 531 (hereafter, Shaw’s Music). 102 Bernard Shaw’s Sense of Music History 103

London and Wagner’s visits there in the 1870s to appraisals of Richard Strauss and Arnold Schoenberg shortly before and after the First World War. As late as 1923 (in his preface to the fourth edition of The Perfect Wagnerite) he was still chiding the British public because of its failure to recognize the sea-change that had occurred in English music over the course of his career.2 He was also (characteristically) insistent on the wisdom of his own judgement and fore- sight. His very first published piece on music – a review of Frederick Cowen’s opera Pauline in 1876 – declares ‘a dearth of native talent’ in English dramatic music and ‘an utter absence of dramatic faculty’ in Cowen’s own work.3 His very last, ‘We sing better than our Grandparents!’, proselytizes not only (and for the hundredth time) on Mozart’s behalf, but also on behalf of homespun experience as a more reliable guide to musical understanding than any professional or academic instruction might afford.4 In the intervening three quarters of a century – and above all between 1885 and 1898 – the documentary richness and detail of Shaw’s encounter with music became part of his greater chronicle. One might say that in telling the story of Victorian and Edwardian musical life as this unfolded, Shaw was also telling his own story. Beneath the remarkable creation of ‘GBS’ as a personality of Wagnerian magnitude lay an abiding preoccupation and obsession with music as the fundamental means of artistic expression and significance. Three aspects of Shaw’s journalism emerge from the vast commentary on operas, concerts, recitals, festivals and other musical events which engaged him throughout his long lifetime. All three speak to Shaw’s own (admittedly preposterous) self-regard as an artist, but they can also explain his enduring significance as a writer on music. The first aspect is perhaps most immediately germane to the broader issue of British musical criticism between 1850 and 1950, namely, Shaw’s habitual tendency to pursue criticism as a mode of cultural propaganda in defence of Wagner and against the British musical establishment of his own day. The enthusiasm of Shaw’s Wagnerian discipleship was matched only by his notorious contempt for Brahms. This partisanship

2 See Shaw’s Music, III, 416. Shaw remarks that when Wagner was in England in the mid-1850s he would not have been able to anticipate either the surge of British composition that would follow after the turn of the century, or that Elgar ‘would attain classic rank as a European composer’. Shaw adds, ‘Yet all this happened very much as it happened before in Shakespeare’s time; and the English people at large are just as unconcerned about it, and indeed unconscious of it, as they were then.’ 3 Shaw’s Music, I, 61–6 (originally published on 29 November 1876), at 62. 4 Shaw’s Music, III, 767–9 (originally published on 11 November 1950). Shaw describes Don Giovanni as ‘the greatest opera in the world’ and concludes by saying that he is able to judge fine singing because he was taught to sing ‘by my mother, not by Garcia’ (769). 104 Harry White undoubtedly relates Shaw’s criticism to the pro-Wagner, anti-Brahms strain of German commentary on both composers (or its converse), but it also relates to a feud of Shaw’s own making which he conducted against the avatars of the British musical renaissance, and against Charles Villiers Stanford in particular. Shaw’s intemperate disdain for Stanford cannot be dismissed on the grounds of personal animosity, because it extended to an indictment of what Shaw regarded as an undue (and deadening) regard for Germanic prototypes in British music generally. His inability to appreciate Stanford’s orchestral music (especially his symphonies) was generally represented as didactic condescension (the self-made musician setting the ponderous professor straight), but it concealed a deeper objection still. The second aspect to be considered here is self-evidently unique to Shaw himself: as a dramatist, Shaw’s sense of musical history was deeply inflected by his own search for a voice and subject-matter in the theatre. Shaw came to regard himself as the natural successor to Wagner,5 but the process by which he arrived at this conclusion entailed a programmatic reading of the music of his British contemporaries (and of British music generally) that privileged ‘the drama of feeling’ (Beethoven and Wagner) and ‘the drama of thought’ (Shaw) as an historically inevitable progression confirmed by the failure of English opera and the (to Shaw) absurd imitation of German symphonic discourse. This determinism helped to shape his immensely influential (and often damaging) readings of British cultural history, even if he largely abandoned it after his position in the theatre was secure. The third, and perhaps most perplexing, aspect of Shaw’s criticism concerns his championing of Elgar, which also throws the other two themes into sharp relief. Shaw’s advocacy of Elgar is well known, but it calls into question his hitherto incessant attacks on European musical genres as adopted by British music. Before Elgar (as it were), the oratorio and the symphony were the principal targets of Shaw’s often exasperated contempt for the British music of the 1880s and 1890s. After The Dream of Gerontius and Elgar’s First Symphony, however, these genres became the glittering exemplars of an artistic imagination which Shaw (remarkably) set above his own. The implications of this musical and critical restoration for Shaw himself are work for another day, but Shaw’s enthusiasm for Elgar requires some consideration in the more general context of British musical criticism.

5 In the preface to Man and Superman (1903), Shaw remarked that he fully intended every word of it to be given when ‘my Bayreuth’ was founded. Bernard Shaw’s Sense of Music History 105 ❧❧ Shaw and Victorian Musical Culture One advantage of Shaw’s immersion in English musical life between the mid-1870s and the turn of the century lies in the extent of the performance record which his journalism preserves.6 Shaw wrote to show (in the main) how awful that record seemed to him: his screed is directed against the complacency, sloth and venal opportunism which he found in the concert hall and the opera house. (Badly rehearsed orchestras, excessively paid singers and lugubrious choral societies would remain in his sights throughout his time as a journalist.) The jeering savagery of his dismissals is even more pointed in relation to the work of individual composers, and British composers above all. Mozart and Wagner apart, one could compile a lexi- con of musical invective exclusively drawn from his animated contempt for Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Tchaikovsky, Verdi, Gounod, Berlioz, Rossini and Offenbach, to say little of Brahms and practically every British composer at work during his own lifetime. To read Corno di Bassetto and ‘GBS’ at length is not for the faint hearted. The engine of Shaw’s critical imagination is mockery, and its staying-power is almost fatally abrasive.7 ‘The whirligig of time brings its revenges in music as in other things’, Shaw remarked in an 1888 review of Mozart and Beethoven, an observation which now applies more to Shaw’s own wearisome subversions than it does to much of the music he surveyed.8 That Shaw occasionally blushed for his earliest criticism (which he nevertheless carefully preserved and subsequently republished) does not redeem the unfortunate (and perhaps inevitable) impression of a sententious and strident bore which the opera omnia of his musical declarations leaves.9

6 Shaw’s biographer, Michael Holroyd, comments that ‘From the pages of Bassetto and G.B.S., and the columns of criticism Shaw scattered anonymously through other papers, the architecture of music in late Victorian England may be recovered.’ See Holroyd, Bernard Shaw, Vol. I: 1856–1898: The Search for Love (London: Chatto & Windus, 1988), 245. 7 When read from end to end, Shaw’s columns promote a disturbing and obsessive negativity towards vast stretches of the concert and operatic repertory which he reviewed. 8 See Shaw’s Music, I, 532, where Shaw uses this phrase to close a short notice (originally published in 1888) in which he observes that a performance of Mozart’s G minor symphony ‘sounded fresher than Beethoven’s in C minor does nowadays’. 9 Shaw called his early music journalism ‘a set of critical crimes’ which he nevertheless retained ‘much as a murderer keeps his bloodstained knife under which his victim fell’. See Dan H. Laurence, ed., How to Become a Musical Critic (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1960), 5. To judge by the sustained harshness of much of his later criticism, however, Shaw’s repentance only extended to his perceived 106 Harry White

In the domain of musical journalism, Shaw was a tyrant, not on account of his loud mouth (and the answering echo of a delighted readership), but because he was so completely in earnest about the fundamental capacity of music to express feeling and improve society. In an essay for The Fortnightly Review published in 1894, Shaw – temporarily emancipated from the obligation and contrivance of his routine assaults – sets out his stall as a writer on music:

Music, then, is the most fecund of the arts, propagating itself by its power of forcing those whom it influences to express it and themselves by a method which is the easiest and most universal of all art methods, because it is the art form of that communication by speech which is common to all the race.

This music wisdom has been urged on the world in set terms by Plato, by Goethe, by Schopenhauer, by Wagner, and by myself. … And indeed the commonsense of the country under present circumstances feels that to take music as seriously as religion, morals, or politics is clear evidence of malicious insanity, unless the music belongs to an oratorio. The causes of this darkness are economic. What is the matter with us is that the mass of the people cannot afford to go to good concerts or to the opera. Therefore they remain ignorant of the very existence of a dramatic or poetic content in what they call “classical” or “good” music, which they always conceive as a weave of learnedly and heavily decorative sound patterns, and never as containing a delicious kernel of feeling, like their favourite Annie Laurie … At the same time, our most gifted singers, instead of getting ten or fifteen pounds a week and a pension, have to be paid more than Cabinet Ministers, whose work turns them prematurely grey, or officers in the field, or musical critics. All this must be altered before any serious advance in culture can be effected. The necessity for change in the social structure is so pressing that it drives the musician into the political arena in spite of his own nature. You have Wagner going out in ’48 with the revolutionists because the State declined to reform the theatre, just as I am compelled, by a similar obtuseness on the part of our own Governments, to join the Fabian Society, and wildly masquerade as a politician so that I may agitate for a better distribution of piano-purchasing power.10

‘ignorance and incompetence’, and did not imply even the mildest regret for having vilified dozens of composers, alive and dead, throughout his published work. Even if we were to let pass Shaw’s appetite for derision (a difficult task in itself), the demagoguery of his critical prose, read at sufficient length, is trying and tiresome in the extreme. In this essay, I have deliberately restricted examples to a minimum, not least because they diminish the impact of his critical perceptions, which are otherwise considerable. 10 See ‘The Religion of the Pianoforte’, in Shaw’s Music, III, 105–23, at 121–2. Bernard Shaw’s Sense of Music History 107

However naïve (and conceited) this passage may now appear, its argument is a serious representation of Shaw’s understanding of music as an agent of social reform, and as a vital amplification of speech. The unabashed lineage from Plato to Wagner from which he derives his own motivation as a critic amid the class-divided tumult and prejudice of London in the 1890s is expressive of Shaw’s gravity of purpose, all posturing, sarcasm and self-promotion to one side. Shaw believed in musical art as a political force, and (as here) he correspondingly disparaged its structural intelligence (‘learnedly and heavily decorative sound patterns’) when this appeared to him to be promoted for its own sake. He repeatedly voiced this complaint in relation to the European symphony, which he considered was no longer an intelligible (or even viable) genre after Beethoven. His more personal animus, however, was generally reserved for his great (if unwitting) rivals in British musical reform, Parry and Stanford. The ‘sham classics’ which these composers produced (the phrase is from an especially ungenerous review of Stanford’s Eden in 1891) were intoler- able to Shaw on several grounds. One might be inclined to set aside (or gratefully forget) Shaw’s repeated expressions of resentment against ‘the music of the professors’ as little more than a personal grudge.11 The defensive hostility of the autodidact excluded from the charmed circle of ‘gentlemanly’ privilege is embarrassingly to the fore in Shaw’s reviews and remembrances of late Victorian music. But Shaw’s derisive glee in such notices is significant for another reason: after decades of British musical mediocrity and stagnation, Shaw perceived in the compositions of Stanford and his contemporaries not a vital renaissance, but a moribund revival. When he reviewed Parry’s Job in 1893, he not only affirmed that he was ‘violently prejudiced against the professorial school of which Dr Parry is a distinguished member’, but also ended by affirming the hope that Parry would ‘burn the score’ of Job, and ‘throw Judith in when the blaze begins t o fl a g ’. 12 Five years earlier, he had advised readers of the Pall Mall Gazette that Stanford’s recently composed Irish Symphony represented ‘an additional proof that the symphony, as a musical form, is stone dead’.13 For Shaw, such music either represented outright creative failure (as in his decisively influential dismissal of the Irish Symphony as ‘a fearful conflict between the

11 Shaw was defensive in the extreme about his self-taught status in relation to the educational establishment represented by figures such as Parry and Stanford. Moreover, the musical mentor of his youth (and of his early years in London), Vandaleur Lee, had been ‘hounded out of Dublin’ by Stanford’s teacher, Robert Prescott Stewart. See Holroyd, Bernard Shaw, I, 48–9. 12 Shaw’s review of Job, which appeared on 3 May 1893, was brutally entitled ‘The Most Utter Failure Ever Achieved’. See Shaw’s Music, II, 869–76, at 876. 13 See Shaw’s Music, I, 515. Shaw reviewed Parry’s Judith in December 1888. 108 Harry White

Celt and the Professor’) or a misguided and hopelessly dull perpetuation of absolute music, propped up by reprehensible snobbery and privilege. British music, when it was not in the throes of ‘oratorio-mongering’, had fallen prey to the majestic delusions of an outmoded and meaningless symphonism. It nurtured Brahms and silenced Wagner. Shaw’s remarks at the outset of The Perfect Wagnerite illustrate the calamity which this represented to his sense of musical apprehension:

If Wagner were to turn aside from his straightforward dramatic purpose to propitiate the professor with correct exercises in sonata form, his music would at once become unintelligible to the unsophisticated spectator, upon whom the familiar and dreaded “classical” sensation would descend like the influ- enza. Nothing of the kind need be dreaded. The unskilled, untaught musician may approach Wagner boldly; for there is no possibility of a misunderstanding between them: the Ring music is perfectly single and simple. It is the adept musician of the old school who has everything to unlearn: and him I leave, unpitied to his fate.14 The Ring, in Shaw’s perception, is art on the side of ‘the right and the poor’ and against ‘the rich and the wrong’.15 It is the supreme vindication of Shaw’s sense of musical history, not least because it leads Shaw himself into the theatre and clears a space for him there. It is, finally, music which amplifies verbal meaning and deepens whatever emotional feeling language can afford in the vital enterprise of its own social critique. Shaw’s resentments are legion, but his febrile dislike of Stanford and Parry – which endured as a reliable if unpleasant influence in the annals of British musical historiography until comparatively recently16 – rests upon a more

14 See Shaw’s Music, III, 423. 15 Ibid., 443. 16 In many quarters, it still does, notwithstanding the decisive reassessment of Stanford and Parry by Jeremy Dibble which has contributed so much to a fresh appraisal of Victorian musical culture on its own terms. In this regard, it is interesting to revisit Frederick Hudson’s article on Stanford in the first (1980) edition of The New Grove, which is wholly silent on Stanford’s symphonies and operas in its assessment of the composer’s significance. (Hudson privileges instead Stanford’s church music, his oratorios, his songs and his influence as a teacher.) Works which we might now recognize as masterpieces of late nineteenth-century British music (notably the Requiem, much of the chamber music, Shamus O’Brien and several of the symphonies and concertos) are tactfully resigned to the work-list. One thinks of Arnold Bax’s damning verdict on Stanford in the preface to Aloys Fleischmann’s Music in Ireland (1952): Bax regarded Stanford as a composer lost to ‘the outer darkness of Brahms’. It is hard not to discern Shaw’s malign influence here. See Frederick Hudson, ‘Stanford, Sir Charles Villiers’, in Stanley Sadie, ed., The Bernard Shaw’s Sense of Music History 109 fundamental objection which becomes clear in his reaction to Brahms. In 1936, Shaw apologized for his ‘hasty (not to say silly)’ review of Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto (originally published in that Wunderjahr of Shavian musical spleen, 1888), but this modest retraction did not prevent him from republish- ing no less provocative (‘not to say silly’) notices of the German Requiem and the Fourth Symphony. Taken in apposition with Shaw’s Wagner (the ‘perfectly single and simple’ music of The Ring, obstructed only by the fog of ‘classical’ misprision and pedantry), Shaw’s Brahms projects a misdirection, and even perhaps an egregious falsehood:

Brahms takes an essentially commonplace theme [in the Fourth Symphony]; gives it a strange air by dressing it up in the most elaborate and far-fetched harmonies; keeps his countenance severely … and finds that a good many wiseacres are ready to guarantee him as deep as Wagner, and the true heir of Beethoven. The spectacle of the British public listening with its inchurchiest expression to one of the long and heavy fantasias which he calls his symphonies always reminds me of the yokel in As You Like It quailing before the big words of the fool. … His symphonies are endured at the Richter concerts as sermons are endured, and his Requiem is patiently borne only by the corpse.17 This, in other words, is the music of the Victorian hypocrite, half-enchanted by the strains of a German imagination which commands his dutiful respect but escapes his comprehension. Brahms is the specious pretender to Beethoven’s throne, his music swaddled in lush and prolix harmonies (Shaw elsewhere calls Brahms ‘the most wanton of composers’, adding that ‘his wantonness is not vicious: it is that of a great baby’) which distract from the ‘ponderous nothings’ of what the composer has to say. Brahms is Wagner’s insufferable foil. That he should have been claimed by the constituency of interest which Shaw detested in British music almost certainly made things worse, but one cannot mistake the young tyro facing down a potential rival not only to his great master, but also to himself:

The truth is that Brahms is the son of Bach and only Wagner’s second-cousin. Not understanding this, Brahms feels bound to try to be great in the way of Beethoven and Wagner. But for an absolute musician without dramatic genius to write for the theatre is to court instant detection and failure, besides facing a horribly irksome job. Therefore he falls back on a form of art which enables absolute music of the driest mechanical kind to be tacked on to a literary

New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Vol. 18 (London: Macmillan, 1980), 70–4. 17 See ‘A Legion of Pianists’ (18 June 1890), in Shaw’s Music, II, 90–5, at 93. 110 Harry White

composition and performed under circumstances where boredom is expected, tolerated, and even piously relished. That is to say, he writes requiems or oratorios. Hence Brahms’s requiem, Job, and Eden!18 We can see plainly enough in this passage the connection which Shaw makes between Brahms, Parry and Stanford (the composers of Job and Eden, respectively). In condemning his British and Irish peers, Shaw frequently enlisted the music (and especially the oratorios and symphonies) of Mendelssohn and Sterndale Bennett as evidence of artistic mediocrity and stagnation in the (comparatively) recent annals of music in England.19 Here, however, he imputes to Brahms a more immediate, and therefore more pernicious, influence. The dismissive rhetoric (‘falls back’, ‘tacked on’) is a characteristic provocation, but it does not quite suppress the anxiety of influence (to borrow a phrase) which colours the vehemence of these indictments. One feels that Shaw protests too much. He cannot altogether erase ‘the son of Bach’ from serious evaluation, even as he seeks to account for Brahms’s otherwise mystifying prestige as the mere expression of polite tolerance. In Shaw’s view, to listen to Brahms is only to yawn in church. By 1894, Shaw had begun to establish himself as a playwright in London (Widowers’ Houses, originally titled Rhinegold, was produced in 1892, and Arms and the Man in 1894), but he had not yet abandoned journalism as a profession. Nevertheless, his early success as a dramatist fortified his own reading of music history, in which the intimacy between word and tone (in Mozart and Wagner above all others) paralleled the intimacy between art and Fabian socialism which he was to pursue with erratic but unmistakably incremental success in the theatre. The Ring was the great precedent and inspiration for his own enterprises as a writer. Wagner had made ‘symphony articulate’. His music dramas admitted thought to the company of ‘noble feeling’ (the expression of which was Beethoven’s abiding significance). To endorse Brahms – still less the

18 See ‘Learning from Dr Parry’ (4 April 1894), in Shaw’s Music, III, 168–74, at 172–3. 19 See Holroyd, Bernard Shaw, I, 241: ‘The very word oratorio roused in him a tempest of evil passions’. In addition, Holroyd quotes from Shaw’s 1890 essay on Arthur Sullivan, in which he states that Goss and Bennett ‘trained him to make Europe yawn; and he took advantage of their teaching to make London and New York laugh and whistle’. But Shaw adds immediately that only ‘a critic with no sense of decency’ would commend Sullivan’s emulation of Offenbach, having already declared that the reader (thanks to Shaw’s elaborations) ‘can now understand the tragedy of Sir Arthur Sullivan’. See Shaw’s Music, II, 170–4. Shaw’s pronouncements upon Mendelssohn as a composer of oratorios are especially vindictive. Bernard Shaw’s Sense of Music History 111 music of his pale English or Irish acolytes – was an impossibility. Or so it still seemed in 1894.20

❧❧ Don Giovanni Explains21 In his reading of Shaw’s much-cited attack on Stanford’s Irish Symphony, Michael Holroyd tantalizingly suggests that we might construe the terms of Shaw’s criticism ‘as self-censure, self-analysis and self-encouragement’. Holroyd argues that despite its withering diagnosis of irresolute division (between Irish airs and symphonic development) and its dismissal of Stanford as a symphonist, Shaw’s review touches upon a wounding rift which deeply affected Shaw himself: that between the wild Irishman and his dull, Saxon master. The healing of this rift, Holroyd remarks, ‘was to become his theme in John Bull’s Other Island [1904]’.22 We might indeed suppose that having seen off Brahms as a threatening rival to Wagner (and absolute music as a creditable alternative to ‘making symphony articulate’), Shaw was now anxious to clear a path for his own theatrical discourse unimpeded by the startling international success (and distraction) of the Irish Symphony. In his 1893 review, Shaw took pains to dissuade Stanford from the ‘violent

20 In a later edition of The Perfect Wagnerite (1913), however, Shaw added an essay on ‘The Music of the Future’ (originally written for the 1907 German translation) in which he made some small concession to Brahms as a composer of significance: ‘The ultimate success of Wagner was so prodigious that to his dazzled disciples it seemed that the age of what he called “absolute music” must be at an end … All those who attempted to carry on his Bayreuth tradition have shared the fate of the forgotten purveyors of second-hand Mozart a hundred years ago. As to the expected supersession of absolute music, Wagner’s successors in European rank were Brahms, Elgar and Richard Strauss. The reputation of Brahms rests on his absolute music alone: such works as his German Requiem endear themselves to us as being musically great fun; but to take them quite seriously is to make them oppressively dull.’ See Shaw’s Music, III, 533–5; here, at 533. 21 ‘Don Giovanni explains’ is the title of a short story by Shaw written in 1887. 22 See Holroyd, Bernard Shaw, I, 241–3. Shaw’s review of the Irish Symphony appeared as ‘Going Fantee’ on 10 May 1893. See Shaw’s Music, II, 876–83. Jeremy Dibble’s definitive study of the composer, Charles Villiers Stanford: Man and Musician (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) documents the extraordinary success of the Irish Symphony (among many other international performances, Mahler conducted the work in New York in 1901), but notes that Stanford did not seek to incorporate traditional Irish music within the body of his other four remaining symphonies. One cannot help wondering whether Shaw’s ebullient fault-finding – however much it may have been prompted by his own creative anxieties, as Holroyd appears to suggest – contributed to this outcome. 112 Harry White repugnance’ between popular music and ‘the sonata form’, and having exon- erated the first movement of the symphony from this clash went on to assert that this movement ‘does not persuade me that Professor Stanford’s talent is a symphonic talent, any more than Meyerbeer’s was’. Although he was quick to evade the charge that this likening might be taken as a criticism in itself (given Wagner’s ugly indictments of Meyerbeer), Shaw disingenuously pressed home this comparison by suggesting that ‘[W]ith the right sort of book, and the right sort of opportunity in other respects, Stanford might produce a powerful and brilliant opera’.23 Less than a year later (in April 1894), he had completely changed his mind:

the whole problem for the critics at present is how to make Professor Stanford and the rest see their own destiny clearly, and save themselves from the fate of Lot’s wife, which will most assuredly overtake them if they look back to the librettos operatic and “sacred” (save the mark!), which are superstitions from the age of England’s musical impotence. Let them leave the theatrical exploitation of music to Kistler, Mascagni, and the rest of the brood of young lions: they themselves, the absolute musicians, will only succeed by sticking to absolute music, wherein their strength lies.24 Given that Shaw had inveighed for almost twenty years against ‘absolute music’ as a blind alley for British composers (in which the symphony lurked alongside its even more deplorable companion-in-arms, the oratorio), we might wonder at his symphonic insouciance here. But by 1894 Shaw had written three plays (Widowers’ Houses, The Philanderer, Mrs Warren’s Profession) and was embarked on a fourth (Arms and the Man), so the ‘brood of young lions’ to whom he recommended leaving ‘the theatrical exploitation of music’ effectively included himself. Turbulent, chaotic and controversial as his early years as a dramatist undoubtedly were, they fortified his conviction that the spoken drama (and a concomitant reform of the British theatre) answered his socialism and his musical awareness all at once. In the preface to Mrs Warren’s Profession (published in 1902) he would write:

23 It is arguable that Stanford achieved just such a ‘brilliant opera’ three years later with Shamus O’Brien (1896). Shaw’s sister Lucy sang in the premiere of that work, which may account (at least in part) for Shaw’s critical silence upon it. 24 See ‘Stanford’s Beckett’ (published on 11 April 1894), in Shaw’s Music, III, 174–80, at 179. In the same review, Shaw likens ‘modern “English” music of the Bohemian Girl School’ by comparison with Elizabethan music to the experience of being in ‘a jerry-built suburban square’ after one has walked through ‘a medieval quadrangle at Oxford’ (179). As will be obvious by now, Shaw liked to leave no stone unturned when in pursuit of an argument, even when this stratagem contradicted his previous and long-held position. Bernard Shaw’s Sense of Music History 113

The drama of pure feeling is no longer in the hands of the playwright: he has been conquered by the musician, after whose enchantments all the verbal arts seem cold and tame. Romeo and Juliet with the loveliest Juliet is dry, tedious and rhetorical in comparison with Wagner’s Tristan, even though Isolde be both fourteen stone and forty, as she often is in Germany. Indeed, it needed no Wagner to convince the public of this. The voluptuous sentimentality of Gounod’s Faust and Bizet’s Carmen has captured the common playgoer; and there is, flatly, no future now for any drama without music except the drama of thought. The attempt to produce a genus of opera without music (and this absurdity is what our fashionable theatres have been driving at for a long time without knowing it) is far less hopeful than my own determination to accept problem as the normal materiel of the drama.25 Shaw’s apprenticeship – indeed his very sensibility as a writer – had been formed through the agency of music, but in pursuing a drama of ideas which might rival (and even transcend) the Wagnerian synthesis of music and dramatic poetry, he came to terms with Wagner as the guiding star to his own vigorous enterprises in the spoken theatre.26 In this progression, it is small wonder that he could afford (at last) to leave the music of the professors to its own devices. ‘What broke up English music was opera’, Shaw wrote in a review of a concert of early English music given by Arnold Dolmetsch in March 1894, adding that ‘the Englishman is musical, but he is not operatic’. He would emancipate English music from the abject imitation of foreign models by sending it back to the seventeenth century to begin afresh, while he pushed forward into the twentieth century with the drama of ideas.27 Native opera was a lost cause; the symphony was an irrelevant slipstream and the state of music in Britain hopelessly unreceptive to (or incapable of following) Wagner’s true path. Slum landlords and prostitution (the subjects of Shaw’s early plays) can scarcely have seemed like the true path either, at least not to the upholstered environs of bourgeois taste which Shaw despised. But the precedent of opera as an exemplar nevertheless obtained throughout much of Shaw’s subsequent career as a dramatist: he never shook off its shaping intelligence. ‘Do you not know that the act of a play is intended, just like a piece of music,

25 Cited in Martin Meisel, Shaw and the Nineteenth-Century Theater (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963; repr. Greenwood Press, Connecticut, 1976), 44. 26 For a persuasive and cogent account of Wagner’s influence on Shaw, see ‘Bernard Shaw: Wagnerite’, in Anna Dzamba Sessa, Richard Wagner and the English (London: Associated University Presses, 1979), 50–64. 27 See ‘English Music’ (published on 14 March 1894), in Shaw’s Music, III, 156–63; here, at 161–3. 114 Harry White to be heard without interruption from beginning to end?’, he wrote in an address to the audience at the Kingsway Theatre, in ‘a personal appeal from the author of John Bull’s Other Island’. 28 The director of that play, Harley Granville Barker, ‘was not far out when he exclaimed’ (during a rehearsal), ‘Ladies and gentlemen, will you please remember that this is Italian opera?’29 Man and Superman, the most explicitly operatic of his plays, had come the previous year. ‘Grand opera in the middle of musical comedy’ was Shaw’s description of the third act of Man and Superman, in which Mozart’s Don Giovanni is engaged to debate (and ultimately to reject) the Wagnerian con- tract between opera and drama in favour of the ‘Life Force’ espoused by the other acts of the play. At the end of his life, Shaw observed that ‘opera taught me to shape my plays into recitatives, arias, duets, trios, ensemble finales and bravura pieces to display the technical accomplishments of the executants’.30 But Wagner taught him something else, namely that Italian opera could give way to music drama, and that music drama in turn could yield – as it does in Man and Superman – to the musically imbued problem-plays and comedies of Shaw’s own imagination.31 In this progression, Shaw – literally and figuratively – gradually abandoned his role as chief witness for the prosecution and indictment of British music. The thousands of pages he had published (and republished) as a professional critic came to represent a vast prelude (of Wagnerian proportions) to his own plays and prefaces. After 1898 (and the publication of The Perfect Wagnerite), his regular music journalism abated (even if his less frequent musical commentaries thereafter remained as pugnaciously opinionated as ever). And then he discovered (and took up) Elgar.

❧❧ ‘Neither an Imitator nor a Voluptuary’: Acclaiming Elgar Wagner in his youth and first maturity, Elgar in old age: if Shaw’s persistent desire for greatness in music, either as an inspiration or an exemplar, were

28 See Bernard Shaw, John Bull’s Other Island, ed. Dan H. Laurence (Harmondsworth: Allen Lane), 184. 29 From the 1937 preface to Shaw’s London Music, 1888–89 as heard by Cornetto di Bassetto, reprinted in Shaw’s Music, I, 29–60, at 57. 30 From an article published in 1950 as ‘The Play of Ideas’ and cited in Meisel, Shaw and the Nineteenth-Century Theater, 50. 31 The key text on Shaw’s debt to operatic prototypes in his own plays in Meisel, Shaw and the Nineteenth-Century Theater. See also Harry White, Music and the Irish Literary Imagination [‘Opera and Drama: Bernard Shaw and ‘The Brandy of the Damned’] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 133–52. Bernard Shaw’s Sense of Music History 115 the beginning and end of matters, we could scarcely complain of his magis- terial attempts to shape the reception history of British music either during his years as a firebrand critic or in the aftermath of his brilliant success on the London stage. Elgar was the great vindication of Shaw’s journalism. Having lashed the conscience of music in Britain for decades, having denounced its slipshod reliances and stiff-necked academicism, Shaw at last came upon a composer who bountifully answered his own quest for musical truth (if not love). Here was the self-made musician, the lonely voice once excluded from the madding crowd of privilege and class, whose symphonies, overtures and oratorios restored greatness to English music following two centuries of barren misadventure. Phrased thus, Elgar’s story has a familiar ring about it. ‘I consider that the history of original music, broken off by the death of Purcell, begins again with Sir Edward Elgar’, Shaw told The Morning Postin 1911.32 He did not stop there: in an essay on Elgar published in Music & Letters (1920), he returned to his old stamping ground, like a ghost haunting the scene of past misdeeds, to affirm Elgar at the expense not only of his British contemporaries but also of Brahms himself, the fons et origo of British musical mediocrity:

[Elgar] was no keyboard composer: music wrote itself on the skies for him, and wrote itself in the language perfected by Beethoven and his great predecessors. With the same inheritance, Schumann, who had less faculty and less knowledge, devotedly tried to be another Beethoven, and failed. Brahms, with a facility as convenient as Elgar’s, was a musical sensualist with intellectual affectations, and succeeded only as an incoherent voluptuary, too fundamentally addleheaded to make anything great out of the delicious musical luxuries he wallowed in. … Elgar, neither an imitator nor a voluptuary, went his own way without both- ering to invent a new language, and by sheer personal originality produced symphonies that are really symphonies in the Beethovenian sense, a feat in which neither Schumann, Mendelssohn, nor Brahms, often as they tried, ever succeeded convincingly.33 Shaw barely acknowledges ‘the London branch’ of that ‘ridiculous little mutual-admiration gang’ of German composers and musicians (Brahms, Clara Schumann and Joseph Joachim) whom he scorns as a means of situating Elgar’s genius, except to remark that it was a shock for Parry and his devotees that Elgar had never heard of the supertonic. The whole essay appears

32 Cited in Laurence, ed., How to Become a Music Critic, xx. 33 See Shaw’s Music, III, 721–8, at 724–5. 116 Harry White mean-spirited, interleaved with ill-considered references to Debussy and Stravinsky (‘Elgar could turn out Debussy and Stravinsky music by the thousand bars for fun in his spare time’),34 and its Elgarian rhapsodies are jarringly demeaned by Shaw’s determination to prove that he had been right all along about the empty effeteness of absolute music after the death of Beethoven. None of this impugns the integrity of Shaw’s genuine esteem for Elgar’s music: in later writings, he chastised the concert-going public for a pitiful attendance at a performance of The Apostles; he took Edward Dent to task for his poor appraisal of Elgar in a revised edition of Adler’s Handbuch der Musikgeschichte;35 in 1929, at an exhibition of Shaw’s work at the Malvern Public Library, he recognized in Elgar ‘a greater art than mine and a greater man than I can ever hope to be’.36 Shaw’s Elgarian enthusiasms are to his credit, but these were almost always accompanied by a recovery of his old grudges: when it came to British music in late nineteenth-century England, no critic ever dragged Hector’s body in the dust so constantly as did Shaw himself. His acute and often brilliant sense of music history was sadly compromised by a great incapacity to recognize compositional technique as anything other than a confirmation of his own instincts as a dramatist. His systematic dismissal of so many individual genres in British music suggests that, for much of the time, nothing might be allowed to impede the Shavian enterprise of becoming a great composer independent of music itself. This reading of Shaw’s criticism in relation to Elgar is especially problematic, because the genres which Elgar mastered were those which Shaw had hitherto despised as wholly inadequate or unsuited to British music. If this change of mind were simply a matter of Shaw’s preference for Elgar’s oratorios and symphonies over those of Stanford and Parry, it would scarcely matter. Nor does it matter especially that Shaw’s enthusiasms (at least in print) came after the fact of his own long-established success as a dramatist (although one cannot help wondering – given his persistently negative appraisals of so much British music in the 1880s and 1890s – whether he would have been quite so uncritical of Elgar’s greatness had he encountered his music while

34 Ibid., 723. 35 Excerpts from Dent’s critical assessment of Elgar are republished in Shaw’s Music, III, 731–2, together with Shaw’s postscript to the letter, which he and seventeen others wrote and sent to the Press Association in 1931 to protest Dent’s reading. 36 For details of Shaw’s enterprises on behalf of Elgar, see Stanley Weintraub, ‘Elgar: Shaw’s Musician’, in Shaw: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 22 (2002), 1–18; Weintraub (8) reports that the September 1929 issue of The Musical Times observed that Shaw’s deference to Elgar as an artist was ‘apparently the only public utterance in which Mr. Shaw has acknowledged himself to be second to any creative artist, living or dead’. Bernard Shaw’s Sense of Music History 117 he was struggling to make his way in the theatre). But it does matter that the favourable reception history afforded to Shaw’s criticism (not least by Edward Dent) should have passed so easily over its aggressive and damaging assaults. In 1946 Dent suggested that ‘we are all agreed that England today is a much more musical country than in 1890, and no doubt a good deal of that improvement is due to the persistent shaking of Mr. Shaw’, but this is difficult to accept at face value when one revisits Shaw’s criticism (and the musical world he inhabited) seventy years after Dent’s genial tribute appeared.37 At the last, we might reconsider whether Shaw’s campaign of ridicule perhaps did more harm than good.

37 See Edward J. Dent, ‘Corno di Bassetto’, in Stephen Winsten and Sir Max Beerbohm, eds, G.B.S. 90: Aspects of Bernard Shaw’s Life and Work (London: Ardent Media, 1946), 122–30, at 122. 6 Henry Hadow (Royal College of Music/ArenaPAL) 7 Ernest Walker (Ernest Walker Archive, Balliol College, Oxford) 8 Ernest Newman (Reproduced by kind permission of the Estate of Ernest Newman) 9 George Bernard Shaw (Performing Arts Images/ArenaPAL) 10 Donald Francis Tovey (Royal College of Music/ArenaPAL) Chapter 6 Analysis and Value Judgement: Schumann, Bruckner and Tovey’s Essays in Musical Analysis

Julian Horton

❧❧ Tovey and the Symphony after Beethoven onald Francis Tovey’s writings have polarized scholarly opinion since D his death in 1940. By 1980, opposing critical positions had been staked out by Hans Keller and Joseph Kerman, who respectively styled his analyses as blandly descriptive and humanely critical.1 Subsequently, Tovey (1875–1940) has been characterized as a ‘Victorian man of letters’, a product of fin-de-siècle British intellectual history, and a precursor of post-war music theory.2 The informality of his approach, his belief in the virtues of the ‘naïve listener’ and the capacity of musical works to reveal their aesthetic content without the need for systematic theory have proved frustrating and appealing in equal measure, furnishing evidence of conservatism and postmodernity avant la lettre.3 These debates notwithstanding, his writings have proved remarkably enduring as

1 Hans Keller, ‘K. 503: The Unity of Contrasting Themes – I’, Music Review 17 (1956), 48–58; and Joseph Kerman, ‘Tovey’s Beethoven’, in Alan Tyson, ed., Beethoven Studies 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 172–91. The critique of Tovey’s informality is sustained in Jonathan Dunsby and Arnold Whittall, Music Analysis in Theory and Practice (London: Faber & Faber, 1988), 62–73. 2 See, respectively, Catherine Dale, Music Analysis in Britain in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003); Michael Spitzer, ‘Tovey’s Evolutionary Metaphors’, Music Analysis 24/3 (2005), 437–69; Christopher Wintle, ‘“Humpty Dumpty’s Complaint”: Tovey Revalued’, Soundings 11 (1983), 14–45; and Richard Cohn, ‘“As Wonderful as Star Clusters”: Instruments for Gazing at Tonality in Schubert’, 19th-Century Music 22/3 (1999), 213–32, which revisits Tovey’s ‘Tonality’, Music & Letters 9/4 (1928), 341–63. Dunsby and Whittall also ascribe Tovey’s mentality to his essential Victorianism: see Music Analysis in Theory and Practice, 65–6. 3 As Spitzer puts it: ‘in the light of the new musicology, [Tovey’s] “faultless descriptions” and his lack of a “systematic analytical theory” now look more like virtues than faults’; see ‘Tovey’s Evolutionary Metaphors’, 437. 123 124 Julian Horton aids to informed listening, sustaining value judgements about composers and works irrespective of the vicissitudes of academic reappraisal. The Essays in Musical Analysis have enjoyed an especially rich afterlife. Conceived chiefly as programme notes for the Reid Concerts in Edinburgh and (for the Brahms symphonies) the visit of the Meiningen Orchestra to London in 1902, the Essays have proved uniquely successful at mediating popular instruction and analytical insight. Their generic nuances – the ways they convey an essentially, if sometimes covertly, historical model of how genres develop – however await detailed excavation. Tovey’s hostility to abstraction complicates this task, or at least makes it a simple matter in some cases and an act of lexical archaeology in others. His essays on the concerto, for example, mobilize the notion of the genre’s ‘true’ form expounded in ‘The Classical Concerto’, in which Tovey confidently installed a Mozartian paradigm as a generic benchmark.4 Despite writing extensively on its repertoire, however, he never articulated a comparable model for the symphony. The tendency, evident particularly in German-language literature, to orientate the genre’s history around Beethoven is not overtly pursued, despite being strongly implied, and no single essay sketches a paradigm of symphonic practice, Beethovenian or otherwise.5 Tovey’s criticisms of the symphonic and concertante repertoires nevertheless operate comparable methodologies: a notional ‘true’ symphony, which coordinates critical engagement with a view of the genre’s proper evolution, still underpins analysis. The problems of reconstructing Tovey’s generic-historical attitudes are illustrated by his commentaries on the nineteenth-century symphony, which disclose a broad argument about the Beethovenian symphonic inheritance, distributed across essays on works by Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Brahms, Bruckner, Dvořák, Franck, Tchaikovsky, Elgar and Sibelius.6

4 Donald Francis Tovey, ‘The Classical Concerto’, in Essays in Musical Analysis, Vol. III: Concertos (London: Oxford University Press, 1936, repr. 1966), 3–27. 5 Examples are too numerous to cite extensively, but benchmark contributions range from Paul Bekker, Die Symphonie von Beethoven bis Mahler (Berlin: Schuster & Loeffler, 1922), to Carl Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. J. Bradford Robinson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). For a recent English- language example, see Mark Evan Bonds, After Beethoven: Imperatives of Originality in the Symphony (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). 6 Essays in Musical Analysis, Vol. I: Symphonies (London: Oxford University Press, 1935), which contains the essays on the nine Beethoven symphonies, Brahms’s four symphonies, Schubert’s Fifth Symphony, ‘Unfinished’ and ‘Great’ C major, and Mendelssohn’s ‘Italian’ Symphony; and Essays in Musical Analysis, Vol. II: Symphonies (II), Variations and Orchestral Polyphony (London: Oxford University Press, 1935), which comprises the supplementary essay on Beethoven’s Ninth and essays on Schumann’s First, Third and Fourth symphonies, Franck’s D minor schumann, bruckner and tovey’s essays 125

Reflecting Michael Spitzer’s observation of Tovey’s twin debts to British empiricism and German idealism (which he inherited above all from Ernest Walker), the abstract concept of formal and generic perfection around which Tovey orientates this repertoire emerges empirically, in the critical assessment of individual works, rather than inductively, as a higher-level ideal type, in line with his argument that ‘the record of the immortal classics presents a variety of forms which can yield their principles only to an attention concentrated on each individual case’.7 In these terms, a composer’s canonical position is determined both by the extent to which such attention reveals formal ‘defects’, and in the qualitative judgements that this adjudication facilitates. In an intellectual turn betraying Tovey’s Hegelian roots, such critique supplies evidence for the higher conjunction of analysis and aesthetic judgement embodied in the notion of ‘organic unity’, the idea that form expresses the music’s ‘inner nature’ rather than its architectonic conformity.8 As might be expected from his studies with Parry, youthful engagement with pro-Brahmsian elements of the British musical establishment and friendship with Joseph Joachim, Tovey installs Brahms as the symphony’s post-Beethovenian centre of gravity, and concomitantly denigrates

Symphony, Dvořák’s Fifth, Sixth, Seventh and Ninth symphonies, Tchaikovsky’s Sixth, Bruckner’s Fourth and Sixth, Elgar’s First, and Sibelius’s Third and Fifth. 7 Essays in Musical Analysis, Vol. I, 212; and Spitzer, ‘Tovey’s Evolutionary Metaphors’, 440: ‘Tovey’s eclectic world-view was shaped by the cross-currents of British Empiricism and German Idealism in Victorian intellectual culture. On the one hand, his habitual references to the “musical facts”, his disdain for analytical abstraction, and his popularizing mission to educate the public demonstrate the “common sense” basic to British liberal democracy; on the other, his repertoire was primarily German, identified with the Brahms–Schumann–Joachim axis and its cult of Beethoven.’ On the contradictions in Tovey’s thought, see Spitzer, ‘Tovey’s Evolutionary Metaphors’, 437–8, which traces Tovey’s engagement with German idealism to his time as an undergraduate at Balliol College, Oxford, and especially to its Master Sir Edward Caird, an important figure in the English revival of Hegelian philosophy centred on Oxford in the 1890s. On Tovey’s time at Balliol, see Mary Grierson, Donald Francis Tovey: A Biography based on Letters (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), 32–85. Walker’s work and background are considered in detail by Jeremy Dibble in Chapter 3 of this volume. 8 See for instance Tovey’s explanation of this idea in A Companion to Beethoven’s Pianoforte Sonatas (London: Associated Boards of the Royal Schools of Music, 1935), 8–9. The irony of this position is that Tovey’s analyses are usually chronological surveys employing the ‘précis’ method adopted by Parry, a technique inevitably privileging the schematic succession of material over its overarching conceptual relationships. 126 Julian Horton or marginalizes Lisztian or post-Wagnerian alternatives.9 In so-doing, he exposes an aesthetic background in the educational and compositional agendas attending the so-called English musical renaissance, concretized in the founding of the Royal College of Music, central to which was an orientation around the Mendelssohn–Brahms axis of German music as a paradigm for the restoration and advancement of Britain’s claims to being a musical nation.10 Refracting this agenda, Tovey credits Brahms’s symphonies with a degree of aesthetic substance accorded to no other symphonic music after Beethoven, a stature occasioning frequent hyperbole.11 Brahms’s contemporaries, successors and predecessors are variously judged in relation to this achievement, either by association or constitutive opposition. Tovey’s assessment of Schubert evidences the former with particular clarity. He defends Schubert’s symphonies by distinguishing between the quality of their content and the imperfection of their forms. Although ‘[f]ew of Schubert’s large instrumental works are free from obvious redundancies and inequalities’, the substance of his art compensates for its failings:

Critics of literature and the fine arts are better trained to recognize in imperfect examples the qualities which will produce perfection under special conditions: thus they do not so constantly make the mistake of assuming that work which

9 On the dissemination of Brahms’s music in England, see Gerald Norris, Stanford, the Cambridge Jubilee and Tchaikovsky (Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1980), 69–74. On Tovey’s study with Parry, which began when he was fourteen, see Jeremy Dibble, C. Hubert H. Parry: His Life and Music (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 283–4, and Grierson, Donald Francis Tovey, 19–22. On Parry’s admiration for Brahms, see Dibble, C. Hubert H. Parry, 98–104 and 148. On Tovey’s relationship with Joachim, see Grierson, Donald Francis Tovey, 81–2 and 93–5. According to Grierson, Joachim commented in correspondence that ‘Of all the musicians of the younger generation that I know … Tovey is assuredly the one that would most have interested Brahms’; see ibid., 96. 10 On which subject, see Meirion Hughes and Robert Stradling, The English Musical Renaissance, 1840–1940: Constructing a National Music (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), 31–42. Tovey’s Brahmsian sympathies crystallized in 1902, when his programme notes for the Meiningen Orchestra’s performances of the Brahms symphonies provoked a vitriolic attack in Musical Opinion: ‘The scores of the master make a Brahms specialism easy. They delight a mind such as that of Mr D. F. Tovey … who finds an unholy pleasure in noting the diminution and augmentation of a theme … Brahms, in short, has become the refuge of the half- educated in music’; see Grierson, Donald Francis Tovey, 105. 11 Thus the coda of the Second Symphony’s finale is ‘among the most brilliant climaxes in symphonic music since Beethoven’, the first movement of the Fourth Symphony ‘acts its tragedy with unsurpassable variety of expression and power of climax’, and the scherzo of the Fourth is ‘perhaps the greatest scherzo since Beethoven’; see Essays in Musical Analysis, Vol. I, 106, 115 and 119. schumann, bruckner and tovey’s essays 127

shows the highest qualities can be outweighed by work which does not. … Such a mistake is made … when we say that Schubert is no master of form because any fool can see where Schubert fails.12 In Schubert’s case, musical taste (what Tovey calls ‘good judgement of musical style’) cancels out problems of formal execution: ‘It does not matter when, where, and how he lapses …: the quality is there, and nothing in its neighbour- hood can make it ridiculous’.13 Here as elsewhere, Brahms is invoked to anchor the argument, as a successor who successfully integrated Schubertian style and Beethovenian form.14 Tovey’s commentaries on symphonies he regards as constitutively opposing rather than enhancing the Beethovenian–Brahmsian lineage are no less instructive; this role is primarily filled, albeit for contrasting reasons, by Schumann and Bruckner. For Tovey, both composers stood in a problematic angle of relation to the symphonic mainstream, in each case thanks to an essential conflict between the genre’s requirements and the composer’s natural mode of expression. Their respective shortcomings define the polar extremes of Tovey’s critical territory: Schumann’s difficulties could be traced to his epigrammatic style, which found its natural home in piano cycles and lieder; Bruckner’s monumentalism ran ahead of his formal competence, producing symphonies that burst the constraints of classical form to the detri- ment of its proportions. Schumann was, in effect, too small for the symphony, and Bruckner too large; but in both cases, their music helped to define the Beethovenian–Brahmsian generic paradigm. This chapter’s primary aim is to reassess and update Tovey’s analyses of Schumann’s and Bruckner’s symphonies, understood as attempts to explain formal processes, as reflections of reception history, and as components of a generic-historical conspectus. His views on both composers stand in urgent need of reappraisal, since critical engagement with his arguments remains scarce, while research since his death has shifted their frames of reference, especially in Bruckner’s case. This urgency is compounded by the influence Tovey’s Essays still exert over popular opinion, which has the potential to sustain views that no longer withstand close analytical scrutiny.

12 Essays in Musical Analysis, Vol. I, 201–3, at 202. 13 Ibid. 14 Comparable arguments surface in Tovey’s appraisal of Dvořák, who succeeded (and secured Brahms’s approval) despite his manifest naivety and ‘primitive, Bohemian, and childlike’ phrasing. See Essays in Musical Analysis, Vol. II, 89–90 and 106. 128 Julian Horton ❧❧ Schumann and the Lyric-Epic Symphony Tovey’s reading of Schumann’s symphonies furnishes one instance of the comprehensive reversal of critical fortune through which his music turned in the early twentieth century. For much of the nineteenth century, Schumann’s reputation rested upon his achievements in the public genres. His first international success came in 1843 with the oratorio Das Paradies und die Peri; thereafter, his public profile depended considerably upon the symphonies’ transmission, both in the concert hall and as paradigms for later composers.15 By the mid-twentieth century, the opposite view had prevailed: Schumann was perceived to excel in the domestic forms of the piano cycle and lied, a manner of composition that could not support public ambitions. The symphonies persisted in the repertoire as weak responses to Beethoven; and the dramatic works (Peri, Genoveva and the Szenen aus Goethes Faust) disappeared almost entirely from the repertoire, despite periodic revival. The essays on Schumann’s First, Third and Fourth symphonies identify core features of the composer’s musical personality and assess their compatibility with a generic ideal as evidence of success or failure. Tovey’s stance reflects a view of Schumann as fundamentally a domestic composer, whose musical ideas are self-contained, episodic or paratactic, rather than developmental and ripe for expansion. The ‘defects’ of his symphonies arise from the attempt to make this style generate symphonic forms and textures. For Tovey, Schumann’s miniaturism had two negative consequences. Primarily, it drove a wedge between the symphonies’ material and the processes that symphonic forms require. As he explains:

[T]here are some things which you cannot have both ways. Schumann is a master of the epigram. His ideas normally take the shape of gnomic sayings; and no writer is fuller of memorable Einfälle … It has been observed by more than one eminent critic that the creators of such Einfälle seldom show high construc- tive genius on a larger scale. But what else can we expect? Large forms imply the expansion of initial ideas by development; and development is the very thing that an epigram will not bear.16 In consequence, the symphonies work by accumulation rather than development. Their epigrammatic themes build into forms by sequence, not variation, a technique that preserves their self-consistency but results in a ‘nobly rough

15 On the genesis and early reception of Peri, see John Daverio, Robert Schumann: Herald of a New Poetic Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 267–84; on the general trajectory of Schumann reception, see ibid., 7–19. 16 Essays in Musical Analysis, Vol. II, 46. schumann, bruckner and tovey’s essays 129 mosaic’, which robs the genre of its organic raison d’être.17 Lying beneath these criticisms is a sociological distinction between private and public modes of expression. The epigrammatic style originates in art song and feeds a domestic musical market; the developmental style facilitates a higher art instantiated by the Beethovenian genres. This dichotomy also underpins Tovey’s second, more familiar complaint, which concerns Schumann’s apparent discomfort with orchestral composition. The lyricist’s domesticity precludes mastery of orchestration; Schumann’s problem, for Tovey as for many others, was ‘an incredible clumsiness’ of orchestral technique, manifest especially in the excessive doubling of winds and strings, which indicates an inability to conceive ‘a definite tone colour that would be spoilt by any change’.18 Again, this engenders a split between content and the medium of its dissemination; in the First Symphony, Op. 38, ‘the inner content … is a perpetual springtime of young enthusiasm’, whereas ‘the externals are robed in an old dressing-gown and carpet slippers amid thick clouds of tobacco smoke’.19 Tovey further posited an accelerating decline in orchestral competence as Schumann aged, while stopping short of the cliché that the later works signify the composer’s impending madness. The scoring of the First Symphony is consequently ‘not nearly as opaque as that of the later works’, whereas the 1851 revisions to the Fourth Symphony constituted ‘a tragedy’.20 The idea that Schumann’s material is generically inadequate has a British prehistory tracking back to the early reception of Op. 38. The critic on The Times, most likely J. W. Davison, described the impression of its London premiere, given by the Philharmonic Society in June 1854, as ‘a complete fiasco [italics in original]’, complaining that a work ‘so long, so full of pretence, and so destitute of merit we have rarely had to listen to’ and singling out its paucity of invention.21 Contrasting with his later affiliation with a classic-romantic lineage, Davison associated Schumann with Liszt and Wagner as exponents of ‘the music of the future’, dismissing their music altogether as ‘calculated

17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., 47. 19 Ibid., 48. 20 Ibid., 56. Tovey based his analysis on the 1841 version of the symphony, in order to compensate for the alleged problems of reorchestration in the 1851 revision. For Tovey, ‘the progress in Schumann’s own orchestration is set steadily in the direction of making all entries “fool-proof” by doubling them in other parts and filling up the rests. That way safety lies, and the same may be said of martial law.’ Schumann’s later orchestration then ‘took this final state of petrification as its starting point’. See ibid., 57 and 58. 21 ‘Philharmonic Concerts’, The Times (7 June 1854). 130 Julian Horton rather to degrade than elevate the art’.22 Performances of Op. 38 at the Crystal Palace in the 1860s elicited similar reactions.23 On 26 March 1860, the Morning Chronicle damned the symphony as ‘the work of a clever uninspired musician; but, to our thinking, clever uninspired musicians should not attempt symphonies, in which none have excelled except the greatest musical intelligence, among whom most indubitably cannot be ranked Robert Schumann’.24 The work’s return four years later was received with equal hostility. The Era considered it to exemplify the failings of German modernism:

Robert Schumann, the founder and chief ornament of the ‘future’ school, was beyond doubt, a gifted man, and a profound musician; but the ‘divine spark’ which can sustain the minds of listeners by means of continuous melody was wanting in this composer, whom a German clique have placed at the head of all orchestral writers.25 The Manchester Guardian discerned a comparable lack of unity in Charles Hallé’s rendition of Op. 38 on 29 December 1865:

The principal subject of the Allegro is badly chosen, and little is made of it in the way of development. There is much aspiration, but little inspiration; the form is there, but the life’s blood does not circulate within it; there is an abundance of pretty phrases, but they are fragmentary and do not belong to any central unity.26 Yet the issues Tovey broaches extend beyond Schumann reception. The dichotomy of lyricism and development is vital to debates about the Romantic persistence of Classical forms; similar arguments have attached to Schubert and Mendelssohn, with comparably negative consequences.27 The question

22 Davison’s association of Schumann with Liszt and Wagner is elaborated by Peter Horton in Chapter 1 of this volume. 23 On the development and significance of the Crystal Palace Concerts, see Colin Eatock, ‘The Crystal Palace Concerts: Canon Formation and the English Musical Renaissance’, 19th-Century Music 34/1 (2010), 87–105. 24 ‘Crystal Palace Concerts’, Morning Chronicle (26 March 1860). 25 ‘Crystal Palace Concerts’, The Era (27 November 1864). 26 ‘Mr Halle’s Grand Concerts’, Manchester Guardian (29 December 1865). 27 For Schubert, see seminally J. W. Davison’s review of the first performance of Schubert’s orchestral music in England, conducted by Mendelssohn on 10 June 1844: ‘Perhaps a more overrated man than this Schubert never existed. He has certainly written a few good songs. But what then? Has not every composer who ever composed not written a few good songs?’; see The Musical World (6 December 1844), cited in John Reed, ‘Schubert’s Reception History in Nineteenth-Century England’, in Christopher H. Gibbs, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Schubert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 254–62, at 256. The more recent schumann, bruckner and tovey’s essays 131 of lyric symphonism is central to David Brodbeck’s recent critique of Carl Dahlhaus, who viewed the nineteenth-century symphony overwhelmingly in terms of Beethovenian models and disparaged Schumann accordingly.28 Brodbeck proposes a ‘lyric-epic’ alternative originating with Schumann’s discovery of Schubert’s ‘Great’ C major Symphony in 1839 and its subsequent performance and reception in Leipzig, of which Schumann’s First Symphony was an immediate compositional consequence.29 Schubert’s model offered Schumann a means of moving beyond Beethoven by synthesizing dramatic-motivic and poetic-lyric modes of composition.30 The ‘Great’ C major articulates theme groups as opportunities for lyric presentation rather than motivic action. The notion of the symphony as a drama propelled by motivic process is thus replaced by a distinction between the episodic presentation of lyric themes and phases of developmental action, which are separate in

critique of lyricism in Schubert’s sonata forms begins with Felix Salzer, ‘Die Sonatenform bei Schubert’, Studien zur Musikwissenschaft 15 (1928), 86–125; the question has been revisited in Poundie Burstein, ‘Lyricism, Structure and Gender in Schubert’s G major String Quartet’, The Musical Quarterly 81/1 (1997), 51–63; Anne M. Hyland, ‘The Tightened Bow: Analysing the Juxtaposition of Drama and Lyricism in Schubert’s Paratactic Sonata-Form Movements’, in Gareth Cox and Julian Horton, eds, Irish Musical Studies, Vol. 11: Irish Musical Analysis (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2014), 17–40; and Su-Yin Mak, Schubert’s Lyricism Reconsidered: Structure, Design and Rhetoric (Saarbrücken: Lambert, 2010). For issues of lyricism in Mendelssohn’s sonata forms, see Friedhelm Krummacher, ‘Zur Kompositionsart Mendelssohn’, in Carl Dahlhaus, ed., Das Problem Mendelssohn (Regensburg: Bosse, 1974), 169–84, trans. Douglass Seaton as ‘On Mendelssohn’s Compositional Style’, in Seaton, ed., The Mendelssohn Companion (Westport, CT, and London: Greenwood Press, 2001), 551–68; Friedhelm Krummacher, Mendelssohn – der Komponist: Studien zur Kammermusik für Streicher (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1978); and Greg Vitercik, ‘Mendelssohn the Progressive’, Journal of Musicological Research (1989), 333–74. 28 See David Brodbeck, ‘The Symphony after Beethoven after Dahlhaus’, in Julian Horton, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Symphony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), responding to Carl Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, 152–60. Dahlhaus’s view of Schumann’s Op. 38 echoes Tovey: ‘however shrewdly Schumann calculated the form [of the first movement], by substituting the motivic unity of the character piece for that of the Beethoven symphony he became embroiled in contradictions between lyricism and monumentality … that led not so much to a productive dialectic as to mutual paralysis of its various components.’ Ibid., 160. 29 ‘The Symphony after Beethoven after Dahlhaus’, 67–71. 30 On the relationship between the two works, see Jon W. Finson, Robert Schumann and the Study of Orchestral Composition: The Genesis of the First Symphony, Op. 38 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 23–7. 132 Julian Horton the discourse and advance by sequential accumulation and fragmentation.31 This idea is not antithetical to the Beethovenian alternative, which readily discloses episodic lyricism and cumulative sequential techniques (for instance in the Sixth and Seventh symphonies), but reorders its priorities, reflecting the concern, preoccupying symphonists from Schubert to Mahler (Brahms included), of how to sublimate the vocal impulse that takes control of the genre in Beethoven’s Ninth, by reversing its trajectory and making vocal lyricism a means to a symphonic end. In Schumann’s case, this ambition aligned with the aesthetic conviction which John Daverio describes as ‘the notion that music should be imbued with the same intellectual substance as literature’: Op. 38’s composition signalled the point at which this project annexed the symphony.32 Viewed in these terms, Tovey’s critique misses the point, which is not that Schumann’s poetic mentality precludes true symphonism, but that his symphonies ramify the poetic and the dramatic. The main theme’s treatment in Op. 38’s first movement offers clear evidence of this objective. The acceleration of the introduction’s opening motto fanfare (‘x’ in Example 6.1) to produce the main theme itself (A in Example 1) is already an act of lyric sublimation, because Schumann reportedly associated the fanfare with a poem on the subject of Spring by Adolf Böttger: Daverio illustrates the similarity of rhythm between the fanfare and the poem’s final couplet, ‘O wende, wende deinen Lauf, – / Im Tale blüth der Frühling auf!’ (Oh desist, desist from your course, – / Spring blooms in the valley.’)33 As Jon Finson explains, the fanfare also references the horn theme opening Schubert’s ‘Great’ C major, while its dramatic continuation in D minor in bars 4–6 shadows Schubert’s deployment of the mediant minor in his introduction and in the body of the sonata form.34 The post-Beethovenian ambition is announced immediately: under Schubert’s auspices, Schumann begins by translating a poetic source into an instrumental theme, thereby constraining the Ode to Joy’s lyric impulse within the work’s generative instrumental material.

31 On this distinction in Schubert, see Hyland, ‘“The Tightened Bow”’, especially 34–7. 32 Daverio, Robert Schumann, 19. 33 See ibid., 231, and also Finson, Robert Schumann and the Study of Orchestral Composition, 33–4. For a view challenging this derivation, see Lodewijk Muns, ‘Schumann’s First Symphony: “The Nightwatchman”’, The Musical Times 151/1911 (2010), 3–17. 34 Finson, Robert Schumann and the Study of Orchestral Composition, 36–8 clarifies the relationship between the introductions to the two symphonies, both thematically and in terms of their shared interest in mediant relationships. Schubert introduces E minor in the introduction, and tonicizes it as the key of the exposition’s interior subordinate theme, this forming part of a hexatonic strategy that also draws in A flat major in the introduction and development. {INSERT EXAMPLE 1 NEAR HERE}

schumann, bruckner and tovey’s essays 133

Andante un poco maestoso Allegro molto vivace motto fanfare ('x') A theme 39

Example 6.1 – Schumann, Op. 38/i, derivation of main theme from introduction

Spanning bars 134–290, the development’s motivic strategy reinforces this connection, travelling from main theme to motto and back, a process that requires us to reappraise Tovey’s complaint of sequential accumulation. The development’s sequences are organized into four larger units, explained in Table 6.1. Units 1 and 2 are graphed in Example 6.2. Unit 1 is tripartite, consist- ing of a main-theme-based model and its sequence up a tone in bars 134–49, followed by a model combining the main theme and a new counterpoint in bars 150–7, sequenced at the fifth in bars 158–65, and a fragmentation of theme A in bars 166–77, constructed as a rising 10-7 linear intervallic pattern discontinued in bar 174, so that E flat can be reinterpreted as the root of an augmented sixth approaching the Phrygian half cadence onto D in bar 178. As Example 6.3 shows, the process of fragmentation here liquidates the A-theme sequential model established in bars 134–41; bar 178 reveals this liquidation as a preparation for the wholesale recovery of the main-theme presentation and continuation comprising unit 2, now transposed up a major third (bars 178–201 correspond to bars 39–62), which pivots around a rapid conversion of D as V into D as I. Unit 3, beginning at bar 202, is an incomplete transposition of unit 1, commencing a fifth higher in F and reaching a half cadence on V/D {INSERT TABLE 6.1 at bar 245. This ushers in unit 4, which employs the closing section’s ascend- NEAR HERE} ing figure first introduced at bar 118 as the basis for a model. This in turn is {INSERT EXAMPLE sequenced once and then fragmented in advance of the tonic arrival 6-4 at bar 2 NEAR HERE} 290, which signals the fanfare’s return. This process discloses an overarching logic which the sequence-building {INSERT EXAMPLE technique serves. The governing idea is that one sequential process should 3 NEAR HERE} yield two results: first, a transposition of the main theme (in bars 178–201); second, a retransitional sequence (in bars 246–90) that recovers the introduction. The first path returns us to the motto as theme, the second to the motto as fanfare. The fact that the latter is also the return of I generates a ‘breakthrough’, as Daverio, referencing Adorno and Hepokoski, terms it, which conflates both of the motive’s functions in one event (Example 4).35 The

35 See Daverio, Robert Schumann, 232, Theodor Adorno, Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992) Table 6.1

Schumann, Op. 38/I, development section

Bars: 134 142 150 158 166 174 178 186 194 Units: 1 (A-based) 2 (A-based) Elements: 1 2 3 1 Functions: model sequence model sequence fragmentation statement response continuation Tonal plot: I→ II→ iii→ vi→ LIP Phrygian HC III→

Bars: 202 210 218 226 234 242 246 254 262 282 290 Units: 3 (1 transposed) 4 (C-based) break- Elements: 1 2 3 1 through Functions: model sequence model sequence fragmentation model sequence fragmentation 1 fragmentation 2 arrival 6-4 Tonal plot: V→ VI→ vii→ iii→ LIP Phrygian HC V/III→ I schumann, bruckner and tovey’s essays 135

1. sequential liquidation of A 1 2 3 model sequence model sequence fragmentation (LIP)

134

10 7 10 7 10

2. presentation of A statement response continuation

178

Phrygian HC

Example 6.2 – Schumann, Op. 38/i, development, units 1 and 2, reduction

model 134 138

sequence 142 146

model+sequence fragmentation 150 166

presentation 178

Example 6.3 – Schumann, Op. 38/i, development, unit 1, liquidation of main theme 136 Julian Horton

motto’s triumphant introductory form overwrites the main theme’s expositional statement and response phrases; correspondence with the exposition resumes with the continuation phrase (bars 317–25 transpose bars 54–62 up a fourth). The breakthrough’s harmonic features mean that the recapitulation’s task of recovering the tonic is compromised; as Example 6.4 shows, the fanfare returns over a 6-4 chord, which only resolves through V5-3 onto I at the phrase ending in bars 307–8; and the even more forceful turn to D minor in bars 310–16 generates the temporary impression that this rather than B flat is the development’s long-range tonal goal. The true tonic is then implied by the I: HC medial caesura in bar 339, but this is sidestepped by the subordinate theme’s entry in D minor in bars 343–4, and it is ultimately left to the coda to confirm B flat. The breakthrough is also hermeneutically suggestive: having transformed a poetically motivated call to order (the fanfare) into a symphonic main theme in the introduction and exposition, Schumann then calls this transformation into question, reasserting the material’s pre-thematic variant at precisely the moment that traditionally demands syntactic stability, in effect composing out the tension between lyric and dramatic impulses as a recapitulatory crisis. Schumann’s epigrammatic style is consequently not opposed to a Beethovenian symphonic process, as Tovey contends, but is the means by which it can be transcended, by fusing Beethoven’s precedent and the ‘new’ Schubertian alternative. The question of orchestration is no less problematic. Tovey’s criticisms reflect {INSERT EXAMPLE an attitude traceable to Felix Weingartner and Tchaikovsky, which persisted 4 NEAR HERE} in the English-language literature.36 Compare, for instance, Julius Harrison’s remark that the symphonies are ‘unequal in their instrumental presentation’, or Mosco Carner’s claim that ‘the disconcerting inequality of [Schumann’s] orchestral style’ was a direct consequence of his mental illness, which ‘affected the clarity of the inner sound picture of the music’.37 Yet, as Jon Finson’s account of the First Symphony’s genesis and early reception reveals, these views misrep- resent both the aims and context of Schumann’s orchestration. Finson points out that the orchestration was not criticized in Schumann’s lifetime, but only

and James Hepokoski, Sibelius: Symphony No. 5 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 6 and 67–8. 36 Tchaikovsky’s view is reported in Rosa Newmarch, Tchaikovsky: His Life and Works, with Extracts from his Writings and the Diary of his Tour Abroad in 1888 (New York: Bodley Head, 1900), 135–6; Felix Weingartner critiques Schumann’s orchestration in Die Symphonie nach Beethoven (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel), 29. 37 Julius Harrison, ‘Robert Schumann (1810–1856)’, in Robert Simpson, ed., The Symphony, Vol. I (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), 246–61, at 247; Mosco Carner, ‘The Orchestral Music’, in Gerald Abraham, ed., Schumann: A Symposium (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), 176–244, at 186. schumann, bruckner and tovey’s essays 137

motto 'x' returns as fanfare, but functions as A presentation recapitulation

293

sempre

tonal recapitulation over 6-4 chord continuation phrase (tonic prolongation, not V) of introduction as development climax

304

ritardando

motto as A theme, but returns as continuation phrase transposed Tempo 1 314

321

Example 6.4 – Schumann, Op. 38/i, development breakthrough and main-theme recapitulation in the later century as a consequence of attempts to perform the works with significantly larger forces than were available to the composer in Leipzig, and to filter the orchestration through post-Wagnerian orchestral technologies.38 Indeed, the First Symphony’s early reception praised its orchestration: reviews of Op. 38’s premiere on 31 March 1841, for example, singled out its instrumental qualities. Against Tovey, we might set Ernst Wenzel, who noted ‘the great power

38 Finson, Robert Schumann and the Study of Orchestral Composition, 138–43. 138 Julian Horton of its instrumentation and its beautiful orchestral effects’.39 Wenzel’s approval is reflected in early English commentaries:The Era, for instance, commended Schumann’s ‘profound knowledge of instrumentation’ as a virtue that offset the symphony’s material failings.40 Schumann was, moreover, diligent in his attempts to craft Op. 38 with the Gewandhaus Orchestra in mind, which in 1841 comprised forty-nine players, and differed from modern ensembles above all its smaller string group.41 The issue of doubling is critical in this respect: Schumann’s doubling of winds and strings reinforces material that the strings alone could not forcefully convey in this ensemble.

❧❧ Bruckner and the Wagnerian Symphony TheEssays in Music Analysis collect two extended commentaries on Bruckner, on the Fourth and Sixth symphonies. The analysis of the Fourth begins with a sustained appraisal of the problems that Bruckner’s symphonies engender, central to which are four familiar tropes in the Anglophone critical literature: the reflection of Bruckner’s personal naivety in his compositional style; the symphonies’ proximity to Wagner; the juxtaposition of Bruckner and Brahms; and the music’s incompatibility with the symphonic sonata dynamic. Tovey connects the numerous anecdotes evidencing Bruckner’s inadapt- ability to Viennese cultural life directly to his symphonic style, regarding this as limiting the composer’s capacity to function as an artist in the broad sense, rather than a musician in a restricted sense: ‘the carrying out of his vast symphonic conceptions was quite enough occupation for him, without the burden of understanding other kinds of art which interested persons who were anything but kind to him’.42 This perception is ultimately used as a type of defence: approaching Bruckner, Brahms and Beethoven on a level playing field does Bruckner no favours; but obviating the comparison allows Bruckner to stand or fall on his own terms. Bruckner’s salvation, like Schumann’s, is consequently

39 Review in the Leipziger Zeitung cited in Alfred Dörffel, Geschichte der Gewandhausconcerte zu Leipzig bis vom 25. November 1781 bis 25 November 1881 (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1882), Vol. I, 214, trans. in Finson, Robert Schumann and the Study of Orchestral Composition, 92. 40 ‘Crystal Palace Concerts’, The Era (27 November 1864). 41 The string group in 1841 comprised nine first violins, eight second violins, five violas, five cellos and four basses. See Finson, Robert Schumann and the Study of Orchestral Composition, 76, drawing on Dörffel, Geschichte der Gewandhausconcerte zu Leipzig, Vol. I, 128. Schumann’s orchestra is at the upper limit of size for the Leipzig ensemble. Its expansive properties include the addition of a third timpano, a triangle, four horns and an independently treated trombone trio. 42 Essays in Musical Analysis, Vol. II, 70. schumann, bruckner and tovey’s essays 139 his aesthetic honesty: ‘his defects are obvious on a first hearing, not as obscurities that may become clear with further knowledge, but as things that must be lived down as soon as possible’.43 Yet despite Tovey’s knowing distance from Viennese cultural politics (he describes Hanslick’s critical writing as ‘one of the unlovelier forms of parasitism’), he cannot resist patronising Bruckner for his aesthetic simplicity: ‘this art has no tricks. Listen to it humbly; not with the humility with which you would hope to learn music from Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms, but with the humility you would feel if you overheard a simple old soul talking to a child about sacred things.’44 Tovey was alert both to the Wagnerian traits in Bruckner’s style and to their manipulation as a tool of Viennese cultural politics. His music is essentially if naively Wagnerian (‘If you want Wagnerian concert-music other than the few overtures and the Siegfried Idyll, why not try Bruckner?’), a characteristic that unfortunately made it susceptible to Wagnerian appropriation: ‘the musical party politicians who honoured Wagner with their patronage felt that das Allkunstwerk of Bayreuth lacked a writer of symphonies. And they found their desideratum in Bruckner’, whose symphonies ‘always began with Rheingold harmonic breadths and ended with Götterdämmerung climaxes’.45 This inevitably raises the comparison with Brahms, which for Tovey turns on a distinction between monumentality and proportion. Bruckner’s supporters defended his symphonies on the grounds of expressive scale: ‘The devout Brucknerite, regarding Bruckner’s “pyramidal” and “lapidary” structures as the result of the mating of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with Götterdämmerung, thought Brahms’s ideas ridiculously small.’ Yet Brahms might also be considered advan- tageously to relativize scale to proportion: ‘The “Brahminen” … could fairly say that size does not become proportion until it is differentiated; and that Bruckner’s proportions were not masterly. And in this matter the Brahminen had the advantage that they knew what they were talking about; whereas the Wagnerians evidently did not.’46 Despite manifest stylistic and aesthetic differences, then, Bruckner’s symphonies ultimately express the same dichotomy of form and content as Schumann’s: Bruckner’s ‘lapidary’ themes, like Schumann’s epigrams, do not readily support symphonic forms. His symphonies’ ‘defects’ arise both from the mistaken assumption that they do, and from an inability to conceive a formal principle that properly compensates for the mismatch: ‘It is Bruckner’s misfortune that his work is put forward by himself so as to present us the angle

43 Ibid., 72. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid., 69. 46 Ibid., 70. 140 Julian Horton of its relation to sonata form. That very relation is a mistake.’47 Tovey explicitly linked this issue to Bruckner’s alleged rural naivety: in contrast with Brahms’s urban sophistication, Bruckner ‘dragged along with him throughout his life an apparatus of classical sonata forms as understood by a village organist’.48 This dichotomy is illustrated with examples from the first and second movements of the Fourth Symphony. In the first movement, it is prominent in the subordinate-theme group, the presentation phrase of which is quoted in Example 6.5. For Tovey, Bruckner’s mistake is to treat a ‘leitmotivic’ idea as if it were the basis for a sonata-type theme: ‘If such phrases were obviously Wagnerian leitmotiv [sic] … whether or not identifiable with poetic or dramatic elements, nobody at this time of day would have any difficulty in understanding the enormous process that follows.’49 The slowness of this process, however, makes each phrase unit sound like a complete classical theme in its own right, such that Bruckner’s subordinate group is both ‘short-breathed’ in its localized syntax and ponderous on the large scale, as the phrases accu- mulate beyond the duration that classical precedent implies. In the Andante, Tovey perceives the same problem to destroy the sense of contrast essential to symphonic form. The main and subordinate themes are undifferentiated in tempo or phrase construction; the latter ‘consists of no less than seven phrases, all ending in full-closes or half-closes, all four bars long except the last but one … and all given to the viola with a severely simple accompaniment of pizzicato chords in slow-march time’.50

hervortretend 75

pizz.

Example 6.5 – Bruckner, Symphony No. 4/i, 1878/80 version, subordinate theme

47 Ibid., 71. 48 Ibid., 121. 49 Ibid., 73. 50 Ibid., 75. schumann, bruckner and tovey’s essays 141 {INSERT EXAMPLE 5 NEAR HERE} Tovey’s guarded response to Bruckner is consistent with opinions in the first phase of the symphonies’ British reception, which are characterized by a spectrum of negative reactions, from polite incomprehension to outright hostility. Charles Barry’s review of the Seventh Symphony’s London premiere in 1887 set an indicative tone: the work failed on account of its ‘extreme length’, ‘lack of proportionate interest’, ‘spasmodic manner’ and ‘extraordinary mixture of scholasticism with the freedom of the Wagnerian school’.51 Inter-war attempts to present Bruckner in England provoked press reactions along Toveyan lines. The critic onThe Times reacted to the Eighth Symphony’s London premiere under Otto Klemperer on 20 November 1929 by stressing ‘the curious dis- jointedness of its structure’, while the same newspaper’s review of the Fourth Symphony on 6 November echoed Tovey’s dichotomy of form and content, arguing that ‘the musical material … is not really strong enough to support so vast a structure’.52 Music-historical perceptions in this period are scarcely different; Gerald Abraham’s assessment of Bruckner’s material as lacking ‘the fer- tility of good themes and the beauty of genuine melodies’, and Julius Harrison’s complaint that the symphonies ‘are in no wise worthy to rank with those of the great masters’ are broadly representative.53 Since Tovey’s death, various factors have transformed Anglophone understanding of Bruckner’s music, beginning with the publication of the Gesamtausgabe under Robert Haas, which was underway in Tovey’s lifetime and continued under Leopold Nowak after 1945. Notwithstanding critical differences (Nowak disputed Haas’s editions of the Second, Fourth and Eighth symphonies and published the earlier versions of the Third, Fourth and Eighth), both pursued the revisionist policy of returning to the manuscript sources surviving in Bruckner’s Nachlass, driven by the now well-known conviction that the first editions had been changed without Bruckner’s consent or, in some cases, knowledge.54 Dissemination of Haas’s editions in Britain was

51 Charles Barry, ‘Richter Concerts’, The Musical Times 28 (1 June 1887), 342. 52 Review in The Times (6 November 1929), 12. 53 Gerald Abraham, One Hundred Years of Music (London: Duckworth, 1938), 199; Julius Harrison, ‘The Orchestra and Orchestral Music’ in D. L. Bacharach, ed., The Musical Companion (London: Gollancz, 1934), 127–284, at 237. On Bruckner’s British reception in this time, see also Julian Horton, Bruckner’s Symphonies: Analysis, Reception and Cultural Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 4–8. 54 The literature on this subject is too large to cite in detail. Recent appraisals include Manfred Wagner, Der Wandel des Konzepts: zu den Verschiedenen Fassungen von Bruckners Dritter, Vierter und Achter Sinfonie (Vienna: Musikwissenschaftlicher Verlag, 1980); Paul Hawkshaw, ‘The Bruckner Problem Revisited’, 19th-Century Music 21 (1997), 96–107; Wolfgang Doebel, Anton Bruckner in Bearbeitung: die Konzepte der Bruckner-Schüler und ihre Rezeption bis zu Robert Haas (Tutzing: 142 Julian Horton pursued initially by Geoffrey Sharp and subsequently with mounting conviction by Erwin Doernberg, Robert Simpson and especially Deryck Cooke, as part of a gathering defence of the music in the 1960s and 1970s.55 By the 1990s, the symphonies had been consolidated in the performing canon, and a second wave of revisionism was underway, thanks in part to a new Anglophone involvement in the Gesamtausgabe following Nowak’s death in 1991, which encouraged reappraisal of the first editions, a more complete and nuanced perspective on the manuscript sources and the belated interest of transatlantic analysts and theorists.56 From this perspective, the most controversial aspect of Tovey’s analyses is their reliance on the first editions. He was aware of Haas’s efforts, and reacted with suspicion. In the ‘Retrospect and Corrigenda’ appended to Volume VI of the Essays, he rejected the new scores on the grounds that the first editions represented Bruckner’s final intentions: ‘If these changes had been made after Bruckner’s death or against his will, there would be a strong case for returning to his original versions; but, apart from their intrinsic merits, they were all accepted and published by him as expressing his final intentions. And it is to

Hand Schneider Verlag, 2001); Benjamin Korstvedt, ‘Bruckner Editions: The Revolution Revisited’, in John Williamson, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Bruckner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 121–37; and Dermot Gault, The New Bruckner: Compositional Development and Dynamics of Revision (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010). For contemporary criticism of Haas’s project, see Emil Armbruster, Erstdruckfassung oder ‘Originalfassung’? Ein Beitrag zur Brucknerfrage am fünfzigsten Todestag des Meister Leipzig: Jost, 1946). 55 See Deryck Cooke, ‘The Bruckner Problem Simplified 1: Sorting Out the Confusion’, The Musical Times 110/1511 (1969), 20–2, ‘The Bruckner Problem Simplified 2: The F minor, Nos 0, 1 and 2’, The Musical Times 110/1512 (1969), 142–4, ‘The Bruckner Problem Simplified 3: Symphonies 3 and 4’, The Musical Times110/1514 (1969), 362–5, ‘The Bruckner Problem Simplified 4: Symphonies 5 to 9’, The Musical Times 1515 (1969), 479–82; Deryck Cooke, ‘Anton Bruckner (1824–96)’, in Robert Simpson, ed. The Symphony, Vol. I: Haydn to Dvořák (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1966), 283–306, and ‘Bruckner, Anton’ in Stanley Sadie, ed., The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Vol. III (London: Macmillan, 1980), 352–71; Robert Simpson, The Essence of Bruckner: An Essay Towards an Understanding of his Music (London: Gollancz, 1967, repr. 1992). 56 Examples include Hawkshaw and Jackson, eds, Bruckner Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Benjamin Korstvedt, Bruckner: Symphony No. 8 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Crawford Howie, Paul Hawkshaw and Timothy L. Jackson, Perspectives on Anton Bruckner (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001); John Williamson, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Bruckner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Julian Horton, Bruckner’s Symphonies: Analysis, Reception and Cultural Politics; and Gault, The New Bruckner. schumann, bruckner and tovey’s essays 143 these that piety is due.’57 Tovey’s preference for the first editions has recently been revived by Benjamin Korstvedt, who points out the combination of aggressive journalism and lax scholarship characterizing Cooke’s arguments, as well as the complex mingling of textual and political motivations inflecting Haas’s project.58 Tovey, however, hitched his argument to an aesthetic chauvinism, which is harder to defend. He again sought out the Brahmsian intellectual high ground, to Bruckner’s evident disadvantage:

The limitations of Bruckner’s champions certainly did not include a blindness to his spiritual qualities: on the contrary, an out-and-out Brucknerite was, in his day as now, a person of slow intellectual processes to whom subtleties were as unintelligible as they were to Bruckner himself, and for whom Brahms’s mind was eight times too alert. We ought rather to expect to find them obtuse as to much that we pride ourselves on appreciating.59 Having criticized the first editions for their formal asymmetries, Tovey also rejected the restoration of passages deleted with or without the composer’s consent, which might restore formal proportions: ‘I should be very much surprised to find myself tempted to restore Bruckner’s original complete reca- pitulations. The most ungebildet phenomenon in his treatment of form is his failure to see the irrelevance of his vestiges of classical procedure.’60 So-saying, Tovey traps Bruckner in a critical double bind: the first editions’ proportions are ‘not masterly’; but any attempt to repair editorial cuts violates the material’s character, which is unsuited to classical forms in any case. And arguments to the contrary are flawed from first principles, because to defend Bruckner is to betray an intellect that cannot grasp the Brahmsian alternative. Whether we recuperate the first editions or not, it is hard to ignore the effect that the Gesamtausgabe has on Tovey’s analyses. Many of his remarks about orchestration, for instance, have to be rethought. As Example 6.6 displays, his approval of the way Bruckner reorchestrates the main theme in the Fourth Symphony’s first-movement recapitulation depends on instrumentation diverg- ing considerably from the 1878/80 revision, on which both the Haas and Nowak

57 Essays in Musical Analysis, Vol. VI: Miscellaneous Notes, Glossary and Index (London: Oxford University Press, 1939), 144. 58 Benjamin Korstvedt, ‘Constructing the “Bruckner Problem”’, The Bruckner Journal 15/3 (2011), 23–32. 59 Essays in Musical Analysis, Vol. VI, 144. Simpson rightly took Tovey to task for these remarks, noting that they express ‘a condescension unworthy of him’; see The Essence of Bruckner, 89. 60 Essays in Musical Analysis, Vol. VI, 145. 144 Julian Horton

1. First edition

Tempo 1. sehr ruhig und feierlich flute 1 solo 365

so ruhig und leise als möglich horns I and III

ruhig violin 1 Dämpfer

so ruhig und leise als möglich

remaining strings

2. 1878 version (Nowak) flute 1 solo 365

horns I and III

immer deutlich hervortretend timpani

hervortretend strings trem.

Example 6.6 – Bruckner, Symphony No. 4/i, comparison of main- theme recapitulation in first edition and 1878/80 version editions are based.61 For Tovey, this divergence only reinforced his original perception: ‘To an expert in orchestration it must seem incredible that [the figure elaborating the main theme] should have been entrusted merely to an unsupported flute; yet such is the case.’ By way of supporting evidence, Tovey fabricates a problem of balance where none exists, arguing that, in performance, the flute is necessarily allotted unusual prominence, demonstrating that in practice ‘the composer’s first idea’ aspires to ‘the far-better conditions of the revision’.62

61 On the versions and editions of this piece, see Benjamin Korstvedt, ‘The First Published Edition of Anton Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony: Collaboration and Authenticity’, 19th-Century Music 20/1 (1996), 3–26. 62 Essays in Musical Analysis, Vol. VI, 145. schumann, bruckner and tovey’s essays 145

The questions of proportion that Tovey perceived also have to be re-eval- {INSERT EXAMPLE uated, especially in the Fourth Symphony’s Finale. His reading of the move- 6 NEAR HERE} ment as ‘the same kind of three-decker arrangement as that of Bruckner’s slow movements’ relies on the fact that the first edition cuts the main-theme recapitulation, passing directly from the retransitional standing on V to the subordinate-group return in D minor. The assertion that ‘to distinguish recapitulation from development is merely to use long words’ is meaningless for the 1878/80 version, which comprises a sharply profiled tonic-minor main- theme return (bars 383–412 in Nowak’s edition; see Example 6.7). The tonal scheme is also reconceived. The D minor second-group reprise is not a feature of the 1878/80 score: the same material returns in F sharp minor, and the two versions coincide with the D major polka four bars after letter P in the first edition (bar 431 in 1878/80; Example 6.7 makes the comparison).63 Table 6.2 compares the formal design of the Finale in all three versions. As the comparison clarifies, there is no comparable issue of disproportion to {INSERT EXAMPLE address in the 1878/80 version. The closing-section recapitulation is omitted, 7 NEAR HERE} the polka (here described as B2) instead fragmenting in bars 457–76 in antic- ipation of the coda; but this omission is easily explained as a response to the closing section’s extensive treatment in the development (see bars 295–338). And all of these observations have to be revised again if we examine the 1874 version, which was published by Nowak in 1975. The materials shared between the 1874 and the 1878/80 finales – chiefly the unison main theme and B2 – coexist with radical differences, including a changed design for the introduction and main-theme group, the introduction of B1 in 1878/80, a closing section that was completely excised in the revision, and substantially different conceptions for the development and coda.64 Issues of disproportion therefore have to be rethought. The 1874 Finale’s recapitulation consists of a near-complete return of the exposition, which is radical in its tonal scheme: the introduction installs V of E flat at bar 389, but the unison main theme is ejected in favour of a fresh climax in E minor at bar 407 decaying to a medial caesura over V/B, and the subordinate group ensues in D major, leaving the coda to restore the symphony’s tonic. {INSERT TABLE 6.2 Tovey’s arguments are affected by the revision process elsewhere in the work. NEAR HERE} The lack of contrast he notes between main and subordinate themes in the Andante is a consequence of renotation: in the 1874 version, the subordinate

63 For a comparison of the 1878/80 and 1887/8 versions of the Finale, see Korstvedt, ‘The First Published Edition of Anton Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony’, 8. 64 Bruckner also composed an interim Finale, the so-called ‘Volksfest’, which he discarded in 1879; on which subject see Korstvedt, ‘The First Published Edition of Anton Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony’, 4. 1. First edition retransition B theme recapitulation (D minor) winds Viertel wie vorher die Halben 385

horns

timp.

strings

ausdrucksvoll

pizz.

2. 1878 edition (Nowak) A theme recapitulation retransition winds Tempo 1 (Haupthema anfangs) 378

dim. horns trumpets

horns timp.

strings

B theme recapitulation (F sharp minor) 386 413 ...

Example 6.7 – Bruckner, Symphony No. 4/iv, retransition and main- theme recapitulation in first edition and 1878/80 version Table 6.2

Bruckner, Symphony No. 4, comparison of 1874, 1878/80 and 1887/8 finales

1874 Bars: 1 29 103 161 225 389 419 463 511 Large-scale functions: Exposition Development Recapitulation Coda Inter-thematic functions: Intro. A B2 (polka) C Intro. material only B2 (polka) C Tonal plot: V/e flat e flat C →B flat → V/e flat→e→V/B D → E flat 1878/80 Bars: 1 43 93 105 155 203 383 413 431 477 Large-scale functions: Exposition Development Recapitulation Coda Inter-thematic functions: Intro. A B1 B2 C A B1 B2 (preface) (polka) (preface) (polka) Tonal plot: V/e flat e flat c C b flat→B flat → e flat f sharp→ D e flat→E flat 1887/8 Bars: 1 43 93 105 155 203 385 397 443 Large-scale functions: Exposition Development Recapitulation Coda Inter-thematic functions: Intro. A B1 (preface) B2 C B1 B2 (polka) (preface) (polka) Tonal plot: V/e flat e flat c C b flat→B flat → d D e flat→E flat 148 Julian Horton

1. A theme (1874) Andante quasi allegretto

con sordini

2. B theme (1874) Adagio 57

cresc. dim.

3. B theme (1878) 51

cresc. dim.

Example 6.8 – Bruckner, Symphony No. 4/ii, subordinate theme in 1874 version and 1878/80 version

theme is cast as an ‘Adagio’ episode, which, as Example 6.8 shows, was brought within the tempo of the main theme in 1878/80 by doubling its note values. Residues of the expressive difference between Andante and Adagio remain embedded in the subordinate material in 1878/80 and 1887/8, even though the notation has changed, a factor that bears directly on the claim that main and subordinate themes are undifferentiated in the first edition. These issues relate to Tovey’s critique of Schumann via the shared influence of Schubert, and consequently as differing engagements with lyric and dramatic paradigms. Both the discontinuities and expanded timescale of Bruckner’s forms ultimately reference Schubert’s ‘Great’ C major and ‘Unfinished’ symphonies. When Tovey points out the ‘stiff archaic pause on the dominant’ comprising the exposition’s medial caesura and subsequent digression to D {INSERT EXAMPLE flat, he invokes Cherubini’s Faniska Overture as a precedent, but not Schubert, 8 NEAR HERE} whose two mature symphonies and numerous chamber works employ the same device; examples 6.9–11, for instance, compare Cherubini and Bruckner with the medial caesura in the ‘Unfinished’ Symphony’s first movement.65 The

65 Essays in Musical Analysis, Vol. II, 73. The connection between Schubert’s articulation of interior themes and Cherubini’s Overture has recently been pointed schumann, bruckner and tovey’s essays 149

99 mode switch to C minor

V:HC MC

103

B theme begins in E flat 107

Example 6.9 – Cheubini, Faniska Overture, expositional medial caesura

end of transition 35

i:PAC MC

40 B theme begins in G

Example 6.10 – Schubert, ‘Unfinished’ Symphony, expositional medial caesura

end of transition B theme begins in D flat hervortretend 71

V:HC MC pizz. Example 6.11 – Bruckner, Symphony No. 4/i, 1878/80 version, expositional medial caesura 150 Julian Horton

effect is the same for Bruckner and Schubert: the subordinate theme begins as an interior episode in a relatively distant key, and thereby gains lyric self-sufficiency. Bruckner and Schumann differ in the conclusions they draw from the Schubertian influence. Schumann’s lyric impulse engenders formal con- {INSERT EXAMPLE centration: his sequential techniques in Op. 38 articulate a discourse between 9 NEAR HERE} a pre-thematic poetic source in the opening fanfare and its developmental {INSERT EXAMPLE transformation as a symphonic theme. For Bruckner, Schubert’s model implies 10 NEAR HERE} monumentality and a formal expansionism, which engenders a radically new concept of symphonic time. {INSERT EXAMPLE 11 NEAR HERE} ❧❧ Schumann and Bruckner after Tovey Simplistic as it would be to claim that revisionism has functioned comparably for Schumann’s and Bruckner’s symphonies since Tovey’s death, there is nevertheless a similarity in the resistance of criticism to scholarly reappraisal, revealed especially in the tendency for the ideas instantiated in Tovey’s writings to resurface in journalistic criticism. Schumann has perhaps fared better in this regard. Writing in 1960, Joan Chissell could welcome the symphonies’ stable presence in the performing canon, offsetting the increasingly tired notion of the composer as miniaturist: ‘music-lovers of today need not accept Schumann merely as a miniaturist: he has a bigger chance now of making a comeback as a universal master than at any time since his Victorian heyday’. Chissell nevertheless tempered her conclusions, in effect meeting Tovey halfway. The symphonies could be redeemed by sensitive performance, but Schumann’s imagination still prospered chiefly under poetic stimulus: ‘Invariably he starts gloriously … but in spite of all his efforts to master the craft of composition, which is essentially the ability to develop an argument, he invariably betrays the effort involved in keeping afloat when launched on a sea of purely musical, academic thought.’ Consequently ‘Schumann’s true greatness resides in his miniatures … [which are] undimmed by the travail of procrustean craftsmanship’.66

out in Anne Hyland, ‘Die lyrische Gedank: Schubert, Salzer and the Problem of Form in the Early Quartets’, Research Seminar, Durham University, 28/2/2017, and in private communication. I am grateful to Dr Hyland for her advice on this subject. My usage of the term ‘medial caesura’ follows James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy, Elements of Sonata Theory: Norms, Types, and Deformations in the Late-Eighteenth-Century Sonata (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 23–50. 66 Joan Chissell, ‘Schumann: Miniaturist or Symphonic Master?’, The Musical Times 101/1408 (1960), 353–5, at 353, 354, and 355. schumann, bruckner and tovey’s essays 151

The symphonies have since proved attractive to the historically informed performance movement, notably Sir John Eliot Gardiner’s 1998 Archiv set, which stimulated fresh debate about the music’s quality and relevance, provoked by Gardiner’s professed revisionism: ‘towards the end of his life Schumann’s four published symphonies were understood by the more perceptive of his contemporaries as constituting the most significant additions to the repertoire since Beethoven. Our aim is to revalidate that claim’.67 Gardiner’s ambitions drew the attention of Richard Taruskin, who responded by circumventing entirely the critical tradition Gardiner opposed and Tovey inhabited, accusing Gardiner and conductors before him of erecting critical straw men (his ‘own little web of myth’), and arguing instead that ‘if Schumann’s reputation as a symphonist ever suffered an eclipse, it was during the period from the 1850s to the 1870s, when, under pressure from Liszt, Wagner and the so-called “new Germans”, the symphony itself briefly suffered one’.68 Taruskin thereby brushes aside the Toveyan critical lineage altogether, or at least renders it marginal to the symphonies’ real status, which for him has waxed and waned with that of the genre itself. Bruckner has similarly acquired canonical security, but the manifest enthusiasm for his symphonies in the 1990s has since provoked a critical backlash. That Tovey’s critique still has popular traction is apparent in the dialogue between Zachary Woolfe and Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim comprising the New York Times’s review of the first complete US Bruckner cycle, given at Carnegie Hall by the Staatskapelle Berlin under Daniel Barenboim in January 2017.69 Despite refraction through contemporary references, the critics’ deployment of Toveyan tropes is hard to miss. Woolfe immediately identifies the mixture of Christianity and naively Wagnerian theatricality that exercised Tovey (Bruckner’s ‘pseudo-medieval self-importance’), given a contemporary spin by the addition of film-musical and televisual references: ‘For me there’s always been a sense that his symphonies don’t take place in the real world. You’re either in the middle of hellishly pummeling “Lord-of-the Rings”- style battles or you’re at the transcendent Pearly Gates.’70 Tovey’s complaints about redundancies and discontinuities are also revived: ‘there’s something so

67 Robert Schumann: Complete Symphonies, Sir John Eliot Gardiner, Orchestre revolutionaire et romantique (Deutsche Grammophon, 1998), liner notes. 68 ‘Let’s Rescue Poor Schumann from his Rescuers’, New York Times (17 May 1998), repr. in The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2010), 124–8, at 126. 69 ‘When a Composer Just Doesn’t Do It for You (No Matter How Much You Listen)’, New York Times (30 January 2017), https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/30/arts/ music/bruckner-barenboim-staatskapelle-berlin-carnegie-hall.html?mcubz=1 [accessed 2 March 2017]. 70 Ibid. 152 Julian Horton awkward about the Fifth – the meandering buildup of the final movement! – compared with the inexorable focus of the Eighth. (Though even in that later work, we are trudged through transformation after transformation of the burly “Game-of-Thrones”-like theme in the Scherzo).’ Da Fonseca-Wollheim steers into more controversial territory, connecting the music to the concerts’ external political context and recalling Bruckner’s Nazi appropriation by way of direct analogy:

My experience in the hall was inevitably colored by what has happened in the world, beginning with a presidential inauguration that was heavy on nationalistic rhetoric. … [The Scherzo of the Ninth] seems to contain all that is both seductive and terrifying about the unified energy of the masses. … It’s music to go to battle to – and the Nazis did, making Bruckner the star of their weekly classical broadcasts in the latter years of World War II.71 These comments evidence both the covert durability of some of Tovey’s opinions and the ultimate irresponsibility of their maintenance. Da Fonseca- Wollheim’s claim that Bruckner somehow prefigured his music’s Nazi appropriation is especially troubling, made as it is in apparent ignorance of scholarship differentiating the music’s compositional aesthetic and the National Socialist appropriation of it.72 The forced analogy with Donald Trump’s inauguration compounds the offence: Bruckner is condemned to compose the soundtrack to any right-wing agenda, notwithstanding his own weak political motivation. The ultimate, if undisclosed, source of this burden is Wagner, whose political and politicized art drags Bruckner along in its wake for these critics as for Tovey, now diverting Bruckner’s attempts to reinvent Beethovenian and Schubertian symphonism through crude appropriations of Wagnerian styles in film and tel- evision, as if Hollywood pseudo-medievalism compelled rather than adapted Bruckner’s music.

71 Ibid. 72 See for example Bryan Gilliam, ‘The Annexation of Anton Bruckner: Nazi Revisionism and the Politics of Appropriation’, in Hawkshaw and Jackson, eds, Bruckner Studies, 72–90; Manfred Wagner, ‘Response to Bryan Gillliam regarding Bruckner and National Socialism’, The Musical Quarterly 80 (1996), 118–31; Morten Solvik, ‘The International Bruckner Society and the N.S.D.A.P: A Case Study of Robert Haas and the Critical Edition’, The Musical Quarterly 83 (1998), 362–82; and Benjamin Korstvedt, ‘Anton Bruckner in the Third Reich and After: An Essay on Ideology and Bruckner Reception’, The Musical Quarterly 80 (1996), 132–60, and ‘Return to the Pure Sources: The Ideology and Text-Critical Legacy of the First Gesamtausgabe’, in Hawkshaw and Jackson, eds, Bruckner Studies, 91–121. For consideration of the Nazi appropriation as an expression of German monumentalism, see Alexander Rehding, Music and Monumentality: Commemoration and Wonderment in Nineteenth-Century Germany (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 180–96. schumann, bruckner and tovey’s essays 153

The theoretical elephant in the room in both cases is a developed framework for analysing the lyric-epic symphony in general, which lacuna variously affects our understanding of Schumann, Bruckner, Berlioz, Mendelssohn, Liszt, Brahms, Dvořák, Tchaikovsky, Balakirev, Borodin and Mahler, not to mention composers on the symphonic canon’s margins including Spohr, Gade, Raff, Rubinstein, Glazunov and Bruch. Both Schumann and Bruckner sought the mediation of Beethoven and Schubert, in Bruckner’s case via an additional engagement with Wagner; but so long as analysts insist that the lyric stands in opposition to the processes that define symphonic forms, its profound influence on this repertoire will remain at best problematic and at worst obscured by the myopia that the recycling of received opinion engenders. Tempting though it is to emphasize the ‘postmodern’ Tovey, who eschews overarching theoretical systems and prefigures the topographical language of neo-Riemannian theory, what his engagement with Schumann and Bruckner tells us above all is that Tovey is a product of his time. His arguments reflect critical tropes which say more about their cultural milieu than they do about the music’s formal and material processes. This is particularly marked in Bruckner’s case: Tovey’s reaction to the Haas editions evidences retrenchment rather than reappraisal, which owes much to the critical encounters of Tovey’s early career and the Brahms–Wagner dialectic that motivated them. This is, in itself, a variant of British debates about musical modernism; and it is in this context that his conception of a symphonic mainstream should be understood, steering as it did via Brahms through Sibelius after World War I, a path that ultimately led to the ‘modern’ symphonies of Walton, Vaughan Williams, Bax and others composed in the 1930s.73 The afterlife of Tovey’s arguments further underlines the good sense of Spitzer’s contextualization of his writings. The weight of understanding that now accrues to Schumann and Bruckner is sufficient to reveal the inadequacies of Tovey’s criticisms. That they persist says much about the skill with which Tovey pursued his popularizing agenda. It also illustrates the tenacity of critical comfort zones in reception history, which often take the place of substantive explanations because it is easier to mobilize received opinion than to account for the music’s processual, affective and cultural-historical complexities. Significant as Tovey is as a progenitor of modern musical analysis, the conclusions his methods produced sometimes tell us more about the critic’s context than the music’s substance.

73 On this phase of British modernism see, for instance, Paul Harper-Scott, ‘Our True North: Walton’s First Symphony, Sibelianism, and the Nationalization of Modernism in England’, Music & Letters 89/4 (2008), 562–89. Chapter 7 The Scholar as Critic: Edward J. Dent

Karen Arrandale

The ordinary “critics” – of whom (thank goodness) I am no longer one, though I had some experience of that life between 1919 and 1924 – are generally more interested in performers than in composers; my outlook on music is just the other way.1

For us in England, who are obliged to earn our living by scribbling about music, it is a very good thing that no one attaches much weight to our opinions.2

If Dent’s views were not to everyone’s taste, they were expressed in a vivid and challenging form that forced his readers to reconsider their basic assumptions. He regarded this as an important objective, and few who have given serious thought to the subject would disagree with him.3

❧❧ Understanding All Music In 1903 a young Edward Dent (1876–1957) was summoned to the cultural fortress at I Tatti, above Florence, and, fragile tea-cup in his shaking hands, was politely, relentlessly grilled on his ideals by art critic Bernard Berenson. Terrified, but determined not to compromise, Dent found himself stammer- ing that he wanted to ‘understand all music’. ‘Even the bad music?’ his host pressed. ‘But what about Taste?’ Dent stuck to his guns; it was one of the defining moments of his life, first for recognizing the difference between taste and understanding, and second, for taking a deliberate stand against the opinion

1 E. J. Dent to Benjamin Britten, 27 February 1946. 2 E. J. Dent, ‘Young England’, The Nation & the Athenaeum (26 February 1921), 744. 3 Winton Dean, ‘Edward J. Dent: A Centenary Tribute’, Music & Letters 57 (1976), 353–61, at 354. Dean was himself a former pupil of Dent’s, and the unattributed quotes here are taken from his short piece, still probably the best appreciation of Dent currently available. Another excellent brief biography is Philip Radcliffe’s shrewd and affectionate E. J. Dent: A Centenary Memoir (Rickmansworth: Triad Press, 1976). 154 The Scholar as Critic: Edward J. Dent 155 of a monumental figure like Berenson. The episode remained with him, and at a time when some critics wielded enormous power through diktat, Dent brought another dimension to the critic’s role, that of understanding.4 The scholar, he came to believe, is best placed to explain the mostly opaque processes of composition, whether Mozart’s or cutting-edge contemporary; and besides being one of the foremost scholars of his time, Dent was also a gifted writer. Pinning him down is another matter entirely. Dent applied his scholarship in a number of inimitable, unconventional ways; in his day, few future Professors of Music stage-managed their own production of The Magic Flute or did hack-work for a living. But Dent was a maverick, ‘a highly idiosyncratic character … in many ways a bundle of contradictions’.5 His brilliant, uneven and obliquitous career was a succession of seized opportunities and impro- vised roles: his was the first Fellowship awarded for Music (at Kings College, Cambridge), but his failure to compose a suitable piece for the Doctorate of Music necessary for an academic career led to his finding or inventing other ways. Eventually he helped to define what it meant to be a ‘musician’ in the new twentieth century, while along the way he was himself player, composer, scholar, linguist, impresario, Fellow, teacher, translator of opera libretti, critic, committee member and international-society president before becoming Professor of Music at Cambridge University. Although it took him decades, Dent never doubted his own role in establishing twentieth-century music, sustained by a substantial ego together with the confidence and unconscious noblesse oblige of his background and class, even as he battled to replace the formidable institutions and complacent attitudes his forebears had helped to put in place. In his restless, relentless explorations of music in all its forms, writing became a constant factor in Dent’s career, and a shop front for his unorthodox views. Daily letters and diary entries over his long life sharpened his perceptions and the facility to communicate them.6 Dent’s output was phenomenal, an astonishing number of books and articles written over fifty years right up to the end of his life, on a wide range of subjects, from pioneering biographies of Alessandro Scarlatti7 and Ferruccio

4 He later used the episode to illustrate the point in his seminal article for The London Mercury in 1920: E. J. Dent, ‘Revaluations’, The London Mercury (September 1920), 619–62. 5 Dean, ‘Centenary Tribute’, 354. 6 Dent’s twenty-two years of diaries and many of the thousands of letters he wrote are in the King’s College archive. 7 Alessandro Scarlatti: His Life and Works (London: Edward Arnold, 1905). However important, it did not sell well. 156 Karen Arrandale

Busoni,8 studies of Mozart’s operas9 and early opera, to his later Penguin Opera and A Theatre for Everybody, deliberately populist pieces of ‘propaganda’ which are nevertheless grounded in scholarship. His closest friend and bibliographer, Lawrence Haward, remarked on his ‘extensive and multifarious contributions to musical history and thought … [on an] immense variety of topics’10 which stretched the concept of ‘music criticism’. So, beside reviews of productions and books, serious contemporary articles on Pfitzner and Busoni, scholarly articles on early vocal music and the Russian Ballet, and the ‘Letters from Germany’ series which prefaced the founding of the ISCM (International Society for Contemporary Music), there are in Dent’s corpus odd excursions into, for example, ‘The Southern Syncopated Orchestra’,11 or ‘Jacopo Calascione and the Band of Venice’,12 as well as pieces addressing musical ethos and aesthetics. Dent was fussy about which journals he wrote for and did not limit himself to musical journals; he preferred to work with editors whom he liked and trusted, and who trusted him. There was no question but that he was an acknowledged intellectual heavyweight with an international reputation that was only enhanced after World War I. He hardly ever wrote for The Musical Times, doing so only when he needed to make a public point, as he despised its general conservatism.13 Having started in 1897 on The Cambridge Review,14

8 Ferruccio Busoni: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933). 9 Mozart’s Operas: A Critical Study (London: Chatto & Windus, 1913). It was translated into German by Anton Mayer; a heavily revised second edition was published in 1947. The book emerged out of Dent’s 1911 production at Cambridge of The Magic Flute. 10 Lawrence Haward, Edward J. Dent: A Bibliography (Cambridge: privately printed at the University Press for King’s College, 1956), v. Haward’s bibliography is incomplete yet includes nearly 350 sections, with some very long subsections (e.g. The Athenaeum, running to eighty-seven articles). The sections include ‘contributions to composite books’ (which Dent called ‘fritto misto’), ‘programme notes’, translations of operas, and articles in numerous foreign journals, among them Musica, La Rassegna Musicale, Faust, Melos, and Il Pianoforte. 11 The Athenaeum 26 (26 September 1919), featuring Sydney Bechet. Dent hated it at first but was fascinated, later coming to appreciate it in America. 12 The Monthly Musical Record 38 (January 1908), 8–9. Dent loved Italian bande cittadine. 13 Most notably during World War I; see ‘Academic Teaching: A Defence and a Criticism’, The Musical Times 56 (May 1915), 269–71, and ‘The Alleged Stupidity of Singers’, The Musical Times 58 (October 1917), 443–5. In total Dent wrote just seven pieces for this publication. 14 In 1897 a diary entry discusses the possibility of his founding a new review ‘addressed to the cultured amateur rather than to the professional musician’. Diary, 12 December 1897, King’s College Archive. The Scholar as Critic: Edward J. Dent 157 in 1903 he expanded to J. S. Shedlock’s Monthly Musical Record, for which he continued to write off and on for the rest of his life. His support for such short-lived but excellent pre-war publications as The Blue Review and Rhythm, together with his friend G. E. P. Arkwright’s The Musical Antiquary, reflect his fine but offbeat taste. Through his contacts in the IGM, he published in their Sammelbände and Zeitschrift, and also wrote for the American The Musical Quarterly and a number of Italian, German and French publications. During World War I, he abandoned music and worked with C. K. Ogden on his pacifist Cambridge Magazine, editing the Foreign Press and learning how to type; he later used it as a vehicle to promote the revival of Cambridge music. For five years after the War, when he was earning a living solely by his writing, he was highly sought after by some of the most prestigious of the new journals: Middleton Murry’s The Athenaeum (later The Nation & the Athenaeum), The London Mercury, Truth, Music & Letters, and the Illustrated London News. Through The Old Vic Magazine and, later, The Sadler’s Wells and Old Vic Magazine, Dent helped to prop up those institutions he loved, and in which he believed. Germany became his second journalistic base; after he became President of the ISCM, and later the IMS/SIM/IGM, his work was translated by friends, such as Anton Mayer or Rita Boetticher in Melos and Faust. Later in life he was a regular contributor to The Music Review and The Listener, besides broadcasting on the BBC. The raw materials Dent brought to his critical writings were remarkable enough: his facility for languages and boundless curiosity, his mental and physical energy, his minutely detailed note-taking,15 his appetite for discovering music in the most unpropitious places,16 and his endless, scrupulous copying, bringing obscure pieces back to Cambridge. He wrote fluently; constructing an argument was second nature to him, his sharp dialectic skills honed at High Table and in Combination Room. A compulsive networker who was soon fluent in five languages, from 1899, Dent spent nearly half his time on the Continent; his extensive research in Italy, Germany and France gave him an internationalist edge over most of his British colleagues, with a wider social and intellectual base. Even before he helped found the ISCM in 1922, his circles included composers, producers, writers, artists and scholars: Ferruccio Busoni, E. M. Forster, Johannes Wolf, Alfred Einstein, Egon Wellesz and others. His more shadowy homosexual networks often afforded him

15 Some of his tiny, highly detailed slips have been preserved in boxes now in the Cambridge University Library, Add. MS 9193. 16 In search of Scarlatti manuscripts up in the dirty, abandoned attics of the Santini Library in Münster-in-Westphalen, Dent first had to take a mop and bucket to clear the mess and grime, then to sort and clean up the piles of music. 158 Karen Arrandale insider knowledge of another kind, around Simplicissimus in Munich or later radical music journals like Melos. But since his undergraduate travels, Dent had always tried to see everything on offer: opera, concerts, bande cittadine and a lot of theatre, especially the Venetian or German drama that fed into opera. His raw, often caustic, diary accounts of hearing contemporary pieces for the first time were never aired in public, and also reveal some deep private prepossessions that he battled against: his own prudery, his desire to remain open-minded, his misogyny, his loathing of organized religion and its pious affectations. He could be arrogantly dismissive of what he saw as pretentious; one early review for the Monthly Musical Record included first performances of Strauss’s Salome and Mahler’s Third Symphony beside a revival of La Vie Parisienne, but barely mentions the first two.17 He hated to see music being hijacked for religious purposes or what he considered to be self-indulgent emotionalism; even film music made him uneasy. But he was meticulous in carrying out his vow to ‘understand’, going over and again to performances of Puccini he mostly disliked and never using his position to blot the chances of a young composer. Although he detested the big religious oratorios (a backlash against his upbringing), and Elgar’s in particular, he appreciated Elgar’s orches- trations. But Dent loved being right as much as he enjoyed being perverse; any mischievous comments are an attempt to control and distance himself from perceived prejudice.

❧❧ ‘Studiamo l’antico per comprendere il presente’18 His natural talents aside, it was Dent’s scholarship, founded on his deep love of music and his belief that it should be part of everyday life, which allowed him to express himself as freely and entertainingly as he did. The ideas emerging from his scholarship pervade all his writings and are based on his conviction from an early stage that the proper appreciation of ‘Music History’19 lay behind all musical activity; this meant stripping away all assumptions or preconceptions about any piece of music, old or new.20 In his first major article – in an international journal rather than a domestic one, the Sammelbände

17 ‘Music in Berlin’, Monthly Musical Record 36 (February 1907), 29–30. 18 Oscar Chilesotti. Dent often cited his old friend, in ‘Revaluations’ and Terpander, et al. 19 Dent called what he did ‘musical history’; ‘musicology’ didn’t enter the English language until c. 1919. 20 In one article Dent tore into the way the piano had usurped the voice in musical composition: ‘The Pianoforte and its Influence on Musical Composition’, Musical Quarterly 2 (1916), 271–94. The Scholar as Critic: Edward J. Dent 159 der Internationalen Musikgesellschaft, edited by Johannes Wolf of Berlin21 – Dent gave what was in effect a slap in the face to establishment German musicologists:

Considering the celebrity which Alessandro Scarlatti enjoyed during his lifetime, he has met with scant justice at the hands of musical historians … All catalogues of Scarlatti’s compositions that have hitherto appeared are very inadequate, and the criticisms of historians of music have suffered from being founded on a more or less incomplete acquaintance with the music criticised.22 The book that followed consolidated Dent’s reputation23 and set a pattern for the easy, elegant style employed in all of his books, scholarly and popular – on Mozart, Busoni, Foundations of English Opera,24 and A Theatre for Everybody. As the following extracts show, Dent is remarkably accessible at every level of his writing; his musical journalism fostered the interplay of serious ideas and popular style, to the benefit of both:

The voice was the only instrument for which chamber-music of a really advanced type could be written; it was the only instrument which combined a finished technique with the greatest variety of beautiful tone-colour, and which in the majority of cases was governed by minds of a high order of intelligence.25

There is no direct connection between the choruses and descriptive symphonies of Monteverdi and those of Weber, except by the circuitous route that traverses the stony asperities of French opera.26

Scarlatti’s work covers exactly the period when concerted instrumental music was beginning to be recognized as a possible rival to the voice, and it is interesting to trace the gradual development of instrumental music in the work of a composer whose natural sympathies were all with the singers, but who was quick to take advantage of any other means that facilitated the expression of his thought.27

21 Johannes Wolf (1869–1947), ‘German writer on music’ according to his entry in the Dictionary of Modern Music and Musicians (1924). Wolf was a university lecturer in music at Berlin when Dent first knew him; he became a lifelong friend and colleague. 22 E. J. Dent, ‘The Operas of Alessandro Scarlatti’, Sammelbände der Internationalen Musikgesellschaft 4 (November 1902), 143–56, at 143. 23 E. J. Dent, Alessandro Scarlatti: His Life and Works (London, Edward Arnold, 1905). All quotes are taken from the first edition. 24 Foundations of English Opera: A Study of Musical Drama in England during the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1928). 25 Dent, Alessandro Scarlatti, 11. 26 Ibid., 42. 27 Ibid. 160 Karen Arrandale

But with La Caduta dei Decemviri (1697) and Il Prigioniero fortunato (1698) there appears a new element. Here Scarlatti either languishes to cloying airs in 12/8 time, all charming, and all exactly alike, or else stamps across the boards to music of that straightforward, square-cut character that one would naturally describe as ‘Handelian’. They remind one of nothing so much as Sullivan’s famous parody in Princess Ida.28 The double-edged ‘serpentine’ style he developed over the years was deliberately evasive. Dent liked to raise awkward questions designed to obviate glib responses, adopting a facetious tone for serious subjects, which irritated and sometimes offended more earnest colleagues. He was consciously reacting against a previous generation’s need to classify everything scientifically, including music – what he later called ‘mere excavation’, ‘musical archaeology’, that resulted in drab academic work of the ‘lists of trumpeters at the court of Charles VII’ ilk.29 ‘His scholarship was not of the kind that concerns itself solely with libraries and microfilms; it was always strongly connected with practical music making’.30

The study of musical history, although less entirely neglected that it was a generation ago, still suffers from the fact that few historians attempt to trace the development of the art as a living emotional force … The mere presentation of documents is not enough; to form a reasonable judgement on the music of a past age we must not be content with a mere exposition of technical processes. The language of music is the most subtle of all artistic languages, subtler even that the language of literature. It is therefore the language which is most susceptible to change.31 Music was unique among academic subjects; for Dent, the challenge became how to address the study of ‘a living emotional force’. He loved to grapple with such abstract concepts and bring them into real life, sprinkling his writings with examples. The ideas aired in his three articles forThe Musical Antiquary (1910–13) went well beyond their nominal scholarly subjects,32 perhaps because written when Dent was involved with two other avenues

28 Ibid., 65. 29 Dent’s shared joke with Dom Anselm Hughes when they were planning the 1933 Cambridge ISMR Congress. Hughes to Dent 12 April 1933, unpublished letter in King’s College Archives, EJD/2/8/1. 30 Radcliffe, A Centenary Memoir, 30. Radcliffe was a former pupil of Dent’s. 31 E. J. Dent, ‘The Baroque Opera’, Musical Antiquary 1 (January 1910), 93–107, at 93. 32 E. J. Dent, ‘The Baroque Opera’ and ‘Italian Chamber Cantatas’, Musical Antiquary 2 (April 1911), 142–53; and ‘Notes on Leonardo Leo’, Musical Antiquary 4 (July 1913), 193–201. The Scholar as Critic: Edward J. Dent 161 of musical exploration: his lectures on music history and his groundbreak- ing productions at Cambridge of The Magic Flute (1911) and The Fairy Queen (1913/1920). His writings throughout this pre-war period laid the foundations for his later studies of early opera, his radical work on Mozart and Handel, his opera translations, editions of Mozart and Purcell, and innumerable prefaces, programme notes, reviews and articles; but perhaps most importantly to him, they also opened up what had been kept on the dusty shelves and brought to life through performance.33 But this odd avenue demanded new scholarly approaches, particularly to gain understanding of the ‘patchwork libretto’ of The Magic Flute and the apparent oddities of The Fairy Queen, which in turn resulted in fresh editions and fresh performances. Dent was very clear on this: ‘It is fundamentally important that the historian of opera should always study his documents with the eye of a producer … A considerable effort of imagination is therefore needed in reading such records as still remain of early experiments in musical drama’.34 The transient, elusive quality of music had fascinated Dent since his first contacts in 1903 and 1906 with Ferruccio Busoni during his early research trips to Germany, when he mixed with the curious and interesting characters with whom Busoni loved to surround himself: composers, players, writers, dancers. Their lifelong friendship fed his musical experience from another stream;35 Busoni’s expansive style captivated Dent, the way he lived his music, his ongoing attempts to consider musical aesthetics while being composer, performer and teacher. Dent reviewed Busoni’s Entwurf einer neuen Aesthetik der Tonkunst (1905) in the Monthly Musical Record,36 a near-impossible task, given the rambling, unclear nature of Busoni’s fluid thinking. But that elusive quality in itself helped Dent to appreciate how no genuinely original voice is ever going to be definitive: ‘Busoni does not shirk the difficulty of pointing out the true path that music must take, although he cannot be said to have given us a very clear direction’.37

33 These writings were: Mozart’s Opera ‘The Magic Flute’: Its History and Interpretation (Cambridge: W. Heffer & Sons, 1911), which became Mozart’s Operas: A Critical Study; ‘The Magic Flute’, The Cambridge Review 33 (30 November 1911), 150; later Dent’s Foundations of English Opera (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1928); and editions of Purcell and Mozart’s Requiem. 34 E. J. Dent, Foundations of English Opera, viii. Dent began working on his landmark study after publishing the articles in the Musical Antiquary, while he was planning the production and edition of Purcell’s The Fairy Queen, postponed until after the War. 35 Dent’s friend Jack Gordon was certain that Dent was in love with Busoni. Thanks to Dr Valerie Langford for this information. 36 E. J. Dent, ‘Busoni on Musical Aesthetics’, Monthly Musical Record 39 (September 1909), 197–8. 37 Ibid., 197. 162 Karen Arrandale

Through his friendships with Busoni and with Ralph Vaughan Williams before World War I, Dent came to recognize the basic need for composers to have a public hearing – not only to be heard, but to be read and talked about – and that excellence should be tested through a grass-roots system of the kind Dent began to hope for at Cambridge. Through a stream of articles in the Monthly Musical Record and The Cambridge Review,38 Dent brought the achievements into the public arena, planting the idea of future possibilities at Cambridge. In Dent’s view, Cambridge was perfectly placed to become a major cultural and musical centre in which budding composers, actors and producers could experiment; the idea was cut short by the War, but Dent kept it alive in a rare article for The Musical Times;39 after the War, in one of his last articles for the defunct Cambridge Magazine, he drummed up support once again:

Cambridge is filling up again with new blood, and it is urgent that we should contribute our share to the new movements in art and letters. We want to see Cambridge as a place of pilgrimage … a place where thought takes shape, where experiments can be tried and criticised both sympathetically and severely. We want Cambridge to be a place not only where people create, but to which other creators can come for their first audiences, where we may see the new plays and the new ideas in stage-craft, hear the new music, read the new poetry and look at the new pictures which London is not yet ready to face. We want to feel that the leaders in London and elsewhere can send to Cambridge for young fellow-workers, and know that we shall supply them with the best brains and the keenest ideals.40 But Cambridge had to wait; Dent decided to make his way as a writer based in London, armed with his ideas, already part of the lively modernist post-war arts world, working with the Old Vic, the new Drama League and Eaglefield Hull’s new British Music Society, ‘caught’ as he phrased it, ‘between music and letters’.41 His articles, especially in The Athenaeum, were more than simple

38 ‘The Music in The Knight of the Burning Pestle’, Cambridge Review 32 (23 February 1911), 307–8 (Dent’s review follows Rupert Brooke’s review of the drama); ‘The Magic Flute’, Cambridge Review 33 (30 November 1911), 150; ‘Cambridge Music, 1893–1912’, Cambridge Review 34 (5 June 1912), 501. Dent later continued to write up articles and reviews relevant to current Cambridge productions, especially supporting performances of music he advocated, landmark performances of Handel operas and oratorios, of Purcell’s The Fairy Queen (1920), Mozart’s Idomeneo, and others. 39 It was his first for this publication. See ‘Academic Teaching: A Defence and a Criticism’, The Musical Times 56 (May 1915), 269–71. 40 ‘Cambridge and the Theatre’, Cambridge Magazine (25 January 1919). 41 Dent to J. B. Trend, unpublished letter 22 October 1919, King’s College Archives. The Scholar as Critic: Edward J. Dent 163 reviews; they were intended to provoke new thinking about music and generate support for new ventures:

The War was to rescue music from the stuffy atmosphere of theatres and concert-halls and take her out into God’s own fresh air. Yet the great heart of the people still remains loyal to its sentimental ballads and its sentimental hymns. Not even rag-times, not even the Jazz bands, have saved us, though when rag- time first came into prominence it was hailed in a leading daily paper, and by one of our most distinguished composers, as a wonderful new inspiration of new and natural health and vigour. It is equally fatuous to suppose that the war would bring forth isolated compositions of outstanding greatness … Under the stress of war people had little time and little inclination to listen to music. They wanted either mere frivolities to distract them from thinking or those old favourite classics which required of them no conscious effort of thought.42 Educating the public was part of the chicken-and-egg approach; if the audiences demanded better standards, then the London cultural shift could finally get beyond its commercial limitations:

Some people seem to think that if boys are only forced to listen to a sufficient number of classical quartets and symphonies, they will become musical without further trouble. But the most that results from this is merely the ‘formation of good taste’ – a sort of average standard of musical good manners. To develop real musicianship, even among those who will go through life mainly as listeners, something more is needed – contact not only with inspired compositions of the past but with inspiring teachers of the present.43

Academic training means, or should mean, the teaching of principles; commercial training teaches nothing but the reproduction of clichés. Academic principles are not in the least degree cramping or dangerous to art as long as they are thorough, and as long as we have no blind reverence for traditions, but keep our methods in working order by subjecting them to constant criticism and satire … No ideal is worth keeping until it has passed the test of being thoroughly well laughed at.44 Dent had always tried to argue that the processes of making music, of understanding music, of enjoying music, and the integrity of the highest possible

42 E. J. Dent, ‘The Resurrection of Music’, The Athenaeum 27 (April 14 1919), 144. 43 E. J. Dent, ‘The Cinderella of the Arts’, The Athenaeum28 (30 May, 1919), 404. 44 E. J. Dent, ‘The Leaders’, Cambridge Magazine (18 January 1919). Dent always encouraged laughter at the opera, often mentioning how John Christie had once told him that ‘no-one ever laughs at Glyndebourne’. 164 Karen Arrandale production standards, were the real building-blocks for a healthy cultural life, but now he showed willing, for two years writing dozens of articles/reviews on the current scene.45 He was doomed to disappointment. Although he tried to support the fragmented efforts at the Surrey, the Lyric, Hammersmith, at the Old Vic he was operating in a cultural world where the Ballets Russes were on the same bill at the Coliseum as ‘Winston’s Wonderful Water Lions’. Opera was expensive to produce, but the way forward was not via the old-fashioned Covent Garden audience.

At Covent Garden there are boxes and box-holders who adore Melba, Caruso, and the rest. There is a splendid orchestra, there are fine singers, there is magnificent scenery. But the longer the company stays there the less chance there seems to be of their preparing the way for the real English opera of the future. What English opera wants is an audience. And the best audience that I have ever seen in any opera-house in Europe is the audience at the ‘Old Vic’.46 The Old Vic already had its audience, youthful and enthusiastic, and was ready, with the help of Dent, Clive Carey and Muriel Gough, to oblige. Dent wrote the first of many articles singing its praises. It was not empty puffery; rather a concerted effort to bring attention to something Dent felt was being done ‘in the right spirit’ and attracting a fresh audience it had worked hard to build up:

The opera happened to be Mignon. It is not an easy opera to perform, for, despite its conventionality, its workmanship is intricate and ingenious … The ‘Old Vic’ establishes at once a feeling of perfect confidence and security. They have no great singers, they have the shabbiest of scenery, their band consists of less than twenty players; but they do create that atmosphere in which one simply dis- regards inevitable shortcomings because one is compelled to enjoy the opera from start to finish. That in itself is a great achievement, and it is worth while inquiring how it is attained … The ‘Old Vic’ audience brings a valuable influence to bear on its performers and on its producers and stage manager, because it is unsophisticated and without operatic experience, and therefore insists on having everything made perfectly clear and intelligible. Thus common sense counts for more than tradition, and in most opera-houses common sense is the last motive to prevail with either a producer or a prima donna. Miss Baylis and Mr Corri give it opera in the right spirit. The performances make no pretence of being perfect, but they are as good as the material at hand

45 In The Athenaeum alone, 39 articles in 1919, 83 in 1920, 34 in 1921, then in The Nation & the Athenaeum, 18 in 1922 and 32 in 1923. 46 E. J. Dent, ‘The Function of the Audience’, The London Mercury 1 (April 1920), 763–5. The Scholar as Critic: Edward J. Dent 165

can provide. Indeed, they are a great deal better than one could ever expect from such material, for the simple reason that real brain-work is at the back of them and a determination to maintain a really high artistic standard.47 At the opposite pole, we find a review of Beecham’s opera season for J. C. Squire’s literary monthly, The London Mercury:48

As long as Sir Thomas Beecham was fighting the battle of English opera with dogged persistence and unstinted expenditure of material in the face of apathy and indifference, and possibly the hostility of vested interest as well, there was a very general feeling that his courage and high idealism should not be hampered by a too searching criticism of his performances.49 Where praise can be given – and Dent was scrupulous to praise the musicality – it is often offset by a very discreet but penetrating barb. Dent’s antipathy towards sloppy production comes through in his comments on Beecham, for instance, and the implication is very strong that Beecham really should know better; with all his musical gifts Beecham had chosen a mode which compromised the music yet was needlessly expensive to produce. Dent’s long- time battles with Thomas Beecham and John Christie had their roots in his intense dislike of their promotion of opera for the rich, where the well-heeled audience didn’t care about production values as long as they heard the celebrity singer; sets, language issues (often with the soloist singing in one language with the chorus in another) and musicality didn’t matter:

The present season has so far been something of a disappointment. Several of the operas to be seen have been given over and over again in the provinces if not in London. In the case of an absolutely new opera insufficiency of rehearsal may be pardoned; but it is not a sign of good management when the performance of stock classics is allowed to become slack and indifferent. Sir Thomas has not been seen very often at the conductor’s desk, and this is the more to be regretted,

47 E. J. Dent, ‘Opera at the Old Vic’, The Athenaeum28 (7 November 1919), 1160. Dent enthused to J. B. Trend, his partner, Professor of Spanish at Cambridge: ‘the most brilliant thing that has ever been seen’; unpublished letter dated 1 September 1919. He had discussed this with Squire and W. J. Turner over lunch at The Mitre. Dent already knew Turner through the Drama League, but now began to see him more often, going along with him to various new productions, and even standing in for him at one point. 48 ‘The Beecham Opera’, The London Mercury (November 1919), 248. 49 Even his review of Beecham’s A Mingled Chime: Leaves from an Autobiography, in Music Review 5 (August 1944) was kind. Dent and Beecham had history stemming from before and during World War I, when Beecham took Dent’s translation of The Magic Flute without permission. 166 Karen Arrandale

since he has a most remarkable genius for pulling through a performance which in other hands would be always trembling on the verge of disintegration. He has very little sympathy with singers, it seems. He always tends to regard the orchestra as the main thing, and the singers as mere adjuncts to it … The Beecham opera did occasionally attain something like a worthy standard, but at a cost which made its permanent maintenance impossible. Yet the Beecham management did something more than just pour out money like water. It had what the Carl Rosa lacks – artistic direction.50 The battles for the soul of a new ‘English’ opera continued for decades, even while Dent himself was diverted by his presidency of the ISCM and the Cambridge professorship in 1926. He was on the Board of Sadler’s Wells from its inception in 1931, and much of his writing was devoted to its promotion as the cradle of English opera, aiming at excellence for everyone, supported by his translations and editions which kept up the standards. He continued to argue for high production standards capable of conveying the marriage of music and words to a receptive audience. But in 1920 Dent found a lot of what he was seeing completely inadequate,51 from Beecham’s tiara-and-champagne style to Rutland Boughton’s worthy efforts to establish a kind of British Bayreuth at Glastonbury.52 In the meantime, Dent relieved some of his frustration with an attempt to recapture his old ideals and present them to his public. ‘Revaluations’, his elev- enth and final article for The London Mercury, is an eloquent and entertaining compendium of ideas on the place and style of music history, of critics, of listening to new music and of appreciating old music. Never prescriptive, Dent rather suggests and nudges, raising questions, citing – as he often did – his old friend Oscar Chilesotti, ‘Studiamo l’antico per comprendere il presente’:

50 ‘Opera in English at Covent Garden’, The Athenaeum 30 (11 December 1921). Compare The Musical Times (January 1919). Dent’s colleagues R. O. Morris and W. J. Turner often caught his style and substance; cf. Morris, ‘Covent Garden: “Othello”’, The Athenaeum 28 (7 November 1919), 1160. 51 ‘… to Cyril Scott’s new 5tet at the Wig H. It tries hard to be shocking, but is really rather academic & dry… Last night I went to the Beggars Opera. I thought it perfectly dreadful, but as I’m a personal friend of Playfair, F. Austin and Lovat Fraser I had to be careful what I said. So I have executed a masterpiece of serpentism this morning wch I hope will amuse you … The Ballet is back at Cov. Gard. Pulcinella by Pergolesi & Stravinsky is dismal rot.’ Dent’s letters to J. B. Trend, May/June 1920; there is much more along the same lines. 52 E. J. Dent, ‘The Glastonbury Players at the “Old Vic”’, Truth 11 (16 June 1920). Although Dent always tried to support Boughton’s efforts, he felt that much of the latter’s endeavour was limited by poor planning and rehearsal. Of Boughton’s operas, only The Immortal Hour impressed him. The Scholar as Critic: Edward J. Dent 167

No music is new to us more than once. It may be wondered whether those who give up the riddle of modern music in despair have in reality a much more intelligent appreciation of the classics. The difficulty in the case of most of the classics is to warm them into real life, to put ourselves back into a period when they too were new and disturbing.53 It was a tactic that he often employed, especially after he returned to teaching in 1926. Thinking about musical aesthetics grounded him. ‘Music,’ he wrote in Terpander, ‘expresses itself and nothing else … The real music is not that which is written down: it is the sounds which are made by those who perform it’.54 Dent’s ideas were rescued, his enthusiasm rekindled, when Murry (of The Athenaeum) sent him to Germany in October 1920. For the next four months he caught up with old friends and the vibrant arts world of the Weimar Republic. He sought to channel the experience while making the source of inspiration palatable to its former enemy:

One’s first impression of music in Berlin is that it is fifty years behind London. Concert programmes confine themselves mainly to the classics … I was told that promoters of modern music are obliged to go forward with tact and discretion … The young composer may rest assured that he has a much better chance of coming to a hearing than his contemporary in Germany.55

But it is the weakness of music in Germany that in Germany music is taken for granted; the fact that in England music is the perpetual struggle of a few artists against an apathetic majority gives us the best hope for English music. It is not likely that we shall ever make English music a national industry like hotel-keeping in Switzerland, but for that very reason we may possibly produce a small number of first-rate musicians.56 The resulting ‘Letters from Germany’ awakened Dent’s dormant internationalist tendencies; immediately he felt the potential mutual benefit that greater cultural links could provide, because what he saw excited him as London had not; yet, even if (in Dent’s view) it was currently lacking in native talent, London was far more receptive to new ideas. His experiences

53 E. J. Dent, ‘Revaluations’, London Mercury (September 1920), 619–21, at 620. 54 E. J. Dent, Terpander: Or Music and the Future (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1926), 20. Part of a series, ‘To-day and To-morrow’. Dent’s colleague W. J. Turner published his Orpheus: Or Music of the Future at around the same time. 55 ‘Letters from Germany I. First impressions’, The Athenaeum 29 (5 November 1920), 628. 56 ‘Letters from Germany II. The Tradition of German Music’, The Athenaeum 29 (19 November 1920), 707. 168 Karen Arrandale with Busoni and, later, with other contemporary German composers, also fed Dent’s ideas about the cultural responsibilities of critics:

One reason why the young composer in Germany has such a poor chance is that people are all so terribly frightened of the critics. The critics know it, and delight in their tyranny.57 By 1922 Dent was using his Nation & Athenaeum articles much more boldly, easing in the case for state-sponsorship, something he had always advocated. Responding to the fact that the Purcell Society were trying to raise £3,000 to finish publishing a complete edition of Purcell’s works, Dent said: ‘It is one of the many misfortunes attendant upon music in England that we have as a nation no sense of public duty towards it … a complete failure of our government[’s] … pious resolutions’.58 Throughout 1922, Dent’s articles pointed the way towards a musical future, directed at his British readership but using examples from his own musical odyssey via Prague, Hungary, Handel in Germany, and finally ‘At the Source’, on the remarkable festival of contemporary chamber music at Donaueschingen.59 This was followed by ‘A New International’, then, in January 1923, ‘Plans for Salzburg’. At last Dent’s dreams were being realized in the shape of the newly formed International Society for Contemporary Music, with himself as its first President.60 Dent quickly co-opted other music critics, most notably his former enemy and rival Edwin Evans, and the British section of the ISCM became its rock and foundation, the benefits most evident in the Oxford and London festivals of 1931 and the Cambridge Congress of 1933, when much broader international vistas of contemporary music and current thinking were presented to the British public. His brief career in full-time journalism had opened Dent’s eyes to what critics could or could not do; focusing on the music itself rather than the performer or performance, he expanded the critic’s role, using his position and his experience, practical and theoretical, to effect change. If he failed in some respects, in others he was a conspicuous success. In the 1930s his articles in The Old Vic and Sadler’s Wells Magazine, articles for The Listener and broadcasts for the BBC disseminated his ideas beyond the university. For the last fifteen years of his life he returned to writing reviews, mostly because he

57 E. J. Dent, ‘Young England’, The Nation & the Athenaeum 28 (26 February 1921), 744. 58 E. J. Dent, ‘A National Duty’, The Nation & the Athenaeum 32 (9 December 1922), 432. 59 E. J. Dent, ‘At the Source’, The Nation & the Athenaeum 31 (19 August 1922), 690. 60 His entertaining account of its founding, ‘Looking Backward’, can be found in Hugh Taylor, ed., Edward J. Dent: Selected Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 272–90. It should be taken with a large grain of salt. The Scholar as Critic: Edward J. Dent 169 needed the money to pay his medical bills. But in 1946 his failure to convince Maynard Keynes to support Sadler’s Wells as the new national opera gave rise to a battle in the press to keep the venue alive.61 Dent contributed with pieces for the Monthly Musical Record62 and his ‘propaganda book’, A Theatre for Everybody.63 Even when old and infirm, Dent never let up, writing dozens of articles, programme notes and introductions. His pupils took up his ideas, Lord Harewood editing Opera magazine, besides the musicologists Winton Dean, Nigel Fortune, Philip Radcliffe and Tony Lewis, to name only a few. Along the way his influence was also felt by other music critics, for example R. O. Morris and W. J. Turner.

❧❧ The ‘Elgar Hetz’ Like any conspicuously influential figure, Dent made enemies, but few critics have been attacked with such ferocity and thoroughness; to this day many people only remember Dent because of this ancient storm in a musical teacup. In 1931, Dent saw in the birth of Sadler’s Wells, was elected President of the IMS/SIM/IGM (he is the only person to have been President of both the IMS and the ISCM), was elected Chair of the Philharmonic standing committee, and was invited to a number of international musical events beside the first ISCM festival to be held in England, at Oxford and London. As Professor of Music in Cambridge he nurtured the new generation of musicians there, and had been co-opted onto the Cambridgeshire committee to produce a radical report on the teaching of music in schools, exactly the kind of far-reaching project to pique his interest.64 By the end of the year, his Busoni biography was nearly drafted. In retrospect, therefore, it does seem perverse that the one event from this eventful year to stick in the public mind is such a ridiculously minor one, what Dent called the ‘Elgar Hetz’ against him. In late 1930, the German book Handbuch der Musikgeschichte (1924) by Dent’s old friend Guido Adler was published in English, and Dent’s brief

61 According to Robert Skidelsky, Keynes, who knew very little about music, was afraid of compromising excellence, so backed Covent Garden to receive the bulk of the money. Dent was on the board of both houses. 62 ‘Rebuilding for Music’, Monthly Musical Record 74 (December 1944); ‘Hurry along there!’ Monthly Musical Record 80 (May 1950). 63 E. J. Dent, A Theatre for Everybody: The Story of the Old Vic and Sadler’s Wells (London: T. V. Boardman & Co., 1945). 64 ‘The Value of Music to the Community and the Place that it should Occupy in Education’, 9–16, and Preface, Music and the Community: The Cambridgeshire Report on the Teaching of Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933), xiii–xiv. 170 Karen Arrandale remarks on Elgar brought a deluge of self-righteous wrath down upon his head. There were outraged letters to The Timesand other papers, all ‘instigated’ by Peter Warlock and signed by many musical great and good, including a number of old friends and colleagues, among them Percy Scholes and Bernard Shaw, William Walton and even Donald Tovey, ‘who in his young days had invented an adjective “velgar” and christened The Dream of Gerontius “Gerry’s N i g h t m a r e”’. 65 The offending passage, especially when taken out of context, seems harsh, and now possibly wrong and misjudged:

He was a violinist by profession, and studied the works of Liszt, which were an abomination to conservative, academic musicians. He was, moreover, a Catholic, and more or less a self-taught man, who possessed little of the literary culture of Parry and Stanford … To English ears, Elgar’s music is too emotional and not entirely free from vulgarity. His orchestral works, two symphonies, concertos for violin and cello, and several overtures, are vivid in colour, but pompous in style and of a too deliberate chivalrousness (Ritterlichkeit) of expression.66 Philip Radcliffe, who was studying with Dent at this time, later took some trouble to provide context for Dent’s remarks, discussing with sympathy and understanding Dent’s ‘idiosyncrasies’, his sometimes apparently contradictory stances and his dismissive phrases (e.g. ‘too emotional and not quite free from vulgarity’, and the ‘chivalric rhetoric which badly covers up his intrinsic vulgarity’).67 Radcliffe personally remembers Dent ‘inveighing against the English ultra-respectable fear of vulgarity’ while appreciating – as he does in the offending article – Elgar’s ‘orchestral brilliance and glowing expressiveness’. The point, not picked up at the time but since aired, is that Dent’s apparently offhand use of an emotionally charged term like ‘vulgar’ is in fact part of his complex distinction, made over a long period, between what can be acceptable, indeed sometimes desirable, in music, and what is pretentious or sentimental. Dent’s personal aversion to late Victorian piety in all its forms made him suspicious of Elgar’s attempts at ‘nobility’, especially when linked to a conspicuous piety. In 1936, at the apparent height of his career and on the occasion of his honorary doctorate, Dent gave a lecture at Harvard University, ‘The Historical Approach to Music’.68 His brief, to ‘defend the dignity of Music as a subject of

65 Radcliffe, A Centenary Memoir, 18. 66 E. J. Dent, ‘Engländer’, in Guido Adler, ed., Handbuch der Musikgeschichte, Vol. II: Die Moderne (seit 1880) (Berlin: Wilmersdorf, 1930), 1044–57. 67 Radcliffe, A Centenary Memoir, 17–18. 68 E. J. Dent, ‘The Historical Approach to Music’, in Authority and the Individual (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1937), repr. in Taylor, ed., Selected The Scholar as Critic: Edward J. Dent 171 university study’, a subject which had exercised him most of his life. Since his own first ‘excavations’, Dent had often written on the subject, but this was his swansong, addressed to an audience containing many refugees bringing their culture to America. The previous April he had collapsed with the effort of holding together the two international music societies of which he was President, having planned a joint Congress/ISCM Festival at Barcelona in the teeth of official German opposition and operations to undermine him personally and professionally. The Barcelona event was a cultural high never really equalled, the closest realization of Dent’s defiantly internationalist vision, of his sense of the relationship between music history and contemporary music, and of the vital role played by performance. The triumph was all the greater for being staged in the face of current nationalist storms, and with civil war just around the corner. Now, coming after the debacle of Barcelona, the lecture is a poignant return to the ideas that kept him going. It is quietly refractory, discussing ‘my musical principles … freedom of thought, unshackled by the trammels of authority … To us of the present day … music has become almost a religion, or a substitute for religion’, hampered by its deadening ‘reverence for the classics’, which Dent as historian deftly puts in its place as nineteenth-century affectation, part of the classifying process which had bagged Bach, Palestrina and Handel:69

English people are notoriously illogical; I think their underlying reasons for rejecting the word ‘musicology’ was that, however keenly they might be interested in musical research, they refused to lose sight of the principle that music was an art.70

If we are still to go on listening to the classics, we must cease to reverence them: we must set to work to understand them. It is here that the work of the musicologists becomes necessary to us; we have to grasp the fact that all music which is not of the immediate present is ‘old’ music.71 Dent the scholar had the last word. His many reviews throughout the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s are a gold standard, as he returned to operas and early music, always illuminating without attacking, revelling in the exercise of his own erudition. He particularly enjoyed reviewing books by old friends with whom he had worked, such as Alfred Einstein’s monumental The Italian Madrigal:

Essays, 189–206. 69 Dent, ‘Historical Approach to Music’, 192–3. 70 Ibid., 189. 71 Ibid., 195–6. 172 Karen Arrandale

This book is one of the greatest works of musical scholarship that has appeared during the last hundred years. Its erudition is overwhelming. It has involved the ant-like industry of an Eitner or a Vogel, but that is nothing astonishing in a German scholar; what gives it its grandeur is its astonishing intellectual breadth of view, not only in music but in Italian history and literature … The madrigale spirituale may be negligible in the history of music, but the lighter madrigal forms – villotte, villanelle, giustiniane, greghesche, moresche and so forth – are absolutely indispensable for an adequate study of the sixteenth century, not merely because they present a vivid picture of social life, but because the scientific analysis of their technique is integral to the understanding of that of the serious madrigal and of the whole transition of musical composition from mediaeval to modern times.72 As his friend Bernard Shaw had before him, Dent saw his critic’s role as giving music ‘a good shaking-up’,73 upsetting complacency and preposses- sion, but above all, positively engaging the reader:

One of the best pieces of prophetic criticism is to be found in the article that Mr Shaw wrote on the Mozart centenary of December 1891. He pointed out, at a moment when Mozart was almost utterly neglected, that Mozart was the consummation of an epoch, and that after his death it was impossible to go on imitating him.74 Dent expanded the purlieus of the ‘music critic’ to include the responsibilities of a teacher and the imaginative understanding of a cultural commentator with extensive practical knowledge of his subjects. He may not have been a mainstream music critic, but Dent influenced his generation’s appreciation of the high arts, especially opera, while lifting the standards of public discourse on music. Did artistic standards rise because of Dent? This is impossible to pin down, but the legacy of his ideas can be seen in English National Opera, English Touring Opera, and the current health of music, theatre and opera at Cambridge, to cite but a few instances. The mere fact that there is an outfit called English Touring Opera, which can fill provincial houses with Cavalli and Monteverdi operas, is down to Dent. But perhaps Dent’s most enduring

72 E. J. Dent, Review of Alfred Einstein, The Italian Madrigal (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1949), in Music and Letters 31 (January 1950), 56–60. 73 E. J. Dent, ‘Corno di Bassetto’, in Taylor, ed., Selected Essays, 238–49. Originally published in S. Winsten, ed., G.B.S. 90: Aspects of Bernard Shaw’s Life and Work (London: Hutchinson, 1946), 122–30. Dent’s entertaining piece on his much- admired old friend GBS also contains several profound observations on the history of music criticism. 74 Ibid., 243. The Scholar as Critic: Edward J. Dent 173 legacy is the moving, elegant, passionate way he expresses his lifelong love for his subject.

All art aspires to the condition of music … The condition of music which gives it an advantage over other arts is its transitoriness … The musician can forget or remember at will. He at least can be honest enough to admit that not even the acknowledged greatest works of music are possessions for eternity. And it is for that reason that some of us begin to feel that it is impossible to pronounce the clear-cut judgements of the man of taste who divides music into good and bad, or, at any rate, that it is unimportant in comparison with the unceasingly fascinating occupation of trying to understand it.75

75 E. J. Dent, ‘Revaluations’, 621. Chapter 8 Russia and Eastern Europe

Philip Ross Bullock

❧❧ Empire and Nation unctuated by a series of military and diplomatic conflicts and set P against a background of shifting strategic alliances, the reception of Russian and Eastern European music in Britain from 1850 to 1950 vividly illustrates how geopolitical concerns can impinge upon discussion of culture and the arts. In particular, the condition and legacy of empire are at the heart of the relationship between Russia and Britain, whether in the second half of the nineteenth century, or in the first half of the twentieth. Although Russia and Britain found themselves on opposite sides of the Crimean War (1853–6), they were later to become uneasy allies in the major conflicts of the twentieth century. Even when not involved in military conflict, the ideological interaction between the two countries was shaped in the long nineteenth century by terri- torial rivalries in Central Asia and the Far East (what historians often refer to as the ‘Great Game’), and in the twentieth by revolutionary politics (something that would eventually give rise to the so-called ‘Cold War’). Empire shaped the reception of the cultures of Eastern Europe too. Until 1918, many of Eastern Europe’s national cultures were part of broader, multi- lingual and multi-ethnic entities. Poland was divided between Austria, Prussia and Russia; Bohemia, Moravia and Slovakia were subject to Austro-Hungarian rule. The South Slavonic peoples were governed either by Austro-Hungary or the Ottoman Empire, whether directly or through fealty. Even countries seldom considered part of Eastern Europe share the legacy of imperial rule. Between 1809 and 1917, Finland was a Grand Duchy of the Russian Empire, and its nineteenth- and early twentieth-century history was shaped as much by this relationship as it was by that with its Scandinavian neighbours to the west. Long subject to Ottoman rule, Greece won its independence against a backdrop of widespread European philhellenism, something that has masked its cultural affinities with other nations in the Balkans until comparatively recently.1

1 Jim Samson, Music in the Balkans (Boston: Brill, 2013). 174 Russia and Eastern Europe 175

It is this imperial framework that makes the study of the British reception of Russian and Eastern European music such a complex topic, not least because Britain – like Russia – was itself caught between imperial and national (not to say nationalist) agendas. The fact that the nations of Eastern Europe were seeking to establish themselves as distinct from the hegemonic powers that ruled them means that their small-state nationalism maps only very imprecisely onto artistic and social developments in Britain, which functioned as an imperial authority on a global scale. Even within the region, linguistic, ethnic, social and religious identities were rarely aligned; pan-Slavism, for instance, promised a vision of ethnic and linguistic unity that ran counter to divisions between Catholicism, Protestantism, Orthodoxy and even Islam. Neither was imperialism always pitted against the expression of national sentiment (even while it suppressed calls for national self-determination). The national movement in Finland was in large measure nurtured by Russian rule,2 and the revival of Polish vernacular culture took place within the context of partition. Even after the end of the First World War and the establishment of autonomous nation states in Eastern Europe (supported by Woodrow Wilson’s doctrine of self-determination and most vividly expressed in two essays by leading politicians in the newly independent Czechoslovakia, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk’s ‘The Problem of Small Nations in the European Crisis’ [1916] and Edvard Beneš’s ‘The Problem of Small Nations after the World War’ [1925]), the region was still conditioned by ‘great power’ politics. Britain’s support for the newly independent state of Czechoslovakia, for instance, was less an act of disinterested cultural affinity, bolstered by Masaryk’s own Anglophilia, than a strategic attempt to lessen the influence of Austria and Hungary, which – as titular heads of the former dual monarchy – were felt to retain regional ambitions.3 The relationship between Britain and the cultures of Eastern Europe was governed, then, by a series of asymmetries and discontinuities that were geographical and historical, spatial and temporal. Yet it is important to guard against an unthinking sense of ‘Ruritanianism’, that is, a fetishization of the fiddly and often fissiparous nature of politics in the region. British identity was itself every bit as intricate and contested as that of the nations of Eastern Europe, and it is again empire that provides a way of thinking through this problem. In particular, London’s status as the capital city of a global empire

2 Philip Ross Bullock, ‘Sibelius and the Russian Traditions’, in Daniel M. Grimley, ed., Jean Sibelius and his World (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011), 3–57. 3 Gábor Bátonyi, Britain and Central Europe, 1918–1933 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999). 176 Philip Ross Bullock

(matched in part by the importance of cities such as Bristol, Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester and Glasgow as globally connected centres of trade and industry) partly undermined its ability to function as specifically national capital.4 This outward-looking perspective was matched by the complexities of the United Kingdom’s constitutional arrangements. As the capital city of a polity made up of four separate nations (it should be recalled, of course, that the issue of Irish Home Rule and eventual independence sits squarely in the middle of the period considered here), London’s Englishness and Britishness were frequently in tension.5 Finally, London’s status as a capitalist entrepôt was matched by its importance as a centre for visiting performers, conductors and composers, something which lent its cultural life a decidedly cosmopolitan character that often worked to the exclusion of national local talents. A frequent complaint of native composers around the turn of the century was that their works were crowded out by foreign imports, for which British audiences seemed to have an endless appetite.

❧❧ Institutions and Audiences The relationship between nationalist politics in Russia and Eastern Europe and the unresolved question of what constituted British cultural identity can be traced through two interconnected musical institutions: teaching and learning on the one hand; and concert life and music appreciation on the other. Although music had been taught in British universities since the medieval period, this was largely as a practical subject for performers (especially organ- ists), or as a branch of philosophy with its roots in the classical quadrivium. Musicology as a modern academic discipline arrived only towards the end of the nineteenth century in England, when the curricula at Oxford and Cambridge were substantially reformed (Edinburgh had appointed a chair in the history of music much earlier in the century).6 These innovations often drew on institutional developments elsewhere, most notably in Germany, where the professionalization of music history, analysis and criticism had taken place much earlier. The presumed normativity of the Austro-German canon had profound consequences for how nineteenth-century nationalist movements were perceived and discussed, at least in academic circles (indeed,

4 Raymond Williams, ‘Metropolitan Perceptions and the Emergence of Modernism’, in Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists (London: Verso, 1989), 37–48. 5 Jed Esty, A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004). 6 Rosemary Golding, Music and Academia in Victorian Britain (Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013). Russia and Eastern Europe 177 the notion that German music was itself a form of nationalism seems barely to have been countenanced). Parry, for instance, could be dismissive of anything that did not conform to his expectations of musical form: ‘it seems to be the rule with the artistic work of Slavs that the power of creating intrinsic interest is considerable, but that the faculties which are needed for concentration and systematic mastery of balance of design are proportionately weak.’7 Statements such as these were motivated in part by imperial rivalries between Britain and Russia (witness Parry’s claim that Russia was ‘semi-oriental’),8 but they were also underpinned by theories of racial difference, as Parry’s summary of the turn-of-the-century vogue for Russian music illustrates:

The qualities of races but little advanced from primitive temperamental conditions are even more conscious in the Russian music which has almost submerged the world, especially England, in the closing years of the century. The music has naturally appealed to the awakening intelligence of the musical masses by vehe- ment emotional spontaneity, orgiastic frenzy, dazzling effects of colour, barbaric rhythm, and unrestrained abandonment to physical excitement which is natural to the less developed races.9 Such views were based on the fallacy that the further east one travelled, the closer one came to supposed barbarism (as in Parry’s claim that Russian composers ‘are in closer contact with beings that are hardly raised above savagery’).10 As Larry Wolff has argued, the distinction between Western European civilization and Eastern European barbarism had its roots in eighteenth-century discourses of Enlightenment.11 What is most productive about Wolff’s account, though, is that it is not based on a simplistic binary opposition between East and West, but on a gradient connecting two extremes: ‘Eastern Europe was located not at the antipode of civilization, not down in the depths of barbarism, but rather on the developmental scale that measured the distance between civilization and barbarism.’12 Wolff’s theory can be applied to the reception of Russian and Eastern European music in Victorian Britain (and, indeed, thereafter). Where, for Wolff, the pole of civilization

7 C. Hubert H. Parry, Summary of the History and Development of Mediæval and Modern European Music, revised edn (London: Novello, 1905), 89. 8 C. Hubert H. Parry, Style in Musical Art (London: Macmillan and Co., 1911), 240. 9 Parry, Summary of the History and Development of Mediæval and Modern European Music, 119. 10 Parry, Style in Music Art, 406. 11 Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994). 12 Ibid., 9. 178 Philip Ross Bullock is represented by French enlightenment philosophy, musicians in Victorian Britain looked to Germany as the marker of a supposedly universal standard. Russia, represented above all by Tchaikovsky, stood at the opposite extreme, with other cultures occupying an indeterminate position in between. Here, the case of Dvořák is particularly instructive (though Chopin, Szymanowski, Janáček, Bartók, Enescu and others could equally well be chosen). To be sure, Parry’s description of Dvořák carries a certain note of condescension: ‘The Czechs have always been among the most spontaneously musical races of Europe … Antonín Dvořák … illustrated in a very attractive manner the characteristics of a race more primitive and unsophisticated than those among whom Art had attained to its greatest and noblest manifestations.’13 Yet there was far less resistance to Dvořák’s music than to that of Tchaikovsky, and with a few minor modifications, his symphonies could be incorporated into the prevailing Brahmsian model of the form that was so central to British academic taste. (The reception of these works in Vienna further facilitated this alignment with the German tradition.)14 The premiere of Dvořák’s Requiem at the 1891 Birmingham Festival further underlined the extent to which he works accorded with dominant aspects of British musical taste. Yet the universities and music colleges were not the only institutions involved in shaping musical taste in Britain, and alongside the establishment of academic canons of criticism there existed a vital concert scene, which often found itself in tension with scholarly authorities. Although Britain had enjoyed a lively concert life throughout the nineteenth century, this was not always supported in coherent and consistent ways through state or quasi-state institutions (unlike musical life on the Continent, where academies, opera houses, philharmonic societies and conservatories were not only central to concert life, but also served to articulate the national aspirations of the state itself). The absence of such institutions in Britain meant that music-making often had an ad hoc feel, at least until the founding of such bodies as the BBC, the Royal Opera House, and various permanently constituted orchestras. In particular, the importance of box-office income in supporting concert life in Britain meant that popular taste played a crucial role in shaping the repertoire of works on offer, especially in such enterprises as Henry Wood’s Promenade concerts at the Queen’s Hall or Thomas Beecham’s opera seasons

13 Parry, Summary of the History and Development of Mediæval and Modern European Music, 118. 14 David Brodbeck, ‘Dvořák’s Reception in Liberal Vienna: Language Ordinances, National Property, and the Rhetoric of Deutschtum’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 60/1 (2007), 71–132. Russia and Eastern Europe 179 at the Drury Lane Theatre.15 To be sure, the works performed by Wood and Beecham were not merely the result of opportunistic programming; both men clearly believed in the repertoires they so keenly championed. But as Parry lamented, the vogue for Russian music in particular seemed to be driven by the tastes of impressionable and seemingly unthinking audiences:

The exact date when the Russian musical invasion commenced may be given at the performance of his [Tchaikovsky’s] ‘Pathetic’ Symphony (in B minor, No. 6) by the Philharmonic Society under the conductorship of Sir Alexander Mackenzie on February 28, 1894. From that moment Wagner’s supremacy in the concert-room ceased to be uncontested. Public taste gravitated from the subtle emotionalism of the great Teutonic musical dramatist to the more obvious and highly accentuated passion of the more primitive and plain-speaking Russian. But, as has been before pointed out, Wagner had prepared the way, and had unintentionally led public taste away from the purity of abstract Art and created a craving which could only be satisfied with draughts of stimulants of ever-increasing strength.16 The vitality of concert life in Britain was matched by a new type of writing that sat alongside academic scholarship and supported the careers of a number of writers who worked outside the institutional framework of the country’s main educational establishments. Newspaper reviews, programme notes, popular biographies and synthetic histories of genres, repertoires and individual national traditions came together under the broad banner of criticism. And if the new musical cultures of Russia and Eastern Europe were not readily incorporated into canons of academic musicology, they certainly found a welcome home in the works of a number of writers and critics who appealed more directly to Britain’s growing popular audience for classical music between 1850 and 1950. It is to three such figures that the discussion now turns, and the focus will predominantly be on Russian music.

❧❧ Women and Russia One of the most striking features of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writing on Russian and Eastern European music is the prominent role that women played in it. The sixteen short articles published by Constance Bache

15 Philip Ross Bullock, ‘Tsar’s Hall: Russian Music in London, 1895–1926’, in Rebecca Beasley and Philip Ross Bullock, eds, Russia in Britain, 1880–1940: From Melodrama to Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 113–28. 16 Parry, Summary of the History and Development of Mediæval and Modern European Music, 119–20. 180 Philip Ross Bullock in The Anglo-Russian between July 1897 and January 1900 constitute some of the earliest overviews of modern Russian music available to British readers, and these were soon followed by similar essays by A. E. Keeton in The Monthly Musical Record, The Contemporary Review and The Proceedings of the Anglo- Russian Literary Society. But by far the most significant figure in this regard was Rosa Newmarch, whose very substantial output of books, articles and translations dominated British writing on Russian music from the late 1890s through to the early 1920s.17 Although her first publications were devoted to Brahms (a translation of Hermann Deiters’ Johannes Brahms: A Biographical Sketch that appeared in 1888, and a brief essay on his late works that was included in the final volume of George Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians in 1889), her focus soon switched. Newmarch began by translating Alfred Habets’ biography of Borodin, and translation would remain a central feature of her work throughout her life (she could produce versions of Modest Tchaikovsky’s biography of his brother, as well a large number of singing translations of songs and opera libretti). Yet after a trip to Russia in 1897 (the first of four in total), she soon began publishing critical and biographical works of her own, including the first life of Tchaikovsky in any language (1900), monographic treatments of Russian poetry (1907), opera (1914) and the visual arts (1916), entries for various editions of Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, and substantial articles in such scholarly publications as the Proceedings of the Musical Association and the journal of the International Musical Society. That women should have played such a prominent role in the reception of Russian music in Britain – as indeed they did in the reception of Russian culture more generally – is in part a product of the structural factors and social expectations that were characteristic of Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Modern European languages formed part of the domestic education of many middle-class women, as did music-making, drawing and painting. At a time when classical learning was still the preserve of the public schools and ancient universities, modern languages represented one way in which women could employ their aptitudes and interests in the public sphere. Moreover, writing – because of its associations with education and enlightenment – did not necessarily transgress norms of decorum that still limited the extent of women’s participation in social life. For Newmarch, criticism, translation and programme-note writing allowed her to establish a reputation as an authority on Russian music, as well as to support her family financially (especially after her husband’s mismanagement of their affairs in 1910), even at a time when many of the professions were still closed to her. Finally, the relative marginality of

17 Philip Ross Bullock, Rosa Newmarch and the Reception of Russian Music in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009). Russia and Eastern Europe 181 the Russian arts within Britain’s intellectual and artistic institutions meant that it was a culture to which women could readily lay claim as their own. There were, to be sure, plenty of men active in the field, as the extensive output of M. Montagu-Nathan demonstrates.18 But as Montagu-Nathan himself admitted, women had played a profound role not only in the development of Russian music itself, but in its propagation abroad too.19 Newmarch was clearly stimulated by the growing presence of Russian music in orchestral concerts throughout the 1880s and 1890s. There had even been a smattering of opera productions too (Rubinstein’s Demon was performed, albeit in Italian, in 1881, as was Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar in 1887, and an English version of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin was given in 1892), and visits by Rubinstein and Tchaikovsky sparked yet further interest. Yet important as such visits were, the reception of Russian music had its roots in an earlier vogue for Russian literature that went back to at least the mid-century, when the Crimean War inspired readers to learn more about a country that was still largely unfamiliar to them. Moreover, Russian realist prose – primarily the novels of Turgenev and Tolstoy – was well suited to British literary taste, which embraced this new tradition as a counterpart to novelists such as George Eliot and as a counterweight to the claims of French naturalism. This tension between the sociological and the stylistic ran through the reception of Russian literature for some time to come, and can be seen in the work of the most prominent translator of the time, Constance Garnett. Single-handedly responsible for the translation of almost the entire canon of nineteenth-century prose into English, Garnett was guided in her work by two influential collaborators. The first of these was her husband, Edward Garnett, who felt that Russian literature held open the promise of literary renewal in Britain. The second, by contrast, was the radical émigré Sergey Stepnyak-Kravchinsky, for whom literature served to expose the brutalities of Tsarist autocracy.20 Even in her lifetime, Newmarch’s achievements were explicitly compared to those of her literary forebears. An interview with the French edition of the journal of the International Music Society suggested that ‘c’est elle qui a accompli pour l’Angleterre l’œuvre qui en France a rendu fameux M. de Vogüé’ (the reference is to Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé, whose Le Roman russe of 1886

18 Montagu-Nathan’s principle works include A History of Russian Music (1914, second edition 1918), An Introduction to Russian Music (1916), Contemporary Russian Composers (1917) and studies of Glinka (1916), Musorgsky (1916) and Rimsky- Korsakov (1916). 19 M. Montagu-Nathan, ‘The Influence of Women on the Russian School’, The Musical Times (1 July 1914), 442–4. 20 Richard Garnett, Constance Garnett: A Heroic Life (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1991). 182 Philip Ross Bullock played a definitive role in the European reception of Russian literature).21 Later, Arthur Jacobs drew a similar analogy: ‘Rosa Newmarch became the great educator of the British public in Russian music – a function comparable to that of Constance Garnett … as translator of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Chekhov’.22 The comparisons are apt, inasmuch as Newmarch’s work displays the sociological and stylistic imperatives characteristic of both Garnett and de Vogüé. On the one hand, she sought, through extensive evocations of the Russian intellectual and artistic milieu with which she was so familiar, to por- tray Russia not as some barbaric, quasi-Asiatic culture of primitivism and des- potism (which was the impression readers were likely to gain from accounts such as Parry’s), but as a civilized and cultured place in which the arts played a central role in civic life. Take, for instance, her depiction of Rimsky-Korsakov, whom she offered as a corrective to widespread stereotypes about the Russian national character: ‘Rimsky-Korsakov was the embodiment of all those qualities which stage literature and a misinformed Press have taught us not to look for in the Russian character: sincerity, unpretentiousness, refinement, gaiety, and a sweet and healthy outlook upon life.’23 At the same time, she also promoted Russian music as a model for the future development of British music in contrast to the Germanic tradition espoused in the universities and London colleges. In a programmatic interview published in The Musical Times in 1911, she explicitly addressed the question of the musical influences on the so-called ‘musical renaissance’:

As to the influence exerted by foreign music on the revival, she thinks that some of our composers have submitted too much to the influence of Brahms, who, although a sincere and natural composer, produces on his disciples the curious effect of making them wearisome, even though he gives them academic respectability. As to young composers, the influence of Russian music has been extensive and salutary. They have learned from Tchaikovsky a certain emotional pessimism and in general the art of effective orchestration.24 This double prism is characteristic of all of Newmarch’s writing on Russian music. Russia represented a culture of inherent interest that deserved to be studied, admired and demythologized, and simultaneously offered much that was worthy of emulation in turn-of-the-century Britain itself.

21 Charles Chassé, ‘La Musique anglaise moderne: une interview avec Mrs Rosa N e w m a r c h’, Bulletin français de la S.I.M. 4 (1908), 556–62, at 556. 22 Arthur Jacobs, Henry J. Wood: Maker of the Proms (London: Methuen, 1994), 58. 23 Rosa Newmarch, ‘Rimsky-Korsakov: Personal Reminiscences’, Monthly Musical Record 38 (August 1908), 172–3, at 173. 24 M., ‘Mrs. Rosa Newmarch’, The Musical Times (1 April 1911), 225–9, at 226–7. Russia and Eastern Europe 183

Yet Newmarch’s work contained its own fair share of mythologization, as her handling of the question of Russian musical nationalism suggests. In keeping with widely held stereotypes, early accounts of Russian music often emphasized its primitivism, backwardness and oriental qualities. Edward Dannreuther’s entry on Tchaikovsky for the first edition of Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians is perhaps typical of this tendency:

Tschaikowsky makes frequent use of the rhythm and tunes of Russian People’s songs and dances, occasionally also of certain quaint harmonic sequences peculiar to Russian church music. His compositions, more or less, bear the impress of the Slavonic temperament – fiery exaltation on a basis of languid melancholy.25 In the dictionary’s second edition, however, Newmarch replaced this interpretation with a very different emphasis on Tchaikovsky’s European traits: ‘it would be truer to say that in much of his music it is the racial element which is the echo, and the cosmopolitan element which forms the actual basis of his inspiration’.26 Newmarch’s re-evaluation of Tchaikovsky (as well as her concomitant denigration of Rubinstein) was, moreover, accompanied by a commitment to the nationalist composers, whose works were then little known in Britain. Here, she drew on the ideas of her mentor, Vladimir Stasov, with whom she studied in St Petersburg in 1897, and whose highly tendentious and partisan views shaped her handling of musical historiography. Following Stasov, Newmarch argued that it was the works of the so-called ‘New Russian School’ (Balakirev, Borodin, Cui, Musorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov) that marked the highpoint of Russian musical culture in the second half of the nineteenth century. As a woman writer and a critic committed to a repertoire that enjoyed little academic approval, Newmarch was forced to build her reputation by engaging with popular audiences and newer, more flexible institutions (such as Henry Wood’s concerts at Queen’s Hall, for which she wrote the programme notes from 1908 to 1920). Moreover, one of the problems for Russophiles such as Newmarch was that the country whose art they advocated had been a military enemy and diplomatic rival for much of the nineteenth century. Russia’s autocratic regime and reputation for authoritarianism meant that it was politically problematic too. Newmarch’s work acquired sudden public significance around the time of the First World War, however, when Britain and Russia

25 E. D. [Edward Dannreuther], ‘Tschaikowsky, Peter Ilitsch’, in George Grove, ed., A Dictionary of Music and Musicians (A.D. 1450–1889), 4 vols, Vol. IV (London: Macmillan, 1879–89), 183. 26 R. N. [Rosa Newmarch], ‘Tchaikovsky, Peter Ilich’, in J. A. Fuller Maitland, ed., Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 5 vols, Vol. V (London: Macmillan 1904–10), 33–49, at 44. 184 Philip Ross Bullock found themselves allied against Germany. Although rapprochement was complicated at an ideological level, culture and the arts did constitute one field where a sceptical public could be persuaded to support collaboration between the two countries.27 Newmarch’s music criticism thus came to exercise a social function that far exceeded its original cultural aspirations. The War was, though, a brief moment in which her personal interests were aligned with geopolitical ones. The October Revolution of 1917 confounded her belief in liberal politics, and neither the music of Soviet Russia, nor that of the Russian emigration, was in keeping with her underlying aesthetics. Instead, she applied her linguistic abilities and artistic sympathies to promoting the music of Czechoslovakia, and in particular that of Leoš Janáček, a concert of whose works she organized in London in May 1926. Arrangements for this were complicated by the General Strike that took place that month, and in would not be until the 1950s that British audiences finally heard any of his operas as part of a broader European rediscovery of his works. Newmarch was more successful in promoting the reputation of her close friend Jean Sibelius, who visited Britain on five occasions between 1905 and 1921, and whose symphonies and orchestral works came to dominate concert programmes by the 1930s in much the same way as Tchaikovsky’s had done around the turn of the century.28

❧❧ Paris and London Newmarch’s work illustrates how the reception of Russian music in Britain was in part patterned on the prior translation of Russian literature into English. Yet it also reveals how British interest in Russian music drew on developments in the French-speaking world. French audiences had been exposed to concert performances of Russian works from the late 1870s (notably by Anton Rubinstein at the 1878 Exposition universelle, as well as at subsequent exhibitions in 1889 and 1900), and Russian music soon came to represent an alternative source of inspiration for French composers after the turn against German music that followed the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1.29 In addition to concert performances, audiences could read surveys and studies by

27 Michael Hughes, ‘Searching for the Soul of Russia: British Perceptions of Russia during the First World War’, Twentieth Century British History 20/2 (2009), 198–226. 28 Philip Ross Bullock, ed. and trans., The Correspondence of Jean Sibelius and Rosa Newmarch, 1906–1939 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2011). 29 Inga Mai Groote, Östliche Ouvertüren: russische Musik in Paris, 1870–1913 (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2014); and Elaine Brody, ‘The Russians in Paris (1889–1914)’, in Malcolm Hamrick Brown, ed., Russian and Soviet Music: Essays for Boris Schwarz (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Research Press, 1996), 157–83. Russia and Eastern Europe 185

César Cui (1880), Alfred Habets (1883), Albert Soubies (1893 and 1898) and Arthur Pougin (1904), a number of which were subsequently translated into English. The final factor that made Paris the preeminent centre for Russian music in Europe was, of course, the debut of Sergey Diaghilev’s seasons of Russian opera and ballet from 1908 onwards. Newmarch reported on the first performance outside Russia of Musorgsky’s Boris Godunov (with Chaliapin in the title role), wondering: ‘When may we hope to see anything so new, so instructive, and so profoundly interesting in London?’30 Five years later, she pointed out that Britain still lagged behind France; writing in advance of a visit by the Ballets Russes to London, she observed that in France the operas of Musorgsky ‘seem to have found permanent anchorage; whether they will sail into the haven of our affections and remain there, is a question that the next few weeks will decide one way or the other’.31 In fact, despite the efforts of Newmarch and other Russophiles, London was always more reserved in its appreciation of the Ballets Russes than Paris. Although not as conservative as often suggested, London never wholly manifested that taste for avant-garde experiment that was so characteristic of the French musical scene. A key intermediary between the French and British scenes was Michel- Dmitri Calvocoressi, whose memories – Musicians Gallery: Music and Ballet in Paris and London (1933) – give one of the best accounts not just of his own career, but also of the Western European discovery of Russian music more generally. Born in 1877 in Marseilles to Greek parents who had fled their home- land in the 1820s, Calvocoressi was a formidable linguist: ‘As soon as I was able to talk, I was taught Greek, Italian, and English as well as French.’32 On moving to Paris in 1886, he not only studied philosophy with André Lalande (something that left its imprint on his subsequent writings on music appreciation and criticism), but also threw himself into the lively and cosmopolitan musical scene of the capital. He became friends with Debussy and Ravel, went through a Wagnerian phrase, but most of all experienced ‘the revelation of Russian music: of Balakirev’s Tamara and Rimsky-Korsakof’s Antar and Shéhérazade and of various works of Borodin at the symphony concerts (no question, as yet, of Russian opera) and of Musorgsky’s songs’.33 Active as a critic for a number of French journals and periodicals, he built his career as a well-connected

30 Rosa Newmarch, ‘Russian Opera in Paris: Moussorgsky’s “Boris Godunov”’, Monthly Musical Record (July 1908), 147–9, at 149. 31 Rosa Newmarch, ‘Moussorgsky’s Operas’, The Musical Times (1 July 1913), 433–9, at 439. 32 M. D. Calvocoressi, Musicians Gallery: Music and Ballet in Paris and London (London: Faber and Faber, 1933), 25. 33 Ibid., 39. 186 Philip Ross Bullock advocate of Russian music. Between 1907 and 1910, he collaborated with Diaghilev, working as a translator and programme-note writer for the Ballets Russes. Calvocoressi’s critical preferences, which he shared with Ravel, marked a departure from the Russian music that had been so prominent in France in the late nineteenth century, when Tchaikovsky dominated concert programmes and critical discussion:

On Russian music, he [Ravel] and I were in almost complete agreement. We gave pride of place to Mussorgsky, Borodin, and Balakiref. We love Rimsky- Korsakof’s music, especially his tone-poems and some of the early operas. We were not interested in Tchaikovsky, and we belonged to the few who held Glazunof’s early works in high esteem – especially his tone-poems The Forest, Stenka Razin, the Oriental Rhapsody, and the second and third symphonies.34 His love of Musorgsky gave rise to a French-language study in 1908, which was reissued in 1911 and translated into English by A. Eaglefield Hull in 1919. (Calvocoressi would, however, have been horrified by Eaglefield Hull’s passion for Scriabin.) His interest in the nationalist interpretation of Russian music history also led to a study of Glinka published in 1911 (his earlier study of Liszt had been dedicated to Mily Balakirev), and as well as works of his own he produced French translations of Svetlov’s history of modern ballet (1912) and Rimsky-Korsakov’s treatise on orchestration (1914). This account of Calvocoressi’s career and interests makes him appear like a French version of Newmarch. Both built their careers through translation as well as journalism and criticism, and both were closely associated with institutions which played a central role in the dissemination of Russian music through performance – Wood’s Queen’s Hall concerts in the case of Newmarch, and Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in the case of Calvocoressi. But there is a crucial distinction in their critical practice, which is part generational (Calvocoressi was twenty years younger than Newmarch), and part intellectual. Newmarch’s formation took place under the tutelage of Stasov, a trenchant polemicist committed to the values of nationalism and realism. By the time she first met him in 1897, however, his views were already considered dated and tendentious, not least by the circle of aesthetics and decadents associated with the World of Art journal and who would later form the Ballets Russes. Although still committed to the values of musical nationalism (as evinced by his lifelong interest in the works of Musorgsky), Calvocoressi was much closer to this younger generation in outlook. Moreover, he was able to draw far more than Newmarch ever could on the more measured scholarship of a new generation of Russian

34 Ibid., 53–4. Russia and Eastern Europe 187 critics who shaped Russian musicology in the early years of the twentieth century and laid the foundations for Soviet scholarship after 1917. Indeed, one of Calvocoressi’s earliest and most important works is a bibliographical sketch of recent Russian scholarship that he published in the French bulletin of the International Musical Society in 1907. It was, though, Calvocoressi’s first visit to Russia in 1912 that exposed him to contemporary trends in composition (he met figures such as Glazunov, Grechaninov, Lyapunov, Senilov, Steinberg and even the young Prokofiev, as well as the sole surviving member of the New Russian School, Cui).35 He also met Nikolay Findeisen, the founder and editor of the Russian Musical Gazette, which included not only reviews of concerts and publications, but also substantial works of scholarship and criticism. Findeisen was also an important authority in his own right, producing thoroughly documented works of Russian music history, including a seminal study of Russian music before the nineteenth century. Calvocoressi drew extensively on the work of Findeisen and his successors, and this can be seen especially in the works he wrote after he moved to Britain during the First World War (when he appears to have used his linguistic gifts working for British military intelligence). Calvocoressi had been approached to write two books for British publishers as early as 1913 – one on Russian music for Novello, and another on French music for Methuen, though nothing came of these plans. In fact, he would not produce a book on Russian music for nearly two decades, though he did write regularly for journals and periodicals such as the Monthly Musical Record, The Morning Post and The Musical Times. In 1936, together with Gerald Abraham, he produced Masters of Russian Music, for which he wrote chapters on Dargomyzhsky, Balakirev, Cui, Borodin, Lyadov and Lyapunov. As their jointly written introduction makes clear, this new book was necessitated because ‘an enormous quantity of new materials has cropped up and completely changed the state of our information on Russian music’:

Now we have an abundance of trustworthy documents, many accessible only to people who can read Russian, and not a few inaccessible outside Russian libraries and archives. Letters and other materials which had been published in censored form are now available in full, with comments by first-rate scholars, such as Andrei Rimsky-Korsakof, Serge Dianin, ‘Vladimir Karenin’ (pseudonym of Varvara Komarova, Vladimir Stassof’s daughter), Keldysh, and others. Naturally, all this has altered our perspective of both composers and music.36

35 Ibid., 232–45. 36 M. D. Calvocoressi and Gerald Abraham, Masters of Russian Music (London: Duckworth, 1936), 9. 188 Philip Ross Bullock

Similarly, Calvocoressi’s Survey of Russian Music (1944) drew on work by Findeisen, Andrey Rimsky-Korsakov, Grigory Timofeev, Vyacheslav Karatygin, Georgy Khubov, Viktor Belyaev and others. Although his focus remained the composers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Calvocoressi’s writings were indebted to the latest in Soviet scholarship, which, despite extensive censorship and the advent of socialist realism, remained a productive field of intellectual enquiry. Calvocoressi’s most decisive encounter with Soviet scholarship was his discovery of the work of Pavel Lamm, whose mission it was to remove the substantial editorial interventions made by Rimsky-Korsakov to Musorgsky’s compositions after his death. In 1925, Calvocoressi became aware of Lamm’s work on the original version of Boris Godunov, and thereafter agitated for performances of the new edition of the opera (published in 1928), as well as drawing extensively on the work of Lamm and other Soviet scholars in his own two books on Musorgsky, both of which were published posthumously. Mussorgsky (1946) and Modest Mussorgsky: His Life and Works (1956) are substantial and at times technical studies of the composer’s life and œuvre. Although Calvocoressi never renounced his nationalist interpretation either of Musorgsky or of Russian music more generally, and was always committed to practical, accessible forms of music criticism, his use of a wide range of contemporary sources illustrates just how far Western scholarship on Russian music had come from its origins in the late nineteenth century.

❧❧ Amateur and Professional Calvocoressi’s Masters of Russian Music (1936) was co-written with Gerald Abraham, who also edited his two posthumously published studies of Musorgsky. Like Calvocoressi, Abraham drew heavily on modern Soviet scholarship in his writings. His On Russian Music (1939), for instance, prefaced an account of Glinka’s operas with a substantial survey of Russian opera in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that went far beyond anything previously attempted in English. Similarly, his Rimsky-Korsakov: A Short Biography (1945) offered a succinct portrait of the composer based on documentary sources that had only recently been published in the Soviet Union. Yet his first book – Borodin: The Composer & his Music (1927) – shows a debt to an earlier generation of British critics. Montagu-Nathan’s History of Russian Music (1914, second edition 1918) and Introduction to Russian Music (1916) are both credited in Abraham’s foreword, as are ‘the various writings of Mrs. Rosa Newmarch’. It was, moreover, not just material that Abraham borrowed from these studies, but some of their emphases too. He evinces, for instance, admiration for the achievements of the nationalists: Russia and Eastern Europe 189

It would be difficult to conceive of ideals more noble and, apparently, more difficult of attainment than those which animated a little group of Russian musical amateurs in the middle of the last century. To found a national school of composition, deriving its musical basis from the rich stores of national folk- song and having as a literary source of inspiration the fantastic fairy-tales of Slavonic folk-lore; to discover a form of music-drama which should be melo- dious without being Italian, and dramatically and logically sound without being Wagnerian; and last, but by no means least, to bring their work before an indifferent, if not hostile public, and compel it to recognise its merit; such was the truly Herculean task which the members of the ‘Invincible Band’ set themselves – a task more difficult in that they had but few satisfactory models to work from, little encouragement from the leading Russian musicians of the time, and in one or two cases a somewhat defective knowledge of the fundamental technique of musical composition.37 Alongside their interest in Russian musical nationalism as a historical phenomenon, Abraham’s writings are occasionally indebted to stereotypical generalizations about national character (the opening essay of his Studies in Russian Music (1935) is called ‘The Essence of Russian Music’).38 Often enough, these differed little from the kind of claims made in the Victorian period: ‘The Russian creative mind, in seeking inspiration from oriental art (or perhaps through its natural affinity with Eastern mentality) has absorbed two curiously antithetic ideas of beauty – a love of monotony, of endless repetitions and of meditations on the more sombre aspects of nature, and a love of the most vivid, even violent, contrasts of bright colour.’39 Although Abraham was later to disown his book on Borodin, his interest in character would persist through much of his later writing, not least in his short biographical studies of two major Russian writers: Tolstoy (1935) and Dostoevsky (1936). The impact of such essentialism was to be felt most deleteriously in Abra ham’s various writings on Tchaikovsky. His Tchaïkovsky: A Short Biography (1944) struck an explicitly biographical note that was oddly out of keeping with the documentary, factual tone of his works on other composers:

Many composers have written music more interesting than Tchaïkovsky’s; none, it is fairly safe to say, has been more interesting as a man. Far from being a great man, he was not even a great personality, like Wagner, or a striking one, like

37 Gerald Abraham, Borodin: The Composer & his Music (London: William Reeves, 1927), 1–2. 38 Gerald Abraham, ‘The Essence of Russian Music’, in Studies in Russian Music (London: William Reeves, 1935), 1–20. 39 Abraham, Borodin, 20. 190 Philip Ross Bullock

Berlioz; some of his fellow-Russians – for instance, Balakirev and Skryabin – led far more fantastic lives. But Tchaïkovsky was more puzzling than any of them; his character offers more interesting material to the amateur psychologist than any musician from Jubal to the present day.40 Of Tchaikovsky’s marriage to Antonina Milyukova, he suggested that ‘Fate can have played few more fantastic pranks than this marriage of a homosexual to a nymphomaniac’, before going on to speculate as to the origins of the composer’s sexuality:

Was Tchaïkovsky’s abnormality congenital or the result of environment – perhaps at the School of Jurisprudence? Probably the former. As a boy, like other natural homosexuals, he showed an abnormal and unhealthy affection for his mother, who died when he was fourteen; and here, perhaps, we have the clue to his side of the extraordinary spiritual ‘love-affair’ which gradually developed with Nadezhda von Meck, who apparently answered in his imagination to that ‘certain need for tenderness and care which only a woman can satisfy’ which he felt and which sometimes filled him with ‘mad longing’. And despite the unusual amount of affection he often showed towards males, there is little ground for supposing that he was a ‘practising’ homosexual. He appears to have exercised great self-control and was obviously profoundly ashamed of his abnormality.41 Abraham’s views were certainly not unusual in English-language criticism of the first half of the twentieth century, when insinuations about Tchaikovsky’s personal life fed into a broader hostility towards his music that were borne of the evident popularity of his music with concert audiences (as Abraham noted, ‘it is customary not to criticize Tchaïkovsky’s music, but to sniff at it, or to admire the tunes’).42 Yet despite the fact that Abraham had access to a great deal of recent Soviet scholarship, much of which painted a far less sensational account of the composer’s life than generally prevailed in the West, his pseudo-Freudian interpretation of human sexuality seriously compromised Tchaikovsky’s reputation in the post-war period. If Abraham’s treatment of nationalism and his attitude to Tchaikovsky’s sexuality showed continuities with much writing on Russian music in the Victorian

40 Gerald Abraham, Tchaïkovsky: A Short Biography (London: Duckworth, 1944), 11. 41 Ibid., 79–80. 42 Ibid., 130. On early twentieth-century views on Tchaikovsky, see Malcolm Hamrick Brown, ‘Tchaikovsky and his Music in Anglo-American Criticism, 1890s–1950s’ in Alexander Mihailovic, ed., Tchaikovsky and his Contemporaries: A Centennial Symposium (Westport, CT, and London: Greenwood Press, 1999), 61–73, republished in Sophie Fuller and Lloyd Whitesell, eds, Queer Episodes in Music and Modern Identity (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 134–49. Russia and Eastern Europe 191 and Edwardian periods, then in other regards his work marked a major departure from what had gone before. One of his most significant achievements was to integrate the study of Russian and East European music into mainstream narratives of Western European music. Newmarch had, of course, written about Sibelius and Janáček, but Abraham’s range was far wider than hers, or even Calvocoressi’s for that matter. A Hundred Years of Music (1938), for instance, is a synoptic account of European music from the death of Beethoven to the present day and traces what Abraham himself referred to as ‘The Triumph, Decline, and Fall of Musical Romanticism’.43 While Abraham continued to per- petuate a nationalist account of Russian music history (‘Borodin, Mussorgsky and Balakirev … seem to have absorbed folk-music into their very blood so that its rhythms and melodic shapes naturally crept into nearly everything they wrote’) and proved surprisingly indebted to a Germanocentric account of what constituted true symphonic form (‘Russian symphonic music in general is patchy and sectional – with the sections badly joined’),44 his wide-ranging studies did much to break down the ghetto of specialization and defended the right of Russian and East European music to be treated on equal terms with other national repertoires. Particularly significant in this regard are the six so-called ‘symposia’ that he edited between 1945 and 1954. Beginning with Tchaikovsky (1945), these went on to include Schubert (1946), Sibelius (1947), Grieg (1948), Schumann (1952), and finally Handel (1954). Here, Abraham’s catholic taste is evident, as is his willingness to challenge critical and academic orthodoxies (in his introduction to Grieg: A Symposium, he noted that many people would be surprised by the inclusion of the Norwegian composer in such a series). To be sure, Tchaikovsky: A Symposium contains its fair share of disappointments, such as Edward Lockspeiser’s patronizing and patholo- gizing account of the composer’s personality (‘Tchaïkovsky’s mind, seen for a moment from a scientific viewpoint, constitutes a text-book illustration of the borderland between genius and insanity’),45 or Martin Cooper’s less than fulsome study of his symphonic œuvre. Yet set against this must be the range and detail in which Tchaikovsky was covered, often for the first time, as well as the contrasting approaches that the various contributors felt able to take:

The fact that so much of Tchaïkovsky is so little known is reflected in the space devoted to certain aspects of his work. It is, for instance, the only excuse for what at first sight may appear to be the disproportionate number of pages allotted to his dramatic music. The same remark applies to the chapter on the songs,

43 Gerald Abraham, A Hundred Years of Music (London: Duckworth, 1938), 9. 44 Ibid., 168 and 175 respectively. 45 Edward Lockspeiser, ‘Tchaikovsky the Man’, in Gerald Abraham, ed., Tchaikovsky: A Symposium (London: Lindsay Drummond, 1945), 9–23, at 12. 192 Philip Ross Bullock

written by a distinguished Soviet critic whose magnum opus on Tchaïkovsky is awaited with keen interest. Professor Alshvang’s essay has the additional value of representing a typical contemporary Russian view of Tchaïkovsky markedly different in some respects from that generally taken in Western Europe.46 From the late nineteenth century onwards, writing on Russian and East European music had been dominated by a small group of devoted advocates; now, however, Abraham’s supervision was leading to a widening of the field. Much of Abraham’s work covered similar ground to that previously established by Newmarch and Calvocoressi: Tchaikovsky and the ‘Mighty Handful’, the composers of the early twentieth century, and Stravinsky (it would be some time before Rachmaninov was written about in any detail by music critics).47 He was, however, also aware of developments in the Soviet Union, despite never visiting the country (he was able to meet some of his Soviet counterparts at the Prague Festival in 1947). Soviet music had, in fact, become increasingly familiar in Britain from the 1920s onwards, particularly through concert performances in London (such as the UK premiere of Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District at Queen’s Hall in 1936, given in an English translation by Calvocoressi). There were also some sporadic attempts to write about this repertoire, such as Leonid Sabaneyeff’s Modern Russian Composers (1927). By the early 1940s, however, the Soviet Union and Britain found themselves involved in a military alliance against Nazi Germany, and there was a particular need for reliable and up-to-date information, not least because the show trials, Ukrainian famine and rumours of the purges were likely to be fresh in the memory of listeners. If audiences knew anything about contemporary music in the Soviet Union, it would probably have been limited to the scandal surrounding the banning of Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth in 1936, or the worldwide success of the same composer’s Seventh Symphony (the so-called ‘Leningrad’). Abraham’s Eight Soviet Composers (1943) contains chapters on Shostakovich (‘an undeniably gifted if somewhat overrated, musician’),48 Prokofiev, Khachaturian, Knipper, Shebalin, Kabalevsky, Dzerzhinsky and Shaporin, and sought to explain something of the nature of socialism and Soviet culture. Politics were, however, never far away, and the vicious

46 Gerald Abraham, ‘Preface’, in ibid., 7–8, at 7–8. 47 John Culshaw, Sergei Rachmaninov (London: D. Dobson, 1949); and Sergei Bertensson and Jay Leyda, Sergei Rachmaninoff: A Lifetime in Music (New York: New York University Press, 1956). See also the slightly earlier Rachmaninoff’s Recollections, Told to Oskar von Riesemann, trans. Dolly Rutherford (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1934). 48 Gerald Abraham, Eight Soviet Composers (London: Oxford University Press, 1943), 13. Russia and Eastern Europe 193 denunciation of Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Myaskovsky and Khachaturian at the Congress of Soviet Composers in 1948 meant that Abraham’s more factual approach soon found itself overshadowed by Alexander Werth’s Musical Uproar in Moscow (1949) – a vivid, first-hand account of cultural life in the Soviet Union. (The Russian-born Werth worked as a correspondent there in the 1940s, first for the BBC and then for The Guardian.) Abraham’s first book concluded with a revealing description of Borodin as ‘the supreme justification of the amateur in music’.49 Abraham would surely have been struck by potential parallels between his own career and those of the composers of the ‘Mighty Handful’, who eschewed professional training and preferred to practise music alongside other careers (Borodin was himself a chemist). Without a university degree, and self-taught as both a linguist and a musicologist, Abraham initially earned his living by publishing books designed to appeal to intelligent amateur audiences, as well as by writing for periodicals such as Music & Letters, The Musical Times, The Musical Standard, the Radio Times and The Listener (many of these pieces were subsequently recycled in his books). In this respect, his career resembled those of Newmarch and Calvocoressi, who similarly combined freelance writing with an interest in repertoires that were by and large excluded from academic consideration. In 1947, however, Abraham became the first Professor of Music at Liverpool University. His post-war career – which also included a period as assistant controller of music at the BBC from 1962 to 1967, a visiting professorship of music at the University of California, Berkeley (1968–9), the presidency of the Royal Musical Association from 1969 to 1974, a fellowship of the British Academy (1972) and a series of honorary degrees – is beyond the chronological confines of this chapter. Yet it stands as proof of how successful the advocacy of ‘amateurs’ such as Newmarch, Calvocoressi and Abraham himself had been in making Russian and Eastern European music a respectable topic for scholarly study, as well as illustrating how post-war academic professionalization in Britain had its roots in independent criticism earlier in the century.50

49 Abraham, Borodin: The Composer & his Music, 205. 50 Abraham’s career is treated in detail in Brian Trowell, ‘Gerald Earnest Heal Abraham, 1904–1988’, Proceedings of the British Academy 111 (2001), 339–93, at 353. 11 Edward Dent (by kind permission of the Provost and Fellows of King’s College, Cambridge) 12 Rosa Newmarch (Royal College of Music/ArenaPAL) 13 Philip Heseltine (Boosey & Hawkes/ArenaPAL) 14 Cecil Gray (Lewis Foreman Collection) 15 Bernard van Dieren (Lewis Foreman Collection) Chapter 9 Anti-Intellectualism and the Rhetoric of ‘National Character’ in Music: The Vulgarity of Over-Refinement

Sarah Collins

As Europeans go, the English are not intellectual. They have a horror of abstract thought, they feel no need for any philosophy or systematic ‘world-view’.1

A complete anesthesia to formal considerations is the most conspicuous common factor exhibited by English artists in every age and in every medium, and one which is shared by the public for which they create.2

Vaughan Williams started his life as an academic composer which is practically equivalent to saying that the first influences to which he was exposed were Germanic.3 his chapter makes a series of claims that should be stated at the outset. T First, while we should be highly suspicious of the rhetoric of ‘national character’ in general, and of critical assessments of music based on notions of ‘Englishness’ in particular, the discursive strategies involved in these assessments provide a glimpse into ideological debates that have shaped musical culture and are therefore worth historicizing. Second, it is tempting to draw a causal link between the idea of anti-intellectualism in English national character on the one hand and the more recent narrative about the absence of ‘intellectuals’ in Britain on the other. The latter narrative arises from scepticism towards the close ties between British political and intellectual elites of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries (the so-called ‘intellectual aristocracy’) and infers from these ties the lack of a separate intelligentsia capable of providing a systematic critique of the prevailing social structure. This claim judges British

1 George Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (London: Penguin, 1941, repr. 1982), 38. 2 Cecil Gray, Musical Chairs; or, Between Two Stools, Being the Life and Memoirs of Cecil Gray (London: Home & Van Thal, 1948), 21. 3 Francis Toye, ‘Studies in English Music – IV’, The Listener (24 June 1931), 1057. 199 200 Sarah Collins thinkers against Continental models of the ‘intellectual’ – a comparison that seems to find the former complicit in maintaining social hierarchy. The comparison also assumes that political dominance must necessarily be conservative, pitted against radical dissent. Conversely, anti-intellectualism is typically cast as the preserve of the reactionary, the conservative and the philistine – a characterization that certainly resonates with the anti-intellectualisms of our own time. An examination of early twentieth-century British music criticism, however, suggests that, in fact, anti-intellectualism became a means to subvert dominant structures – in this case, professional and institutional monopolies – serving more radical and modernist ends than hereto acknowledged. Far from constituting a reactionary bid to sure up the status quo, I will suggest that musical thinkers used anti-intellectualism to link ideas about English national identity with a concern for aesthetic modernity, construed as distinct from Continental models of thought and practice, including the very model that associated the ‘intellectual’ with revolution. Anti-intellectualisms of this type aimed to undermine pretension, mystification, and the perceived complacency of those in positions of institutional power; to advocate for amateurism over dilettantism; and to attempt to shape a non-imitative British response to modernism which emphasized ‘vitality’ and directness as markers of gradualist innovation.

❧❧ Historicizing the Rhetoric of English ‘National Character’ In The Lion and the Unicorn (1941), George Orwell sketched a controversial but still-pointed image of the English ‘national character’. Writing here in his polemical mode, Orwell not only remarked upon the social and psychological insights that can be gained from the typical Englishman’s ‘bad teeth and gentle manners’, his ‘love of flowers’, his ‘addiction to hobbies’ and the ‘privateness of English life’, but also from more overt national values – the ‘liberty of the individual’, the hatred of militarism, the respect for constitutionalism and legality, and the belief in ‘the law’ despite its inequities. He wrote, ‘in England such concepts as justice, liberty and objective truth are still believed in. They may be illusions, but they are very powerful illusions.’4 That the same might be said of any rhetorical trope about ‘national character’ – they may be illusions, but they are powerful illusions5 – is evident from

4 Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn, 45. 5 Indeed, as Joep Leerssen notes, the ‘strongest rhetorical effect’ of national characterizations, among other stereotypes, ‘lies in [their] familiarity and recognition value rather than in their empirical truth value’. See Joep Leerssen,‘The Anti-Intellectualism and the Rhetoric of ‘National Character’ 201 the measurable impact such tropes have had on debates about Britain’s relationship with Europe historically, most recently in the 2016 ‘Brexit’ campaign,6 but also a decade earlier in relation to the Maastricht treaty.7 It may be, as Peter Mandler has claimed, that the idea of an English tradition with any kind of historical continuity has been discredited by a range of seismic shifts in processes of identity-formation in the twentieth century (or ‘non-political revolutions – urban, industrial, consumer, information’),8 yet the ongoing pervasiveness of the rhetoric of national character in public discourse is undeniable and its

Rhetoric of National Character: A Programmatic Survey’, Poetics Today 21/2 (2000), 267–92, at 280. 6 For example, the ‘Leave’ campaign’s successful bid to convince the polity of the merits of Britain withdrawing from the hard-won international agreements and partnerships that underpin the European Union capitalized on long-standing notions of British self-reliance and independence, the distaste for centralized authority, a suspicion of elite power-holders and a concern to protect individualism (within certain terms), as well as the vision of the British as self-governing and, of course, ‘democratic’. The British commitment to protecting liberal democracy became particularly important, and indeed the campaign explicitly drew upon historical fears of ideological encroachment from Continental political regimes, such as in Boris Johnson’s comment that sought to draw a link between the ‘Remain’ campaign’s support from ‘experts’ and the Nazi-supported scientists who denounced Albert Einstein (an interesting discussion of this comment and the Eurosceptic historical consciousness upon which it drew can be found in Ben Wellings, ‘“Don’t Mention the War” (Unless You’re Trying to Brexit)’, The Drum, ABC, 17 May 2016, ). The widespread support of the ‘Remain’ campaign among a publicized list of leading intellectuals and professionals became mere fodder for the anti-intellectualism of the ‘Leave’ campaign, with its co-convener Michael Gove commenting that ‘people in this country have had enough of experts’ (reported in Michael White, ‘Should We Listen to the Experts on the EU Referendum?’, Politics Blog, The Guardian, 8 June 2016, , and across many other outlets). But this attitude to the ‘Remain’ campaign’s focus on ‘experts’ went deeper than such opportunistic quips as these: the noted historian of the idea of Englishness and national character Peter Mandler linked this reaction to the elitist detachment of cosmopolitan London from the rest of England (see Peter Mandler, ‘Britain’s EU Problem is a London Problem’, Dissent, 24 June 2016, ). 7 Alain Frogley noted how similar tropes of ‘national character’ to that seen in the reception of Vaughan Williams’s music could be seen in the debates about the Maastricht Treaty; see ‘Constructing Englishness in Music: National Character and the Reception of Ralph Vaughan Williams’, in Alain Frogley, ed., Vaughan Williams Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 1–22, at 22. 8 Peter Mandler, ‘England, Which England?’ Contemporary British History 13/2 (1999), 243–54, at 244. 202 Sarah Collins historical significance as a lens through which to view changing social formations continues to be demonstrated.9 Attributions of national character in writings about music have also attracted scholarly interest, often generating revisionist historiographical reflection on processes of canon formation and the history of disciplinary development. Scholarship on British music in the early twentieth century has been particularly alive to the insidious effect of seeing in certain musical traits the expression of national character. For example, Alain Frogley noted that ‘mention the name Ralph Vaughan Williams and into most people’s minds come immediately three words: English, pastoral, and folksong’, leading him to call for an interrogation of these types of association in order to uncover the ‘ideological substrata on which our view of the musical world is built’.10 Matthew Riley, in his carefully titled edited collection, British Music and Modernism, makes a similar plea against taking at face value the rhetoric associating notions of Englishness in music with narrow ideas of landscape, folk-song and conservatism.11 The complex and shifting reputations of composers such as Edward

9 Though the nature of ‘national character’ itself is not my subject here, it is relevant to note that this topic and its attendant rhetorical formations have prompted a field of scholarly research all its own. Some important texts in this field include: Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Robert Colls and Philip Dodd, eds, Englishness: Politics and Culture, 1880–1920 (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2014); Raphael Samuel, ed., Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity, 3 vols (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), particularly Vol. III on ‘National Fictions’; Roy Porter, ed., Myths of the English (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993); Roberto Romani, National Character and Public Spirit in Britain and France, 1750–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); and Krishan Kumar, The Making of English National Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). There has also been an interest in the rhetoric of national character from the perspective of semiotics, where the process of national stereotyping has been distinguished from other types of discourse related to national character, such as factual reporting or poetic representation (see, for example, Leerssen, ‘The Rhetoric of National Character’). For more on the notion of ‘national identity’ and the disciplinary problematics that have been involved in studying it, see Peter Mandler, ‘What is “National Identity”? Definitions and Applications in Modern British Historiography’, Modern Intellectual History 3/2 (2006), 271–97. 10 Frogley, ‘Constructing Englishness’, 1. For similar investigations related to Elgar and Delius, respectively, see Jeremy Crump, ‘The Identity of English Music: The Reception of Elgar, 1898–1935’, in Colls and Dodd, Englishness: Politics and Culture, 1880–1920, 189–216; and Robert Stradling, ‘On Shearing the Black Sheep in Spring: The Repatriation of Frederick Delius’, in Christopher Norris, ed., Music and the Politics of Culture (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1989), 69–105. 11 Matthew Riley, ed., British Music and Modernism, 1895–1960 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010). Anti-Intellectualism and the Rhetoric of ‘National Character’ 203

Elgar and Frederick Delius have provided fertile ground for similar revisions, as we shall see. And indeed, in recent decades the ample range of literature aimed at undermining the narrative of the ‘English Musical Renaissance’ has typically taken a sceptical view of constructions of ‘Englishness’ that appeal to the nostalgia for pre-industrial England and the countryside; with the folk- song revival and songs of pre-modern England; and with reactionary musical attitudes, styles, techniques or subject matter.12 Maintaining this healthy scepticism towards such claims, it is also important to acknowledge that the rhetoric itself is of historical interest. It is of no small importance, for example, that the question of what might be taken to constitute ‘Englishness’ in music – and conversely, what techniques and styles might be deemed ‘un-English’ – loomed large over a great deal of early twentieth-century music criticism in Britain. This self-conscious preoccupation was part of a broader discourse on ‘English national identity’ at this time – a discourse the intensification of which can been attributed to a range of political events that had eroded national confidence since the mid-nineteenth century, such as the Crimean War, the Indian Mutiny of 1857, the Boer War, the debates over Irish Home Rule, and others. In music, an additional element compounding national self-consciousness was undoubtedly the emergence of a ‘cultural modernism’ that was associated with Continental musical styles. The rhetoric of musical ‘Englishness’ in this context was not only constructed against the threat of Continental cultural dominance (a threat that has a long history in determining the shape of British national identity, as we shall see); it was also a response to a broader critical reflection on questions of authenticity in musical progress, the appropriate relationship between tradition and innovation, and a concern with how to identify innovations that were merely transient and novel, as opposed to those that signified a lasting contribution to the development of the art. The rhetoric of English national character became a convenient port in these storms, because it provided a grounding of perceived authenticity and connection with tradition, while not debarring the possibility of gradualist change. It also provided a tangible point of distinction from Continental expressions of modernism. What follows examines a neglected trope within this discourse on English national character in music from the early twentieth century – what I will call, for reasons that will be articulated below, ‘anti-intellectualism’. In writings about music in the early twentieth century in Britain, the term ‘intellectual’

12 For a selected list of the relevant literature see n. 12 in my own ‘Practices of Aesthetic Self-Cultivation: British Composer-Critics of the “Doomed Generation”’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association 138/1 (2013), 85–128. The writing of this revisionist history continues, with perhaps the latest contribution being Ben Earle’s ‘Modernism and Reification in the Music of Frank Bridge’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association 141/2 (2016), 335–420. 204 Sarah Collins was used to indicate a range of identifications, some of which were related and others downright oppositional. For example, the term was used to imply decadence, an absence of artistic integrity, a faddish interest in Nietzsche and a preference for tweeds, a slavish imitation of Austro-German musical models (following the supposed ‘cleverness’ of Strauss, or the overly ‘cerebral’ Schoenberg) and a craving for novelty or passing fashion, a commercial attitude to music, a bloated complacency associated with the occupation of a professional position at a metropolitan music academy, or an ‘academic’ cosmopolitanism and perceived distance from ‘the people’. In attempting to disentangle some of the governing ideologies at play within these designations, I will identify and investigate two streams of discourse in British music criticism that sought to establish a cultivated or desirable ‘anti-intellectualism’ as a constitutive feature of national character. The first tendency centred upon construing far-reaching contrasts between British and Continental temperaments, which evidently found expression as much in musical styles and modes of composition as they did in forms of social organization, government and religion, and the level of commitment to individual rights and liberties. I will argue that this discourse arose from a desire to shape a distinctively British response to a burgeoning cultural modernism, and was intended as a counterforce to the influential forms of musical innovation that became associated with the Continental avant-garde. Anti-intellectualism allowed British critics to cast their native composers as internationally competitive for the very reason that they were not competing according to the same criteria as their Continental counterparts. This effectively exempted them from the need to seek prestige on the basis of deep structural unity, technical complexity, conceptual weightiness or innovative theorization, given that these were held to be antithetical to the English temperament. English or British music could thereby address the concerns of ‘modernity’ in a different manner. This type of claim typically allotted prestige to works by native composers that exhibited, by contrast, formal procedures associated with ‘surface’ elements such as timbre or melody (thought to be more ‘intuitive’ and to involve less pre-compositional planning), a focus on emotional over conceptual content, and a scepticism (verging on hostility) towards music that subscribed to a particular ‘theory’, aesthetic position or an over-reliance on craft or technique (including counterpoint). In highlighting this type of anti-intellectualism, I am not of course claiming that what might be termed ‘British musical modernism’ was in any way devoid of intellectual content – far from it. What interests me here are the rhetorical strategies involved in ‘making modernism native’, as it were. In other words, while musical modernism was often not seen as organic to British national traditions, I will argue that attributions of anti-intellectualism helped to fashion Anti-Intellectualism and the Rhetoric of ‘National Character’ 205 a notion of a ‘native’ form of musical modernism, capitalizing specifically on an historical distrust of intellectuals and ongoing debates about their level of engagement in systematic social critique. In the early twentieth century, against the backdrop of imperial contraction and the increasing political dominance of the Continental powers (providing the external ‘threat’ so necessary to ignite the impulse towards nationalism), British thinkers needed to show, as Mandler notes, that ‘turning inward did not mean turning backward’, and to construct a peculiarly British form of modern subjectivity in response.13 The second rhetorical tendency associating anti-intellectualism with national identity focused on the level of professionalization evident in a composer’s work, taken as a crucial indicator of whether he or she might be considered to speak for ‘the people’ and presumably thereby to embody the national temperament. The terms involved in this discussion again capitalized on a broader contest, this time between the historically ingrained ideology of amateurism and a bourgeoning entrepreneurial and professional culture, or what Lauren Goodlad has described, following Matthew Arnold, as a contest not between classes but within a middle class ‘cut into two’.14 At the heart of the division in this case was the way in which the aesthetic desire to undertake certain cultural activities for their own sake, rather than for professional or commercial gain, needed to be balanced against the view that philanthropic or government-sponsored musical events, technical examinations and the tradition of separating practical musical training from the broader liberal education offered by the ‘ancient universities’ did not encourage musical innovation. So while in the first stream of anti-intellectual discourse, the rhetoric contributed to an agenda shaping an English/British musical response to modernism that was distinct from – though in their view, no less progressive than – Continental models, in the second it served to promote musical innovation by reforming prevailing models of professionalization. After a broader examination of the history of anti-intellectualism in Britain in the next section, I will explore each of these streams in music criticism in turn, and finally suggest ways in which these tendencies can inform a more nuanced understanding of the connection between anti-intellectualism and the project of modernization in Britain.

13 Peter Mandler, ‘The Consciousness of Modernity? Liberalism and the English “National Character”, 1870–1940’, in Bernhard Rieger and M. J. Daunton, eds, Meanings of Modernity: Britain from the Late-Victorian Era to World War II (Oxford: Berg, 2001), 119–44, at 134. 14 Lauren M. E. Goodlad, ‘“A Middle Class Cut into Two”: Historiography and Victorian National Character’, ELH 67/1 (2000), 143–78. 206 Sarah Collins ❧❧ Anti-Intellectualism and the Absence of Intellectuals

Man is sent hither not to question but to work: ‘the end of man’, it was long ago written, ‘is an Action, not a Thought.’15 The terms ‘intellectual’ and ‘anti-intellectual’ are inherently imprecise and not always as oppositional as they might seem. For example, George Bernard Shaw satirized intellectual pretensions in Fanny’s First Play (1911) and was certainly part of attempts to construct Elgar’s reputation in anti-intellectual terms;16 yet, as a supporter of Wagner and Ibsen he himself fell foul of a different notion of the ‘intellectual’, which typically associated these investments with decadence, or more superficially with the false connoisseurship of an upwardly mobile middle class.17 Similarly, Edward Dent cultivated anti-intellectual associations across a range of fronts – he abhorred intellectual pretension and the use of over-technical language in music criticism, he identified throughout his career as a gentleman amateur, he celebrated his professional independence as a music critic and independent scholar, and was wary about accepting the nomination for the professorship at Cambridge.18 Yet in 1931 he was pilloried

15 Thomas Carlyle, ‘Characteristics’, The Edinburgh Review 54 (1831), cited in Walter E. Houghton, ‘Victorian Anti-Intellectualism’ Journal of the History of Ideas 13/3 (1952), 291–313, at 291. 16 This can be seen in an anecdote that Shaw chose to recount in his essay ‘Sir Edward Elgar’ (1920): ‘Elgar has certainly never let any pedantry stand in his way. He has indeed not been aware of its academic stumbling blocks; for, like Bach, he has never been taught harmony and counterpoint. A person who had been corrupted by Day’s treatise on harmony once tried to describe a phrase of Wagner’s to him by a reference to the chord of the supertonic. Elgar opened his eyes wide, and, with an awe which was at least very well acted, asked, “What on earth is the chord of the supertonic?” And then, after a pause, “What is the supertonic? I never heard of it”’. See George Bernard Shaw, ‘Sir Edward Elgar’, in Dan H. Laurence, How to Become a Musical Critic (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1960), 309–16, at 131. 17 See for example C. W., ‘The New Decadence’, The Academy and Literature (19 August 1911), 246–7. Needless to say, this was by no means an accurate association to apply to Shaw, and indeed he too decried the complacency of ‘English and American gentleman-amateurs, who are almost always political mugwumps, and hardly ever associate with revolutionists’. See George Bernard Shaw, ‘Preface to the First Edition of “A Perfect Wagnerite” (1898)’, in Major Critical Essays (Middlesex: Penguin, 1986), 190–1. 18 Even as late as July 1926, just before he was appointed to the professorship, Dent was writing to Clive Carey that ‘I hear that Charles Wood is dying of cancer of the liver and not expected to live more than a few weeks if that. So the whole question of the Professorship is in the air again; Lawrence heard from Howard Bliss that Rootham lives at the telephone asking for hourly bulletins. As for me I feel rather bored with it all. I am not going to contest an election again. If I was elected Anti-Intellectualism and the Rhetoric of ‘National Character’ 207 for being too ‘academic’ after branding Elgar’s music ‘vulgar’, appearing to fall on the wrong side of a different anti-intellectual discourse (this controversy will be further examined below). To complicate matters further, the term ‘academic’ was also used to refer to the imitation by British composers of Austro- German compositional models, as can be seen in the opening quote about Vaughan Williams’s early ‘Germanic’ influences, as well as Frederick Delius’s comment to Philip Heseltine that ‘I should very much like to hear Schonberg’s music – He seems to be very Academic – à rebours – He writes after a system’.19 There is clearly a range of non-equivalences here, even in these few examples, yet it was this very imprecision in meaning that allowed these and related terms to exercise disproportionate rhetorical power in support of an array of diverse ends. The current OED records no fewer than ten different definitions of the central term ‘intellectual’, both in the form of a noun and an adjective; most date from the seventeenth century, but some are far older. The term, however, took on a particular range of meanings and associations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which have been given detailed attention by scholars such as Walter Houghton, Peter Allen, Thomas William Heyck and Stefan Collini.20

unanimously I would accept it from a sense of duty; in any case I admit that 500 pounds a year would be a great assistance to me; but I want another 500 pounds a year and freedom to do all my various activities, not 500 pounds a year and prison, which is what the Professorship would mean. I should have to give up a great many of my interesting activities and I doubt whether I should find much time for writing learned books. And I feel that I am now completely out of the world of lectures and examinations, and don’t want to go back to it. I love teaching, but I am not competent to teach modern composition. I hate lecturing, and I have forgotten all I ever knew about harmony and counterpoint and fugue. And I simply loathe examining. What I want is what you mention in your letter – I want to produce operas and work in a theatre with you and other people of the right sort. But I am growing old, and when I meet P-G I realize that I am regarded merely as an aged and incompetent amateur with a bee in his bonnet and several grievances as well. I think the best thing will be for me to re-catalogue Scarlatti’ (Edward Dent, letter to Clive Carey, 11 July 1926, GB-Ckc, FCSC/1/1/9, item 257). 19 Frederick Delius, letter to Philip Heseltine, 11 September 1912, reproduced in Barry Smith, Frederick Delius and Peter Warlock: A Friendship Revealed (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 51. 20 Houghton, ‘Victorian Anti-Intellectualism’; Peter Allen, ‘The Meanings of “an Intellectual”: Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Usage’, University of Toronto Quarterly 55/4 (1986), 342–58; Thomas William Heyck, The Transformation of Intellectual Life in Victorian England (Bechenham: Croom Helm, 1982), and ‘Myths and Meanings of Intellectuals in Twentieth-Century British National Identity’, Journal of British Studies 37/2 (1998), 192–221; and Stefan Collini, Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), especially chapters 1 and 2, and ‘Intellectuals in Britain and France in the Twentieth Century: 208 Sarah Collins

Collini supplies by far the most detailed explanation of the term as a noun and its history, tracing the consolidation of the modern sense of ‘intellectual’ in France to the Dreyfus Affair of 1898,21 and of the related term ‘intelligentsia’ to Russian usage, referring to a social group that was highly educated and independent of the imperial court. The meanings I elaborate here focus more on the term’s adjectival use, corresponding to the two strains of discourse to be investigated – namely the idea of intellectual pursuit as a Continental habit of mind, or an indication of unwarranted pretension in professionalism. Still, discussion of the ‘absence of intellectuals’ in Britain has certainly become partly conflated with these other adjectival uses of ‘intellectual’, and so this narrative and its critique are of relevance here. In an important article on ‘Victorian Anti-Intellectualism’ the historian Walter E. Houghton traced the term in the sense used by Carlyle quoted at the head of this section. Houghton was concerned with the anti-intellectualism referring to the supposedly:

practical nature of the English mind, its deep respect for facts, its pragmatic skill in the adaptation of means to ends, its ready appeal to common sense – and therefore, negatively, its suspicion of abstract and imaginative speculation – [which] have always been characteristic of the nation.22 Houghton entertains the idea that this characterization might be supported empirically, commenting that J. S. Mill’s observation in 1835 that the ‘celebrity of England rest[ed] on her docks, her canals, and her railroads’23 was not without evidence, as the:

Industrial Revolution owed very little to scientific theory. The great inventors, Watt, Stephenson, Arkwright, Hargreaves, had had little mathematics and less

Confusions and Contrasts – and Convergence?’, in Intellectuals in Twentieth- Century France: Mandarins and Samurais, ed. Jeremy Jennings (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1993), 199–225. See also M. S. Hickox, ‘Has there Been a British Intelligentsia?’, British Journal of Sociology 37 (1986), 260–8. 21 For more on the influence of this event on the consolidation of intellectual identity in France see Christophe Charle, ‘Academics or Intellectuals? The Professors of the University of Paris and Political Debate in France from the Dreyfus Affair to the Algerian War’, in Intellectuals in Twentieth-Century France, 94–116. And for other British–French comparisons see Iain Pears, ‘The Gentleman and the Hero: Wellington and Napoleon in the Nineteenth Century’, in Myths of the English, 216–36. 22 Houghton, ‘Victorian Anti-Intellectualism’, 291. 23 From ‘Professor Sedgwick’s Discourse on the Studies of the University of Cambridge’, in Dissertations and Discussions, Vol. I (Boston: W. V. Spencer, 1875), 95–159, 96, cited in Houghton, ‘Victorian Anti-Intellectualism, 292. Anti-Intellectualism and the Rhetoric of ‘National Character’ 209

science. Their investigations were almost entirely empirical. It was only after the mid-century that the work of trained scientists like Davy and Faraday began to reveal the practical fruits of scientific theory.24 Not surprisingly, the humanities (including music) and a liberal education more generally did not fare well under this test of utility – ‘condemned as useless or patronized as “cultural”’.25 Indeed, this notion of the English as a practical people spurred its own anti-intellectual intellectual tradition, as it were, in the work of thinkers such as Kingsley, Froude, Carlyle and Macaulay. It also drew together some strange bed-fellows, such as the individualist interest of business and the practice-driven ethics of Victorian Puritanism – both of which emphasized moral discipline, hard work and a fear of the undermining effect of scepticism and doubt.26 There were deeper political reasons for the development of this rhetoric, of course, and Gerald Newman and Linda Colley have traced the intensification of rhetoric of national character back to the ‘Gallophobia’ of the eighteenth century (sprung from a series of military conflicts between England and France), which caused the English to conceive themselves as ‘free Protestants struggling against a “superstitious, militarist, decadent and unfree” Catholic f o e’. 27 It is also worth noting how the imagery that became associated with the national caricature of ‘John Bull’ may have been influenced by the desire of ‘English cartoonists … to oppose to the mythological goddesses brought into play by the French Revolution (Liberty, Reason) a common man, a being of flesh and blood, and a male one at that’.28 Twentieth-century representa- tions of the English as somehow inherently anti-intellectual built upon this tradition. The notion of the English as ‘doers’ rather than thinkers was a fiction of national identity that was not only a response to external Continental threats, but also served a particular philistine purpose with respect to middle-class identity. This was the purpose against which Matthew Arnold made his

24 Houghton, ‘Victorian Anti-intellectualism’, 293. 25 Ibid., 294. 26 For a more detailed account of this association see ibid., 302–4. For more on the relationship between notions of ‘Englishness’ and Puritanism more generally, see Matthew Grimley, ‘The Religion of Englishness: Puritanism, Providentialism, and “National Character”, 1918–1945’, Journal of British Studies 46/4 (2007), 884–906. 27 See Gerald Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History, 1780–1840 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1987); and Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1701–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 5. 28 Jeannine Surel, ‘John Bull’, trans. Kathy Hodgkin, in Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity, Vol. III: National Fictions, ed. Raphael Samuel (London: Routledge, 1989), 3–25, at 9. 210 Sarah Collins famous protest in Culture and Anarchy (1869): ‘Now, and for us, it is a time to Hellenise, and to praise knowing; for we have Hebraised too much, and have over-valued doing.’29 Similarly, early Victorian social critics began to construe the idea of the ‘new industrial capitalist society’ as being inherently inimical to ‘culture’ and activities of the mind – a view emblemized in Arnold’s work. So during the later nineteenth century, as Heyck has noted, matters of the mind came to be seen as ‘pitted against ordinary life’.30 This was a strain of anti-intellectualism that was defined by those who rejected it, associated with Romantic and Victorian writers who embodied an opposing ‘anti-industrial spirit’.31 E. M. Forster and other Bloomsbury figures contributed to this view in the early twentieth century, cementing in the minds of their detractors the idea that such ‘intellectuals’ were abstracted from the interests of everyday British people. This view intensified during the War years, and crystallized in what have been called the ‘home-front wars’, or the fear of ‘internal sub- versives’ – the ‘enemy within’ – which targeted avant-garde intellectuals and bohemian artists, among others.32 Across a range of discourse, these figures – and intellectual pursuit more generally – began to be cast as, at best, affected and pretentious, and at worst, dangerously subversive. By the 1930s, the perceived distance between ‘intellectuals’ and the concerns of the ordinary people was expressed in terms of the former’s lack of patriotism, and Orwell accused the ‘left-wingers’ of ‘chipping away at English

29 Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, in Matthew Arnold, The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. R. H. Super, Vol. V (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1965), 85–256, at 255, quoted in David Wayne Thomas, Cultivating Victorians: Liberal Culture and the Aesthetic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 35. 30 Heyck, ‘Myths and Meanings’, 197. 31 Descriptions of the anti-intellectual English bourgeoisie by its critics can be seen in the following works, helpfully cited by Heyck in ‘Myths and Meanings’, 198: Ford Madox Heuffer, England and the English and The Spirit of the People: An Analysis of the English Mind (both 1907); R. N. Bradley, Racial Origins of English Character (1926); Ernest Barker, National Character and the Factors in its Formation, 3rd edn (1927); W. Macneille Dixon, The Englishman (1931); Hilaire Belloc, An Essay on the Nature of Contemporary England (1937); Harold Nicolson, The Meaning of Prestige (1937); Wyndham Lewis, The Mysterious Mr. Bull (1938); Dorothy L. Sayers, The Mysterious English (1941); A. Berriedale Keith, W. A. Robson et al., British Life and Thought (1942); D. W. Brogan, The English People: Impressions and Observations (1943); George Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn (1941) and The English People (1947); Ernest Barker, ed., The Character of England (1947); T. H. Pear, English Social Differences (1955); Anthony Sampson, Anatomy of Britain (1962); J. B. Priestly, The English (1973). 32 See Karen Arrandale, ‘Artists’ Rifles and Artistic License: Edward Dent’s War’, First World War Studies 2/1 (2011), 7–16. Anti-Intellectualism and the Rhetoric of ‘National Character’ 211 morale’,33 acknowledging that in the current climate, ‘to be “clever” was to be suspect’ for this reason. He offered a famously damning critique of the ‘English intelligentsia’, remarking upon the ‘emotional shallowness of people who live in the world of ideas and have little contact with physical reality’, and whose political impotence can be attributed to their ‘severance from the common culture of the country’ and their cosmopolitanism – ‘the English intelligentsia are Europeanized. They take their cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow.’34 Similarly, in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), Orwell criticized intellectuals for being ‘detached from the common people’ and therefore ‘un-Eng- l i s h’. 35 Interestingly, Orwell’s critique seemed to be based more on a perception of complacency and limpness rather than ideology – an impression that the intelligentsia’s drive to be oppositional saw their views vacillate arbitrarily rather than being based upon principle. The outcome of this characteristic was an inability to institute real change, which was in fact, and somewhat ironically, really quite English according to Orwell’s own analysis. Indeed, Orwell’s attributes of Englishness outlined at the opening of this chapter support an image that relied upon a tacit acknowledgment that nothing would actually change, and that the purpose of the discourse of national identity itself was to ensure the maintenance of the status quo, resting as it did on a ‘strange mixture of reality and illusion, democracy and privilege, humbug and decency, the subtle network of compromises, by which the nation keeps itself in its familiar s h a p e’. 36 The inter-war scepticism towards intellectuals, and the notion that intellectual endeavour signalled an abstraction from the concerns of the ‘people’, became part of a more wide-ranging historiographical narrative promoted in the early 1960s by British Marxist critics of the ‘New Left’, such as Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn.37 Perry Anderson observed the peculiar state of intellectual pursuit in England in terms of the lack of distinction between the aristocracy and the intellectual class in the nineteenth century up until 1914. He situated the origins of this problem in the absence of a tradition of Marxist thinking that in other European intellectual traditions had led to the development of the discipline of sociology (either in concert with it, or in tension):

Why did Britain never produce either a Weber, a Durkheim, a Pareto or a Lenin, a Lukács, a Gramsci? The peculiar destiny of the nineteenth-century industrial

33 Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn, 64. 34 Ibid., 63. 35 George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1958), 13. 36 Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn, 46. 37 For a list of the central contributions to this narrative see Perry Anderson, English Questions (London: Verso, 1992), 121, n. 1. 212 Sarah Collins

bourgeoisie in Britain is the secret of this twin default. The class which accomplished the titanic technological explosion of the Industrial Revolution never achieved a political or social revolution in England. It was checked by a prior capitalist class, the agrarian aristocracy which had matured in the eighteenth century, and controlled a State formed in its image. There was not insuperable contradiction between the modes of production of the two classes. The industrial bourgeoisie, traumatized by the French Revolution and fearful of the nas- cent working-class movement, never took the risk of a confrontation with the dominant aristocracy. It never evicted the latter from its hegemonic control of the political order, and eventually fused with it in a new, composite ruling bloc in mid-century.38 ‘Cramped’ within their class bounds, according to Perry, British intellectuals failed to produce any general theory of society. The result was that the ‘British bourgeoisie from the outset renounced its intellectual birthright. It refused ever to put society as a whole in question’ as an abstract totality, producing only ‘empirical, piece-meal, intellectual disciplines correspond[ing to] humble, circumscribed social action’.39 The implication here is that the relationship between the ‘hegemonic class’ and intellectuals was far more cosy than in other national traditions.40 Anderson traced this situation back to the separation of practical legal training from the consideration of jurisprudence in universities during the medieval period, and also to the fact that the aristocracy had been prominent in public schools and universities since the sixteenth century, ‘preventing the development of a separate clerisy within them’.41 Anderson’s essays in the New Left Review of this period, and those of his colleague Thomas Nairn, forwarded a joint thesis that became known as the

38 Perry Anderson, ‘Components of the National Culture’, New Left Review 50 (1968), 1–57, at 12. 39 Anderson, ‘Components of the National Culture’, 13. 40 See Noel Annan, ‘The Intellectual Aristocracy’, in J. H. Plumb, ed., Studies in Social History (London: Longmans, 1955), 241–87; repr. in Noel Annan, The Dons (London: Harper-Collins, 1999), 304–41. For a longer history of the reasons for this lack of separation between aristocracy and intellectual tradition see Perry Anderson’s ‘Origins of the Present Crisis’, New Left Review 23 (1964), 26–53. 41 Perry outlined how ‘Equally important was the absence of Roman Law in England, which blocked the growth of an intelligentsia based on legal faculties of the universities in the mediaeval period. On the Continent, the law schools of such centres as Bologna and Paris, which taught the abstract principles of jurisprudence, made an important contribution to the emergence of a separate intellectual group; whereas in England legal training was controlled by the guild of practising lawyers and was based on the accumulation of precedent’ (Anderson, ‘Components of the National Culture’, 15, n. 15). Anti-Intellectualism and the Rhetoric of ‘National Character’ 213

‘Anderson–Nairn hypothesis’. This hypothesis has of course been contested, most immediately and brutally perhaps by E. P. Thompson, who pointed out, in response to Anderson’s earlier essay in 1964 titled ‘The Origins of the Present Crisis’, that the analysis that sees British thinkers as failing to produce a separate intellectual tradition capable of conceiving of the social totality and providing a ‘systematic’ critique of it, was based on a European model of intellectual tradition.42 Not only did this comparison rest on an assumption that this was the most desirable form, and therefore a norm against which the British example was a failed exception, but it also neglected to take into account the distinctive nature of England’s Protestant history, the tradition of Dissent, and the fact that the landowning class had for centuries been gradually intertwining with the merchant class and business interests.43 Thompson argued that the British intellectual tradition could be found not in a united separate group in the nature of an intelligentsia, but rather in smaller units of thought and action dispersed in a decentralized manner throughout the kingdom, not the central drivers of a large-scale revolution (a model which in any event casts the proletariat as indebted to an intellectual vanguard), but nonetheless effective in a different and gradualist way. As Stefan Collini also noted in his own critique, Anderson ‘tended to over- look the varieties of social criticism engaged in by … [thinkers like] Ruskin, Spencer, Morris, Hobson, Tawney, Leavis, and many many more’.44 Collini outlined a number of other persuasive criticisms – including pointing out Anderson’s assumption that the dominant mode of thought is necessarily conservative, requiring a ‘radical’ critique, while in the Britain of late 1940s, it was the arch-conservatives Eliot and Oakeshott ‘who saw themselves as opposing a dominant consensus’.45 In addition, against the casual linking of the absence of a separate British intellectual tradition with the presence of the ‘intellectual aristocracy’, Collini pointed out that such close ties do not guarantee conservatism: for example, William Morris was intimately connected with leading elites, yet ‘no one is tempted to read off a lack of dissidence from social position’ in his case.46 The same could be said of John Maynard Keynes, perhaps, just as it can be said of musical figures such as Edward Dent and Ralph

42 E. P. Thompson, ‘The Peculiarities of the English’, Socialist Register 2 (1965), 311–62. 43 For more on the impact of differing social and institutional histories on the development of an ‘intelligentsia’ in Britain, German and France, respectively, see Hickox, ‘Has there Been a British Intelligentsia’. 44 Collini, Absent Minds, 174. 45 Ibid., 178. 46 Ibid. 214 Sarah Collins

Vaughan Williams, both of whom were well connected in the upper echelons of society but who were both politically progressive. The tendency to judge British intellectual traditions on the criteria of Continental models (and the corollary tendency to construe theory and systematic thinking as inherently valuable) was exactly what many British music critics of the early twentieth century were attempting to work against. As part of this agenda, it became important to reformulate the idea of the artist in a way that was distinct from the supposedly detached intelligentsia and its cosmopolitan sympathies, to be closer to the idea of the English as a ‘practical’ people. Ironically, this reformulated version of the English artist capitalized on the same pre-industrial nostalgia that had typified arguments in favour of activities of the mind made by Romantic and Victorian writers and social critics that had protested so vehemently against the anti-intellectual version of English selfhood. So in order to rebrand the English/British composer, critics needed to navigate carefully between this bourgeois version of anti-intellectualism on the one hand and the gentleman amateur version on the other – both of which had a common enemy in the elite power structures that sustained what has since been called the ‘intellectual aristocracy’. Vaughan Williams was particularly alert to the implications of his familial connections, educational background, and early involvement with pre-Raph- aelite sympathisers, in this respect. In his 1934 book, National Music, he famously called passionately for the artist to be engaged and participatory – indeed to be a ‘servant of the state’ and to build national monuments. He thus wrote about the need to cultivate a sense of ‘musical citizenship’:

Art for arts sake has never flourished among the English-speaking nations. We are often called inartistic because our art is unconscious. … The composer must not shut himself up and think about art; he must live with his fellows and make his art an expression of the whole life of the community. If we seek for art we shall not find it.47 The idea of not consciously ‘seeking’ after art was clearly designed to undermine the importance of sustained intellectual engagement, in preference to a process more firmly based in practice and intuition. Here, we see Vaughan Williams marking out a place for the British composer, a place which is different from that of the intellectual elite and more aligned with ‘the people’, while at the same time managing to avoid an industrialist identification. This manœuvre is accomplished by playing down processes of abstraction, theory and pre-formulation.

47 Ralph Vaughan Williams, ‘Should Music Be National?’, in National Music (London: Oxford University Press, 1934), 3–22, at 18, emphasis added. Anti-Intellectualism and the Rhetoric of ‘National Character’ 215

Hubert Foss, in his later study of Vaughan Williams’s music, further propa- gated this emphasis, writing that ‘we may talk of “planning”, but we are in fact men of action first and consideration after. Of intellectual and artistic planning we are particularly suspicious’.48 Foss’s construction of Vaughan Williams’s persona along these lines takes the composer as far as possible away from any intimation of intellectual abstraction, capitalizing on the historical link between anti-intellectual values and the rhetoric of English national character and once again separating the composer from intellectuals and tradesmen alike: ‘like the English, [Vaughan Williams] is seldom intellectual … his mind is no more smart than his clothes, and he dresses like a forgetful farmer’.49 For Foss, the aesthetic of true Englishness is ‘healthy, sincere, muddy perhaps, but free from dust. It is like carpentry, firm and moderately exact: but it is not like illumination or silver-work – not perfect in detail and carefully cherished during the process of creation’.50 The reference to moderation here is particularly important in this construction, because it helps cast anti-intellectualism as a process that is not hide-bound or ‘dusty’, but which supports gradual change. So although distanc- ing Vaughan Williams from an elite intellectual class distances him from the very cohort providing the principal link between early twentieth-century British art and the modernist experiments of the Continental avant-garde, nothing in the ‘forgetful farmer’ characterization negates Vaughan Williams’s possible association with progressive thinking, either politically or musically. Indeed, Foss’s characterization of Vaughan Williams was explicitly attuned to his own overarching agenda to market a form of ‘British musical modernism’ as part of his position at Oxford University Press.51 Unfortunately for Vaughan Williams’s reputation, the 1950s witnessed a critical turn against self-congratulatory British anti-intellectualism, and to the extent that Vaughan Williams’s rough and ready orchestral technique (Foss affectionately referred to it as ‘clumsy’) was aligned with it, this characterization rapidly lost capital. Frogley noted that the rhetorical terms surrounding the simultaneous rise of Britten and fall of Vaughan Williams during this period intertwined the various antipathies evoked in such characterizations:

48 Hubert Foss, Ralph Vaughan Williams: A Study (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950), 57. 49 Foss, Vaughan Williams, 52. 50 Ibid., 56. 51 For more on Foss’s agenda in this respect, see Kirstie Asmussen, ‘Hubert Foss and the Politics of Musical Progress: Modernism and British Music Publishing’ (PhD diss., University of Queensland, 2016), which draws extensively from the personal archives of Hubert Foss (administered by his daughter Diana) and the Music Department archives at Oxford University Press, where Foss made a substantial contribution. 216 Sarah Collins

‘cosmopolitanism versus nationalism, professional technique versus sincere expression’, ‘cleverness versus directness’ coupled with a ‘terror of insularity [that] runs strong in the intelligentsia’.52 In this new post-war context, the rhetoric of anti-intellectualism had hardened and had become useful only for reactionary purposes, as explored recently by Philip Rupprecht.53 For example, when Ernest Gold claimed that one of the central challenges faced by younger British composers in the mid-1950s was the ‘sterility’ of the prevailing ‘scientific’ approaches to music, Peter Maxwell Davies hit back, noting how their real battle was instead with ‘a peculiarly English misconception – that “inspiration” is incompatible with the methods of “conscious construction” one hears about from the continent’.54 The palpable frustration evident in Davies’s searing attack on anti-intellectualism in the British musical sphere in the 1950s was surely similar to that which underpinned the Anderson– Nairn polemic (which Collini characterized as a ‘cry of pain’).55 As such, these accounts themselves need to be cast in an historical frame, and we should be wary of allowing them to speak for earlier instantiations of anti-intellectualism without first excavating a more nuanced account of how this discourse operated. Indeed, in the context of early twentieth-century British music criticism, anti-intellectualism was by no means necessarily insular, xenophobic or reactionary, as we shall see in the next section.

❧❧ A Progressive Anti-Intellectualism? Shaping a ‘Native’ Musical Modernism Whether reactionary or progressive, anti-intellectualism was certainly gradualist, and it is clear that this tendency has shaped much of the current

52 Frogley, ‘Constructing Englishness in Music’, 21–2. 53 Philip Rupprecht, British Musical Modernism: The Manchester Group and their Contemporaries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Also see his earlier article, ‘“Something Slightly Indecent”: British Composers, the European Avant- Garde, and National Stereotypes in the 1950s’, The Musical Quarterly 91/3–4 (2008), 275–326. 54 Ernest Gold, ‘The New Challenge’, The Score and I.M.A. Magazine 14 (1955), 36–40; and Peter Maxwell Davies, ‘The Young British Composer’, The Score and I.M.A. Magazine 15 (1956): 84–5. For an account of this exchange see Rupprecht, British Musical Modernism, 35–6. 55 Describing Anderson’s essay ‘The Components of the National Culture’ in particular, Collini wrote that ‘its prose expresses a reaction, at times vengeful, at times despairing, frequently acerbic, to what many of his generation experienced as the coercive empiricism and stifling “normality” of the 1950s’ (Collini, Absent Minds, 180). Anti-Intellectualism and the Rhetoric of ‘National Character’ 217 understanding of the rhetoric. In 1925, Edwin Evans (at the time a music critic known for his modernist sympathies, and later the President of the International Society for Contemporary Music) gave a poignant assessment of the pros and cons of the gradualism of the British, writing that ‘from the extreme Tory to the convinced Communist’ all are ‘several degrees to the right of the corresponding faction on the Continent’. In the arts too:

movements which occur elsewhere with some rapidity assume in our midst the pace of the elephant carefully testing the plank before he commits his weight to it. Therein lies at once our strength and our weakness – our strength because it keeps us aloof from the thought-wasting medley of ‘isms’ and the making of music to fit arid theoretical speculations, and our weakness because so much of our best work, deprived of the pungent seasoning of militancy, appears to be lacking in the spirit of adventure. We have to confess that the most ‘advanced’ of our composers, if placed beside some of their Continental contemporaries, appear as Fabian socialists at a meeting of ‘Reds’. We think none the less of them for that, for we are a law-abiding people.56 This gradualist tendency was exactly what writers such as Orwell and Anderson sought to critique, claiming that its effect was to preserve the status quo. Yet there is also evidence that the rhetoric was used to promote a peculiarly British form of modernism, and indeed Evans acknowledges this later in the same article:

The English musician is rarely an intellectual theorist. It may be a fault, but at least it helps him to avoid those dreadful patches of aridity of which one becomes conscious in the music of certain composers who require the most careful exegesis before they can be appreciated. He may be good or bad, but he is seldom dry, because he is usually practical. At present, perhaps, he is extracting from the multitude of current theories what may be of practical use to himself, and that requires time.57 The attempt to characterize gradualist thought – and the anti-intellectual processes that supposedly supported it – in progressive terms has figured in the reception of the music of Edward Elgar, as writers such as Jeremy Crump identified when he described the composer as ‘modern in a peculiarly English way; experiment was tempered by genuine if vaguely defined feeling’; and noted that the ‘Musical Opinion praised the Enigma Variations as “music that will please and interest the public”. It did not just aim at being admired by

56 Edwin Evans, ‘A Survey Without Names’, The Sackbut 6 (September 1925), 36–8, at 36. 57 Evans, ‘A Survey Without Names’, 38. 218 Sarah Collins

“a few professors here and there who are in a position to grasp its technical exercises”.’58 The targeted construction of Frederick Delius as an ‘English’ composer who was somehow both modern and anti-intellectual is also an interesting case, as it allows us to see exactly which attributes of persona and music were harnessed to evoke the rhetoric of anti-intellectualism in national character. Delius’s personality, his intellectual process, his interaction with literary texts and the formal construction of his works themselves, were all routinely cast as being intuitive and instinctual, in apparent opposition to being calculated and intellectually inclined. In the immediate English reception of his works, and in much of the subsequent biographical literature, Delius is consistently cast as a great feeler, rather than a great thinker. Delius’s works that employ the texts of explicitly political writers such as Whitman, or explicitly philosophical or aesthetic thinkers such as Nietzsche, are routinely interpreted as being merely poetical and evocative, rather than engaging with any of the substantive conceptual themes of the texts in question. For example, in his 1948 biography of Delius, Arthur Hutchings wrote that he:

was incapable of following any speculative thought that did not flatter his own inclinations and rebellions … Only a fool would suppose the favourite books from Delius’s elegant shelves to have been more intellectual than the thumbed volumes of poor Schubert, whose taste in verse has been the jibe of several snobs.59 In a related vein, Delius’s music has often been referred to as being so intuitive and wayward that it is beyond the reach of conventional musical analysis. The point came up in some of the critical responses to the 1962 centenary of his birth. In response to Peter Heyworth’s comment that ‘the intellectual content of Delius’s music is perilously thin’, and Rollo Myers’s comment that ‘For Delius … form was unimportant’,60 Deryck Cooke engaged in a spirited and lengthy defence of the composer, writing a sizable article across two issues of The Musical Times that year, arguing that the inability of the ‘classical method of analysis’ to discern form did not mean that form was nonexistent, though it might be a form that was not pre-formulated. Cooke argued that ‘the only possible solution to the problem [of analysing the apparently “rhap- sodic” parts of Delius’s music] is to apply to one of Delius’s works the new

58 Crump, ‘The Identity of English Music’, 196. 59 Arthur Hutchings, Delius: A Critical Biography (London: Macmillan, 1948), 62. 60 Peter Heyworth, The Observer (4 February 1962); and Rollo Myers, letter to The Listener (15 February 1962), both quoted and rejected in Deryck Cooke, ‘Delius & Form: A Vindication’, The Musical Times 103 (1962), 392–3. Anti-Intellectualism and the Rhetoric of ‘National Character’ 219 analytical methods, stemming from the writings of Schoenberg, which have come into being recently’. He pointed to the way in which Rudolf Réti used an idea of ‘thematic process’ to demonstrate formal coherence in Debussy’s La Cathédrale engloutie.61 Cooke then proceeded to undertake an analysis of Delius’s Violin Concerto using the ‘new’ method of analysis developed by Hans Keller – ‘Functional Analysis’ – to show that the concerto was in fact a ‘superb example of germination and rigorous thematic development, but of a uniquely plastic kind, far removed from the traditional hammer and chisel type’.62 Perhaps of even more interest, however, is that later that year, in a lecture given to the Royal Musical Association on 18 December 1962, Cooke expressed his deep concern over the way in which the criticism of Delius’s formlessness was so often clothed in morally inflected language, including descriptions such as ‘self-indulgent’, ‘narcissistic’ or ‘wallowing in nostalgia’. Cooke quoted John Warrack’s comment about A Village Romeo and Juliet, that Delius ‘is himself the real Dark Fiddler, luring us to turn our backs on modern life, to forget responsibilities and abandon aspirations, to drift in the siren flood of his music down the river to oblivion’.63 The idea that the support of Delius’s music involved a moral commitment to decadence was certainly not confined to pages of The Sunday Telegraph during the centenary, where this quote appeared, yet it did have a particular moral flavouring in the early 1960s that had quite different implications in earlier manifestations of this aspect of Delius’s reception. In the early 1960s, then, some supporters of Delius clearly felt that the composer needed to be rescued from the morally subversive implications of his intuitive style and his scepticism towards pre-formulated procedures, whereas many of the earlier characterizations that stressed his anti-intellectualism in fact did so in way that emphasized his heroic independence and individuality, his self- made qualities, and his lack of deference to any formalized affiliation. While these qualities have been accentuated as part of a long tradition of attributing ‘cosmopolitan’ characteristics to Delius, as I have argued elsewhere,64 they also played a significant role in Delius’s construction as an ‘English’ composer – or in his ‘repatriation’, in Robert Stradling’s words.65

61 Deryck Cooke, ‘Delius & Form: A Vindication II’, The Musical Times 103 (1962), 460–5. 62 Ibid., 461. 63 John Warrack, ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, The Sunday Telegraph (8 April 1962), quoted in Deryck Cooke, ‘Delius the Unknown’, Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, 89th Sess. (1962–3), 17–29, at 18. 64 Sarah Collins, ‘The Composer as “Good European”: Musical Modernism, Amor fati and the Cosmopolitanism of Frederick Delius’, Twentieth-Century Music 12/1 (2015), 97–123. 65 Stradling, ‘On Shearing the Black Sheep’. 220 Sarah Collins

Delius’s ‘repatriation’ referred of course to more than merely the re-interment of his body in a burial site in England almost a year after his death in France, but rather to the coordinated and persistent effort on the part of some supporters to claim him as distinctly ‘English’ and to market his music as quintessentially so. In the context of this agenda, Delius’s intuitive compositional methods and feelingful persona were grafted onto just the same tropes of English national character that I have sketched above in relation to anti-intellectualism – namely, Delius was made to appear self-governing and self-reliant, sceptical of the elite and the abstract, of theorizing and pre-fabricated ideals and formulas, and also sceptical of centralized ‘lawgivers’. This characterization, as we have seen, evoked a particular constellation of associations in the first decades of the twentieth century. Again, Vaughan Williams, in his essay of 1912 ‘Who Wants the English Composer?’, likened the approach of the ideal ‘English composer’ to the development of common law (in other words, ‘judge-made law’), which he viewed as an organic process of deriving rules from practice, rather than the abstracted codification that attends the civil law systems of France and elsewhere (a point that Perry Anderson, writing later in the 1960s, saw as a distinct negative). And in a similar vein, Cecil Gray in his 1948 memoir noted how the national aversion to planning could be seen even in the layout of the London capital, with its meandering and organically developed street layout, in contrast to the organized grid formation of the new town area of his native Edinburgh, which he felt was probably influenced by French models.66 Using this difference to distinguish English ‘vitality’ from French ‘form’, Gray pointed to the fact that Paris’s ‘broad, majestic, symmetrical thoroughfares pursue a pre-ordained purpose, fulfil a pre-conceived design, and achieve a perfect, harmonious form’, in contrast to London, which is organic and vital yet amorphous. He added, ‘it is significant to note that where London attempts to belie her nature and to emulate alien models, as in such abortions as Oxford Street, Kingsway and the Strand, she contradicts her innermost nature’.67 In other words, the charge of being intuitive and anti-intellectual was certainly not something that one needed rescuing from in the first decades of the twentieth century, in the way that seemed necessary at Delius’s centenary in 1962 – indeed, quite the opposite: it was a marker of one’s authenticity as a type of modernist who was ‘vital’ and spontaneous, and therefore English to the core. The problem for people like Thomas Beecham, Cecil Gray, Philip Heseltine and others invested in presenting Delius as both English and modern via the rhetoric of anti-intellectualism, was that Delius never enjoyed widespread

66 Gray, Musical Chairs, 21–3. 67 Ibid., 23. Anti-Intellectualism and the Rhetoric of ‘National Character’ 221 popular support in Britain to the extent that Elgar and Vaughan Williams did. Delius’s work was certainly associated by some with the English ‘spirit’ and the nature-loving aspect of English Romanticism, but never was he seen as a composer ‘of the people’. This meant that for Delius to be constructed as quintessentially English, he needed to be seen as anti-intellectual in some other way. This was achieved, in sum, by a combination of casting his personality as emotionally sensitive; downplaying his attachment to Nietzsche and other polemical writers and poets whose work he set to music; and positioning his approach to composition as primarily intuitive. Delius’s anti-intellectualism was thereby construed as facilitating a more ‘authentic’ or ‘sincere’ engagement with musical innovation than the apparently over-theoretical experimentation of his Continental colleagues.68

❧❧ The ‘Vulgarity’ of Over-Refinement

[Elgar] might have been a great composer if he had not been such a perfect gentleman.69 Shaping a ‘native’ musical modernism in the negative image of Continental models was one usage of the anti-intellectualism-as-Englishness discourse, but there were others that responded to more local tensions socially and insti- tutionally. A useful entry-point into the operation of this discourse within the local professional sphere is the famous controversy that was sparked by Edward Dent’s comments about Elgar in the second edition of Guido Adler’s Handbuch der Musikgeschicte (Handbook of Music History).70 In 1931, a year after the publication of the Handbuch in its second edition, several English

68 It is worth noting that Arnold Schoenberg adamantly rejected the criticism that his experiments in atonality and the 12-tone method were too ‘cerebral’ or the ‘result of uninspired, dry construction, of a kind of engineering’. See his response to the ‘Open Forum’ section of the first and only issue of the ISCM’s journal Music To-day, in 1947, where the question ‘Music’s Future: Tonal or a-Tonal?’ was posed to a range of composers (132–3). 69 Cecil Gray, A Survey of Contemporary Music (London: Oxford University Press, 1924), 93. Gray’s image of the gentleman here refers to the ‘atmosphere of pale, cultured idealism, and the unconsciously hypocritical, self-righteous, complacent, Pharisaical gentlemanliness which is so characteristic of British art in the last century’ (92–3). He also ascribed this same tendency to Ruskin, Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, Walter Pater, Burne-Jones, and Thackeray. 70 Edward J. Dent, ‘Engländer’, in the chapter ‘Moderne’, in Guido Adler, ed., Handbuch der Musikgeschichte, 2nd edn (Berlin: Max Hesses Verlag, 1930), 1044–57. The first edition of this text was published in 1924, with only minor alterations to Dent’s part in the second edition. 222 Sarah Collins newspapers published an open letter of protest against Dent’s supposedly cursory treatment of Elgar in his entry on ‘English Music’. At the time, Dent was fifty-four years old, Professor of Music at the University of Cambridge, President of the ISCM, and a year away from being elected President of the International Musicological Society (IMS).71 The letter of protest was signed by composers, performers and artists from a younger generation, including composers Philip Heseltine, E. J. Moeran, William Walton, John Ireland, the post-impressionist artist Augustus John, the critic George Bernard Shaw, and a number of others. The passage in Dent’s chapter on English music that evidently enraged them was translated as the following:

Elgar began music later in life than his contemporaries, Parry, Stanford, A. C. Mackenzie, and F. H. Cowen, and surprised his listeners by the unusual glamour of his orchestration and the glowing expression of his music. He was a violin player, and studied Liszt – an abomination to academic musicians. He was a Catholic, and self-taught, and had little of the literary culture of Parry and Stanford. … For English ears Elgar’s music is much too emotional, and not free from vulgarity.72 In rejecting Dent’s criticisms, the signatories to the letter of protest insisted that Elgar’s music, far from sounding ‘vulgar’ to English ears was held in the ‘highest honour by the majority of English musicians and the musical public in general’.73 George Bernard Shaw castigated Dent for ‘belittl[ing] his coun-

71 Julian Rushton has pointed out that had Elgar’s admirers came across Dent’s comments when the Handbuch was published in its first edition, in 1924, it would likely have caused far less of a stir, but by the time of the second edition, Dent had become ‘a leader – arguably the leader – of British musicology’. See Julian Rushton, ‘Elgar and Academe (1): Dent, Forsyth, and What is English Music?’, The Elgar Society Journal 15/4 (2008), 27–32, at 28. A similar point was made by Robert Anderson in Elgar (New York: Schirmer, 1993), 167; and see also Karen Arrandale’s chapter in the present volume. 72 As reported in ‘The Elgar Protest’, The Mercury (1 July 1931), 5. For more on this controversy see Brian Trowell, ‘Elgar’s Use of Literature’, in Raymond Monk, ed., Edward Elgar: Music and Literature (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1993), 182–326, at 182–6; Aidan Thomson, ‘Elgar’s Critical Critics’, in Byron Adams, ed., Elgar and his World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 193–222; Jeremy Dibble, ‘Elgar and his British Contemporaries’, in Daniel M. Grimley and Julian Rushton, eds, The Cambridge Companion to Elgar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 15–23; and Rushton, ‘Elgar and Academe’. See also Karen Arrandale’s forthcoming biography of Edward Dent (Boydell & Brewer, forthcoming). These sources each give slightly different translations of the original text, but for our purposes, the term ‘vulgarity’ is fairly consistent. 73 ‘Sir Edward Elgar: Musicians Against “Unjust” Estimate’, Manchester Guardian (6 February 1931), 8. Anti-Intellectualism and the Rhetoric of ‘National Character’ 223 try by belittling the only great English composer who is not dwarfed by the German giants’.74 Subsequent readings of this incident cast it as emblematic of a rift between academic music circles and the broader public for whom Elgar was thought to speak on the one hand, and a burgeoning vanguard who had an interest in the alterity that this supposed rift represented on the other.75 Even at the time, Herbert Hughes characterized the episode in terms of ‘the strange and rather shameful opposition [Elgar] has encountered at the hands of his own countrymen’.76 Basil Maine explained what he considered to be Dent’s ill- founded criticism as caused partly by the ‘conflict of generations and partly by the conflict of education’, characterizing Dent and other supposedly anti-Elgar critics as ‘extreme academic types’ with ‘rigidly academic mind[s]’.77 These accounts cast Dent as out of touch with the very things that seemed to define an English composer – namely sympathy with the sentiment of ‘the people’ and an embodiment of the national temperament. Apparently detached by the abstraction of his academic position and his educational and familial privilege, Dent’s supposed failure to stand by his ‘own countrymen’ placed him at odds with these hallowed attributes. The implications behind the terms of the protest were clear: while Elgar was the apotheosis of Englishness, anti-Elgar critics were tainted with a disinterested cosmopolitanism, by virtue of being merely ‘academic’. There were also aesthetic implications underpinning the attempt to link academicism with a sympathy towards Continental forms of modernism. For example, J. H. Elliot, writing in The Sackbut in October 1931, admonished Dent for attributing to ‘English ears generally the antipathies of his own. The ears that have admitted the German romantics and the Russians are not likely to cavil at Elgar – at any rate on the grounds suggested.’78 And even as late as Christian Kennett’s 1995 survey of British ‘musicological’ writings since World War I, Dent is described as a ‘committed academic and modernist’ in contrast to Donald Tovey, whom he claimed ‘hated the company of musicologists,

74 Quoted in ‘Sir Edward Elgar: Musicians Against “Unjust” Estimate’. 75 Jeremy Crump wrote that ‘this revival of the old rivalry between Elgar and academic musical circles came at a time when the divergence between new European music and the English national school was marked. For the first time, the gap between a conservative public taste and leading composers’ innovations seemed unbridgeable’. See Crump, ‘The Identity of English Music’, 204. 76 Herbert Hughes, ‘Music and Musicians’, Review of Basil Maine, Elgar: His Life and Works (1933), The Saturday Review (27 May 1933), 511. 77 Quoted in Hughes, ‘Music and Musicians’, 511. 78 J. H. Elliot, ‘Elgar and England’, The Sackbut 12/1 (October 1931), 11–13, 11. 224 Sarah Collins disliked radical contemporary music, and thought of himself as a popularizer, who aimed his programme notes … at enlightening the “naïve listener”’.79 It is worth mentioning that this little episode – which Dent came to refer to as the ‘Elgar Hetz’ against him – has been made to carry more evidential weight than it perhaps deserves, and the extent to which it can be considered indicative of a broader schism in British music culture is debatable. When Dent had initially written this passage on Elgar for the first edition of the book, in 1924, he was a music journalist and independent scholar, and as Julian Rushton has pointed out, his entry is ‘buried within 1,200 pages of smallest print … [and] was probably dashed off without much thought as to likely reactions in Britain’.80 Dent himself was surprised at the traction of the controversy, and joked that such was the concern of his friends for his safety in the wake of the protest that ‘a bodyguard of Cambridge undergraduates is being organized for me’.81 The exchange clearly had more to do with professional politics than aesthetic concerns: as both Meirion Hughes and Karen Arrandale have pointed out, the critic Francis Toye had already coined the term ‘velgar’ in an article that he wrote in 1910 for Vanity Fair in response to the premiere of Elgar’s Violin Concerto, and many readings of the use of this term in relation to Elgar see it as a product of class consciousness.82 To add further complication, Dent himself later in the same section of his entry described Elgar’s music as ‘dry and academic’. There were clearly a range of tensions that could be expressed using the powerful rhetorical ambiguity of the word ‘academic’ as both a noun and an adjective, similar to the ambigu- ities of the term ‘intellectual’. What makes this episode interesting, then, is the misreading itself upon which the protest was based, and the fact that the terms involved were made disproportionately effective because of a combination of being so highly loaded and so easily twisted.

79 Christian Kennett, ‘Criticism and Theory’, in Stephen Banfield, ed., Music in Britain: The Twentieth Century (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 503–18, at 506. 80 Rushton, ‘Elgar and Academe’, 27. 81 GB-Ckc, EJD/4/111/10/8 (Edward Dent Papers, LH 10/07/1931), quoted in Arrandale, forthcoming. 82 Francis Toye, ‘Velgarity’, Vanity Fair (16 November 1910), cited in Meirion Hughes, ‘“The Duc d’Elgar”: Making a Composer Gentleman’, in Music and the Politics of Culture, 41–68; and Arrandale’s forthcoming biography of Dent. Arrandale observes that what should have been a minor event turned into a noted protest for a number of reasons: ‘It was bad timing, since by this time Elgar’s reputation was in some decline and opinion on his music polarized; moreover, his health was poor, while the whole reaction was fuelled by residual anti-German feelings, and bristling with class-resentment of a very English kind.’ Anti-Intellectualism and the Rhetoric of ‘National Character’ 225

In reality, of course, Dent shared many of the underlying concerns of his would-be detractors. As Philip Radcliffe has noted, although Dent certainly derided Elgar’s music on the whole, it is also true that he railed against ‘the English ultra-respectable fear of vulgarity, and he was always a staunch upholder of Liszt, a composer in many ways very similar to Elgar in his brilliant imaginativeness and his occasional lapses of taste’.83 Arrandale, similarly, called Dent’s use of the term ‘vulgar’ a

part of his complex distinction, made over a long period, between what can be acceptable, indeed sometimes desirable, in music, and what is pretentious or sentimental. Dent’s personal aversion to late Victorian piety in all its forms made him suspicious of Elgar’s attempts at ‘nobility’, especially when linked to a conspicuous piety.84 On this reading, Dent’s point was that Elgar’s music pretended to be too refined (joining this with other criticisms of Elgar’s supposedly affected manner), rather than referring to either a perceived amateurism in his compositions or to his popular appeal, as it has been conventionally read. Indeed, had Dent’s comment been made a few decades earlier, his meaning would not perhaps have been so misconstrued; the shift in usage of the term ‘vulgarity’ over the war years is consequently instructive for our investigation of the rhetoric of anti-intellectualism. In 1895, John Runciman described the faddishness of ‘modern music’ as ‘vulgar through an excess of refinement’, claiming that composers were driven to such excess by an unwarranted ‘dread of the commonplace’, and, ironically, a fear of ‘being set down as vulgar’ for subscribing to more conventional forms:

most of the vulgarity in music to-day proceeds not from those who have gone into music as into a trade, but from those who honestly wish to write the best music there is in them, music like in kind, if not in degree, to the music of the great masters. They desire, that is, to write cultured music – and this desire is their undoing.85 The ‘vulgar’ described here were products of the ‘university extension and evening continuation class culture’, which Runciman called a ‘sham culture’:

the reason why so much of our art is vulgar is that our writers, painters, and musicians, forsaking the vernacular mode of expression which they might use

83 Philip Radcliffe, E. J. Dent: A Centenary Memoir (Rickmansworth: Triad Press, 1976), 17. 84 See Karen Arrandale’s chapter in this volume, 170. I am also extremely grateful to Arrandale for allowing me to see her forthcoming work. 85 John Runciman, ‘Vulgarity in Music’, Monthly Musical Record 25 (1895), 267–9, 268. 226 Sarah Collins

naturally, easily, with effect, ape the accent and manner (so to speak) of those with whom they would fain associate, the accent and manner of Wagner, of Whistler, of Swinburne, and George Meredith.86 For Runciman, then, writing in the closing years of the nineteenth century, vulgarity signalled over-refinement, decadence, artificiality and imitation. Yet by 1905, usage of the term ‘vulgar’ had already shifted to indicate a more positive connotation, to be used in fact as a weapon against just the kind of ‘sham culture’ to which Runciman had applied the term a decade earlier. This shift was such that in Elgar’s opening lecture as Peyton Professor of Music at Birmingham University, he was able to claim that ‘Vulgarity often goes with inventiveness and it can take the initiative […] the commonplace mind can never be anything but commonplace, […] no polish of a University, can erad- icate the stain’.87 In 1910, Francis Toye sought to consolidate the possibilities of this new positive identification. Offering a view on the ‘prospects of English music’ that year, Toye referred to the fact that the only English symphony to have attained popular traction at that time was Elgar’s First Symphony – a popularity based on the broad appeal of his earlier works, bringing visitors to the concert hall who had never previously attended.

The very superior … will point out the worthlessness of ‘Salut d’Amour’, the vulgarity of ‘Pomp and Circumstance’, and ask whether it is seriously proposed to rest the popularity of England’s greatest composer on kickshaws such as these. To which we may reasonably reply that popularity has nothing to do with greatness, but that it is a good thing that the great should be popular, however illogically or even undeservedly their popularity may have been acquired. And as to vulgarity, is it not to be found in the works of nearly all great composers? Consider the blatancy of early Wagner, the crudity of some Beethoven, even the exuberant spirits of the composer of ‘Non più andrai’ … vulgarity may be called the composer’s measles, a disease to be got over early but without which he cannot be said to have been properly brought up. Nor should such statement seem merely paradoxical when it is considered that vulgarity often postulates strength and directness – qualities most rare and most valuable in a composer. Indeed over-refinement is perhaps the most unmistakable hallmark of a second-rate talent … Sir Edward Elgar has at least dared to be straight-forward. He

86 Runciman, ‘Vulgarity in Music’. 87 Edward Elgar, A Future for English Music and other Lectures, ed. Percy Young (London: Dobson, 1968), 47 and 49, quoted in Hughes, ‘The Duc D’Elgar’, 49. Anti-Intellectualism and the Rhetoric of ‘National Character’ 227

is not so desperately anxious to be somebody greater than himself that he has ceased to be anybody at all.88 Dent would no doubt disagree with the final statement; yet the idea of a valuable directness is nonetheless illuminating with respect to the rhetorical link constructed between Englishness and modernity by the prizing of vulgarity. The meaning of the term ‘vulgarity’ was of course never unambiguous, and during the inter-war years music critics began to take advantage of what H. Morgan-Browne described, in 1932, as a ‘shameless three card trick’ by interchanging ‘intellectual vulgarity’, ‘ethical vulgarity’ and ‘aesthetic vulgarity’ without specifying which sense was intended.89 Nevertheless, there was clearly a sense among some that cultivating a homely ‘vulgarity’ could help move artists beyond the persistent influence among the ‘intellectual’ class, of a fading Continental late-Romanticism.90

88 Francis Toye, ‘The Prospects of English Music’, English Review (December 1910), 206–15, at 211. 89 ‘Anything is vulgar intellectuality speaking which only makes such a call on the intellect as the poorest intelligences can respond to with ease. Anything is vulgar ethically, which is not the exclusive appendage of a ruling caste. Anything is vulgar aesthetically which fails to stimulate and satisfy an exceptionally rich organic sensibility. They throw these cards face down, and you never know where the “aesthetic queen” has gone to’ (H. Morgan-Browne, ‘Vulgarity and Music’, British Musician and Musical News 8/81 (September 1932), 194–5). Morgan-Browne also identified a fourth kind of vulgarity – a ‘poverty in technique and craftsmanship’ – and in the second instalment to the article he wrote that critics exercised a kind of ‘unconscious blackmail’ over composers in their use of the term, ‘as if they said, “Now write music of which I approve, or I shall call it ‘vulgar’”’; see H. Morgan- Browne, ‘Vulgarity and Music II’, British Musician and Musical News 8/82 (October 1932), 226–7. 90 Taking this interpretation a step further, some in fact argued that vulgarity was a necessary attribute to ward against over-intellectualization, forwarding a form of ‘sublimated vulgarity’ without which the English would become, in a word, un-English: ‘vulgarity has its uses. It is a wise dispensation that compels a man regularly day by day to remember that he is a person vulnerable to physical indignity. When people begin to forget all about their vulgar bodies they are in danger of entering the vacuum which Nature abhors … The Englishman is usually an idealist, sometimes an intellectual prig, and always an able moralist. Such a combination would inevitably lead him to the insufferable pride which precedes a certain fall, were it not that Nature has providentially streaked his character with a healthy and companionable grossness.’ See John Palmer, ‘The Uses of Vulgarity’, Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art (25 April 1914), 530–1. 228 Sarah Collins ❧❧ Against the Complacency of Professionalism The terms ‘vulgar’ and ‘vulgarity’ in relation to music, then, shifted from referring to the pretentiousness of over-refinement associated with Continental decadence at the turn of the century, to gradually acquiring positive connotations of ‘strength and directness’ during and immediately after the War, primarily as a weapon against that same milieu. This mirrored shifts in the status of ‘intellectuals’ in Britain during that period, as we have seen. Yet these changes also responded to a perceived monopoly over musical training and practice held by middle-class professionals. Once again, there are many non-equivalences within the arguments against professionalism in music, though they tended to vacillate between conceiving of professionals either as self-interested tradesmen, corrupt and complacent officials, or reactionary members of an ‘intellectual aristocracy’. In the terms of the first mythology, the professionals plied their trade by offering practical instruction and practical examinations, and by encouraging a culture of technical craftsmanship at the expense of artistic inspiration and experimentation. The latter two mythologies emphasized the ineptitude and complacency of professionals who occupied positions of institutional power, and their desire to sure up their position rather than reform a system that was the greatest obstacle to the development of an ‘English’ music. The fluidity of this discourse reflected a broader split in middle-class identity, between what Lauren Goodlad described in the Victorian context as the ethoi of entrepreneurialism and professionalism respectively (a precursor perhaps to Orwell’s slightly different categories of ‘Blimps’ and intelligentsia).91 Goodlad’s categories are interlinked, of course – the authority of the entrepreneur and the professional both relied on the social mobility provided by free-market competition, notionally binding together the ‘self-made expert’ and the ‘self-made capitalist’, as she notes. Yet each groups developed antagonistic positions in relation to the other – the professionals became critical of industrial ‘progress’ and the consumer market, while the entrepreneurs were critical of officialdom, grouping middle-class professionals with upper-class ‘Old Corruption’ as well as with Continental-style bureaucracy.92 Samuel Smiles – the ‘principal mythologist of the entrepreneur’ in Victorian England and author of the famed book Self-Help (1859) – expressed this antagonism when commenting on the reforms proposed by the 1854 Northcote and Trevelyan Report on the Organization of the Permanent Civil Service. Goodlad summarizes:

91 Goodlad, ‘A Middle Class Cut into Two’; and Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn. 92 Goodlad, ‘A Middle Class Cut into Two’, 150. Anti-Intellectualism and the Rhetoric of ‘National Character’ 229

It is, [Smiles] opines, ‘a most pitiable sight’ to see educated young men ‘eager for the poorly paid and routine, though “genteel” occupation of a government office’. The system of ‘cramming’ for examinations, Smiles explains – employing a rhetoric made familiar by contemporaneous objection to state education – is ‘thoroughly demoralizing’. With so ‘little room left’ for ‘free’ mental action, ‘a functionarism as complete as’ China’s might develop, ‘at the expense of that constitutional energy and vigour … so indispensable’ to ‘a robust manhood’.93 Yet Matthew Arnold, who championed the value of the middle-class professional in Culture and Anarchy (1869), celebrated the cultivated and genteel credentials of professionals and the activities of the mind. It other words, the ethos of professionalism was not explicitly against the entrepreneur as outlined by Smiles (namely self-reliant, energetic and against bureaucracy), but rather was against a certain mode of entrepreneurship that promoted self-interest and exploitation. Similarly, Smiles’s entrepreneur did not reject the cultivation of mindful activities per se, but was merely against bureaucracy and officialdom. Later in the nineteenth century, the relationship between these two middle-class identities became further complicated, and in George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1870) the idea of the entrepreneur signalled a valorization not of exchange value for its own sake, but of labour.94 Even later, in the early twentieth century, the rhetoric of anti-intellectualism allowed music critics to cut across both the image of the philistine entrepreneur, whom Arnold had pilloried, and the cultivated intellectual professions he celebrated, constructing instead the figure of the artist who could be at once individual and national – both of the people and pioneering new forms, as we have seen. The impact that this confusion of middle-class identities had on the discussion of music can be seen in a different article by Runciman from 1895, where he cast his call for institutional reform in terms that conflated the qualities of tradesmen, officialdom and aristocracy simultaneously. On the one hand, he attributed the lack of any ‘school of English music’ or ‘music of our own’, to the fact that

in England music is a trade, and men and women go into it, as they might go into typewriting, with the one object of making it pay … our music schools, having been founded and carried on by men who went into music as a trade, have been in the past and are in only a slightly less degree at present, flagrantly commercial concerns. And on the other hand, he wrote that Sir A. C. Mackenzie had found the Royal Academy:

93 Ibid., 151. 94 Ibid., 161. 230 Sarah Collins

hopelessly diseased, and had to contrive the odious body known as the Associated Board to suck off the poison that was destroying it. In other words, the professors refused to give up the lucrative trade of examining, and Sir. A. C. Mackenzie had to allow them to continue.95 Runciman was less critical of the Royal College, but did note that its fees were ‘exorbitant’ and that the ‘main inducement it holds out to intending students is not that it will make artists of them, but that it can get them more or less profitable posts when their education is finished’. He concluded that the:

Academical atmosphere paralyses the most hopeful talent … scholarships are given, and the students take their lessons and grow impotent on them, and the professors take their fees and grow fat on them; and every one is so satisfied that no outsider dare grumble at the system.96 Though it goes without saying that Runciman’s assessment of the RAM and RCM hardly gives a balanced account, what concerns us here is the way in which these academies figured in the rhetoric that he employed and what this reveals about the interplay between anti-intellectualism and a range of middle-class identities. In this account, Runciman casts music students in a similar manner to the way Smiles casts prospective candidates for the civil service: as eager to attain qualifications in order to enter a comfortable and bloated officialdom, rather than pursuing a ‘vigorous’ or more adventurous course of action. Runciman was not alone in this assessment. Rutland Boughton, in a particularly strident essay of 1905, ‘Music and the People’, described the middle class as a ‘parasitic trading class’ whose outlook is so ‘distorted by the inevitable evils of trade-competition, and by their parasitic blood-sucking, lackey-like worship, and snobbish imitation of the wealthy’ that there is ‘no possible hope in any artistic, spiritual way’. Importantly, his description also conjoins trade and profession, with the middle classes preferring the ‘stinking warehouse’ and ‘unhealthy slavery at the desk’ to the ‘life-giving study and conquest of the earth’.97 Ernest Walker, in his History of Music in England (1907), made a similar point, declaring that ‘musical examination is neither education nor artis- t i c ’, 98 and criticizing parents’ obsession with certificates and honours rather than encouraging a vibrant self-reliance in young musicians.

95 John F. Runciman, ‘English Music and English Criticism’, Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art 80 (26 October 1895), 542–3. 96 Ibid. 97 Rutland Boughton, ‘Music and the People’, Musical Standard (16 December 1905), 385. 98 Ernest Walker, A History of Music in England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907), 355. Anti-Intellectualism and the Rhetoric of ‘National Character’ 231

By the time of the War, this association between the metropolitan musical academies’ apparent love of bureaucracy and examinations became additionally tainted with what was perceived to be their reactionary adher- ence to European Romanticism, and their belated imitation of the coterie of Brahms supporters surrounding Clara Schumann and Joseph Joachim on the Continent. Edwin Evans hinted at this point in 1915, lamenting the insularity of the musical sphere in England as a result of a culture of professionalism, and its separateness from broader cultural and intellectual ideas:

pro-British agitation is necessarily a rebellion against all that the official mind, trained in Germany, holds sacred. The less our official musicians have to do with present or future musical patrons, the greater the hope of realising the complete emancipation of English music. A committee of musically intelligent laymen, unassociated with any particular stream or eddy of musical life, could achieve more useful work than all the ‘Associated Boards’ in the kingdom.99 Indeed, in a later essay Evans echoed Runciman’s earlier concerns to a striking degree:

With the revival of music in the Public Schools, which had long treated the art with contumely, there has come a flood of college dilettantism which threat- ens to invade all its branches. Already to-day a Public School education is considered a better credential for a singer than the possession of a voice, and a better preparation for a critic than any amount of musical experience … Not merely is this developing a most insidious form of class consciousness, but it is fostering it in the very class which, except in scholarship, has contributed least to the vitality of English music. The growing ascendancy of this class in the musical community, its well-laid schemes to secure for itself every vacant musical appointment, its unceasing propaganda on behalf of its own members, and its invasion of the critical columns of the leading newspapers, of which it formerly inspired only one, are causing grave apprehension among many musicians who do not belong to that class, and even some who do. It is feared that the smugness which sterilized our music in Victorian days is returning to us in a Georgian form which may prove no less stifling.100 In one sense, there are many aspects to this diagnoses that still resonate with some forms of music training today – particularly concerns about the distorting outcomes of purely technical examination and the marketing to prospective students along the lines of vocational outcomes rather than artistic growth or the development of knowledge and skill for its own sake.

99 Edwin Evans, ‘The Emancipation of Music’, The English Review (1915), 178–87, at 185. 100 Evans, ‘A Survey Without Names’, 37–8. 232 Sarah Collins

Still, it is important to note that the target of these early twentieth-century accounts was invariably the metropolitan musical academies, rather than the university system, with the use of the term ‘academic’ describing a combination of practical instruction and professional elitism. Indeed, William Galloway made the point in 1910 that there was no systematic music training at ‘the older universities’, so that students were forced to seek their diplomas from the ‘great metropolitan training schools’, resulting in a ‘decided feeling of antagonism to the academic standpoint’.101 For some writers at the turn of the century, then, the academies of musical training seemed to represent an upwardly mobile middle class who sought merely to ape the culture of an entrenched officialdom or enhance their social or financial position, rather than pursue radical reform. To an extent, this view still remained in Dent’s mind in the inter-war period. For example, in a letter to his friend and colleague Clive Carey, consoling Carey on a recent professional set-back, Dent wrote:

I sympathize with all you say about your not being appreciated in England. It is the same thing, more or less, with almost all the Oxford and Cambridge people, though some have got on better than others. We may be able to do our jobs a great deal better than the professional gang, but we always behave as if we were amateurs. We frequent the society of amateurs and feel uncomfortable with professionals. We refuse to concentrate on one thing and are no good at pushing ourselves continually; we are too much artists and too little business men. You ought to have sung Herbert Hughes’s songs; you ought to have sedulously

101 William Galloway, Musical England (New York: John Lane, 1910), 11. More optimistically, however, Galloway noted that the situation was gradually changing, with measures such as Stanford’s introduction of the principle of residency to music students at Cambridge (subsequently followed by Manchester, Birmingham and Edinburgh universities), and the new literary and historical requirements of the award. In an article in The Athenaeum from 1877 that examines changes in the Music degrees at Cambridge, the author noted that the University Syndicate’s resistance to Professor Macfarren’s proposal to have only professional musicians on the Examination Board was a part of a desire to ‘make the Musical Faculty academically serviceable, and to domesticate it, as it were, as an integral portion of the academic system’, rather than merely conferring Musical Degrees ‘on persons having otherwise little or no connexion with the University’. The author called this shift an experiment of ‘naturalizing’ Music ‘within the academic walls’ – which may ‘inaugurate a new era in the musical history of the country’: ‘University Musical Degrees – Cambridge’, The Athenaeum (16 June 1877), 778. For more on the history of music and academia in Britain see Rosemary Golding, Music and Academia in Victorian Britain (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013). Anti-Intellectualism and the Rhetoric of ‘National Character’ 233

flattered Legge and Percy Pitt and various others – in fact done all the disgusting things which people like ourselves can’t bring ourselves to do.102 Like Runciman, Dent sought to mark the genuine British artist off from what he saw as the careerist professional of the ‘academy’ – a figure who was made to combine the self-interested commercial motivations of the businessman, with the bloated and comfortable complacency of middle-class professionals, who in this account simply ‘ticked boxes’ in order to move ahead, without creating anything new or pushing any boundaries. A number of the writers cited here advocated reform via a combination of two measures. First, musical studies were to be integrated within a broader liberal education offered by the ‘ancient universities’, in order to subvert the focus on technical mastery and to undermine the complacent professionalism attributed to the metropolitan academies, thereby encouraging an independent ‘clerisy’ within the universities and filling a gap much like that Anderson decried in English legal history. Second, they advocated the establishment of a National Opera, supported by state subsidy so that tickets were affordable, and populated by English singers, who would sing in English, both for the purpose of providing a training ground for native musicians separate from the commercial imperative to engage international artists, and for making the genre more accessible to a general public in the hope that it could help cultivate a broader sense of national culture. From the foregoing, we can see how the discourse on anti-intellectualism in British music criticism in the early twentieth century was used to support an agenda that was in fact not wholly inconsistent with that attributed to the apparently absent ‘intellectuals’ of the Anderson–Nairn account. It is true that the writers cited above were certainly never systematic in their thinking, and they were often sceptical of revolutionary change, both politically and musically. Yet at the same time, they did seek to subvert what they saw as a ‘sham’ bourgeois culture of both entrepreneurialism and professionalism within the institution of musical training – one that they believed had stultified innovation in British music. Similarly, while it is true that they often chose to cast ‘Englishness’ in opposition to Continental models, their nationalism in this sense was often a response to the associated sympathies of the ‘sham’ culture that they sought to undermine. Thus, while Vaughan Williams may have called atonality the ‘wrong-note school’ of composition and Foss may not have been the most radical of musical modernists, it is important to recall that Vaughan Williams was in favour of a federated Europe, and Foss, Dent and Evans were all intimately involved with the ISCM during its more radical inter-war

102 Edward Dent, letter to Clive Carey (21 October 1924), GB-Ckc, FCSC/1/1/9, item Folder 248. 234 Sarah Collins instantiation. In the context of early twentieth-century British music criticism, then, the discourse that construed anti-intellectualism as a constitutive feature of national character was explicitly aimed against the interests and sympathies of those who occupied positions of institutional power, and aesthetically it prized vitality and directness as part of a peculiarly British expression of modernism. Chapter 10 Chosen Causes: Writings on Music by Bernard van Dieren, Peter Warlock and Cecil Gray

Séamas de Barra

distinct change in tone became apparent in British music criticism after A 1918 as conventional journalistic reporting began to give way to the forceful assertion of individual opinion. For a new generation of critics, music became a more serious business, requiring every available rhetorical weapon in the defence of true artistic values. Their impatience with contemporary concert life and its routine programming was matched by their iconoclastic attitude to many of the public’s most venerated composers. In seeking to redress the balance between fashionable taste and the large amount of worthwhile music they believed it prevented from being heard, they became passionate advocates for the work of their contemporaries as well as for neglected music of both the recent and remote pasts. They were provocative in the service of their chosen causes and unconcerned if the expression of their views caused offence. Philip Heseltine (Peter Warlock) and Cecil Gray are among the most prominent representatives of this new trend that emerged between the wars, and they were outspoken in their revolt against everything that seemed stuffy and provincial in British musical life. They discovered their ideal of the dedicated artist in Bernard van Dieren, whose sophisticated cosmopolitanism and artistic integrity contrasted starkly with what they saw as the dispiriting mediocrity around them. They looked to him as a mentor, and admired him to the point of hero-worship. Bernard van Dieren (1887–1936) was one of the most elusive and enigmatic figures in British musical life of the period. He first came to London from the Netherlands in 1909 as music correspondent for various Dutch newspapers.1 By the time he was twenty he had succeeded in publishing a number

1 It is not clear how many: ‘for some of the Rotterdam newspapers’ (Hywel Davies, ‘Bernard van Dieren, Philip Heseltine and Cecil Gray: A Significant Affiliation’, Music & Letters 69/1 (1988), 30); ‘for at least one Dutch newspaper’ (Denis Ap Ivor, ‘Bernard van Dieren: Search and Rescue One Hundred Years On’, The Music Review 47/4 (1987) 254. 235 236 Séamas de Barra of compositions, although his musical training seems to have amounted to little more than a few violin lessons. He was a man of varied interests and wide attainments: in addition to composing, these ranged from medicine (in which he appears to have had some early training) to bookbinding, and in 1920 he published a monograph on the sculptor Jacob Epstein, with whom he was personally acquainted. By 1908 he had met Ferruccio Busoni – through his wife, who had been a pupil – and a friendship grew up between the two men that proved to be of the greatest significance for van Dieren’s creative and intellectual development. But journalism apart, his only substantial published criticism was a collection of essays, Down Among the Dead Men, which Oxford University Press brought out in 1935, the year before his death. ‘Everything about van Dieren was rare, fine, unusual’, wrote Osbert Sitwell, who left a vivid portrait of the composer in his autobiography.2 In Sitwell’s opinion, his was an unusual personality ‘combining as it did intellectual gifts of a high order with a spiritual integrity which was never forgotten by those who had experienced his company’.3 This view is certainly borne out by the overwhelming impression he made on Philip Heseltine (1894–1930) and Cecil Gray (1895–1951), two young men in their early twenties who were introduced to him by Epstein in 1916, shortly after they had first met each other. On the day following their initial encounter, Heseltine and Gray called on van Dieren at his Hampstead home, which marked the beginning of a friendship that was to endure for the rest of their lives. Both young men wrote to him immediately after their visit in the most fulsome terms, and both subsequently had composition lessons from him – which in the event proved more productive for Heseltine than for Gray, who declared that he learned little or nothing from them.4 What is of particular interest, however, is the degree to which van Dieren’s views on musical matters may have influenced the thinking of Heseltine and Gray. They may simply have discovered, of course, that many of van Dieren’s musical values coincided with their own and that they already shared a common outlook on certain important issues: it is possible that van Dieren merely helped them articulate their own beliefs. As they are expressed in Down Among the Dead Men, however, the preferences and prejudices of the older man are certainly echoed in the writings of the younger, even if these echoes are louder and clearer in Gray’s case than in Heseltine’s. Gray – only slightly younger than Heseltine, but less experienced musically and far less

2 Osbert Sitwell, Nobel Essences, or Courteous Revelations (London: Macmillan & Co., 1950), 26. 3 Ibid., 25. 4 See Cecil Gray, Musical Chairs, or Between Two Stools (London: Home & Van Thal, 1948), 109. Bernard van Dieren, Peter Warlock and Cecil Gray 237 mature intellectually in 1916 – certainly seems to have been the more susceptible of the two to the force of van Dieren’s personality, and more readily swayed by the strength of his opinions. From about 1912 onwards, van Dieren began to suffer from a chronic and debilitating kidney complaint. The withdrawn lifestyle to which this invalided condition condemned him undoubtedly contributed to the general perception of him as a mysterious figure who, again in Osbert Sitwell’s words, ‘pursued his own path, made no effort to compromise, and remained aloof, undeterred by lack of popular appreciation and understanding’.5 Out of personal loyalty as well as out of the conviction that he was one of the most important figures in contemporary music, both Gray and Heseltine exerted themselves to do what they could to promote his work – even if their good intentions did not always have the desired consequences. A passionate plea both for the re-assessment of received opinion regarding established figures and for the re-evaluation of neglected composers is one of the principal themes of Down Among the Dead Men. In van Dieren’s view, the existence of a canon at all is largely due to the sedimentation of ignorance, one generation’s lack of knowledge becoming the foundation for the next generation’s unthinking prejudices: ‘the reader of a text-book’, he argues, ‘does not always realize how many of its authoritative assertions are based on nothing more solid than another writer’s authoritative assertions’.6 In consequence, many notable figures are completely passed over, much valuable music remains unperformed and ‘musicians, not to mention “general readers”, come to believe that they hardly lose if they never hear a note of ninety composers out of every hundred, and that time and tide have already determined the relative values of the rest’.7 The injustice of such glib relegation to oblivion, especially when the work of the composers in question remains completely unknown, rouses van Dieren to the heights of eloquent indignation, and two of the most valuable chapters of his book are devoted respectively to his advocacy of Busoni and Meyerbeer, supplemented by many perceptive asides on individual figures, such as Puccini, Bellini, Berlioz and Alkan. (One cannot help thinking that in pleading their cause van Dieren may also, albeit indirectly, have been pleading his own.) But this laudable crusading spirit is complemented by a tendency to debunk, and van Dieren enjoys reducing established reputations to what, in his opinion, are more modest and realistic proportions. There is no mistaking his antipathy to both Brahms and Wagner, for example (in which he follows

5 Osbert Sitwell, Nobel Essences, 25. 6 Bernard van Dieren, Down Among the Dead Men (London: Oxford University Press, 1935), 201. 7 Ibid., 216. 238 Séamas de Barra

Busoni, especially with regard to Wagner), and he cannot resist the odd swipe at Stravinsky, Strauss and Scriabin. Although Lytton Strachey is mentioned only once in passing, the deliberate irreverence of van Dieren’s approach reminds one of Eminent Victorians, which was published in 1918, and, in this respect at least, Down Among the Dead Men chimes in perfectly with the work of post-war critics who were intent on bringing a cold critical light to bear on what the previous generation held most sacred, and mercilessly exposing the darker side of complacent Victorian conventionality. Of Eminent Victorians Harry Blamires says that there was ‘enough evidence of human weakness in the lives of these revered figures for Strachey’s witty, deflationary, and not always accurate pen to achieve its purpose of malicious debunking’.8 Although his assessments can be both exaggerated and unfocused, van Dieren, too, has the ability to see his subjects from unexpected and frequently unflattering angles. To what extent this habit of denigration may have been inculcated or at least encouraged by van Dieren is impossible to say, but it certainly became an early and conspicuous feature of Cecil Gray’s writing style – not so much of Heseltine’s – and one in which he often indulged with startling recklessness. The third principal strand in Down Among the Dead Men comprises an exposition of van Dieren’s vision of what might constitute a viable contemporary approach to composition and of the circumstances necessary to sustain it. It is clear that his reaction to many aspects of the nineteenth century, both social and artistic, was decidedly negative. The crass commercialism and cheap exploitation of artistic sensationalism repelled him. In music, he seems to have associated what he perceived as the current state of aesthetic degradation with the fact that progressive nineteenth-century composers became obsessively preoccupied with harmonic innovation. But this over-emphasis on harmonic audaciousness was, for him, not only a pernicious but also a futile development, since the ‘new chord, hailed with enthusiasm, brings no intrinsic enrichment – the ephemeral power of novelty passes’.9 Furthermore, this constant striving of composers after originality ultimately led, in his view, to ‘the monstrous growth of every element of the musical organism in turn’, which he believed was responsible for the problems besetting contemporary music.10

8 Harry Blamires, Twentieth-Century English Literature (London: Macmillan, 1982), 48. 9 Bernard van Dieren, Down Among the Dead Men, 255. It is interesting to compare this with Tovey’s view (dating from 1929 or earlier) that ‘whenever a composer becomes permanently preoccupied with harmonic ideas, his power of composition is in great danger of paralysis’; see Musical Articles from the Encyclopedia Britannica (London: Oxford University Press, 1944), 138. 10 Ibid., 225. Bernard van Dieren, Peter Warlock and Cecil Gray 239

Busoni’s influence can unmistakably be felt in van Dieren’s desire for high- minded aesthetic values untainted by artistic compromise. ‘Busoni has been called the prophet of the new music’, Willy Schuh remarked, adding: ‘A better description would be its conscience’. 11 By 1920, Busoni’s quest for stylistic purity had led him to believe that the main concern of contemporary composition should be ‘the casting off of what is “sensuous”, and the renunciation of subjectivity … the re-conquest of serenity’,12 and that this ascetic objective could properly be achieved only by returning to a fundamentally polyphonic conception of music. Writing of this approach as it was first manifested in the Fantasia Contrappuntistica (1910), Anthony Beaumont comments that ‘Busoni showed how polyphony could be freed from classical harmonic shackles and formed into a new language which, however dissonant, would at all times be absolutely logical’.13 Down Among the Dead Men unequivocally endorses this position: ‘One escape from the chaotic confusion’, van Dieren wrote, alluding to the crisis of contemporary music, ‘is an orientation which finds fixed points in polyphonic discipline. With this we renounce the chord-block conception of harmony that has been the cause of much musical distortion, and misery, and aesthetic squalor.’14 The most favourable circumstances for the single-minded pursuit of these lofty aesthetic aims, van Dieren believed, were those enjoyed by composers under the patronage of the Roman Catholic Church, which had ‘through all vicissitudes, preserved a venerable musical tradition intact in every country’. (This was of course written before the implementation of changes in the 1960s – in the wake of the Second Vatican Council – that effectively destroyed that tradition.) Although not a Roman Catholic himself, he saw the Catholic Church as creating an environment where ‘the surroundings in which the music is listened to, their spiritual associations, and everything implied in this relationship, here for once form a harmonious whole, with a universally understood meaning which appeals similarly to composer, executant and listener’. Such ‘stabilised organic unity’, van Dieren asserted, allowed the integration of music into a pure aesthetico-spiritual experience, and, ironically evoking Wagner, he observed that a ‘mincing aestheticism, considering the possibilities of a

11 Willy Schuh quoted in Anthony Beaumont, Busoni the Composer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 17 (italics in original). 12 Ferruccio Busoni, letter to Paul Bekker, quoted in Anthony Beaumont, Busoni the Composer, 25; see also Hywel Davies, ‘Bernard van Dieren (1887–1936)’, The Musical Times 128/1738 (1987), 677. 13 Anthony Beaumont, Busoni the Composer, 176. 14 Bernard van Dieren, Down Among the Dead Men, 226. 240 Séamas de Barra combination of all the arts, conveniently ignores to what an extent the Roman ritual already achieves this’.15 The sacred music of the high-Renaissance masters – which he describes as ‘one of the miracles of human achievement’16 – undoubtedly represented a glorious ideal for van Dieren. He found the general principle of disciplined polyphonic thinking and the control of musical design it allowed, as exemplified in sixteenth-century music, to be absolutely compelling, and he believed that the crucial task facing contemporary composers was to reimagine it persuasively in modern terms. It is not clear, however, how – or even if – he believed a secular counterpart to the artistic conditions afforded by the Roman Church might be achievable; how, in other words, he imagined composers might liberate themselves from the compromising vulgarities of the market- place in order to devote themselves to the cultivation of the polyphonic ideal and the preservation of their artistic and spiritual integrity. Down Among the Dead Men is, on the whole, a thought-provoking book in which the ideas are pithily and often wittily expressed. Its weaknesses lie in van Dieren’s fondness for fanciful generalizations, unsupported assertions, and a tendency to adopt an irritating posture of superior discernment and refinement of taste (a trait that to some extent also mars Philip Heseltine’s writing, and is particularly true of Cecil Gray’s, where it often appears in an exaggerated form). The author’s insights are compromised by his crankiness, and the final impression the book makes is (in the author’s own words) one of ‘nostalgic dissatisfaction’ – which he confidently attributes to ‘all thinking musicians’ – combined with a wistful yearning ‘for a faith and a discipline’.17 In attempting to account for the pervasive sense of discontent, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that it is inseparably bound up with an inchoate, unar- ticulated fantasy of a golden age. Located either in the past or in some vaguely anticipated future – when the artist could be integrated in perfect harmony into society – this constituted the principal criterion by which van Dieren assessed what he deemed the irredeemable shortcomings of his own time. A similar sense of dissatisfaction is to be found in the writings of Philip Heseltine and Cecil Gray. They, too, were sharply critical of many aspects of contemporary musical life, and particularly of what they saw as the chronically low standard of British music criticism. Both of them had strongly combative streaks, but unlike van Dieren, whose poor health imposed severe restrictions on his activities, they were able and willing to engage their opponents whenever they felt the prevailing orthodoxies needed to be challenged. Although not gifted

15 Ibid., 185, 186, 188. 16 Ibid., 223. 17 Ibid., 270. Bernard van Dieren, Peter Warlock and Cecil Gray 241 with the devastating irony of Lytton Strachey – their critical approach was less delicately oblique – like other eager young men of their generation, they deplored the self-satisfied pomposities of their elders and did not mind saying so. But this represented only one aspect of their writing: they were also generously and ide- alistically devoted to the cause of those composers whose importance – whether generally acknowledged or not – seemed to them to be incontrovertible. Philip Heseltine – or Peter Warlock, to refer to him by the pseudonym he first used in 1916 and by which he is now more widely known – is the only one of the three figures considered here whose reputation as a creative artist is sufficiently high to overshadow his accomplishments as a writer. Yet at least as much – possibly more – of Heseltine’s energies were devoted to criticism and musical scholarship as they were to composition. It is remarkable just how early his critical outlook began to come into focus. In 1912, when he was just seventeen years old, he published an enthusiastic and informative article on Schoenberg, one of the first to appear in English on the composer. Apparently prompted by what he regarded as ignorant pronouncements by contemporary critics, the article itself as well Heseltine’s confident contributions to the ensuing correspondence suggest a precocious intellectual assurance. The truth, however, is somewhat different. Despite his evident abilities, Heseltine suffered from chronic insecurity as a young man. He was deeply dissatisfied with his lack of systematic musical training and yet, at the same time, he was too impatient and impulsive to submit to the discipline that would enable him to acquire it. Constantly doubting the feasibility of a career in music, he was emboldened to abandon the prospect of entering the civil service only by advice from Delius and a timely intervention by Thomas Beecham (through whose good offices he was offered the post of music critic for The Daily Mail). The friendship he formed with Frederick Delius while he was still a schoolboy was the formative experience of Heseltine’s life. He first developed an interest in Delius’s music in about 1910, and it quickly became something of an obsession. After he met the composer at an all-Delius concert in London in 1911, he wrote to him to express his admiration and the letter initiated a correspondence that was to continue for the rest of his life. A few months later a brief stay in France gave him the opportunity to visit Grez-sur-Loing and renew the acquaintance. This early enthusiasm eventually culminated in the pioneering monograph of 1923, the first book-length study of the composer to be published. In his introduction to the 1952 reprint, Hubert Foss argues that Frederick Delius ‘has a natural beauty of its own’ and that in itself it merits consideration as a work of art.18 It certainly shows that Heseltine possessed

18 Hubert Foss, ‘Introduction’ to Peter Warlock (Philip Heseltine), Frederick Delius (London: The Bodley Head, 1952), 11. 242 Séamas de Barra uncommon literary abilities. It also represents his critical writing at its best, when he was responding positively to music he admired rather than reacting angrily to some perceived stupidity or obtuseness on the part of others. The book is written – as Foss rightly points out – in ‘affection and sympathy’.19 Its lasting interest lies in the value of the insights into the nature of Delius’s art from someone who knew him well and had a profound understanding of his music, and, in this respect at least, it occupies a unique place alongside Eric Fenby’s Delius as I Knew Him (1936) in the literature on the composer. Although Heseltine had a brief (and frustrating) spell as music critic for the Daily Mail in 1914–15, and subsequently published a handful of pieces in various periodicals and magazines, his most significant contribution to music journalism was his editorship of The Sackbut, nine issues of which he oversaw (with the assistance of Cecil Gray) between May 1920 and March 1921.20 ‘I want the first number to be very first-rate’, Heseltine announced, ‘to drop like a bomb into musical and pseudo-musical circles’21 – an aspiration that conveys well the general tenor of his editorial approach. But while he worked hard to ensure the periodical’s success, the publisher, Winthrop Rogers, grew nervous about the contentious nature of some of the material and withdrew as propri- etor. Heseltine failed to keep the enterprise going on his own, and when it was eventually taken over by John Curwen in July 1921 he was disappointed to find that his services as editor were no longer required. Heseltine himself wrote a great deal of material, both articles and reviews, for The Sackbut (often under pseudonyms). In addition to acting informally as assistant editor, Cecil Gray too contributed several substantial articles. Heseltine aimed to broaden the periodical’s scope to include pieces by literary figures – Roy Campbell, Arthur Symons and Robert Nichols were all contributors – and to promote concerts. Of the two Sackbut concerts that actually took place (on 18 October and 2 November 1920), the first featured the premier of van Dieren’s String Quartet No. 2. Gray had already sponsored a concert of van Dieren’s music in the Wigmore Hall in February 1917, for which Heseltine produced the advance publicity and Gray wrote the programme notes. But in the extravagance of their claims for the genius of the largely unknown composer, and in their gratuitously offensive and ill-advised attacks on established

19 Foss, ‘Introduction’ to Frederick Delius, 26. 20 Ten issues, according to some sources; see Fred Tomlinson, Warlock and van Dieren, with a van Dieren Catalogue (London: Thames Publishing, 1978), 24). The tenth issue, however, seems to have been assembled in Heseltine’s absence by The Sackbut’s secretary; see Barry Smith, Peter Warlock: The Life of Philip Heseltine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 185. 21 Letter from Philip Heseltine to Delius, 16 April 1920, quoted in Barry Smith, Peter Warlock: The Life of Philip Heseltine, 170. Bernard van Dieren, Peter Warlock and Cecil Gray 243 figures, they undoubtedly did van Dieren a great deal of harm on this occasion, making him appear ludicrous and prejudicing critics against him. It has been suggested that from the time of their first meeting in 1916, van Dieren began to replace Delius as the object of Heseltine’s hero-worship.22 As a composer, the association was unquestionably beneficial to him. Heseltine purified his compositional style under van Dieren’s influence, disciplining what he had absorbed from Delius into ‘clear vigorous part-writing’.23 This is evident in the three songs that comprise Saudades (1916–17), for example, which, while they undoubtedly reflect his mentor’s approach, also reveal for the first time in his work a distinctive and assured creative voice. Neither Heseltine nor Gray ever wavered in his loyalty to van Dieren, either personally or professionally: cognisant of his difficult circumstances, they frequently came to his assistance financially, and in spite of both public and critical indifference they took every opportunity to reiterate their belief in his significance as a composer. Although the exaggerated claims Heseltine and Gray made for van Dieren may seem eccentric in the light of subsequent music history, the same could not be said about their championship of other composers, one of whom was Béla Bartók. According to Malcolm Gillies, Heseltine and Gray helped ‘to induce the first substantial recognition of his talent outside Hungary. Moreover, through their writings they established certain critical attitudes to Bartók’s music that were adopted not merely in Britain but also in many other parts of Europe’.24 In November 1920, The Sackbut carried a major article by Gray on Bartók that represented the first comprehensive English-language survey of the composer’s output up to that point. True to form, however, Gray began the article with a direct attack on recently published criticism of Bartók’s work that he deemed ill-informed and misleading, and then proceeded to present an assessment of his own so couched in superlatives as to seem deliberately provocative. Around the same time, Heseltine, to whom Bartók’s name had been familiar since his school days, established personal contact with the composer when he wrote both to express his admiration for his work, and to convey his intention of promoting it in a number of forthcoming concerts to be given under the auspices of The Sackbut.25 Bartók was surprised and delighted at this intelli-

22 See Barry Smith, Peter Warlock: The Life of Philip Heseltine, 100. 23 Cecil Gray, Peter Warlock: A Memoir of Philip Heseltine (London: Jonathan Cape, 1934), 140. 24 Malcolm Gillies, ‘Bartók, Heseltine and Gray: A Documentary Study’, The Music Review 43/3–4 (1982), 177. 25 These concerts never took place. 244 Séamas de Barra gent interest in his music from an unexpected quarter, and he replied at length. Shortly afterwards, Cecil Gray, too, initiated a correspondence with the composer, and an abbreviated translation of his article appeared in the Viennese periodical Musikblätter des Anbruch in March 1921. The friendship deepened rapidly: in April 1921, Heseltine visited Bartók in Budapest; Gray also met him when he travelled to Hungary a few months later; and the June issue of The Sackbut for that year featured an article by Bartók on the relationship between folk song and art music.26 In March 1922, Bartók gave a successful concert tour in Britain and, partly by way of advance publicity, Heseltine published a substantial piece entitled ‘Modern Hungarian Composers’ in The Musical Times (discussing both Bartók and Kodály).27 Although both Gray and Heseltine met him again during his second visit to England in May 1923, and Gray reviewed his London concert enthusiastically, they do not appear to have met when Bartók returned the following November. After this, a certain distance opens up between them, partly, perhaps, because of Gray’s reservations about Bartók’s increasingly dissonant compositional idiom. Gray continued to write about his work, however, and after his death he warmly reappraised his achievement, welcoming in particular the greater mellowness of the music he produced during his final years in America.28 As a writer, Heseltine’s most important achievement – with the arguable exception of the book on Delius – is perhaps his contribution to the field of early music. There was widespread interest in the revival of early music in England in the 1920s. The pioneering efforts of such senior figures as Arnold Dolmetch, Sir Richard Terry, Edmund Fellowes and others meant that for the first time a substantial amount of a vast, and hitherto unknown corpus of work was gradually being made available by the publication of scholarly editions on the one hand and the systematic investigation into period performance practice on the other. England’s neglected musical heritage yielded unsuspected riches: Fellowes alone, for example, produced – among much other work – the thirty-six volumes of the English Madrigal School between 1913 and 1924, was a member of the editorial board responsible for the ten-volume edition of Tudor Church Music, which appeared between 1923 and 1929, and in 1950,

26 ‘The Relation of Folk Song to the Development of Art Music of our Time’, The Sackbut (June 1921), 5–11. 27 ‘Modern Hungarian Composers’, The Musical Times (March 1922), 164–7; reprinted in Barry Smith, ed., The Occasional Writings of Philip Heseltine (Peter Warlock), Vol. III: Musical Criticism (2) (London: Thames Publishing, 1998), 38–44. 28 Gray devoted an entire chapter of A Survey of Contemporary Music (London: Oxford University Press, 1924) to Bartók; he also discussed him in Predicaments, or Music and the Future (London: Oxford University Press, 1936) as well as in his autobiography, Musical Chairs. Bernard van Dieren, Peter Warlock and Cecil Gray 245 the year before he died, brought to completion his monumental edition of The Collected Works of William Byrd. Heseltine’s scholarly interests developed in this stimulating context. It seems that his curiosity about early music dates from about 1915, but it was really only after the cessation of his involvement in The Sackbut that he began to devote himself seriously to its study. Although largely self-taught in the techniques such work demanded, from about 1922 onwards he transcribed, edited and published an impressive amount of music, ranging from Elizabethan lute songs and part-songs to seventeenth-century instrumental music.29 These editions were supplemented by informative articles in various journals and by independent studies, such as Thomas Whythorne: An Unknown Elizabethan Composer (1925) and, especially, The English Ayre (1926), both of which appeared under the name of Peter Warlock. Informing and sustaining all of this activity was Heseltine’s conviction that the works of these composers were not ‘“antiques” in need of restoration […] but living music (the best of them) in technique as in vital expression’, and that they should be made available in practical, scholarly editions that would facilitate their performance.30 Nor was his interest exclusively confined to English music. In 1926, writing as Philip Heseltine, he and Gray collaborated on Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa: Musician and Murderer, Gray being responsible for the biographical aspect of the book and Heseltine for the study of the music. Based on original archival research, this book might be said to have introduced Gesualdo to contemporary English-speaking readers, who knew little or nothing about either his life or his work. In a posthumous tribute, Terry generously summed up Heseltine’s achievement as a critic and editor of early music: he ‘was a scholar’, he said, ‘but not a pedant; a consummate technician, but withal possessed of vision; a creative artist who could penetrate the minds of Elizabethan composers as no mere transcriber could ever hope to do’.31 In turning to examine Cecil Gray’s career, one notes that at the beginning of his 1948 autobiography, Musical Chairs, or Between Two Stools, he identified himself as both a composer and a writer. Although he completed three operas (but little else), composing seems to have remained essentially a private activity throughout his life, and he showed little interest in hearing his music performed. He is now remembered primarily as a music critic, the

29 For a detailed summary of Heseltine’s achievements as a scholar and editor of early music, see ‘Appendix I: A Note on Warlock’s Work as Editor and Writer’, in I. A. Copley, The Music of Peter Warlock (London: Denis Dobson, 1979), 269–84. 30 Quoted in Barry Smith, ed., The Occasional Writings of Philip Heseltine (Peter Warlock), Vol. II: Early Music (London: Thames Publishing, 1998), 14. 31 ‘Sir Richard Terry’s Tribute’, in Gray, Peter Warlock, 273. 246 Séamas de Barra confrontational nature of whose writing is mitigated to some extent by his flair for the witty and acerbic expression of startlingly unorthodox views. But while this assessment may be true, it is only partly true; and insofar as it suggests that Gray’s principal motivation was simply to shock, it is misleading. As Hubert Foss pointed out, Gray ‘was supremely interested in one thing only – in art and its perfection’, and he passionately believed that whatever obstructed the realization of this ideal should be strenuously opposed.32 It was an approach that undoubtedly led him to adopt extreme positions, often to the point where he compromised his credibility. But it is important to remember that, while he may occasionally have stood in his own way, Gray was fundamentally a champion of causes, chief among which was the cause of art itself. In a revealing passage in Musical Chairs written in disillusionment after World War II, he records his conviction that, with religion’s failure and science’s recent betrayal of mankind, there remains only ‘the possibility of the salvation of humanity through the medium of art’, adding: ‘That is my one and only Credo, which nothing can shake – not even the atomic bomb.’33 Such a belief in the supreme importance of art can admit no compromise; holding this view, his passionate intemperance becomes a little more understandable, if not more acceptable. Apart from some early lessons with Healey Willan, Gray was essentially self-taught as a musician. His cherished ambition was to become a composer, and as a schoolboy he penned a large amount of music, ‘the unspeakable badness’ of which, he later admitted, ‘deals me pangs of retrospective anguish to this day’.34 But, although he had no systematic training and no qualifications – having abandoned Granville Bantock’s course at the Birmingham and Midland Institute after a single term – he moved to London in 1915 in the vague hope, apparently, of being able to establish himself there in some musical capacity. (He was fortunate in that private means relieved him of the necessity of having to earn a living.) The following year, as mentioned above, he met Philip Heseltine and Bernard van Dieren, both of whom were to have a profound influence on his development. Gray’s literary career commenced with the former’s appointment as editor of The Sackbut. He subsequently wrote music criticism for various newspapers, including The Daily Telegraph and The Manchester Guardian, but he first came to serious public attention with the publication in 1924 of A Survey of Contemporary Music. According to Gray’s own account, this was conceived as the central volume in a projected three-volume study that would cover the past, present and

32 Hubert Foss, ‘Cecil Gray, 1895–1951’, The Musical Times 92/1305 (November 1951), 497. 33 Gray, Musical Chairs, 158. 34 Ibid., 85. Bernard van Dieren, Peter Warlock and Cecil Gray 247 future of the art of music.35 The History of Music, the first volume in chronological order, was published four years later, and in 1936, with the appearance of Predicaments, or Music and the Future, this ambitious magnum opus was finally brought to completion. Unsuspecting readers who perused A Survey of Contemporary Music in 1924 expecting to find an objective account of the current state of modern composition must have been taken aback. To say that the book is uninhibitedly partisan and stridently opinionated is scarcely to do it justice. ‘No apology’, Gray explains at the outset, ‘is offered for the outspoken manner of the following studies’:

After all, it is only within the last generation or so that it has come to be considered almost indecent to hail a living artist as a genius, and ungentlemanly to suggest that another is an imbecile. It is only recently that the pernicious heresy has arisen which teaches that no genius is without faults, and no mediocrity without redeeming features, and that consequently we must mingle our praise of the one with blame, and leaven our censure of the other with judicious approval, until black and white are merged into a uniform level of grey.36 This extract conveys well Gray’s flamboyant manner. And while his views are frequently both maddening and preposterous, he could certainly never be accused of timidity in expressing them. ‘Why should one be afraid of being wrong?’ he asked. ‘No doubt it is good to be right, but it is even better to have the courage of one’s convictions.’37 In fairness to Gray, he never claimed universal validity for his opinions:

We can only see a work of art from one angle, from one point of view. No doubt there is an ultimate in which all points of view are reconciled and all contradictions are resolved, but it is unattainable in practice, the way I cannot see all round the table at once. And this is what the objective critic is always trying to do, with the result that he sees nothing at all.38 One of Gray’s principal weaknesses as a critic lies in this all-or-nothing approach. His fondness for arguing in the abstract causes him to forget that diametrically opposed concepts like ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ do not have an exact correlation with the realities of human experience, and that any criticism carried out in such starkly black-and-white terms is unlikely to yield much of

35 Ibid., 294. 36 Gray, A Survey of Contemporary Music, 8. 37 Ibid., 7. 38 Cecil Gray, ‘Subjective Criticism’, The Musical Times (1 February 1926), 161, letter to the Editor in response to remarks by Ernest Newman. 248 Séamas de Barra value or interest. What Gray offers his readers here, as he does so often in his writings, are half-truths masquerading as the whole truth. The main body of A Survey of Contemporary Music consists of twelve individual studies of those composers who, in Gray’s view, merited detailed discussion. Supplementing these is an introductory chapter on music in the nineteenth century, and a concluding chapter, ‘Minor Composers’, in which everyone else of any note is dealt with summarily. Most of the individual figures are those one would expect to feature in such a volume at the time. But there are surprises. The devotion of an entire chapter to the largely unknown van Dieren certainly raised a few eyebrows, especially as his distinguished British contemporaries – Bax, Vaughan Williams and others – were relegated to the section on ‘Minor Composers’. It is also possible to detect van Dieren’s influence in Gray’s decision to include a substantial piece about Busoni, who, although undoubtedly important, is given undue prominence in relation to contemporaries who might be thought to have greater significance. Writing more than twenty years later, Gray acknowledged ‘a slightly cock-eyed perspective here and there’, referring in particular to the inadequate attention paid to Berg, Webern, Prokofiev and Walton, whose most important creative achievements did not appear until after the book was published.39 His single disparaging comment on Mahler – even Puccini, whom he also considered to be a minor figure, is allotted several paragraphs – indicates most clearly how time has altered the relative critical standing of the composers about whom he wrote. Of the others, Schoenberg is treated respectfully; as to some extent – although grudgingly – is Elgar. But apart from van Dieren, Gray’s whole- hearted approval is reserved for Bartók, Delius and Sibelius. If he shows scant enthusiasm for Debussy and Ravel, he makes no effort to conceal his antipathy to Strauss and Stravinsky, while he is unsparingly dismissive of Scriabin, whose work inspires him to new heights of hostile invective:

First we had the synthetic philosophy of Herbert Spencer, then synthetic drugs, synthetic pearls, synthetic butter (popularly known as margarine), and synthetic sugar, or saccharine. Now Scriabine has given us synthetic music, musicine, a product which bears much the same relation to music as margarine to butter, and saccharine to sugar.40 Although doubtless effective as provocation, such writing is less likely to be successful as persuasion, simply because, as one contemporary reviewer

39 Gray, Musical Chairs, 178–9. 40 Ibid., 155. Bernard van Dieren, Peter Warlock and Cecil Gray 249 reasonably remarked, the author’s ‘violent and reckless attitude makes one distrust his judgement’.41 The History of Music, which was first published in 1928,42 is also compromised by much that is questionable: ‘Perhaps it is too much to expect a historian of music to keep his prejudices entirely in abeyance’, the reviewer for The Musical Times observed, ‘but Mr. Gray might almost be said to flaunt his.’43 Based on impressively wide reading and first-hand knowledge of an enormous amount of music, the book is a disconcerting compound of penetrating insight and nonsense in more or less equal measure. The latter becomes more concentrated towards the end as Gray moves into the nineteenth century and permits his personal taste to dominate his judgement: given his intellectual anteced- ents, it is not entirely surprising to find that, although acknowledged to be industrious, Brahms, is considered to be merely ‘a timid, uneasy, self-conscious imitator of the classical masters’;44 or, more startlingly, that Wagner’s music is little more than an amalgam of what he stole from others (‘few composers have actually invented less’);45 while Tchaikovsky is patronisingly granted ‘musical gifts of a high order’ which, we are told, ‘go a long way towards reconciling us to the undeniable vulgarity and unwholesome sentimentality of his ide- a s’. 46 And there is a great deal more of the same. Such negative assessments, of course, flatly contradicted the generally accepted view of such composers. On the other hand, Gray’s sympathetic and astute discussion of such figures as Bellini, Berlioz and Bruckner owed little or nothing to contemporary opinion, which seriously undervalued them, and demonstrate the positive side of his contrariness.47 The depth of Gray’s learning and his fundamental seriousness are perhaps most in evidence in the opening chapters of The History of Music, which deal with Gregorian chant and the age of polyphony. His painstaking research

41 The Musical Times 65/982 (1 December 1924), 1095–6 [review signed ‘H. G.’]. 42 The History of Music was commissioned by Keegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. as a component volume in the series The History of Civilisation, ed. C. K. Ogden, hence the ambitious title. 43 Anonymous review of Gray’s The History of Music, in The Musical Times 69/1026 (1 August 1928), 711. 44 Gray, The History of Music, 232. 45 Ibid. 207. 46 Ibid., 255. 47 Gray was not alone in his insistence on Berlioz’s greatness as a composer. Heseltine shared his view, and J. W. Turner, an older contemporary who may be compared to Gray in his readiness to speak his mind without regard for current opinion, was also a passionate advocate of Berlioz’s music. See Wayne McKenna, W. J. Turner, Poet and Music Critic (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1990). 250 Séamas de Barra in the British Museum was complemented by regular attendance at Mass in Westminster Cathedral, where he heard Sir Richard Terry’s choir (now performing under his successor)48 sing an extensive repertoire of sixteenth-century sacred music that was scarcely known ‘even to otherwise erudite musicians, scholars, and critics’.49 As Timothy Day points out: ‘Nowhere else at that time could he have had a similar experience.’50 This enabled him to evolve a rich, authentic response to the music of the period as a living art, and – for all its shortcomings by modern standards – to present a full and absorbing account that is free of pedantry and that also largely manages to avoid the kind of wilful opinionatedness that mars the later chapters. In 1931, Gray published a short monograph entitled simply Sibelius, which proved to be one of his most important and influential books. Gray first met Sibelius in 1929. When on a visit to Estonia, he persuaded The Daily Telegraph, for which he was working at the time, to divert him to Finland to interview the composer. The meeting and the warm rapport that developed between the two men is described in the author’s customary lively style in Musical Chairs.51 Gray returned to Finland two years later to obtain biographical information for the book as well as to examine unpublished or otherwise inaccessible works, and although he had already written appreciatively of Sibelius in A Survey of Contemporary Music, he now became convinced that the Finnish master would ‘ultimately prove to have been, not only the greatest of his generation, but one of the major figures in the entire history of music’.52 Gray argued that if Sibelius’s name was well known, it was almost entirely as the composer of comparatively slight, popular pieces like Finlandia and Valse triste, while his greatest music was largely ignored. Few contemporary critics shared Gray’s understanding of Sibelius’s importance as a symphonist or grasped as clearly the originality of his contribution to the post-Beethoven, European symphonic tradition. Gray placed the symphonies unequivocally at the centre of Sibelius’s achievement, and while his view of the composer’s handling of symphonic construction might find few adherents today, it was considered authoritative in the 1930s and 1940s. As Laura Gray points out:

48 Terry had resigned his Westminster post in 1924. 49 Gray, Musical Chairs, 247. 50 Timothy Day, ‘Sir Richard Terry and Sixteenth-Century Polyphony’, Early Music 22/2 (1994), 297. One wonders to what extent van Dieren’s view of the ideal relationship that he believed existed between composers and the Roman Catholic Church was indebted to Terry’s achievement at Westminster Cathedral. (Terry is alluded to in Down Among the Dead Men, 224.) 51 Gray, Musical Chairs, 255 ff. 52 Cecil Gray, Sibelius (London: Oxford University Press, 1945 [1931]), 13. Bernard van Dieren, Peter Warlock and Cecil Gray 251

‘It remained virtually unchallenged for almost twenty years, continuing to be cited in numerous concert programmes well into the 1960s.’53 It is a testimony to Gray’s persuasiveness as a critic that the monograph, as the first detailed study of its kind to appear internationally, played a major role in the increasingly sympathetic, intelligent and informed reception of Sibelius’s work throughout the 1930s.54 In England, Erik Tawaststjerna claims that the number of London performances rose steeply in the wake of its publication, culminating in the 1937 and 1938 Sibelius Festivals.55 But here, too, Gray risks spoiling his work by overstating his case. Tawaststjerna reports that, from Sibelius’s point of view, ‘it was as flattering as it was embarrassing to be placed not alongside Beethoven but at times above him’.56 And one can only wonder why, in seeking to elucidate the Finnish composer’s formal procedures, Gray should have felt compelled to argue that German music is ‘fundamentally opposed to the symphonic style’.57 Fortunately, however, for most readers the positive aspects of the book outweighed the negative. A few years later, Gray published as a supplement a short separate study, Sibelius: The Symphonies, which was, as he wrote, intended to be ‘more analytical and expository than critical or appreciative’.58 Predicaments, or Music and the Future, the final instalment of the long- planned trilogy, eventually appeared in 1936. In it, Gray attempted to place the discussion of music on a broader cultural base, though he presents his argument in terms that are so general and so nebulously speculative – ‘The Artistic Supremacy of Races’, being the title of one chapter, for example – as to be virtually without substance. He examined the various aesthetic movements that shaped contemporary composition – nationalism, atonalism, neo-classicism – and forecast that none of them would endure. The future of music, he believed, lay in a new classical ideal, which could be glimpsed in the work of Sibelius and van Dieren:

It is no coincidence, then, that the two composers, of the older and the younger generation respectively, whose achievement seems to promise most for the future should be thus intimately related to Busoni, not merely personally, but spiritually; for the musical art of the future of which Busoni dreamed has been

53 Laura Gray, ‘Sibelius and England’, in Glenda Dawn Goss, ed., The Sibelius Companion (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996), 289. 54 See Erik Tawaststjerna, Sibelius, Vol. III: 1914–1957, trans. Robert Layton (London: Faber & Faber, 1997), 300–1. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid., 299. 57 Gray, Sibelius, 191. 58 Cecil Gray, Sibelius: The Symphonies (London: Oxford University Press, 1935), 3. 252 Séamas de Barra

adumbrated in the work of these two to a greater extent than in that of any other contemporary composers.59 When one looks back over the eighty years since Gray advanced the book’s conclusions, it is difficult to disagree with the perceptive contemporary reviewer who characterized them as ‘well uttered, readable, and rash’.60 Gray brought out his short, descriptive study The Forty-Eight Preludes and Fugues of J. S. Bach in 1938; after that, there was no further major publication until after the War, when in 1947 Contingencies and other Essays (a compilation of pieces written between 1922 and 1943) appeared. In 1948 he published his final, and for modern readers perhaps his most appealing, book: the autobiographical Musical Chairs, or Between Two Stools. It presents an engaging account of his life, his ambitions and his achievements, together with reminiscences of his acquaintances and friends, both musical and literary – including interesting recollections of D. H. Lawrence. In one amusing passage he takes indignant exception to certain disparaging remarks of Osbert Sitwell’s about Philip Heseltine, concluding that ‘the misfortune, however, is chiefly that of the author, because no one who reads this book will be able entirely to believe anything that Sir Osbert says in future’. ‘People who launch boomerangs’, he adds sententiously, ‘should not be surprised when they return to their point of departure.’61 As someone who happily launched innumerable boomerangs throughout his career, it is curious that he seemed unaware of the irony of this rebuke. Because he outlived both Heseltine and van Dieren, Gray was in a position to write accounts of their lives as well as his own. Heseltine’s death in 1930 – by suicide it is generally thought (though the result of the inquest was an open verdict) – came as a terrible shock. With van Dieren’s advice and assistance, he undertook to write the biography of his friend, and many regard Peter Warlock: A Memoir of Philip Heseltine, which was published in 1934, as Gray’s single finest achievement. His suggestion, however, that Heseltine developed a split personality and that a self-destructive alter ego manifested itself as Peter Warlock – ‘the infamous theory’62 – has not found universal acceptance: ‘I am convinced’, Arthur Hutchins later wrote, ‘that the Jekyll–Hyde analogy between shy Heseltine and diabolist Warlock is largely Gray’s creation’;63 and

59 Gray, Predicaments, 286. 60 Herbert Bedford, Review of Cecil Gray, Predicaments, or Music and the Future, in Music & Letters 17/3 (July 1936), 270. 61 Gray, Musical Chairs, 262–3. See also Osbert Sitwell, The Scarlet Tree (London: Macmillan & Co. 1946), 265. 62 Brian Collins, Peter Warlock the Composer (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996), 341. 63 Arthur Hutchins, ‘The Heseltine–Warlock Nonsense’, The Listener 70/1788 (July 1963), 34. Bernard van Dieren, Peter Warlock and Cecil Gray 253 for many of those who knew him, I. A. Copley notes, ‘the differences between Heseltine and Warlock were little more than the differences between Philip sober and Philip drunk’.64 Bernard van Dieren died in 1936. The BBC broadcast a memorial concert of his works (conducted by Constant Lambert) the following year, and Gray marked the occasion with a piece in the Radio Times in which he compared the breadth of the composer’s varied interests and accomplishments to those of Leonardo da Vinci.65 Arresting though such an assertion may be, Gray’s undoubted sincerity in urging van Dieren’s all-round genius seems to have prevented him from realizing that it might also prove to be counterproductive. Gray commenced work on a biography of van Dieren in 1938. ‘In the book which I intend to write about van Dieren’, he confided to his notebooks:

I hope to be able to achieve something of what Plato did for Socrates – to realise and bring out all the implications of what was inexpressed, and to add to it something of my own – to build him up into something more than he actually was without any falsification of the intrinsic personality. For he was a great man, the greatest man I have ever known, or ever shall know. He was the greatest man of our age, potentially, not perhaps in actual achievement – and that constitutes the justification of the book as I have conceived it.66 By the time of his death thirteen years later, however, the book had not advanced beyond a rough draft. Gray’s reluctance to complete it may have been partly because of the sensitivity of van Dieren’s widow to potential criticism of her late husband, especially with regard to his importuning his friends for money or to the controversial contents of Heseltine’s will.67 According to Fred Tomlinson, Gray’s notes were edited for inclusion in a symposium on the composer that was scheduled for publication in 1970, but the book never appeared.68

64 I. A. Copley, The Music of Peter Warlock: A Critical Survey (London: Denis Dobson, 1979), 25. 65 Cecil Gray, ‘Van Dieren: The Modern Leonardo’, Radio Times (2 April 1937), 6. 66 Pauline Gray, Cecil Gray: His Life and Notebooks (London: Thames Publishing, 1989), 169. 67 See Denis Ap Ivor, ‘Bernard van Dieren: Search and Rescue One Hundred Years On’, 259–60. In his will Heseltine left the royalties from his works to van Dieren; his son, Nigel Heseltine, states that Heseltine’s mother bought out van Dieren’s interest in the will for £6,000. See Nigel Heseltine, Capriol for Mother: A Memoir of Philip Heseltine (Peter Warlock) (London: Thames Publishing, 1992), 166. 68 See Fred Tomlinson, Warlock and van Dieren, with a van Dieren Catalogue (London: Thames Publishing, London, 1978), 6. Tomlinson states that Gray’s draft 254 Séamas de Barra

In an unsympathetic summary of his career, Frank Howes, a fellow critic, noted that Gray’s contradictoriness, ‘while making for lively reading, neither aided his chosen causes, nor conferred permanent value on his books’.69 But Gray’s contribution to the reception of the music of Bartók, Sibelius, Warlock and others cannot be disputed (van Dieren must be regarded as a special case), and his advocacy in the 1920s and 1930s of such neglected major figures as Berlioz and Bellini showed a capacity for sound independent critical judgement that proved itself to be far ahead of its time. On the other hand, it may be doubted if Gray ever believed that his books might have a ‘permanent value’. He was perfectly well aware of the transient nature of his work: ‘Musical criticism is, at best, a humble and somewhat disreputable activity’, he wrote in 1920. ‘I am even inclined to believe that all the musical criticism in the world is not worth one bar of good music.’70

was first edited and annotated by John Goss, and subsequently re-edited and re-annotated by Bernard J. van Dieren, the composer’s son. 69 Frank Howes, ‘Gray, Cecil’, in Stanley Sadie, ed., The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (London: Macmillan, 1980), Vol. VII, 650. (New Grove 2 (2000) reprints the same article.) 70 Cecil Gray, ‘A Critique of Pure Cant’, The Sackbut (July 1920), 115. Chapter 11 ‘Es klang so alt und war doch so neu’: Vaughan Williams, Aesthetics and History

Aidan J. Thomson

aughan Williams’s writings on music cover a period of over sixty years, V from his 1897 article in The Musician, ‘The Romantic Movement and Its Results’, to the posthumously published ‘Introduction’ to Classic English Folk Songs in 1959.1 They include articles published in periodicals, encyclopaedia entries, programme notes, introductions to monographs and editions, and three collections of essays: National Music (based on lectures that Vaughan Williams had given at Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania, in 1932), Some Thoughts on Beethoven’s Choral Symphony with Writings on Other Musical Subjects, and The Making of Music (based on lectures given at Cornell University in 1954).2 This substantial body of work reflects the wide range of the composer’s musical interests: the art music of the past and present (including his own works), the folk song movement and the social function of music in Britain. As the leading British composer of his generation and a scholar in the field of hymnody and folk music, Vaughan Williams was both an artist and a public intellectual, and his opinions on music undoubtedly carried much weight. Among the many influences on Vaughan Williams, four stand out in relation to his writings. First, his teachers, particularly Hubert Parry, Charles Villiers Stanford and Maurice Ravel, who, as Byron Adams has shown, refined Vaughan Williams’s technique as a composer and did much to shape his views on compositional pedagogy.3 A second influence was the Folk-Song Society,

1 David Manning, ed., Vaughan Williams On Music (hereafter VWOM) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), xv–xix. Vaughan Williams’s own publications appear below without reference to his authorship. 2 National Music (London: Oxford University Press, 1934); Some Thoughts on Beethoven’s Choral Symphony with Writings on Other Musical Subjects (London: Oxford University Press, 1953); The Making of Music (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1965). The three appear in a single volume: Ralph Vaughan Williams, National Music and other Essays (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996) (hereafterNM ), at 1–82, 83–120, and 205–42 respectively. 3 Byron Adams, ‘Vaughan Williams’s Musical Apprenticeship’, in Alain Frogley and Aidan J. Thomson, eds, The Cambridge Companion to Vaughan Williams (hereafter 255 256 Aidan J. Thomson of which Vaughan Williams was an active member from 1902. His many essays on folk song reflect not only his first-hand experience as a collector, but also his engagement with the views of other leading members of the society, especially Cecil Sharp. A third influence stems from the composer’s student days at the Royal College of Music, where he was an active member of a debating society that met on Saturday afternoons. The society considered matters of both musical and wider cultural interest; among the papers Vaughan Williams contributed was ‘The Rise and Fall of the Romantic School’, which was probably the origin of ‘The Romantic Movement and Its Results’.4 The legacy of this was Vaughan Williams’s willingness to discuss his music with close friends and contemporaries, above all Gustav Holst.5 The fourth influence was Vaughan Williams’s social circle during his undergraduate days in Cambridge, which included two future recipients of the Order of Merit: the philosopher G. E. Moore and the historian G. M. Trevelyan. Moore, Trevelyan and Vaughan Williams’s cousin, Ralph Wedgwood, all belonged to the Apostles, a leading Cambridge intellectual society; Vaughan Williams himself was considered for membership, though ultimately was not invited to join.6 Vaughan Williams scholarship has generally underplayed the role played by this group in the formation of the composer’s musical ideas: surprisingly so, given that Vaughan Williams, Moore and Trevelyan were all part of Britain’s ‘intellectual aristocracy’, the ‘extensively intermarrying cousin- hood of high-minded Evangelical and professional middle-class families’ who dominated academia, politics and the civil service in the first half of the twentieth century.7 According to Paul Levy, Vaughan Williams, Moore, Trevelyan, Wedgwood and Maurice Amos were ‘intimate friends’ at Cambridge, sufficiently close that they went on three reading parties together in the 1890s (to Skye in 1894, Seatoller in the Lake District in 1895, and Penmenner, Cornwall, in 1896).8 While some of the reading on these expeditions was recreational,

CCVW) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 29–55. 4 Ursula Vaughan Williams, R.V.W. (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), 44. Among the non-musical topics was a discussion of Max Nordau’s recently published Degeneration (1892). 5 Much of the correspondence between Vaughan Williams and Holst is documented in Ursula Vaughan Williams and Imogen Holst, eds, Heirs and Rebels: Letters Written to Each Other and Occasional Writings on Music by Ralph Vaughan Williams and Gustav Holst (New York: Cooper Square, 1974). 6 Paul Levy, Moore: G. E. Moore and the Cambridge Apostles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 53. 7 Julian Onderdonk, ‘The Composer and Society: Family, Politics, Nation’, CCVW, 18. 8 Levy, Moore, 139, 150. Vaughan Williams, Aesthetics and History 257 serious topics were certainly discussed as well.9 It is quite possible that the aesthetics of art were among these; it was certainly a subject of interest to Moore, as will be seen below.10 Moreover, Moore was an accomplished pianist and sang in the Cambridge University Musical Society choir under Stanford; many years later, Vaughan Williams reminded him of his ‘sing[ing] “Adelaide” & play[ing] Beethoven sonatas’ as a student.11 Vaughan Williams remained friends with both Moore and Trevelyan for the rest of his life, although they were not as close in later life as during their student days. It is not hard to see Trevelyan’s influence in Vaughan Williams’s writings. The composer quoted Trevelyan’s influential History of England in several essays, notably a passage in which the historian discussed how, during the period between the Norman Conquest and the Hundred Years’ War when it was essentially ‘a peasants’ dialect’, the English language ‘acquired the grace, suppleness and adaptability’ that led to the achievements of Chaucer, Wycliffe, Shakespeare and Milton: a process similar to what Vaughan Williams hoped would be achieved in English music through the rediscovery of folk song.12 More generally, Vaughan Williams and Trevelyan, at least initially, shared a Victorian belief in progress – in Vaughan Williams’s case through the evolutionist thinking of his approach to folk song and music history more generally, in Trevelyan’s through historiography in the Whig tradition – though both men had to address the challenge posed to the progressive narrative by the First World War. The influence of Moore is less immediately obvious, given that Vaughan Williams was often more concerned with practical music-making and craftsmanship than with theories of art, about which he was sceptical. In an important early essay, ‘Who Wants the English Composer?’, he wrote that ‘The composer must not shut himself up and think about art, he must live with his fellows and make his art an expression of the whole life of the community – if

9 Wedgwood brought books on Locke, Descartes and Spinoza for the Skye expedition; on the other hand, Trevelyan wrote to his brother Bob of the Seatoller visit that ‘Moore read … Jane Eyre and novels chiefly, and I all sorts of jolly books’ (Levy, Moore, 139, 151). 10 Levy, Moore, 169. 11 Ibid., 47, 51–3; letter from Vaughan Williams to Moore, 13 October 1947, in Hugh Cobbe, ed., Letters of Ralph Vaughan Williams, 1895–1958 (hereafter Letters) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 419. 12 G. M. Trevelyan, History of England (London: Longman, 1926, repr. 1972), 131–2. Vaughan Williams quotes this passage in ‘The History of Nationalism in Music’ (NM, 54); ‘Making Your Own Music’ (NM, 241–2); and ‘Introduction’ to W. H. Hadow, English Music (London: Longmans, Green, 1931), vii–xiii, reprinted in VWOM, 64. 258 Aidan J. Thomson we seek for art we shall not find it’, on the grounds that music would evolve ‘by accident’, like English drama, poetry, laws and the constitution.13 The cause of art, in Vaughan Williams’s view, was best served not through philosophical deliberation, but through practice in conjunction with others. ‘The average Englishman does not care to parade … his artistic ideals or his spiritual longings’, he observed; ‘in England we don’t talk about these things, we just do them’.14 Yet while Vaughan Williams never wrote an extensive exposition of his artistic ideals, it would be wrong to infer that he was an unreflective practitioner of Gebrauchsmusik. As will become apparent shortly, he had clear views about musical aesthetics, and the relationship between these views and Moore’s is revealing.

❧❧ Musical Beauty In his 1920 article for Music & Letters, ‘The Letter and the Spirit’, Vaughan Williams made a statement about art that owed nothing to utilitarianism and seemingly much to Schopenhauer. For Schopenhauer, aesthetic experience involved the perception of Platonic Ideas – objects that exist beyond time, space and causality, but can nevertheless be perceived by a knowing subject under those conditions.15 In a similar vein, Vaughan Williams wrote:

May we take it that the object of an art is to obtain a partial revelation of that which is beyond human senses and human faculties – of that, in fact, which is spiritual? And that the means we employ to induce this revelation are those very senses and faculties themselves? The human, visible, audible and intelligible media which artists (of all kinds) use, are symbols not of other visible and audible things but of what lies beyond sense and knowledge.16 This invocation of the spiritual may seem odd in the context of someone who was an atheist in his youth and latterly ‘drifted into a cheerful agnosticism’.17 But there is no inconsistency between the recognition of a spiritual realm and non-belief in a deity (Schopenhauer’s own views are a case in

13 ‘Who Wants the English Composer?’, Royal College of Music Magazine 9/1 (1912), 11–15, reprinted in VWOM, 42. His views on this subject would change little, as the same passage appears virtually verbatim in National Music some twenty years later; see NM, 10. 14 ‘Introduction’ to English Music, VWOM, 63. 15 See Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Vol. I (New York: Dover, 1969), trans. E. F. J. Payne, 169–267 (§30–§52). 16 ‘The Letter and the Spirit’, Music and Letters 1/2 (1920), 87–93, reprinted in NM, 122. 17 Ursula Vaughan Williams, R.V.W., 29. Vaughan Williams, Aesthetics and History 259 point). Indeed, for someone as ‘innately and deeply spiritual’18 as Vaughan Williams, art may have provided the means to perceive the metaphysical in ways that conventional religion did not. While one can plausibly question how far Vaughan Williams saw art in spiritual terms before writing ‘The Letter and the Spirit’, afterwards he certainly continued to stress the relationship between art and the spiritual as late as 1954, in his lectures at Cornell University, he defined music as ‘a reaching out to the ultimate realities by means of ordered sound’.19 What qualities, then, should a composition have if it is to reach out to the ‘ultimate realities’? The first is an emphasis on beauty as its goal. Vaughan Williams believed that musical beauty was innate in humanity, that it had to be for music to be of any value, and that such beauty was to be found as much in an ‘unlettered’ man, ‘naturally and spontaneously expressing himself musically’, typically in folk song, as in art music by highly educated composers.20 In particular, he drew attention to how certain compositional principles – basic ternary form, and what Schoenberg would have called ‘developing variation’ – were to be found in folk song.21 To someone with Vaughan Williams’s intellectual background, the fact that the same techniques were to be found in simple and complex music alike was confirmation not just of common standards of beauty among all musicians, but also of the evolutionary model of music history that he had inherited from Parry. But even before he became active as a folk-song collector, he was preoccupied by the idea of musical beauty, and it is here that Moore’s influence is most apparent. On 24 November 1895, Moore delivered a paper to the Sunday Essay Society of Trinity College, Cambridge, on the subject of aesthetics. In it, he largely rejected the idea of art as mimesis or imitation, and attacked modern subjec- tivist theories of aesthetics. Moore proposed that beauty ‘must have a nature of its own, absolutely definite, and which therefore excludes certain others’. But he then suggested that while ‘this definite nature may be known … though certain that we can know it, yet perhaps we can’t’. Thus beauty is neither a

18 Byron Adams, ‘Biblical Texts in the Works of Vaughan Williams’, in Alain Frogley, ed., Vaughan Williams Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 109. The complementary relationship between art and religion is reflected in Ursula Vaughan Williams’s comment that, as a young man, her husband was ‘far too deeply absorbed by music to feel any need of religious observance’ (R.V.W., 29). 19 ‘What is Music?’, NM, 206. 20 ‘British Music’, The Music Student 7/1–4 (1914), reprinted in VWOM, 44–5. Vaughan Williams restates this argument in ‘Some Tentative Ideas on the Origins of Music’, Chapter 2 of National Music. 21 See, for instance, his discussion of ‘Searching for Lambs’ in ‘Some Tentative Ideas on the Origins of Music’, NM, 19–20. 260 Aidan J. Thomson definable quality of objects, nor something ‘that can be deduced from the nature or qualities of beautiful objects’. Instead, Moore tried to define the beautiful as ‘that with regard to which you have a specific emotion’; emotion ‘in its simplest form is pleasure … in something’, such as a sensation; and ‘the higher pleasure, or emotion, ought to be capable of representation as the pleasure in a lower pleasure’.22 Such representation at its highest takes the form of art; and Moore concluded that artistic emotion lies at the apex of what amounts to an emotional hierarchy:

Thus the artist is the man who has the crowning and complete emotion, that which embraces and transforms all others. If he has this, he must be able to express it, since it cannot exist in him, unless it have the distinctive marks which characterize it, and these are also the means of expression. His work is his emotion, and seems more beautiful to us than things in nature, because they are merely our emotions, whereas by virtue of our sympathy we can make his ours.23 As a fellow Trinity man, Vaughan Williams may have heard this lecture; and even if he did not, it is reasonable to assume that he might have discussed some of its contents with Moore, given their close friendship. Either way, it is striking that the connection between beauty and emotion also lay at the heart of an article Vaughan Williams wrote for The Vocalist in 1902 (a year before Moore’s landmark work Principia Ethica was published), in which he considered why Beethoven was considered an ‘emotional’ composer and Palestrina an ‘unemotional’ one.24 The terms ‘emotional’ and ‘unemotional’ are themselves problematic; as Vaughan Williams observed, following Moore, ‘all music, strictly speaking, is emotional, because every impression produced by music is an emotion’.25 Vaughan Williams considered the question ‘Is Palestrina emotional?’ – which he took to mean ‘[d]oes his music have the same kind of effect on the hearer as those works which we have all agreed to call emotional?’ – from a number of different angles.26 The apparent lack of emotion in Palestrina is attributable neither to calmness nor to melodic climaxes occurring in different parts at different times,27 but rather to Palestrina’s

22 Levy, Moore, 170–2 (I paraphrase Levy’s analysis of Moore’s paper). 23 Ibid., 173. 24 ‘Palestrina and Beethoven’, The Vocalist 1/2 (1902), 36–7, reprinted in VWOM, 125–8. 25 ‘Palestrina and Beethoven’, VWOM, 125. 26 Ibid., 126. 27 Vaughan Williams gives examples of Bach’s Fugue in E from Book II of Das Wohltemperierte Klavier and the Prelude to Tristan as rebuttals of the former and latter arguments respectively (ibid., 126–7). Vaughan Williams, Aesthetics and History 261 conception of art as Vaughan Williams saw it. For Palestrina, ‘musical emotion … if it exists, is purely aesthetic. He was possessed by an intense and self-conscious love of beauty, and nothing else’. By contrast, Beethoven ‘seems to have throughout much more of strength of expression than of beauty of the sounds he was inventing. His music was the outcome of his life and thoughts.’ Vaughan Williams then proceeded to demolish the dichotomy that he had apparently set up between the unemotional-but-beautiful Palestrina and the unbeautiful-but-emotional Beethoven, by distinguishing between the agency of the composer and the perception of the listener, which, crucially, ‘have no necessary connection’.28 As Vaughan Williams explained:

The emotion felt by anyone listening to music is purely aesthetic, that is to say, the emotion is purely that of pleasure in the perception of beauty … with our emotions in listening to the music the composer’s intention has nothing to do. Art is to be judged not by intention but by the result … There is but one really musical emotion, and it is produced by the music composed, and not by the agency which composed the music. Consequently, both Palestrina’s and Beethoven’s music are emotional, and ‘to the hearer, the emotion produced by the music of each is the same, namely, that which arises from purely delight in beauty; that is the only true musical emotion’.29 There is much that connects Moore’s lecture with Vaughan Williams’s article. Both accept that beauty arises from emotions; both accept that beauty can be perceived but resist seeing it as something that can be deduced from the nature of beautiful objects; and their arguments and counterarguments are underpinned by logical semantics. But Vaughan Williams’s position differs from Moore’s in a key respect. Moore focuses primarily on the artist’s emotions: it is these that are expressed in the art-work, and through their beauty become the emotions of their audience. By contrast, Vaughan Williams implicitly admits the possibility that the emotions of the composer responsible for the beauty of the work might not be the same as the emotions of the audience who apprehends it. In this respect, Vaughan Williams seems to allow a degree of autonomy to the art-work itself that is distinctly modernist, and even hints at a proto-post-structuralist ‘death of the author’.30 As we shall now see, this

28 Ibid., 127. 29 Ibid., 128. 30 In ‘Some Tentative Ideas on the Origins of Music’, Vaughan Williams refines this idea by emphasizing the need for the performer to reproduce the composer’s intentions: ‘The composer starts with a vision and ends with a series of black dots. The performer’s process is exactly the reverse; he starts with the black dots and from these has to work back to the composer’s vision’. See NM, 14. However, 262 Aidan J. Thomson reflected a conception of authorship that differed sharply from the paradigm of the individual Romantic artist.

❧❧ Reactions to Romanticism In ‘A Musical Autobiography’, which forms part of Hubert Foss’s 1950 study of the composer, Vaughan Williams directly attacked the idea of originality for its own sake. ‘The duty of the composer is to find themot juste’, he wrote. ‘It does not matter if this word has been said a thousand times before as long as it is the right thing to say at that moment. If it is not the right thing to say, however unheard of it may be, it is of no artistic value.’ The consequence of this was that originality depended entirely on context: ‘Music which is unoriginal is so, not simply because it has been said before, but because the composer has not taken the trouble to make sure that this was the right thing to say at the right moment.’31 Reaching out to the ultimate realities depended on beauty, and it was more important that beauty was true than that it was new. Vaughan Williams illustrates this point elegantly in National Music. The opening of the Prelude to Tristan und Isolde is harmonically very similar to the opening of Mozart’s String Quartet in C Major, K 465, and thus, at one level, might not be said to be original. But ‘[i]ts originality lies in the fact that with Wagner it had a definite emotional purpose, while with Mozart it was probably an harmonic experiment’. Because the expression of beauty matches the emotion that gave rise to it, Vaughan Williams argues, Wagner’s music sounds original – or perhaps authentic or spontaneous – in a way that Mozart’s does not. ‘A composer is original’, Vaughan Williams concludes, ‘not because he tries to be so, but because he cannot help it.’32 The need to find the mot juste, even if it had been said before, was something that, as Adams has observed, Vaughan Williams may have absorbed from Ravel in 1907–8.33 It was certainly not something that he advocated before then. Before studying with Ravel, Vaughan Williams had focused more on the need for self-expression, which David Manning has noted may have reflected the pedagogical influence of Parry, and his concern for finding ‘character’ in his students’ compositions.34 After 1908, self-expression remained a concern

he does not suggest that the listener has to perceive the composer’s vision in the performance. 31 ‘A Musical Autobiography’ (1950), NM, 189–90. 32 ‘The Evolution of Folk-Song’, NM, 43. 33 Adams, ‘Vaughan Williams’s Musical Apprenticeship’, CCVW, 44. 34 David Manning, ‘The Public Figure: Vaughan Williams as Writer and Activist’, CCVW, 240. Vaughan Williams, Aesthetics and History 263 in Vaughan Williams’s writings, but with the caveat that the mot juste might sometimes give a listener a sense of déjà entendu:

If another composer has said the same thing before, so much the worse for the other composer. The originality, or perhaps … personality, of music depends very little on the actual outline of the notes. It derives from something more subtle, which perhaps we cannot define but can recognize at once.35 Because Vaughan Williams understood a composer’s originality to be separate from thematic content, this legitimized the cribbing of other composers’ music. He admitted that he had ‘never had any conscience about cribbing’, and robustly defended the practice in his own (and others’) works.36 In particular, he acknowledged passages that he had deliberately taken from Beethoven and places where he realized subsequently that he had subconsciously borrowed from Elgar and Holst.37 While such appropriations were perfectly acceptable, however, ‘one ought to know from where one has cribbed’, as ‘what is most deliberately cribbed sounds the most original’ but ‘more subtle, unconscious cribbing is … dangerous’.38 Consequently, whereas Vaughan Williams was proud of his adaptation of Beethoven, he was much more defensive about his borrowings from Elgar – ‘I am astonished … to find on looking back on my own earlier works how much I cribbed from him, probably when I thought I was being most original’ – and admitted to being ‘horrified’ when Constant Lambert told him that there were echoes of La mer in the opening of A London Symphony.39 Vaughan Williams’s distinction between conscious and unconscious cribbing anticipates the difference that Harold Bloom identifies between how, respectively, ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ poets engage with the works of their predecessors; and perhaps this is no coincidence.40 His admission of Beethovenian

35 ‘How Do We Make Music?’, NM, 217. 36 ‘A Musical Autobiography’, NM, 190. 37 From Beethoven, Vaughan Williams cribbed the Scherzo of the String Quartet in F major, Op. 135, in Satan’s Dance in Job; the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in the opening of his own Fourth Symphony; and the Mass in D, briefly, in the Scherzo of A Sea Symphony. See ‘A Musical Autobiography’, NM, 190. He used the figure ‘Thou art calling me’ from Part I of Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius in both A Sea Symphony and A London Symphony (‘What have we Learnt from Elgar?’, Music & Letters 16/1 (1935), 13–19, reprinted in NM, 252–3) and admits the influence of Holst’s The Mystic Trumpeter in the finale of A Sea Symphony. 38 ‘A Musical Autobiography’, NM, 188. 39 ‘What Have we Learnt from Elgar?’, 252–3; ‘A Musical Autobiography’, NM, 188. 40 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). In Bloom’s theory, the allusion to, or misquotation of, an 264 Aidan J. Thomson influence has to be taken in conjunction with his long-standing ambivalence towards the German composer. ‘I am not a pious Beethovenite’, he wrote in his essay on the Ninth Symphony, something that soon becomes apparent as he complains of Beethoven’s overly conventional melodic ornamentation, particularly in the slow movement.41 In A Musical Autobiography, Vaughan Williams stated: ‘To this day [1950] the Beethoven idiom repels me, but I hope I have at last learnt to see the greatness that lies behind the idiom that I dislike.’42 Viewed in this light, the distortions of Beethoven’s F Major String Quartet in Satan’s Dance in Job and the allusions to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at the beginning of Vaughan Williams’s Fourth – and to Beethoven’s Fifth in the conflated scherzo-finale of that work, an allusion that Vaughan Williams must have been aware of, though he never admitted it – are not simply mots justes déjà entendus but ironic misprisions through which Vaughan Williams consciously distances himself from Beethoven’s heroic subjectivity. Heroic subjectivity stood in direct opposition to Vaughan Williams’s conception of creativity, which rejected Romanticism for something more communal. This reflected the composer’s belief in an evolutionary model for the history of music, and folk song in particular. In National Music, he explained that, as folk song was transmitted orally, it developed variants according to the artistic tastes and abilities of individual singers, and that, over time, good variants would survive while bad ones would die: ‘a real process of natural selection and survival of the fittest’.43 Consequently, it was more likely that a folk song in its most recent form was at the ‘climax of its evolution’, rather than something that had been corrupted from a lost original source.44 Its authorship was shared between the individuals who invented the phrases that made up the song – Vaughan Williams suggested that songs were fashioned from ‘stock phrases’, rather than that a single composer created one original ver- sion45 – and those who provided the variants along the way. The folk song was ‘an individual flowering on a common stem’; its age ‘in one aspect … is as old

older poet by a younger poet is employed by the latter as a literary tactic. ‘Strong’ poets produce work that alludes to their predecessors while simultaneously displaying an innovative voice; ‘weak’ poets are unable to distinguish themselves sufficiently from their predecessors and produce work that is more derivative. 41 ‘Thoughts on Beethoven’s Choral Symphony’, NM, 84. For the points about melodic ornamentation, see NM, 84–7, 91, 110. 42 ‘A Musical Autobiography’, NM, 181. 43 ‘The Evolution of the Folk-Song’, NM, 32–3. 44 Ibid., NM, 37. 45 ‘Some Tentative Ideas on the Origins of Music’, NM, 18. Vaughan Williams, Aesthetics and History 265 as time itself; in another aspect … it is no older than the singer who sang it’.46 By extension, the folk song tradition as a whole belonged to the nation that gave birth to it; there was in it, he said, quoting Gilbert Murray, ‘the spiritual life-blood of a people’.47 The same principle applied to art music, except that evolution occurred through historical eras, usually within single genres. Here, Vaughan Williams’s debt to Parry is often palpable. In his discussion of Baroque instrumental music, Parry had observed that ‘it was only through [the] devoted pioneering’ of the likes of Froberger, Buxtehude, Pachelbel and Kuhnau, among others, ‘that the musical revelation of the personality of Bach … became possible’.48 With Vaughan Williams, this becomes a historical maxim:

The great man closes a period, he does not inaugurate it. It is the small men, the Monteverdes [sic], the Emmanuel Bachs, the Liszts and the Stravinskis [sic] who are the innovators, forerunners who prepare the way for those who are to sum up the work of a musical generation.49 In short, the most important composers were those who consolidated the work of their predecessors, and perfected pre-existing forms and genres, rather than those who initiated them. Thus, Beethoven was the culmination of a classical-era tradition that ‘start[ed] right back from Philipp Emanuel Bach, through Haydn and Mozart, with even such smaller fry as Cimarosa and Cherubini to lay the foundations of the edifice’; and Wagner is presented as the goal to which German-language opera had been heading, via Mozart, Weber and Marschner, from Adam Hiller, the ‘logical outcome of the romantic movement in music [who] dealt it its death blow’.50

46 ‘The Evolution of the Folk-Song’, NM, 33; ‘English Folk-Songs’, The Music Student 4/6–11 (1912), 247–8, 283–4, 317–18, 347, 387, 413–14, reprinted in VWOM, 195. 47 ‘The Folk-Song’, NM, 23. See also Manning, ‘The Public Figure’, CCVW, 243, for a discussion of the extent to which Vaughan Williams’s largely cultural nationalism also sometimes considers issues of race. 48 C. Hubert H. Parry, The Evolution of the Art of Music (London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Trubner, 1917), 179. 49 ‘Introduction’ to English Music, VWOM, 62. Vaughan Williams makes the same point, often with the same supporting evidence, in ‘What are the Social Foundations of Music?’, NM, 232. See also ‘Should Music Be National?’, NM, 3; and ‘Shrubsole’ (1943), NM, 204. 50 ‘Should Music Be National?’, NM, 3; ‘What are the Social Foundations of Music?’, NM, 232; ‘The Romantic Movement and Its Results’, The Musician 1/23 (1897), 430–1, reprinted in VWOM, 14. Vaughan Williams acknowledged that ‘musical drama’ [sic] should be considered a new genre (‘The Words of Wagner’s Music Dramas’, The Vocalist 1/3 and 1/5 (1902), 94–6, 156–9, reprinted in VWOM, 133–51), but does not consider the post-Wagner history of this genre. 266 Aidan J. Thomson

In the light of these views, it is appropriate that Vaughan Williams quoted Virginia Woolf’s 1929 essay, A Room of One’s Own: ‘Masterpieces are not single and solitary births, they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.’51 Woolf’s claim – that had a culture of women writing for money not been established in the late eighteenth century, there would have been no Jane Austen, George Eliot or Brontës – certainly would have attracted Vaughan Williams, as it resonated with his emphasis on the importance of collective authorship (in folk song) and Kleinmeister in (art-musical history).52 Moreover, Woolf’s emphasis on the social roots of this tradition, rather than the purely aesthetic, was congruent with Vaughan Williams’s oft-stated belief that the foundation of a national school of composition required the nation to be ‘saturated through and through with music’.53 What mattered in the first instance was not the quality of what was produced, but the development and normalizing of a culture in which such production occurred. This perspective reflected the thinking not only of Woolf, but also of G. M. Trevelyan, who had claimed that ‘Europe recognized Elizabethan England as the country of music par excellence’, and that ‘the arena of Tudor and Stuart music was not the concert-hall but the domestic hearth … Music and song were the creation and inheritance of the whole people’.54 Admittedly, such thinking was not new. The idealization of the Tudor era was a constant in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British musical scholarship, from the first edition of Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians to Vaughan Williams himself: in ‘British Music’, he argued that ‘only once … has England boasted a “school” of composers … in the Tudor Period’, and described the sacred and secular vocal music (though not domestic instrumental music) of that era at some length.55 But Trevelyan went further in providing an explanation for why this period was so artistically fertile. The Elizabethan age, the culmination of

51 ‘Shrubsole’, NM, 204; ‘Making Your Own Music’, NM, 238–9; ‘The Diamond Jubilee of the Folk Song Society’, Journal of the English Folk Dance and Song Society 8/3 (1958), 123–4, reprinted in VWOM, 282. 52 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas (London: Vintage, 2001), 55–6. 53 ‘British Music’, The Music Student 7/1–4 (1914), 5–7, 25–7, 47–8, 63–4, reprinted in VWOM, 47. See also ‘Shrubsole’, NM, 203, in which Vaughan Williams wrote, concerning Shrubsole’s hymn-tune ‘Miles Lane’, that ‘the interminable oratorios and cantatas of minor composers which are now crowding our salvage heaps are not waste, because without them [Shrubsole’s] moment of inspiration could not have been caught’; and ‘Some Conclusions’, NM, 67–8. 54 Trevelyan, History of England, 367–8. 55 ‘British Music’, VWOM, 47. Vaughan Williams, Aesthetics and History 267 two hundred years of social change, was, he explained, ‘intensely national and intensely individualistic’.56 A combination of the religious liberty that resulted from the Reformation, success in commerce and naval exploration, the development of the English language to a point where it reached ‘brief perfection’, and, perhaps most importantly, the end of feudalism and the emergence of the English yeoman class, created a society that was relatively free, patriotic, self-confident, articulate, and, by the standards of the day, socially mobile.57 In such a society, the arts were apt to flourish, and in the Elizabethan age did so in music, lyric poetry and theatre. It was the ‘potent and life-giving force’ of the ‘yeoman motif’, as Trevelyan put it,58 that Vaughan Williams sought to invoke in developing a national culture of music-making. Patriotic and free, the modern-day equivalent of English yeomen possessed a collective creativity that was the perfect antidote to Romantic subjectivity.

❧❧ Beyond Evolution The connection between Vaughan Williams and Trevelyan extended beyond their celebration of the Tudor period to the way that they understood particular historical narratives (musical in Vaughan Williams’s case, English/ British in Trevelyan’s). As a young man, Trevelyan had expressed the aim of writing and promoting ‘the cause of literary and Liberal history’:59 essentially the Whig tradition of historical writing that, as David Cannadine has noted, was ‘fiercely partisan and righteously judgemental, dividing the personnel of the past into the good and the bad … on the basis of a marked preference for liberal and progressive causes, rather than conservative and reactionary ones’. It was also strongly teleological, presuming ‘that the past should be seen as leading inexorably to a triumphant present, and that the past was only of significance in that it led to such a triumphalist present’.60 While the extent of Trevelyan’s Whiggism has perhaps been exaggerated, his early works, notably England in the Age of Wycliffe (1899), England under the Stuarts (1904) and Lord Grey of the Reform Bill (1920) reflect that tradition in a number of respects.61 But with the decline of the Liberal Party and the liberal intelligentsia after the First World War, Trevelyan’s views changed. He became less partisan and more

56 Trevelyan, History of England, 323. 57 Ibid., 366. 58 Ibid., 232. 59 Letter to Sir George Otto Trevelyan, 24 June 1911, quoted in David Cannadine, G. M. Trevelyan: A Life in History (London: Fontana, 1993), 65. 60 Cannadine, G.M. Trevelyan, 197. 61 Ibid., 104–5. 268 Aidan J. Thomson accommodating of viewpoints that Whig history had traditionally marginal- ized: England under Queen Anne (3 vols, 1930, 1932, 1934), for instance, emphasized the values of compromise, continuity and gradual reform rather than revolution, and recognized the interdependence of Whigs and Tories within the two-party system.62 This change of perspective reflected both the political culture of compromise that manifested itself in the national governments of the 1930s, as Cannadine explains,63 and Trevelyan’s own political shift to the right. But it was also a necessary response to an historiographical crisis: it was difficult to write history that emphasized the values of liberal progressivism in Britain when those values had given way to the class conflict of the Great Strike and the ruralist conservatism of Stanley Baldwin’s governments. While Vaughan Williams’s (and Parry’s) evolutionist approach to music history may have lacked the national specificity and judgementalism of Whiggism, its teleological focus and emphasis on progress placed it squarely within that tradition. And, like Trevelyan, Vaughan Williams was faced with trying to reconcile Victorian values with an age in which they seemed to have hit the buffers. For Vaughan Williams, the problem was that while he continued to subscribe to an evolutionary model of music history (as late as the mid-1950s, based on his Making of Music lectures), he was sceptical of much of the music to which this evolution had given rise. His coverage of the main canonic figures of early modernism is, at best, cursory and/or double-edged. Vaughan Williams recognized that Debussy was one of the leading figures of their generation,64 and praised his technique, but considered him an inappro- priate model for a British student composer to follow.65 Having tantalizingly hinted that Stravinsky was an innovative ‘small’ man at the start of an era, he makes no suggestion elsewhere to whom the Russian might be a forerunner. When Schoenberg died in 1951, he wrote that the Austrian composer ‘meant nothing to me’, and a few years later revealed ignorance of serial techniques.66 His references to Bartók, Hindemith, Webern and (apart from his account of his lessons with him in ‘A Musical Autobiography’) Ravel were occasional and fleeting.67 A sardonic remark about ‘“Baroque” purgatives’, and an admission

62 Ibid., 115–8. 63 Ibid., 119. 64 ‘Who Wants the English Composer?’, VWOM, 40. 65 ‘Should Music Be National?’, NM, 8; ‘Some Conclusions’, NM, 65; ‘What is Music?’, NM, 214. 66 ‘Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951)’, Music & Letters 32/4 (1951), 322, reprinted in VWOM, 173; letters to Michael Kennedy, 29 July and 18 August 1956, Letters, 589–90. 67 The only references to Bartók, Hindemith and Webern in Vaughan Williams’s published writings are in, respectively: ‘Introduction’ to R. Vaughan Williams and Vaughan Williams, Aesthetics and History 269 to Elizabeth Maconchy in 1940 that hers was ‘nearly the only “wrong note” music I see any point in’ indicates that his feelings towards neoclassicism were negative.68 More generally, he referred to the 1925 International Society for Contemporary Music Festival in Prague as a ‘“Freak” festival’, while in 1940 he lamented to Percy Scholes that ‘I find more & more that modern music means nothing to me – I hope it means something to the younger generation – if so then it is all right – but does it?’69 Vaughan Williams was thus in the absurd position of defending a model that instinctively he must have felt was flawed. As a composer rather than a music historian, Vaughan Williams could afford to be less concerned than Trevelyan about the inconsistencies in his historiographical position. Nevertheless, in one respect he adopted a strategy that resembles Trevelyan’s shift away from Whiggism. Just as Trevelyan became increasingly attracted by the continuities in English history rather than simply its progressive elements, so Vaughan Williams emphasized an aesthetic criterion that was concerned more with building bridges between eras than with evolution within them. The origins of this view lie in an early essay about Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben. Vaughan Williams speculated on what made a new work great, and found the answer in Die Meistersinger:

All great music satisfies some craving … and directly the right man comes along and says the right thing, we realize at once that it is just what we have been waiting for; it seems at once to take its place in the order of things as if it had always existed; as Hans Sachs said about Walther’s song: Es klang so alt It sounded so old und war doch so neu. and yet was so new. This, it seems to me, is the test of great music.70

A. L. Lloyd, eds, The Penguin Book of English Folk Songs (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1959), ix–xii, reprinted in VWOM, 292; audio recording of Howland Medal Lecture, Yale University (1 December 1954), reprinted in VWOM, 99; and programme note for ‘Gordon Jacob, Passacaglia on a Well-known Theme’, Leith Hill Musical Festival Orchestra (Dorking, 1932), reprinted in VWOM, 413. In a letter to Edward J. Dent, Vaughan Williams wrote that Elizabeth Maconchy, for whom he had been trying to find a teacher, had been ‘badly bitten’ by Bartók; he suggested that Respighi or Casella might be more appropriate for her (1 July 1928, Letters, 160). 68 ‘The Evolution of the Folk-Song (continued)’, NM, 47; letter to Maconchy, 7 June 1943, Letters, 358. 69 Letter to Robert McEwen, 10 May 1925, Letters, 150; letter to Scholes, 7 December 1940, Letters, 312–13. 70 ‘Ein Heldenleben’, The Vocalist 1/10 (1903), 295–6, reprinted in VWOM, 163. Vaughan Williams did not say whether or not he thought Ein Heldenleben met this criterion. 270 Aidan J. Thomson

Vaughan Williams quotes these words again when discussing Sibelius, ‘to my mind the most original of present-day composers’.71 Sibelius’s originality was ‘not because he defied tradition’, but because he ‘never deviated from the strait [sic] path’, as a result of which he ‘remains new, just as Bach or Beethoven remain new, like the great melodies of the church and the “immortal chants of o l d ”’. 72 The same, implicitly, was true of Holst. Vaughan Williams praised his friend for his modernity – the product of ‘a mind which is the heir of all the centuries’, which ‘has found out the language in which to express that mind’73 – but simultaneously distanced him from the ‘poverty-stricken aridity of modern pseudo-classicism’ by asserting his links with Bach, Wagner and, further back, Weelkes, Byrd and Wilbye.74 In genealogical terms, the connection between Sibelius or Holst and their immediate early-modernist predecessors was negligible: if their music was the evolution of that of ‘smaller’ composers then Vaughan Williams certainly does not explain how. What mattered was not their modernity but that their music was rooted in the past. It is no coincidence that the only other occasion that Hans Sachs’ quotation appears in Vaughan Williams’s written works is during his account of discovering the folk song ‘Dives and Lazarus’. This melody was ‘what we had all been waiting for – something which we knew already – something which had always been with us if we had only known it; something entirely new yet absolutely familiar’.75 In other words, it was the perfect example of music that was ‘as old as time itself’ and ‘no older than the singer who sang it’. Thus, alongside the forward-looking evolutionary narrative that Vaughan Williams promulgated for folk music was a retrospective counter-narrative, in which cultural memory and the continuity of a particular geographical community is every bit as important as historical progress. And, as Vaughan Williams showed in his claim that Holst had inherited the adventurous spirit of the English madrigal school, this narrative could also be applied equally well to art music. Indeed, to modify Walter Pater’s famous dictum about art, one might say that at the heart of Vaughan Williams’s aesthetics was the belief that all music should aspire to the condition of folk music.

71 ‘How Do We Make Music?’, NM, 217. 72 ‘Sibelius at 90: Greatness and Popularity’, Daily Telegraph & Morning Post (8 December 1955), 6, reprinted in VWOM, 175–6. 73 ‘Gustav Holst: An Essay and A Note’ (1920), NM, 130. 74 ‘A Note on Gustav Holst’, in Imogen Holst, Gustav Holst (London: Oxford University Press, 1938), vii–ix, reprinted in VWOM, 302. 75 ‘Let Us Remember … Early Days’, English Dance and Song 6/3 (1942), 27–8, quoted in VWOM, 252. Vaughan Williams, Aesthetics and History 271 ❧❧ Bach, Functionality and Universalism All the elements of Vaughan Williams’s aesthetics considered above – beauty founded on emotion, originality as the product of many rather than of an individual, a future that was rooted in the past – contribute to the culture of amateur music-making that he saw as essential for the cultivation of national music. They could be summed up in the achievements of the composer whom Vaughan Williams admired more than any other: Johann Sebastian Bach. Vaughan Williams had loved Bach’s music since his schooldays, and this deepened through his conducting many performances of the Passions, the B Minor Mass and the cantatas at the Leith Hill Musical Festival between 1905 and 1953.76 His admiration for Bach existed at many levels. On the one hand, Bach was the supreme practical musician: a master craftsman, whose perfection of Lutheran German sacred choral writing supported Vaughan Williams’s theory that a thriving culture of local music-making would provide the foundation from which a genius might emerge; indeed, for Vaughan Williams, Bach had been ‘a local musician all his life’.77 Through this work, Bach exhibited an un-self-conscious nationalism that was founded in ‘a deep love for the spiritual values of Teutonism, as exemplified in the Lutheran religion and the great choral melodies which were one of the outward and visible signs of that spirit’.78 For these reasons, Vaughan Williams described Bach as ‘bourgeois’: an epithet that might appear to connote materialist anti-intellectualism, but which in Vaughan Williams’s eyes represented a combination of practical good sense and humanity.79 This humanity was what Vaughan Williams felt distinguished Bach from Beethoven. ‘Music can be absolutely sublime and universal, or absolutely human and personal’, he wrote in an early essay. ‘Both ways of regarding the art have produced glorious results, but the glory of the one can never be the glory of the other’.80 While Beethoven’s music belonged in the former category (it had ‘caught the “divine Cecilia’s” mantle’, and could ‘“draw an angel down” from heaven’), Bach’s belonged in the latter (it had ‘inherited the gift of old

76 ‘A Musical Autobiography’, NM, 179. Ursula Vaughan Williams wrote that Bach’s cantatas were ‘the music he loved most’ (R.V.W., 140). 77 ‘Should Music Be National?’, NM, 4; ‘Local Musicians’, The Abinger Chronicle 1/1 (1939), 1–3, reprinted in VWOM, 81. 78 ‘The History of Nationalism in Music’, NM, 54. 79 It was also how Vaughan Williams saw himself: ‘being bourgeois myself I considered Bach the greatest of all composers’. See ‘Bach, the Great Bourgeois’ (1950), NM, 171. 80 ‘Bach and Schumann’, The Vocalist 1/3 (1902), 72, reprinted in VWOM, 131. 272 Aidan J. Thomson

Timotheus, and [could] “raise a mortal to the skies”’).81 Consequently, Vaughan Williams wrote, ‘Bach differs from other composers. They, with the exception of a few outstanding Beethoven works, belong to their time, but Bach, though superficially he may speak the eighteenth-century language, belongs to no school or period.’82 This may seem surprising, in view of Vaughan Williams’s emphasis elsewhere on Bach’s engagement with his local musical community. Paradoxically, however, the historical and geographical contingency of this music-making – its essential functionality – is what Vaughan Williams saw as most ‘human and personal’ (and, notwithstanding his earlier distinction, universal), in a way that the more self-conscious universality of a late Romantic symphony might not be. This essentially dialectical relationship between the functional and the universal lies at the heart of Vaughan Williams’s musical thought. The implicitly universal ‘ultimate realities’ may be apprehended through musical beauty, but beauty requires context and understanding, which can be achieved only via a culture of music-making within a community or nation. This culture exists most simply at a functional level, such as in music for worship or entertainment; but through this functional music-making the everyday might be transformed. There is no better illustration of this than Vaughan Williams’s description of amateurs rehearsing Bach’s choral music for months in preparation for the Leith Hill Festival:

[U]ntil we have made these sounds bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh, we cannot attempt to sing them. The expert can pass from one musical experience to another, lightly, easily and forgetfully, but we, when once great music has burnt into our minds and souls, have it for an everlasting possession … For a while we work by faith alone, then one day suddenly revelation comes to us, the notes we are singing are, all at once, not mere sounds, but symbols of a new world, something beyond mundane experience. We have looked through the ‘magic casements, opening on the foam of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn’.83 With this, many different strands of Vaughan Williams’s aesthetics come together: the music in question was of the past and yet also the present; its beauty was perceived individually and collectively by the performers, who responded to it emotionally; and the Passions and the cantatas represented the acme of a genre that was the product of communities, local and national, not just individual composers. If the nation were to be ‘saturated through and through with music’, it had to be through experiencing works like these.

81 Ibid., VWOM, 132. 82 ‘Bach, the Great Bourgeois’, NM, 170. 83 ‘Local Musicians’, VWOM, 80. Vaughan Williams, Aesthetics and History 273

*** Vaughan Williams’s opinions about music changed little over the course of his career; as Ursula Vaughan Williams observed, in ‘The Letter and the Spirit’, he ‘summed up what he believed, both then [1920] and for the rest of his life’.84 That this should be the case reflects less a stubborn resistance to change than a lengthy apprenticeship in which he absorbed views from many different quarters: his teachers, folk musicians, fellow composers, and, as has been shown above, public intellectuals in philosophy, history and literature. His writings therefore have to be seen in the context not just of his own vision for music in Britain, important though that is, but as part of a wider exchange of ideas about the nature of art in the early twentieth century, and about how Britain saw itself in an era when signs of her decline were becoming more visible. Above all, they reflect Vaughan Williams’s idea of history and historical process: how his historical consciousness influenced his aesthetic preferences, and how it formed the basis for a conception of communal, social creativity that was not only a reaction to Romantic subjectivity, but also an attempt to bridge the ‘Great Divide’ characteristic of high literary modernism. Vaughan Williams may have been correct to say that ‘the average Englishman does not care to parade … his artistic ideals or his spiritual longings’.85 But Vaughan Williams was no average Englishman.

84 Ursula Vaughan Williams, R.V.W., 163. 85 See n. 14 above. 16 Ralph Vaughan Williams (Royal College of Music/ArenaPAL) 17 Constant Lambert (Boosey & Hawkes/ArenaPAL) 18 Herbert Howells (BBC Photo Archive) 19 Hans Keller (Clive Barda/ArenaPAL) Chapter 12 Constant Lambert: A Critic for Today? A Commentary on Music Ho!

Christopher Mark

Lambert was a Roman candle: he flared up brilliantly, then was gone.1 tephen Walsh’s assessment epitomizes the generally received view of S Constant Lambert (1905–51). The book he was reviewing when he made this remark, Stephen Lloyd’s Constant Lambert: Beyond the Rio Grande (2014),2 sets out in great detail Lambert’s key musical activities as composer, conductor and writer (at times, as Walsh points out, risking overload) in an attempt to encourage interest beyond the work in the title. But it seems likely that, without a parallel champion in the realm of performance, Rio Grande (1927) will indeed continue to be the work for which Lambert is best known, even though its brand of jazz-tinted exoticism can have little of its original effect on today’s audiences, who are much more familiar with the idiom. Walsh asserts the case for ‘a handful of works belong[ing] in the repertoire’, including Eight Poems of Li-Po (1926–9) in the ensemble version, Music for Orchestra (1927), and the Concerto for Piano and Nine Players (1930–1). To this might be added Lambert’s setting of words from Thomas Nashe’s Pleasant Comedy in Summer’s Last Will and Testament (1932–5), despite its failing to transcend the sum of its most striking moments: the latter stages of the purely orchestral sixth movement, Rondo burlesca (King Pest), and the climax and aftermath of the final Saraband. But for all his technical skill and inventiveness, Lambert’s compositional voice lacks sufficient distinctiveness of personality to secure more than an occasional airing. His two other principal activities, conducting and journalism, are ephemeral in the literal sense, though some of the performances he recorded – catalogued by Lloyd over eighteen pages of appendix – are still commercially available and of historical interest. They include the first recording (1929) of Walton’s Façade (1922–9, rev. 1942, 1951, 1977), with Edith

1 Stephen Walsh, ‘“Let’s to Billards”, Review of Stephen Lloyd, Constant Lambert: Beyond the Rio Grande, in London Review of Books 37/2 (2015), 28–9, at 28. 2 Stephen Lloyd, Constant Lambert: Beyond the Rio Grande (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2014). 278 a commentary on music ho! 279

Sitwell reciting (the Waltons and the Sitwells were his neighbours in Chelsea);3 the first recording of Warlock’s The Curlew (1920–2) in 1931, a performance that is rather unsteady in rhythm and intonation at times, and marred by traf- fic noises during the opening bars; a 1946 recording of Delius’s Piano Concerto (in the original 1897 version) with Benno Moiseiwitsch; and selections of ballet music with the Sadler’s Wells and Philharmonia orchestras. Lambert’s journalism might seem of even more limited interest to posterity, given its inevitable concern with immediate responses to contemporary musical culture, and how tight deadlines militate against sustained reflection. His weekly column for the Sunday Referee from November 1931 to January 1938, and the less numerous pieces for The Listener, The New Statesman and Nation and the Radio Times, are again catalogued by Lloyd in painstaking detail, complete with choice quotations, at times extensive. The latter extract telling and sometimes arresting observations that suggest it is Lambert’s journalism that embodies most insistently and consistently the brilliance of which Walsh speaks. As Lloyd says, it was no surprise that, ‘having established himself as a music journalist of considerable flair’, Lambert ‘should exercise his pen in something wider than his weekly column in the Sunday Referee’. 4 Indeed, he wrote a book that can claim to be one of the most important British critical deliberations of the first half of the twentieth century. Music Ho!, published by Faber & Faber in April 1934, was provocatively subtitled A Study of Music in Decline. It was reissued as a Pelican paperback in 1948 as well as in a further hardback edition in 1966, and was widely influential. It was spurred on perhaps by the publication of his friend Cecil Gray’s A Survey of Contemporary Music in 1924 and Hubert Foss’s Music in my Time, published in October 1933 a couple of months before Lambert had finished his own manuscript.5 (Further exemplars can be found in George Dyson’s The New Music, published like Gray’s in 1924, and also his The Progress of Music, published in 1932.) What I offer here is a commentary on Music Ho!, because of its centrality in Lambert’s work: many of the critical attitudes and insights of his weekly journalism are developed or simply recycled therein. I quote him liberally not only to give as comprehensive an impression of his voice as possible, but also because tone and content are in his case so closely aligned. Which perhaps leads to the central question for

3 Jeremy Dibble, ‘Lambert, Constant,’ Grove Music Online / Oxford Music Online [accessed 7 February 2017]. 4 Lloyd, Constant Lambert, 179. 5 Cecil Gray, A Survey of Contemporary Music (London: Oxford University Press, H. Milford, 1924); Hubert James Foss, Music in my Time (London: Rich & Cowan, 1933). 280 Christopher Mark contemporary readers: whether the book, which has long been out of print, is merely an entertaining and sometimes stimulating record of one view of the compositional proclivities of the early 1930s, or whether it contains insights that have something to contribute to our own musicological and critical vantage points; in other words, whether the Roman candle has transcended its nature and sustained some sort of glow.

❧❧ Music Ho! In one way, at least, Music Ho! connects strongly with today’s scholarship, in that its aims anticipate arguably the key concern of the New Musicology: the book’s main theme is ‘modern music in relation to the other arts and in relation to the social and mechanical background of modern life’ (7).6 Indeed, there are places in the book where the angle and tone are reminiscent of Susan McClary. Thus during the section on romanticism, nationalism and form, in which Lambert asserts that ‘Nationalism … destroys both the aristocratic quality of the eighteenth-century abstract symphony and the individualist quality of the nineteenth-century programme symphony’, he observes that ‘The conflict is not only technical and emotional, it is almost a class conflict, and it is hardly too far-fetched a play upon words to suggest that the phrase “first subject” is in itself undemocratic’ (117). A paragraph found a little later could, with only a little adjustment of style, have been written by Richard Taruskin in one of his many passages on the dangers of what he calls the ‘poietic fallacy’:

It may seem unreasonable to condemn a school of composers [in this instance, the English folk-song movement] for what some people might consider extraneous social reasons; but it is essential that we should see music against its social background. The recent invention by certain critics of a hitherto unknown art described as ‘pure music’ has resulted in the criticism of music becoming more and more detached from any form of life, composers being treated as though they produced patterns of notes in a spiritual vacuum, uninfluenced by the landscape, social life, and political situations surrounding them. For every technical argument for or against a method of composing, there is at least one social argument, and the social argument is often the more far-reaching and convincing. (125) Lambert’s family background and schooling perhaps seeded this approach. His father, George Washington Thomas Lambert (1873–1930), who left the

6 All page references to Music Ho! are given in brackets after the quotation. References are to the 1948 Pelican edition, Constant Lambert, Music Ho!: A Study of Music in Decline (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books in association with Faber, 1948). a commentary on music ho! 281 family home when Lambert was fifteen,7 was a painter, and as part of what seems to have been a relentless intellectual display at Christ’s Hospital, Lambert developed ‘extraordinarily mature’ literary interests.8 Lambert says of Music Ho! that it is ‘a study of movements rather than musicians’ (7). This isn’t entirely the case, since certain individual composers emerge (inevitably, one would have thought) as transcending a simple representation of those ‘movements’. This is certainly true of his discussion of major figures, such as Debussy, Stravinsky, Schoenberg and, especially, Sibelius, who is seen as sui generis and emerges as Lambert’s model for the future of composition. Lambert, however, goes on to say that ‘individual works are cited not so much on their own account as for being examples of a particular tendency’ (7). Technical discussion is eschewed in favour of highlighting composers’ strengths and deficiencies within a consideration of broad themes, announced in the five part-headings: Pre-War Pioneers, Post-War Pasticheurs, Nationalism and the Exotic, The Mechanical Stimulus, and Escape or Submission. In sum, Music Ho! is a nuanced if highly polemical investigation of the compositional situation in the early 1930s, rooted in a learned historical perspective and drawing not just on ‘a remarkably catholic range of contemporary music’, as Peter Evans notes,9 but on a depth of historical knowledge too. Lambert is particularly exercised in drawing a very clear distinction between compositional proclivities before and after World War I. This became a commonplace view only a decade or so later, and is still the guiding notion for today, but it was perhaps less obvious at the time (there is little mention of the effect of the War in Gray or Foss, for example). Taruskin’s ‘revised sub- periodization’ of twentieth-century music history, which is possibly the most influential recent reconception of the topic, roughly keeps the World War I divide, while reinterpreting 1890–1914 as a period of ‘intensification – or maximalization’ of ‘the technical and expressive traditions of the nineteenth century’, rather than ‘a violent break’ with them.10 Lambert is very conscious of his own historical position: his preface to the Pelican edition (published, of course, fourteen years after the first edition, and after the cataclysm of World War II) notes that while it was:

7 He left to return to Australia. George Lambert was born in St Petersburg in 1873; the family emigrated to Australia at the end of 1886 and moved to London in 1900. See Lloyd, Constant Lambert, 1–3. 8 Ibid., 25. 9 Evans, Peter, ‘Instrumental Music I’, in Stephen Banfield, ed., The Blackwell History of Music in Britain: The Twentieth Century (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 179–277, at 214. 10 Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music, 5 vols, Vol. IV (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), xx. 282 Christopher Mark

Written in the ‘thirties’, [the book] is essentially a history of the troubled ‘twenties’ and for the most part avoids any reference to works which I could not view in retrospect. In that sense, it remains a period piece and I am content to leave it as such, making no attempt to soften out the more controversial passages. (9) Acknowledging the book as part of the process of reception is of course another way in which it connects with more recent scholarly concerns. Part One of Music Ho!, ‘Pre-War Pioneers’, opens with Lambert anchoring his historical position, in a tone that epitomizes his critical voice:

To the seeker after the new, or the sensational, to those who expect a sinister fris- son from modern music, it is my melancholy duty to point out that all the bomb throwing and guillotining has already taken place … If your ear can assimilate and tolerate the music written in 1913 and earlier, then there is nothing in post- war music that can conceivably give you an aural shock, though the illogicality of some of the present-day pastiches may give you ‘a rare turn’ comparable to the sudden stopping of a lift in transit. (11) He reinforces his perception of the era of ‘bomb-throwing’ being over by suggesting that ‘it is doubtful if any of the works written since the war will become a popular date in musical history, like those old revolutionary war- horses Le Sacre du Printemps and Pierrot Lunaire’ (12). Lambert’s readers were not to be blamed for being behind the times, however, since the circumstances of war had not allowed musicians and listeners to keep pace, especially with German developments. Indeed:

the famous series of concerts given by Eugène Goossens in London in 1920 were historical in more ways than one. They apparently announced the dawn of a new era, but curiously enough their most potent arguments were drawn from the era which we all imagined to be closed. The clou of the concerts was Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps – a work which was merely the logical outcome of a barbaric outlook applied to the technique of impressionism. (13)

❧❧ Impressionism Impressionism is the launch-pad of Part One and thus the reference point for the whole book. The term is, in Lambert’s view:

loose and easily misapplied … but one can think of no other that sums up so conveniently the undeniable connecting link between the various revolutionary a commentary on music ho! 283

composers of before the war. The connecting link may not be obvious, but it is there nevertheless, and it is something for which we may search in vain at the present time [i.e. after World War I]. (13–14) His usage is pragmatic:

one may doubt the logic of its use as a musical term at all; but its association with the work of Debussy and his followers is so widespread that one may conveniently use it as a generic label for that period of disruption in music of which Debussy was the dominating figure. (15) The extent of Lambert’s willingness to use Impressionism as a catch-all for ‘disruption’ is signalled by his applying it to both Stravinsky and Schoenberg. At the same time, following Cecil Gray and prefiguring Jarocinsky,11 he is happy to admit that Debussy has more in common with Symbolism because of his radical use of the traditional ‘vocabulary’: ‘the novelty of Debussy’s harmonic method consists in his using a chord as such, and not as a unit in a form of emotional and musical argument’ (16). The characteristics of Debussy’s compositional technique are incisively laid out, particularly so for the time of writing, and, despite Lambert’s claims in his introduction, he does make some use of technical language. For example: ‘His use of successions of the same chord, of the pentatonic and whole-tone scales and harmonies based on them, is entirely lacking in the thrust and counter- thrust methods of the German Romantics’ (17). It seems doubtful that a writer for the general reader today would risk this sentence, or perhaps the one that follows, which so succinctly marries a critique of the historical situation and a summing up of the general Debussyan effect:

By his overthrow of the old principles of contrasted discord and concord, of sus- pension and resolution, by his destruction of the key-system, Debussy puts an end to the somewhat mechanical eloquence into which the German Romantics had degenerated and which is based on these premises. The old principles of logic no longer obtain, and we are forced to listen less with our minds and more with our nerves. (18) Debussy’s technical innovations are neither an abstract whim, nor an end in themselves. Rather, they are spurred on by expressive needs: ‘it is more probable that the static style and harmonic mannerisms of Pelléas are due to

11 Gray, A Survey of Contemporary Music, 99; Stefan Jarocinski, Debussy: Impressionism and Symbolism (London: Eulenberg Books, 1976). 284 Christopher Mark his attempt to create a world of halflights and dimly realized emotions, than that he chose this subject because he felt himself unable to achieve music in another style’ (19). Lambert sees a ‘cold and detached pictorialism’ (20) as being of the essence in Debussy’s music before La Mer, and La Mer itself he regards as ‘the most finished and typical of Debussy’s works’ partly through this lack of human element. Like Nocturnes, however, the work is ‘confined to a somewhat narrow range of expression’, as a consequence of throwing out traditional musical romanticism, but ‘his rigid self-control was rewarded by the eventual freedom and richness of style that he achieved in the orchestral Images’ (22). Despite Lambert’s admiration for La Mer, it is Images that emerges as the peak of Debussy’s output, showing ‘conclusively that Debussy’s technical experiments were not the detached and empirical jugglings with sounds that they were at one time held to be, but a logical development towards complete self-realization’ (24).12 Lambert’s view of Debussy as the ‘unifying link’ between ‘apparently disparate experiments’ (24) of the period before World War I is likely to be challenged today; and his idea that Debussy directly influenced a wide range of composers seems questionable in the absence of detailed demonstration (he talks about direct and indirect influence, but does not say what the latter involves). He is, however, cautious about the influence on Stravinsky, because of ‘their common derivation from the Russian nationalists’ (26): he cites as a specific instance the beginnings of Debussy’s Nuages and Stravinsky’s Le Rossignol, which both ‘bear an extraordinary resemblance to one of the songs in Mussorgsky’s Without Sunlight cycle’ (26), as has often been pointed out since. Meanwhile, a perceived influence of Debussy on Firebird leads to a typical Lambertian flourish:

In L’Oiseau de Feu Stravinsky applied the rejuvenating influence of Debussy’s impressionism to the by now somewhat faded Russian fairy-tale tradition in much the same way that one pours a glass of port into a Stilton, thereby hasten- ing the already present element of decomposition. The resultant effect is rich and faisandé, but a little overripe, with a suggestion of maggots in the offing. (27) One admires the repartee, but this is one of many instances where a critical point is over-egged by his not being able to resist the opportunity for a good joke.

12 Here Lambert departs strongly from Gray, who observes ‘a very definite decline … after La Mer, one of his best works’; see Gray, A Survey of Contemporary Music, 107. a commentary on music ho! 285

That Debussy’s role in Lambert’s narrative was at least partly to be a stick with which to beat Stravinsky becomes clear in his comments on Le Sacre du Printemps. The preludes to both parts of the work ‘are in the direct Impressionist tradition’, but Stravinsky’s orchestration does not come up to Debussy’s because of ‘its lack of definition and its reliance on colour alone’ (27). It is in the realm of rhythm, though – contrary to the orthodox view – where Stravinsky is considered to want most: ‘In many sections of Le Sacre du Printemps the notes are merely pegs on which to hang the rhythm, and the orchestration and harmony are designed as far as possible to convert melodic instruments into the equivalent of percussion instruments’ (28). Le Sacre’s form also fails to impress: it is ‘merely a string of ballet movements lacking even in the formal cohesion of an opera ballet like the Polovtsian dances in Borodin’s Prince Igor’ (33). Neither can Lambert resist mocking the work’s impressed audience: ‘The immense prestige that this work enjoys with a certain type of intellectual is due to the fact that it is barbaric music for the supercivilized, an aphrodisiac for the jaded and surfeited’ (30). Schoenberg’s historical position as the self-conscious heir of the Austro- German tradition is expressed with similar waggishness: he is ‘an antichrist with blue blood in his veins’; ‘Like a priest of Diana he is forced to take up the role of the predecessor whom he has slain, and behind his most revolutionary passages lurks the highly respectable shade of Mendelssohn’ (30). This is thought-provoking for a few seconds, in a theatrical, political-debating kind of way, and the tone continues when the difference between Debussy and Schoenberg is summed up in a swiping reference to an august British political institution:

There are two ways of destroying the significance of the House Lords – you can either abolish it or you can make everyone a member. We have no sense of modulation in Debussy’s music for the simple reason that he doesn’t modulate, and we have no sense of modulation in Schönberg’s music because the work itself has become one vast modulation. Debussy destroys the old diatonic scale, with its class distinctions between tones and semitones, by restricting it to whole tones and pentatonic intervals; Schönberg by extending equal importance to all twelve semitones. Debussy destroys one’s sense of harmonic progression by eliminat- ing all contrapuntal feeling; Schönberg by the sheer multiplicity and mechanical application of his contrapuntal devices. The method of approach may be different, but the disruptive effect is the same. (31) Vivid though the distinction is, it has the effect of compromising Lambert’s credibility, since, as he himself must have known, Debussy’s music does indeed employ the diatonic scale, it most certainly modulates, and counterpoint can 286 Christopher Mark easily be found within it. The way in which the rhetoric sweeps all before it here is typical of several passages of the book, though the distortion rarely reaches quite this level. It transpires that the rationale for treating Schoenberg as an Impressionist reduces to what Lambert sees as ‘the elaborate pointillism’ (32) of his scoring, which belies the music’s elaborate contrapuntal construction. Contrary to the contemporary and subsequent fascination with Schoenberg’s techniques, Lambert focuses on the ‘appeal to the musical nerves rather than to the musical reason’ (32), regarding the Schoenberg of Pierrot Lunaire and Erwartung as neurasthenic and decadent. The subject-matter of both would seem to support this, but it is odd to regard Impressionism as a whole in these lights. This results from consideration in the final section of Part I of the influence of art and literature. In Debussy, ‘there is no denying the vaguely aesthetic and “arty” quality of much of his music – a quality that has even more in common with the English than with the French decadents’ (35), with parallels seen between the Nocturnes and Whistler. Meanwhile ‘the antique-fanciers like Pierre Louys and Maurice de Guérin’ are mentioned regarding ‘the Greek evocations of some of the preludes’ (35), with Baudelaire and Proust also mentioned: ‘Debussy’s Gigue is like a Proustian synthesis of the emotion drawn from some jig danced on the Breton coast, a jig in which he himself could never genuinely take part’ (36). Baudelaire is also invoked in relation to Erwartung, which also, ‘with its vague hints of necrophily, brings in the Krafft-Ebing touch (Jung at the prow and Freud at the helm)’ (38). The principle purpose of the closing pages of Part One, however, is to demonstrate that music must change rapidly if it is to achieve effects comparable to those of the other contemporary arts:

Horror and neurasthenia are absent from pre-Impressionist music for the simple reason that composers lacked the technical means to give as much expression to this side of their nature as was accomplished by the poets and novelists. Horror and neurasthenia in literature can be expressed without resorting to extremes of technique. (39) It was not until Debussy’s ‘revolution’ that ‘the composer found himself with a vocabulary capable of expressing the fin-de-siècle spirit that was already a commonplace in literature’ (41).

❧❧ Pasticheurs Despite some misgivings about all three major composers treated in Part One, Lambert sees the period before World War I as extraordinarily innovative and a commentary on music ho! 287 dynamic: there is ‘an exhilaration of the barricades about the Impressionist composers that imposes a certain gratitude’ (42). Much of the rest of the book is a lament that this period is over. Part Two, ‘Post-War Pasticheurs’, might at the beginning adopt the general tone of a disinterested description of contemporary proclivities, but Lambert’s broad distaste for those proclivities is barely disguised even in the opening paragraph: ‘the dominant characteristic of post- war music is either pastiche or an attempted consolidation that achieves only pastiche’ (43; my italics). It soon becomes apparent that every opportunity is going to be taken to continue to attack Stravinsky and those associated with him, especially Diaghilev, who ‘before the war … created a vogue for the Russian ballet, but after the war … merely created a vogue for vogue’ (61). Music composed before World War I had hit the buffers, reaching ‘the absolute limit of complication allowed by the capacity of composers, players, listeners and instrument makers’ (46): ‘modern musical revolutions are revolutions in the meanest sense of the word – the mere turning of a stationary wheel’ (45). The pre-war period saw space-travelling, ‘exploring the remotest jungles and treating unchartered seas as though they were the Serpentine’ (47). After the War composers had taken to time-travel: ‘to-day every composer’s overcoat has its corresponding hook in the cloakroom of the past’ (46). Diaghilev is identified as the chief culprit: being dependent on novelty to capture and maintain his western European audience, he had to change tack once the exoticism of the wares he brought to Paris, and the sensationalism of those he commissioned for performance there, had lost their impact. Central to Diaghilev’s establishing ‘a position of mastery again’ (51) through what Lambert calls ‘time travelling in more than one century or period at once’ (50) was Stravinsky, who was ideally suited to the manipulation of historical objects and attitudes because his ‘executive abilities so far outweighed his creative gifts’ (51). This ‘scrapbook’ approach, as Lambert calls it, is seen to be of the essence in surrealism, which he defines as ‘the free grouping together of incongru- ous and non-associated images’ (54), in a section that anticipates aspects of Taruskin’s tenth chapter, ‘The Cult of the Commonplace’.13 Lambert observes that, in order for surrealistic painting to make its effect, the depicted objects need to exhibit ordinariness: ‘The type of artistic experiment which tends to a slight, or even complete, obscuring of the immediately recognizable shape and function of the depicted object in the interests of formal unity, has no place in surrealism’ (56). There is, however, a certain easiness about surrealist creation:

13 This is the tenth chapter in Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music, Vol. 4, 561–98. 288 Christopher Mark

It is possible to produce a poem that would satisfy surrealist canons by pasting together odd strips from a newspaper – this method is actually advocated by Breton – and it is possible to create a surrealist picture by pasting together, provided they are sufficiently contrasted in subject-matter, odd scraps of old magazine illustrations – the more academic in style the better – a method followed by Max Ernst in his book La Femme – Cent Têtes. (57) This is a process that Stravinsky eagerly embraced, achieving ‘a surrealist incongruity by his wilful distortion of familiar classical formulas. A perfect cadence is broken across like a Chirico column, a suave and formal fugue leads, like the toga of Chirico’s mobled sages, to a harsh and discordant collection of abstract patterns’ (60). The criticisms stack up rapidly from this point. Lambert offers the insight that, while Stravinsky’s career apparently proceeded ‘by a series of reactions’ (63), these changes of stylistic tack are ‘linked together by the presence of one or two qualities in common with the preceding epoch’ (64). But the wartime works evince ‘A drearily forced wit and a species of intellectual and self-conscious buffoonery’. Thus inRenard the inadequacies of Le Sacre are only magnified: ‘Music, from being an ordered succession of sounds, has become a matter of “sonorities”, and anyone who can produce a brightly coloured brick of unusual shape is henceforth hailed as an architect’ (66). Worst is the reduction of music to ‘rhythmic jigsaw puzzles’: ‘the Russian folk dance is by now no longer a live and kicking peasant but a dead kulak whose corpse is so much material for a lecture by the dissecting surgeon’ (66). L’Histoire du Soldat, meanwhile, is beset with ‘melodic poverty, or even nul- lity’ (68). (Later, Lambert asserts that Stravinsky has a ‘complete lack of any melodic faculty’; 69). The work is characterized by ‘objective juggling with rhythm, or rather metre, for there can be no true rhythm where there is no melodic life’ (68). Thus:

Harmony, melody, all that could give the least emotional significance to his music, has been banished in the interests of abstraction, and musical purity has been achieved by a species of musical castration. The formula of sound for sound’s sake is here reduced to its ludicrous essentials, and there is no further progress possible on these lines. (68–9) Nevertheless, Les Noces is declared to be ‘one of the masterpieces of the period and possibly the only really important work Stravinsky has given us’, though precisely why it should be accorded this honour never becomes clear. Lambert’s discussion of the piece is reserved for Part Three, ‘Nationalism and the Exotic’, where it emerges out of a consideration of exoticism in the previous a commentary on music ho! 289 generation of Russian composers. But even here, the praise is grudging at best: ‘It is impossible indeed not to admire the consistency of this work, even though we may feel that the consistency is of a negative order, achieved by rejecting most elements in musical composition rather than by blending them into one harmonious whole’ (137). There is less criticism of rhythm, though, which seems to be the only feature now of any consequence: ‘The harmonies on the pianos are merely there to fix a rhythmic shape in space, as it were; they have no value as sound life examined vertically’ (138). There is a good deal more in similar vein as Lambert continues with his idée fixe that Stravinsky produces ‘not so much music as renowned impersonations of music’ (75). By this (still relatively early) stage in the book the reading experience is like being held captive by a slightly inebriated but brilliant wit who doesn’t know when to stop. The relentless witticisms are entertaining when you agree, but pall when you don’t. When Lambert finally relents in his assault on Stravinsky, it is to discuss more broadly one of his chief complaints about him: his attempt at abstraction. Here he is railing not just against Stravinsky, but also his fellow critics, for ‘Nothing is more typical of the superficial nature of most modern or rather modernist criticism than its slipshod use of the word abstract, particularly as applied to music’ (80). He argues against the very possibility of abstraction in music: ‘Emotional and romantic expression in music is not a late and decadent excrescence, but a natural tradition, that only became temporarily eclipsed in a few minor eighteenth-century works. … Music, far from being an abstract art, is as naturally emotional as painting is naturally representational’ (83). Indeed, in a brief diversion away from the pasticheurs, he insists that even ‘The atonal school, whatever its faults and in spite of its superficial air of mathematical frigidity, can in no way be described as abstract’ (88). Yet there is one composer who in Lambert’s view does inhabit this rarefied realm: Erik Satie. Contrary to the view of him in the United Kingdom as ‘an incompetent dilettante’ (88), Lambert writes that no composer ‘took a more essentially serious view of his art’ (89). Lambert devotes eleven pages to him, about the same as he gives to Debussy if one excepts the passages on Debussy’s influence. One would have thought that Satie, given the almost found-object status of so much of his material, would have been a prime candidate for consideration as a surrealist, which is hardly congruent with abstraction. But this is clearly not the case: Lambert insists that his harmony ‘displays a curiously objective and unatmospheric quality’ (91). Many might dispute this: there is, for instance, a pervading atmosphere of melancholy in the Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes. The ‘strangeness of his harmonic colouring’ is also, of course, an expressive topos. Neither does the conception of Gymnopédies as sculptural (so that each individual gymnopédie is a different view of the same object) of 290 Christopher Mark itself support the case for abstraction. Rather, this seems to lie in what Lambert sees as the static quality of Satie’s work. And it is ultimately this that condemns Satie to secondary status:

We may well ask ourselves if, to obtain the static abstraction of Satie’s best work, it is worth while throwing over the dynamic movement and expressiveness which has hitherto always been considered an essential part of music. … [He] can hardly be said to be a major composer. In spite of his intensely musical faculties it is impossible not to feel that the mentality that directed these instincts would have found truer expression in one of the plastic arts. (96) The title of the section devoted to Satie is ‘Erik Satie and his “Musique d’ameu- blement”’ – music deliberately designed not to be listened to. (Lambert relates an anecdote about the composer’s frustration at the audience actively listening to a performance in a foyer rather than talking, moving about and ordering drinks: ‘Satie, exasperated beyond reason by this uncalled-for respect, dashed furiously round the foyer shouting: “Parlez! Parlez! Parlez!”’ (95–6).) It is the ‘denial of so much that is essentially musical’ (96) that Lambert sees as condemning Satie’s music to inhabit a cul-de-sac. The extent to which Satie can truly be called a pasticheur, at least in the Stravinskian sense (or that of Les Six, who feature in the chapter only very briefly, represented by Poulenc), may be doubted: in contrast to music generally regarded as neo-classical, Satie does not encourage the listener to observe the dialogue or the mis-meshing (as it often is) between historical material and its modern deployment. Indeed, the effectiveness with which he leeches his material of historical baggage is one way in which his music may be said to at least approach abstraction. Lambert’s envoi to Satie is worth quoting at some length, not for the insights into Satie so much as for its demonstration of Lambert’s literary skill. The passage is chiefly concerned, like most of the chapters’ perorations, with setting up the next part, ‘Nationalism and the Exotic’. The transition is perhaps slightly forced here, but one still admires the dexterity:

Satie is not a sufficiently powerful figure or dominating influence to lend support to those who uphold abstractions in music. Least of all does he lend support to those who preach internationalism. For his music, in spite of its objectivity, has at times a very strong French flavour and it is probably this quality that is mainly responsible for the hasty dismissal of his work by English critics, who only seem favourably disposed to those French composers, such as Berlioz and Debussy, who, from the French point of view, are in the nature of an exotic culture. (97–8) a commentary on music ho! 291 ❧❧ Nationalism Nowhere is the breadth of Lambert’s knowledge so much on display as in Part Three, ‘Nationalism and the Exotic’. After delving back in time to Dowland, Byrd and Purcell, he then proceeds through the eighteenth century to the recent music of Bartók and Stravinsky via the nineteenth-century nationalists, with a focus on Russia. A section on ‘Exoticism and “Low Life”’, which commences by highlighting the importance of Chabrier as the precursor of Les Six (Lambert wrote his first two pieces of journalism on him),14 leads to two extensive sections on jazz, which together take up the greater portion of the chapter. The fact that our knowledge of and debates about all of these areas have expanded considerably since Lambert’s time should not detract from the per- spicacity and skill with which he discusses what now seem like very familiar ideas, regarding, for example, the distinction between eighteenth-century internationalism and nineteenth-century nationalism, the relationship between romanticism and politics, and the role of exoticism, undertaken of course before the appearance of classic texts such as Edward Said’s Orientalism.15 Lambert’s enumeration of the issues surrounding folk-song-based compositional approaches – ‘the inherent struggle between national expression and symphonic form’ (115) – are fairly well-worn for today’s readers, too, though expressed in Lambert’s usual invigorating style. Thus folk songs are not suited to the ‘sweeping line demanded by the larger instrumental forms. One cannot use a small watchchain as a link in an anchor cable’ (115). He goes on:

To put it vulgarly, the whole trouble with a folk song is that once you have played it through there is nothing much you can do except play it over again and play it rather louder. Most Russian music, indeed, consists in ringing changes on this device, skilfully disguised though the fact may be. (117) The locus classicus of the latter approach could be said to be Glinka’s Kamarinskya, but Lambert is sceptical of the importance later scholars have accorded it: it is ‘a little masterpiece, no doubt, but Tchaikovsky was wrong in describing it as the acorn from which the oak tree of Russian music grew. It is an acorn that has miraculously produced a series of larger and more decorative acorns’ (118). Thus:

there is an extraordinary lack of formal as opposed to merely colouristic progress in Russian progress [sic – ‘music’?], and during the seventy years that

14 Lloyd, Constant Lambert, 146. 15 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978). 292 Christopher Mark

separate Ruslan from Le Sacre du Printemps there is less real advance, save of a purely decorative and two-dimensional order, than there is in the thirty years that separate Beethoven’s first symphony from his ninth. On the debit side, then, is this one grave accusation. Russian music had the vitality to break up the eighteenth-century tradition, but not the vitality to build up another. Like nomad Tartars, the Russians razed the Western buildings to the ground but put up in their place only gaily painted tents. (122) What now seems like a fundamental misunderstanding of Russian music, very much in tune with its times in being all too in thrall (as Taruskin would say)16 to German hegemony, is followed up by an equally fundamental misunderstanding of the role of folk song in modernist scores. While ‘The harmonic style of Glinka and Borodin … provides a natural counterpart to the modal line of the folk song’, ‘Modern harmony has progressed to such a point that the application of it to a modal folk song is as absurd as an atonal setting of Land of Hope and Glory’ (126). Again the rhetoric (and this is one Lambert’s silliest quips) compromises the argument. But rhetoric aside, the serious points he then makes about both Stravinsky and Bartók are still difficult to agree with in the face of detailed examination of the scores. In Le Sacre, he maintains, ‘we begin to get folk tunes treated in an harmonic style that has not the remotest emotional or technical relation to the harmonies suggested by the melody itself’ (126). Most commentators would concur that there is tension between melody and harmony in Le Sacre. Stephen Walsh, for example, observes:

a consistent opposition between the melody – often Dorian-mode folksong fragments – and the remainder of the harmonic field, which typically sets up chromatic interferences with it. Stravinsky engineers these interferences by joining together Dorian tunes a diminished or augmented octave (major 7th or minor 9th) apart, as on the very first page.17 Walsh, and recent Stravinsky scholars in general, however, view this as a cogent structuring principle rather than a deleterious effect. In Bartók’s earlier works, including Bluebeard’s Castle, Lambert feels that the melodic lines ‘draw [their] inflections from national song’ and are ‘at one with [their] stark harmonic background’ (126); but in his later works there is ‘a dangerous split … between melody and harmony, the melody becoming

16 See, for one example of many, the first chapter (Some Thoughts on the History and Historiography of Russian Music) in Richard Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically: Historical and Hermeneutical Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). 17 Stephen Walsh, ‘Stravinsky, Igor’, Grove Music Online / Oxford Music Online [accessed 31 January 2017]. a commentary on music ho! 293 definitely simpler, squarer and more “folky” while the harmonic treatment becomes more cerebral and outré’ (126). Space for detailed exemplification is not available, of course, but if he had in mind String Quartet No. 3, or indeed No. 4, composed in 1927 and 1928 respectively, just a few years before Music Ho! was written, it is difficult to see his reasoning: a process of simplifica- tion is used as formal device in Part 1 of String Quartet No. 3, and there is a remarkable degree of integration of the horizontal and the vertical in String Quartet No. 4. A short article by Bartók entitled ‘The National Temperament in Music’18 was published in English translation in The Musical Times in 1928. It seems highly probable that Lambert would have come across it, even though he did not write for the journal himself until 1931.19 In this article Bartók outlines the intention of himself and Kodály to ‘create our own musical style’ out of ‘the true spirit’ of the ‘incredibly rich treasure of popular melodies’.20 He concludes by saying ‘that internationalism is not only unimaginable but also injurious to music and to every other art. Music and its sister arts must always reflect the true character of its region and surroundings. From this results variety in art and life.’21 Lambert agrees with this, but thinks that Bartók’s later ‘dangerously split’ music – and, indeed, folk-based music in general – is artificial. Furthermore, the creation of a modern national style is inhibited by a ‘lack of any genuine spiritual or social background’ (127). Nowhere is this more the case than in England: ‘the spiritual background of a modern people’s opera, like Vaughan Williams’s Hugh the Drover, is something that no longer exists and which nothing will bring back and the work in consequence fails to move us except in a detached nostalgic way’ (128). Indeed, there is ‘the depressing fact that English folk songs have for the average twentieth-century Englishman none of the evocative significance that the folk songs of Russia had for the average nineteenth-century Russian’ (123). Rather, the strength of English music from the Elizabethans onwards has always been ‘fruitful foreign influences’, with Elgar and Delius providing contemporary examples of the composition of ‘music that is essentially English in feeling without having to dress itself up in rustic clothes or adopt pseudo-archaic modes of speech’ (124). In a particularly cutting passage Lambert draws a parallel between the English folk-song movement and ‘the admirably meant

18 Béla Bartók, ‘The National Temperament in Music’, The Musical Times 69/1030 (1928), 1079. The article seems to have been written up by another hand from an interview. 19 His first contribution was on Erwartung: see Lloyd, Constant Lambert, 476. 20 Bartók, ‘The National Temperament in Music’, 1079. 21 Ibid., 1079. 294 Christopher Mark endeavours of William Morris and his followers to combat the products of those dark satanic mills with green and unpleasant handwoven materials’ (125). In a brief glimpse of his endpoint and great hope for the future, Lambert suggests the solution for nationalism in music ‘is an absorption of national feeling in an intellectually self-supporting form such as we find in the symphonies of Sibelius’ (132).

❧❧ Exoticism, Jazz According to Lambert, exoticism in music was established by the same composer as nationalism: Glinka. But if the Russian’s ‘authentic exoticism’ – ‘his happy gift for investing an oriental tune with an appropriate harmonic atmosphere’ (135) – brings some rewards, it also initiates another path to decline: ‘Glinka was the first to establish in music that particular type of nostalgic world of escape which has now become so familiar and, unfortunately, vulgar- ized that it hardly requires further definition’ (134). Nevertheless, exoticism’s artificiality, as distinct from nationalism’s, ‘is in its favour, for it induces in the composer a certain degree of stylization that is often to be preferred to the verism of the nationalistic composer’ (136). For a paragraph or two it seems as if exoticism might even rescue Stravinsky’s Les Noces, the rhythms of which Lambert hears, rather quirkily, as employing those of African and Asiatic musics. But he is soon back on track with another of his sillier comments: ‘The exoticism of Les Noces is of the “darker” D. H. Lawrence order and we feel at any moment that middle-aged Englishwomen are going to slip out of the stalls and join in the singing, like the heroine of the Plumed Serpent’ (137). The knife is then twisted, and stabbed into Delius as well: ‘the trouble with exotic music is that so much of it is emotionally and technically two-dimensional. The austere exoticism of Stravinsky’s rhythms soon becomes as wearisome as the lush exoticism of Delius’s harmonies’ (138). In the book’s structure exoticism provides a transition to jazz, via a short section identifying a shift of the source of exoticism necessitated by increasing familiarity with the Other: ‘Unable to find exoticism in the strange and distant, we force ourselves to dive down into the familiar, and what is conveniently called Low Life provides the exotic motive for the post-war artist’ (140). The language employed to talk about nationalism and exoticism has changed somewhat since the early 1930s, and some of Lambert’s prose can now come across as perilously close to racism. Taking individual phrases out of a context in which the dialectics of tone are so important to overall meaning can easily magnify their effect, but even bearing this in mind talk of ‘charming savages’ and the essentializing of the Jewish experience in the following passage will make the modern reader squirm: a commentary on music ho! 295

In point of fact, jazz has long ago lost the simple gaiety and sadness of the charming savages to whom it owes its birth, and is now for the most part a reflection of the jagged nerves, sex repressions, inferiority complexes and general dreariness of the modern scene. The nostalgia of the negro who wants to go home has given place to the infinitely more weary nostalgia of the cosmopolitan Jew who has no home to go to. (153) The next paragraph is also uncomfortably reductive:

The importance of the Jewish element in jazz cannot be too strongly emphasized, and the fact that at least ninety per cent of jazz tunes are written by Jews undoubtedly goes far to account for the curiously sagging quality – so typical of Jewish art – the almost masochistic melancholy of the average foxtrot. (153) Meanwhile, the ‘superiority’ of the European element in the jazz mix is made clear when Lambert describes its ingredients as African rhythms combined with harmony typical of the hymns of John Bacchus Dykes (148). The imported harmony is necessary because ‘the negro’ lacks ‘any innate harmonic sense … [as] can be realized by listening to the bands in the poorer bals nègres in Paris, where the orchestra consists of unsophisticated negroes who have been brought up in the French colonies and not subject to the influence of the suc- culently harmonized Anglo-Saxon religious music’ (149). Hence ‘The sudden post-war efflorescence of jazz was due largely to the adoption as raw material of the harmonic richness and orchestral subtlety of the Debussy–Delius period of highbrow music’ (149). In his critique of various genres of jazz Lambert expends particular scorn on what he calls the ‘Vo-dodeo-vo, poo-poop-a- doop school of jazz song’, with:

its hysterical emphasis on the fact that the singer is a jazz baby going crazy about jazz rhythms. If jazz were really so gay one feels that there would not be so much need to mention the fact in every bar of the piece. Folk songs do not inform us that it’s great to be singing in six-eight time, or that you won’t get your dairy- maid until you have mastered the Dorian mode. (152) The finest jazz in Lambert’s view is to be found in Duke Ellington. Whereas Louis Armstrong is limited – ‘after a few records one realizes that all his improv- isations are based on the same restricted circle of ideas, and in the end there is no music which more quickly provokes a state of exasperation and ennui’ (155) – Ellington ‘is a real composer, the first jazz composer of distinction and the first negro composer of distinction’ (155), outdoing Ravel, Stravinsky and 296 Christopher Mark

Copland in various aspects of his craft. Ellington remains, though, apetit-maî - tre, and ‘having caught up with the highbrow composer in so many ways the jazz composer is now stagnating, bound to a narrow circle of rhythmic and harmonic devices and neglecting the possibilities of form’. Hence ‘It is for the highbrow composer to take the next step’ (162). Gershwin, at least in Rhapsody in Blue, is not, however, the best exemplar of symphonic jazz because he ‘has used only the non-barbaric elements in jazz music’ (162). On the other hand, French developments are facetious (Lambert cites the example of Mihauld in Le Boeuf sur le Toit and La Création du Monde) and the Germans ‘redress the balance with a solemnity of depravity that is at times faintly ridiculous’ (163), though Weill’s The Seven Deadly Sins is regarded as particularly effective. So at the end of the chapter Lambert returns to the fatalistic view of musical culture that is continually breaking the surface of the book. And having focused for the most part on the activity of composers, he now includes audiences as well:

[To the] ordinary public jazz is not even a thing specifically to be danced to, let alone be listened to with any discrimination. It has become a sort of aural tickling, a vague soothing of the nerves giving no more positive pleasure than the mechanically-lit gasper. At its best it provides merely a group emotion for those incapable of more independent sensations. More than the music of any other period jazz has become a drug for the devitalized. (166) As at the end of the previous chapter, Lambert is here setting up the next discussion, perhaps the gloomiest, and the rhetoric is no doubt influenced by this. But it is still a dispiriting view of the reception of music that earlier in chapter was presented as exhibiting considerable vitality and potential.

❧❧ The Mechanical Lambert is not the only composer to complain about what he sees as the deleterious effects of mechanical reproduction. Here is Britten, for example, in his Aspen Award speech: ‘If I say the loudspeaker is the principal enemy of music, I don’t mean that I am not grateful to it as a means of education or study, or as an evoker of memories. But it is not part of true musical experience.’ 22 Lambert begins Part Four, ‘The Mechanical Stimulus’, written thirty years earlier, with a series of assertions of a similar order: ‘never has there been so much music-making and so little musical experience of a vital order’; ‘the more people use the wireless the less they listen to it’ (168); there is danger of

22 Paul Kildea, ed., Britten on Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 261. a commentary on music ho! 297

‘an atrophy of the aural nerves’ (172). His disapprobation stimulates one of his most colourful statements, and certainly one of his most tasteless:

It is obvious that second-rate mechanical music is the most suitable fare for those to whom musical experience is no more than a mere aural tickling, just as the prostitute provides the most suitable outlet for those to whom sexual experience is no more than the periodic removal of a recurring itch. The loud speaker is the street walker of music. (173) Moving on (mercifully quickly) to the musical representation of the mechanical, he makes a more nuanced point about what he calls the ‘mechanical picturesque’, under which rubric he includes such works as Honegger’s Pacific 231 and Rugby:

The objection to realism in music is not that it makes things too easy for the listener but that it makes them too difficult. Instead of receiving an immediate and incisive physical impression he receives a vaguely visual one, which has to be related back to early associations and personal experience before it produces the emotional reaction which the music should have evoked directly. It is for the composer, not the listener, to digest the raw material of his inspiration. (176) All of this, though, represents the divesting of petty annoyances compared with the subsequent attack on the composer whom, even more than Stravinsky, Lambert regards as the nadir of contemporary music: Paul Hindemith. Hindemith is savaged at length, at a time when his influence upon British composers was at its height: the publication of Music Ho! was straddled by the initial composition and revision of Walton’s Viola Concerto, 1928–9 and 1936–7, which was premiered by Hindemith (who was a friend of Walton’s) and much influenced by him. Hindemith is described as ‘the journalist of modern music, the supreme middlebrow of our times’, reflecting ‘the tempo and colour of modern life in the brisk unpolished manner of the newspaper reporter’ (178). The experience he offers is prosaic in the extreme: ‘Listening to his firmly wrought works we seem to see ourselves in a block of hygienic and efficient workmen’s flats built in the best modernism’s manner, from which emerge troops of healthy uniformed children on their way to the communal gymnasium’ (179). Even worse, he has reduced music ‘to the spiritual level of billiards, pingpong and clock golf’ (184). And most devastatingly of all, ‘By resolutely turning his back on “art” Hindemith has lessened our interest even in his craft’ (184). 298 Christopher Mark ❧❧ Sibelius Lambert’s work on Music Ho! was very briefly interrupted by writing a letter in reply to a complaint about his attacks on Hindemith in The Sunday Referee. This came from Hindemith’s foremost disciple in Britain, Walter Leigh. Leigh’s letter is lost, but Lloyd reproduces Lambert’s reply complete. Lambert signs off: ‘when I attack Hindemith I am not so much showing mental laziness or English diehard-prejudice as defending one of the very few convictions I have left’.23 Fortunately he has some more positive convictions too, and in Part Five, ‘Escape or Submission’, he unveils his chief hope for the future. Before this, though, he addresses the Second Viennese School more fully than earlier. He has significant misgivings over aspects of their music. Atonality is described as ‘by far the most abnormal movement music has ever known’ (209). It has ‘no instinctive physical basis’ (here he presages later writers, such as Roger Scruton and others),24 is remote from normal experience, and offers a ‘narrow emotional range’ (211). And in one of his most brilliant evocations he suggests that ‘Like blasphemy, it [i.e. atonality] requires a background of belief for its full effect’ (211). He also cautions that ‘atonalism as a school’ (215) risks too much emphasis on Augenmusik (though he does not use this term), so that ‘devices which were occasionally present in Pierrot Lunaire as a means to an end are now treated as the be-all and end-all of music’ (215). Meanwhile, his words of advice for analysts of complicated music such as that spawned by the techniques associated with atonal music have all too often been unheeded:

That a work is capable of elaborate analysis proves nothing, for a bad work may be just as interesting from the analyst’s point of view as a good one. It is quite amusing, for example, to discover in the introduction to Schönberg’s Variations that one instrument is playing the notes B-A-C-H very slowly while another is playing them backwards at four times the speed, but such tricks in no way effect the ultimate value of the work. (216) Despite all this, Lambert has considerable admiration for both Schoenberg and Berg – though perhaps not Webern, whose music resembles ‘an alembi- cated and intellectual crossword puzzle’ (188). Schoenberg’s early lieder may evince ‘the familiar aroma of stale potpourri prevented from leaving the room by the heavy curtains and double windows’ (212), but Pierrot Lunaire is ‘one of the masterpieces of our time’ (213), while the orchestral Variations, Op. 31,

23 Lloyd, Constant Lambert, 188. 24 See for example the chapter ‘True Authority: Janáček, Schoenberg and Us’, in Roger Scruton, Understanding Music: Philosophy and Interpretation (London and New York: Continuum, 2009), 162–81. a commentary on music ho! 299 is ‘among the most outstanding works written since the war and … undoubtedly the most important music Schönberg has written for twenty years’ (218). Berg is ‘the only atonal composer who is in any way in touch with the general public’ (219), demonstrated by the success of Wozzeck. Lambert must be one of the first writers to identify as a key characteristic of Berg’s music the ‘paradoxical combination of intellectual method and physical result’ (219). Agonizingly, given that Berg’s death was only two years away, he is perhaps the only figure apart from Sibelius in whom Lambert feels he can invest hope: ‘the direction his work takes in the next few years cannot fail to be indicative of far-reaching future developments’ (219). Lambert asserts that since the death of Debussy, Schoenberg is one of the two ‘most significant figures in European music’ (238). The other, of course, is Sibelius, and he is ‘undoubtedly the more complete artist of the two’, mainly because he does not suffer from the restrictions that Schoenberg has built for himself: the Finn’s music ‘indicates not a particular avenue of escape but a world of thought which is free from the paralysing alternatives of escape or submission’ (238–9). Not only is he ‘the only modern composer who has maintained a steady and logical progress’ (221), he is also ‘the greatest orchestral innovator of our time’ (224), possessed of an ‘astonishing sense of form’ (226). In his brief survey of the symphonies, Nos 4 and 7 are highlighted, the former for its ‘astonishing conciseness’ (234) and the latter for its ‘magnificent formal sweep and emotional logic’ (which prompts a final dig at Stravinsky in a perceived contrast with the ‘cold detachment of Stravinsky’s Apollo Musagètes’). These achievements are capped only by Tapiola’s climax: ‘in a sudden moment of intense vision he has, like a Newton or an Einstein, revealed the electrifying possibilities that are latent in the apparently commonplace’ (237). The fact that Sibelius’s long silence was beginning at the time of Music Ho!’s publication makes Lambert’s championing of him slightly ironic, though it is of course the works he had already produced that in Lambert’s mind contained ‘the answer to so many of the questions, both direct and implied, that have been raised in this study’ (237–8). While Sibelius enjoyed a high level of popularity in Britain during Lambert’s lifetime, this fell away – at least among younger composers and the chroniclers of twentieth-century music history – in the 1950s and 1960s, so that it was not until well after his death that, as Daniel Grimley puts it, Sibelius ‘re-emerged as a highly influential force in twentieth-century music’, ‘challeng[ing] our received view of twentieth-century musical development as a straightforward linear progression from late Romanticism through modernism to serialism and the avant-garde’.25 Yet now, in the words of one of the foremost contempo-

25 Daniel M. Grimley, ‘Introduction’, in Daniel M. Grimley, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Sibelius (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 1–4, at 1. 300 Christopher Mark rary British composers, Julian Anderson, Sibelius’s influence ‘on contemporary music is now so substantial and lasting that one can speak of him as a key figure in the shaping of current musical thought’.26 Anderson’s chapter could be read as a vindication of Lambert’s predictions, and in his final paragraph Anderson comes close (whether he knew it or not) to repeating Lambert’s actual words: ‘There is general agreement amongst contemporary composers that beneath the obviously traditional elements of his harmonic syntax, Sibelius addressed some of the most essential problems of composition in innovative and utterly original ways that are of continuing relevance to the newest music.’27

❧❧ Britain Anderson is, though, surely correct to opine that ‘A large number of mid-century British symphonists reflected too vividly the immediate impact of Sibelius’s mannerisms, without always having the merit of understanding the full consequences of his musical language.’28 This is not the place to discuss whether Walton’s First Symphony, long regarded as Sibelian, is one of these pieces,29 but Lambert clearly thinks not since he mentioned the work favourably in his review of the first performance (which was incomplete, because the final movement – possibly the least Sibelian – was not finished). Walton is one of the composers most frequently mentioned in Lambert’s journalism, more in his Sunday Referee column than in his book. Indeed, British composition is accorded little sustained discussion in Music Ho! apart from Vaughan Williams’s appearance in the nationalism section. Lambert’s critique there of the Pastoral Symphony might stand for the prevailing view of the composer until the reconsideration of recent times:

In a work like Vaughan Williams’s Pastoral Symphony it is no exaggeration to say that the creation of a particular type of grey, reflective, English-landscape mood has outweighed the exigencies of symphonic form. To those who find this mood sympathetic, their intense and personal emotional reaction will more than compensate for the monotony of texture and lack of form, of which a less well-disposed listener might perhaps be unduly conscious. (107)

26 Julian Anderson, ‘Sibelius and Contemporary Music’, in Grimley, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Sibelius, 196–218, at 196. 27 Anderson, ‘Sibelius and Contemporary Music’, 216. 28 Ibid., 210. 29 See, rather, J. P. E. Harper-Scott, ‘“Our True North”: Walton’s First Symphony, Sibelianism, and the Nationalization of Modernism in England’, Music & Letters 89 (2008), 562–89. a commentary on music ho! 301

Despite this, the work is ‘one of the landmarks in modern English music’; indeed, a couple of years before Lambert wrote this he told his Sunday Referee readers that the first movement ‘ranks with the composer’s very finest work’.30 He had no reservations about the Fourth Symphony, however, writing in the Sunday Referee in April 1935: ‘all the old mannerisms have gone. The vigour, concision, and intellectual force of this symphony must have taken the composer’s greatest admirers by surprise.’31 And in November of that year he asserted that the completed First Symphony of Walton ‘and Vaughan Williams’s Fourth Symphony, are, to my mind, the two most important novelties of recent years, whether in this country or in Europe’.32 Whether he saw the return in Vaughan Williams’s Fifth Symphony to the pastoralism of the Third as a retrograde step is not recorded. The year of the publication of Music Ho! was pivotal in British music, wit- nessing the deaths of Delius, Elgar and Holst, as well as the births of Birtwistle and Maxwell Davies. It was also the year in which Britten announced his presence with the first performance and broadcast of A Boy was Born. In his homage to Elgar, Lambert praised his ability to ‘write music indubitably English in feeling without adopting a rustic or archaic accent’,33 and after Elgar’s death he insisted, despite its generally poor public reception, on the stature of Falstaff: ‘I cannot understand why Falstaff, which is considered by most musicians to be Elgar’s finest work, should not enjoy the same hold over the public as the symphonies … the general level of thought strikes me as far more distinguished’.34 While he regarded the Dream of Gerontius as patchy and failing to ‘live up to the consistent inspiration of its prelude’,35 he insisted in one of his last columns for the Sunday Referee that ‘those who look upon Elgar as the brave bourgeois of English music will eventually have to remodel their opinions’.36 He was more equivocal about Delius. His Mass of Life ‘almost recalls certain books by D. H. Lawrence, when a somewhat tedious theorizing about life interrupts the superbly written presentation of itself’.37 But Lambert provides a superb encapsulation of Delius’s essential characteristics in his review of a performance of Sea Drift that is far more penetrating than any of his contemporaries managed to achieve:

30 Lloyd, Constant Lambert, 486. 31 Ibid., 496. 32 Ibid., 497. 33 Ibid., 482. 34 Ibid., 491. 35 Ibid., 499. 36 Ibid., 502. 37 Ibid., 487. 302 Christopher Mark

All one can do is attempt some appreciation of that rarer emotional quality, at one moment a reflection of the strange, inhuman beauty of elemental nature, the next moment a poignant expression of the transience of human emotion, which is the dominant characteristic of Delius’s art. In spite of its almost unbearable melancholy and nostalgia, this mood cannot be described as pessimistic. There is a vein of sensuous beauty which runs through even the most tragic moments and saves them from bleakness or austerity.38 No less astute is Lambert’s critique of A Boy was Born, in which he identifies the theme and variation no. 5, ‘In the bleak midwinter’ (in hindsight this can be said to be the most characteristic music of the composer), as especially impressive.39 Britten’s career had hardly begun at the point that Lambert’s regular journalism stopped, but the Variations of a Theme of Frank Bridge, on which Lambert reported in 1938, gave him, along with Rawsthorne’s Variations, ‘renewed faith in the younger generation of English composers’:40 and while the Piano Concerto was slightly disappointing to him it nevertheless possessed ‘wit and invention in every movement’.41 *** If Music Ho! has not been entirely ignored in recent musicological literature, it cannot be said to have formed a linchpin, or vital support, in anyone’s arguments since it went out of print.42 The book remains entertaining to read, a model of literary elegance, and an important resource for reception studies. But the burgeoning activity in twentieth-century music history over the recent decades renders much of its content obsolete in scholarly terms. This is despite the book’s resonances with some aspects of present-day scholarship: unlike Gray in A Survey of Contemporary Music and (to a lesser extent) Foss in Music in my Time, which seem solidly marooned in their own period, it

38 Ibid., 482. 39 Ibid., 493. 40 Ibid., 502. 41 Ibid., 475. 42 Typical citations are Fabian Huss’s reference to Lambert’s comparison of impressionism in painting and music in Fabian Huss, ‘The Construction of Nature in the Music of E. J. Moeran’, Tempo 63/248 (2009), 35–44, at 41; Eric Clarke’s reference to Lambert’s ‘complaining that such availability was responsible for desensitizing listeners to music’s impact’ in Eric Clarke, ‘The Impact of Recording on Listening’, Twentieth-Century Music 4/1 (2007), 47–70, at 53; Lawrence Kramer’s reference to Lambert’s comments on jazz in support of 1920s jazz’s critics’ perception that it was ‘“dross” waiting to be transformed into symphonic gold’ in Lawrence Kramer, ‘Powers of Blackness: Africanist Discourse in Modern Concert Music’, Black Music Research Journal 22/1 (2002), 197–214, at 205. a commentary on music ho! 303 prefigures today’s tendency to focus on themes or issues rather than specific works. And as I suggested earlier, there are some fleeting adumbrations of New Musicological attitudes. There is, however, one way in which Music Ho! is strikingly different from today’s fashion, and one way in which, because of this, it could have a vital effect on contemporary musicology. The author revels in making judgements. Music Ho! is not a musicological work; the closest to a modern equivalent in English might be The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by The New Yorker’s music critic, Alex Ross.43 Impressive though Ross’s book is in scope, it lacks the wit, literary verve and insight of Lambert. It is studiously rel- ativist and description is preferred to critical engagement. Although it, too, is not a musicological work, it takes its cue from New Musicological orthodoxy. In thrall to postmodernism, new musicologists have largely refrained from evaluating compositions and performances (as distinct from evaluating musicological work, of course), preferring to devote their attention to hermeneutics instead. The richness that has flowed from such work should not be denied. But it could be claimed that critical judgement is a form of knowledge – in the sense of comprehension, grasp, grip, command, mastery, apprehension – that might be pursued with profit to at least the same extent. This is not the place to develop this issue at the length it deserves. But for those musicologists who still see critical judgement as the core of their activity, Lambert might provide a valuable source of inspiration.

43 Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (London: Fourth Estate, 2007). Chapter 13 The Challenge to Goodwill: Herbert Howells, Alban Berg and ‘The Modern Problem’

Jonathan Clinch

he field of English literature benefits greatly from the role of the writ- T er-critic, or more specifically here, the poet-critic. In one sense a ‘British’ modernism has no place in that field, headed up as it was by foreign figures such as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Both T. S. Eliot’s critical writings and his celebrated poetry create a symbiotic relationship of meaning; it is almost impossible to imagine one without the other. To take one example of Eliot the critic, his 1919 essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ has a central role in the field of literary criticism and sets out his early views on how a poet must develop his/her ‘historical sense’ in order to write with a truly dynamic view of past, present and future; but, of course, Eliot is always speaking as a practitioner, his methodology is primarily empirical. This synergy is most clearly expressed in the opening of Four Quartets, where the roles of poet and critic combine into an artistic philosophy: ‘Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future, / And time future contained in time past’. Frequently, contemporary writers on modernism emphasize a break with the past (especially the immediate past), when it is equally important to critique how those connections between past, present and future are made and remade. This chapter examines the technical and aesthetic considerations informing Herbert Howells’s views on musical modernism as instantiated by his lectures for the BBC, understood in relation to ongoing debates about British musical modernism and the current prevalence of inter-disciplinary modes of thought. If one considers that the first generation of the ‘English Musical Renaissance’ was dominated by Parry and Stanford at the Royal College of Music, then Howells, as one of Parry’s star pupils and Stanford’s self-confessed ‘son in music’, was the likely chief inheritor of that tradition, spending the rest of his life teaching at the RCM. One of Stanford’s earlier students (and subsequent Director of the Royal College of Music), Sir George Dyson, will

304 Herbert Howells, Alban Berg and ‘The Modern Problem’ 305 also be considered within this second generation, as an influence on Howells, particularly through his book The New Music.1 Howells and Dyson share with Eliot a critique of modernism, which looked back at the past, and valued it. Within cultural theory, this is cultural conservatism, a branch of traditionalist conservatism focused on the question of: what should be preserved during a period of change? As Roger Scruton has argued: ‘Conservatism is itself a modernism … Eliot recognized the distinction between a backward-looking nostalgia, which is but another form of modern sentimentality, and a genuine tradition, which grants us the courage and the vision with which to live in the modern world’.2 All three gentlemen sensed a need in society for a renewed and shared criticism: Eliot acknowledging that great poetry could only be written in times when society had the critical acumen to comprehend it; and Dyson and Howells highlighted similar dangers, due to a lack of musical understanding. This convergence of opinion had the potential to signal a golden age of cultural criticism for traditionalist conservatism. Eliot summarizes a particularly interesting position when he says: ‘the most individual parts of his work may be those in which dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously’, the musical equivalent, perhaps, are the parts of music (such as Vaughan Williams’ Tallis Fantasia) that leave us wondering whether we are listening to something ‘very old or very new’. Dyson wrote positively about ‘The Expansion of Tradition’, a viewpoint which contrasts with the deep negativity elsewhere, for example in Constant Lambert’s book Music Ho! There Lambert refers to ‘Music in decline’ within ‘The Age of Pastiche’, in which ‘The label “modern” is already become a stale joke’. Lambert makes just one mention of Eliot, in a similarly pessimistic vein: ‘To be honest he [i.e. the artist in general] must accept a work like Eliot’s Wasteland as symbolizing the essentially negative and bleak spirit of post-war intellectual England.’3 By contrast, the RCM school of Dyson and Howells is far more optimistic in tone, although their prose is not without its warnings: ‘It is dangerous to assume that even the most convincing of the immediate products of reform have more than temporary significance’;4 ‘We, intent on new devices, are in danger of missing this broader concept of value, and it is doubtful whether any

1 Sir George Dyson, The New Music (London: Oxford University Press, 1924). 2 Scruton, A Political Philosophy (London and New York: Continuum 2006), 194. 3 Lambert, Music Ho!: A Study of Music in Decline (Harmondsworth: Penguin Book, 1948), 279. 4 Dyson, The New Music, 1. 306 Jonathan Clinch merely intellectual grasp of the difficulty can adequately help us.’5 The axioms of such value, held within an artistic discipline in which ‘economy’ of material and ‘coherence of style’ are singled out, point to Dyson’s background as a pupil of Stanford, expanding on elements within Stanford’s treatise Musical Composition of 1911.6 On the other hand, Dyson prefigures T. S. Eliot’s 1944 essay ‘What is a Classic?’ when he writes ‘The classics are classics because accumulated experience has found in them the most permanently satisfying embodiment of values that have gained universal assent’, an almost textbook definition of classical conservatism.7 Ultimately, Dyson’s middlebrow project (and Howells’s too) aimed to reach a large public audience and, in doing so, to warn them of what he called ‘problems of public taste’ which demands programmes for everything and encourages what Dyson derided as ‘extravagant fancy’.8 His alternative to the perceived chaos appeared within the ‘enormous amount of music written and cultivated not only for its own sake, but also for the effort it is calculated to have in the encouragement of sound taste’,9 which development he termed the ‘natural evolution of successive values’.10 Dyson was looking to bring the sort of improvements that Eliot ventured through his publication of The Criterion journal, which aimed at the ‘maintenance of standards’, ‘the reunifi- cation of a European intellectual community’ and a generally more disciplined approach to cultural politics. Dyson summed up the situation most eloquently in The New Music when, on a very personal note, he wrote:

Inconsistency is the despair of those lovers of an art who are not unsympathetic to reform, for the unravelling of confused issues is a thankless task. Yet loose thinking, if it be unchecked, will always tend to weaken even the most firm lessons of experience. Criticism should be most tireless when reformers are most aggressive. Not only must tradition itself be examined without prejudice, but reform must be made to show, if it can, at least an equal measure of sense.11 Howells’s own copy of The New Music is covered in annotations and had a deep influence on his writings, which continued the same cultural project, acting as a cultural mediator. His article on Vaughan Williams’s Pastoral

5 Ibid., 118. 6 Ibid., 123. 7 Ibid., 147. 8 Ibid., 141. 9 Ibid., 11. 10 Ibid., 13. 11 Ibid., 6. Herbert Howells, Alban Berg and ‘The Modern Problem’ 307

Symphony was well known and his friendship with the composer continued to develop.12 By 1935 Howells was being invited to broadcast for the BBC, particularly on new English music, and his pre-concert talk on Vaughan Williams’s Fourth Symphony was provocatively entitled ‘The Challenge to Goodwill’, setting out a case for the traditional aspects of what was considered a strikingly modern work at the time:

In about 16½ minutes from now Dr Vaughan Williams will summon your attention thus:– [opening of the fourth symphony]

That is the fierce challenge he will issue – backed by all the force and skill of the BBC orchestra and Dr Adrian Boult.

... the procession of returning themes will soon carry you along to the Fugal Epilogue. That Epilogue is the crux of the whole symphony. Here Vaughan Williams makes the contrapuntal universe his ‘box of toys’. He mobilises all his themes: puts them on a musical drill-ground, makes them deploy, form fours, march and counter-march. If you’ve any special friend concerned in these evo- lutions don’t look for him: be wise and take a general view of the pageant. When at last the composer brings you out of the labyrinths of counterpoint he will set you down at a point at which your journey had begun 32 or 33 minutes earlier. [Musical Example]

Maybe there is no master-key that will unlock all the doors of this symphony. But if you can ‘make friends’ with 3 or 4 tonal elements you’ll not be shut out.

Instead of the Tonic – Sub-dom. – and Dom. centres –

12 Music & Letters 3/2 (April 1922), 122–32. 308 Jonathan Clinch

Put aside for the time being the pentatonic scale, and dwell upon this:

It is the sound of this symphony that is so new: the structure is as old as Beethoven.13 In 1937 Howells wrote six lectures on modern music – ‘Music and the Ordinary Listener: The Modern Problem’ – which were broadcast on the BBC National Service. The ‘Music and the Ordinary Listener’ series was started by Walford Davies (who had taught Howells at the RCM) and was of major importance in bringing high-quality music education to the masses through the new medium of radio.14 Howells’s topic – ‘The Modern Problem’ – offers a distinctive insight into this turbulent period of musical history. If nothing else, his choice of composer references gives us an idea of his tastes, many of which are, interestingly, not demonstrated in his own music. The lectures provide not only Howells’s own narrative of modern music and the situation in which he found himself in the late thirties, but also a highly politicized narrative, which no doubt influenced the reception and understanding of this repertoire for many listeners. Of its many interesting features, perhaps most significant is the way in which Howells brings the listener round to the view that British composers such as Walton and Vaughan Williams lie naturally alongside the Continental ‘greats’ who receive substantially more respect in our present cultural climate. The exigency of having to write for a mass audience forces Howells to begin from very simple principles, but it is precisely this starting point which makes this series such an important document for our understanding of him and his musical stance. Having stressed his open-mindedness initially, it is also apparent that Howells saw all music within a broad, and inevitably refracted, historical context. Whether this stemmed from his own start at Gloucester Cathedral (a building within which you cannot help but develop a strong sense of your own heritage) or from his days at the RCM, where his historical student essays illustrate the influence of Parry’s historical

13 RCM Howells Collection, 8886a. 14 See M. J. Prictor, ‘Music and the Ordinary Listener: Music Appreciation and the Media in England, 1918–1939’ (PhD diss., University of Melbourne, 2000). Herbert Howells, Alban Berg and ‘The Modern Problem’ 309 writings on his students, is impossible to know, but it certainly had a strong influence on the way Howells contextualizes all of his musical elements. The text of the first lecture begins as follows:

Lecture 1: Friday February 12th 1937 National 1 (Chord) Would you say that chord is worth half-a-crown? I sold it to a composer for that sum. But he hasn’t used it yet. Why should he? It has nothing to commend it. It’s a mere incident – probably the result of an accidental collision between idle fingers and a keyboard. It has come from nowhere: and is going no one knows whither. It’s a meaningless mass of vibrations at 7.2 p.m., twelfth of February, 1937. ‘But it’s jolly modern’, someone will say. Howells’s opening sums up his position for the entire series: that nothing is ‘modern’ inherently of itself. His central argument is that the label is a value judgement on the manner in which a composer uses such sound objects. His tone as he sets out in search of this mythical modernity almost mocks the concept, and this allows him radically to defuse the ‘problem’ with which we began, and to position himself as a leading authority figure; ‘modern’ music is not a ‘problem’ because it simply does not exist! The stream of rhetorical questions is a particularly powerful agent within this process, as the listener has the constant feeling that it is he or she who is making the conclusions; moreover, Howells appears impartial, which of course is far from true, because his simple choice of included examples is telling in itself:

What is ‘modern music’? That’s a question for whose answer many a Jesting Pilate will not wait. What, indeed is it? Is it the gospel of a brutal chord, like my half-crown expletive? … It’s a complex business. And there are extraneous difficulties. There even occurs, sometimes, the terrifying thought that, after all, modern music is merely an ‘-ism’. Somebody once thought of ‘-isms’ in relation to literature, and the poor body of literary criticism has been maimed ever since by the rude hands of those who have operated upon it in search of one deadly -ism after another. The ‘-isms’ have got at music too … as they have at painters, poets, and stylistic pugilists. Small wonder if we ordinary listeners cry out to know whether ‘L’Apres-midi d’un Faune’ is impressionism or whether it is a piece of music – whether Stravinsky wrote neo-classicism or neo-classicism composed Stravinsky … In all conscience our difficulties as listeners are such that we don’t want to bother about the ‘-isms’ and labels of modern jargon. And anyhow, no -ism ever answered questions, tho’ it often darkens counsel.15

15 Lecture 1. 310 Jonathan Clinch

Within our present scholarly environment, heavily shaped by developments in literary theory and the ‘New Musicology’, Howells’s criticism of the ‘-isms’ might seem dated. However, it does demonstrate the sort of anti-intellectual sentiment that characterized British composition at the time. Howells wants to speak to a mass public, both as a composer and writer, and thus his analysis is heavily loaded with popular appeal. Howells continues by further undermining the concept of ‘modern music’. Given that British music often received negative criticism during this period for not being ‘modern’ enough, Howells’s position is not only understandable, but also a considerable reaction against such sentiments:

If the Jesting Pilates will not wait for an answer to our question ‘What is Modern Music?’ I fancy that is because they know there’s no precise answer to wait for. Try the question upon some of your knowledgeable friends. You’ll find some who incline to base an answer on a date: as who should say – ‘Brahms died on the third of April 1897: modern music began on the morrow’. Others will look towards Paris, gazing back to the vague figure of the young Debussy in the nebulous later years of the ‘naughty nineties’. They will see him again a few years later, conjuring up vague atmosphere and new tonal-colours, and neglecting the formal schemes of nineteenth-century composers. And in that refusal of Debussy to accept the heritage of the great German tradition they will mark the real birth of what they would call modern music. But others, again, will recall the avalanche of sounds which Igor Stravinsky loosed upon Europe just before the war; for them, ‘Petruchka’, ‘The Fire Bird’, ‘Le Rossignol’ and ‘The Rite of Spring’ are sign and symbol of the New Music.16 Much of ‘The Modern Problem’ is therefore a survey of what can be meant by the modern label, and, more importantly for Howells, of how the listener can make sense of this new music. There is much that is highly critical of contemporary composers (with the greatest wrath reserved for Arnold Schoenberg); however, by the time Howells reaches his sixth and final lecture his survey has actually become a tour-de-force which champions a new generation of ‘modern’ composers lead by Sibelius and, closer to home, Vaughan Williams:

I have implied, if not insisted, modernity does not confine itself to extreme utterance: does not always shout: does not thunder at the doors: nor exchange the language of the Sermon on the Mount for that of Wall Street. Yet it is the bane of much ‘modern’ music that it does most of these things. It can touch extremes in the tortured theorizing of Schoenberg: it can shout itself hoarse in trying to describe battles, climb Alpine peaks, or conduct us round an up-to- date factory: it can thunder at the doors of any concert hall in Europe whenever

16 Ibid. Herbert Howells, Alban Berg and ‘The Modern Problem’ 311

a misguided composer lets loose the stored-up energy of a giant orchestra. But always there remains, for the selective listener, the finer voice of things. To hear it we must put aside aural laziness. We shall hear it in Sibelius, in Kodály, in Vaughan Williams, Walton, and Berg, and in others whose integrity is beyond question. This finer voice – as I call it – is not concerned with the latest red-hot chord, or the newest clique. Its quality is such as to remind us that music – whether ancient or modern – need have no purposes or relationships external to itself. It proves – if proof were necessary – that vital speech today is not based exclusively on a new vocabulary, a new grammar, or a new syntax. To the nonsensical view that modernity is a thing of new chords and eccentric rhythms, Sibelius opposes this: (Record:) (Play end of ‘Swan of Tuonela’) To those who claim that the true tidings of modernity can be found only in the stop-press, Vaughan Williams opposes this: (Record:) (Play excerpt from ‘Tallis Fantasy’) As a rebuke to those whose view is that modernity is a profuse outpouring of vividly contrasted ideas, all snappy, swift and epigrammatic, Sibelius says this in ‘Tapiola’. (“Tapiola” (C) in score (p.10))17 Despite the many rhetorical questions in Howells’s lectures, a clear picture emerges that, while there are as many definitions of what is ‘modern’ as there are works which could be labelled such, the central concern of modernism for Howells should be that ‘finer voice’ or ‘vital speech’, which he considers time- less. This clarity allows him to move on to the ‘how’ rather than the ‘what’ of modernism; the fact that Peter Franklin starts his piece on modernism in 2014 with a very similar question – ‘HOW modern is modernism?’ – demonstrates the enduring validity of Howells’s analysis.18 When Howells gave his lectures he was building on Walford Davies’s well-established pattern of broadcasts on music education, which had begun in 1926. Walford Davies had taught Howells from his first days at the RCM and, although no correspondence on the matter survives, it is most likely that it was he who invited Howells to speak. Walford Davies’s broadcasts were particularly notable for the level of technical detail that he had been able to build up to, having started initially with the absolute basics. Sitting at a piano, he was able to demonstrate all of his points by playing examples for maximum clarity. If a listener did not understand a point fully, he or she was encouraged

17 Lecture 6. 18 Peter Franklin et al., ‘Round Table: Modernism and its Others’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association 139/1 (2014), 183. 312 Jonathan Clinch to write in, and as a result Davies spent considerable amounts of time replying to letters. This existing theoretical grounding allowed other speakers to pitch their lectures at a notably high level, and throughout Howells’s series he uses examples of compositional technique to highlight how many works which sound ‘modern’ are constructed using traditional methods. By doing this, Howells untangles the ‘problem’, giving the ordinary listener aspects to listen out for, while at the same time highlighting the frequency of ‘modern’ elements in works by British composers. He emphasized a move away from thinking of modernism in term of the ‘big names’, towards an understanding of the musical elements present:

Debussy – Stravinsky – Schoenberg; these then may be three focal points in any vision of the moderns. By considering there we would see how, in the first, the whole emphasis was placed on the vertical aspect – the harmonic: (Brief illustration) how in the second, rhythm has had its barbaric celebrations: (Brief illustration) how, in the third, the weaving of lines – what we call counterpoint – has become the bias (Brief illustration) Yet when this disruptive trinity has been acknowledged, you and I – all we who are so-called ordinary listeners – feel there’s so much more to it than Big Names, Banners, Creeds and Oppositions.19 Howells expands his argument in this area by taking a theoretical stance (based on traditional harmony and counterpoint teaching) and considering the uses of counterpoint, polytonality, canon, synthetic modes, common tones and pedal points. His overall view is one of considerable optimism: ‘there is not likely to be much that will be accounted forbidding in their contrapuntal union, no matter how far that union trespasses beyond academic boundaries’.20 It should come as no surprise that a composer as committed to the use of counterpoint as Howells would centre his discussions on this area:

You know what counterpoint is. Simply stated, we would consider it a weaving together of melodic lines: a kind of unity in diversity – unity in mood, diversity in rhythm. And at highest and best, harmony is a glorious by-product of counterpoint. By-products can be startling enough – as well in musical as in mineral bodies...

19 Lecture 1. 20 Lecture 5. Herbert Howells, Alban Berg and ‘The Modern Problem’ 313

Now, where all the simultaneous melodic lines acknowledge one key, or one mode – as in Purcell or Bach, or in the finale of Mozart’s ‘Jupiter’ Symphony, our conventional ears do not twitch. And with a little training those ears will detect beauty in melodic lines that do not acknowledge one and the same key… Counterpoint and Harmony – so often Cause and Effect – can be on such equal terms as to be almost indistinguishable. If we call Harmony ‘Colour’ and Counterpoint ‘Lines’, there is little doubt that the first is more easily assimilated than the second. When harmony is recognizably present on equal footing with counterpoint then a listener, sometimes without knowing why, feels less of a stranger in a strange land. The ‘moderns’ often offer us that help.21 Of all the examples mentioned in the lectures, it should be noted that it was Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms which moved him to tears ‘not once but regularly’, demonstrating ‘unity in diversity – unity in mood, diversity in rhythm’. 22 Another technique for consideration when balancing such unity and diversity was polytonality. Howells defines it as:

… music, that is, conceived as well as expressed in two or more different keys at once. When this device was a new toy one of its chief employers – Darius Milhaud – could do this: 9 (Record) But he has since softened some of the asperities: and there is now a willingness on the part of one’s ears to find pathos, intensity and beauty in the finer dealings in key-mixtures. If you could hear Mr. Goossens’ Oboe and Mr. Tertis’s Viola begin Dr. Vaughan Williams’s ‘Flos Campi’ you would not desperately fight the idea of submission to two mutually exclusive keys: 10 (Quote ‘Flos..’ 1st line) Polytonality can easily become an acquired taste. And it isn’t essentially new. It appears new, that is only because of the recent emphasis placed upon it. In embryo it existed as long ago as Purcell, who himself did queer juggling with what we call the ‘melodic’ minor scale – that scale enshrines a contradiction of terms, having one sort of sixth and seventh when ascending: (play scale upwards) … But here is an example of polytonality from music’s day-before-yesterday, to show how it can creep into the blood-stream of jazz, and produce a sentimental state: 12 (Aaron Copland’s Piece)

21 Lecture 5. 22 Christopher Palmer, Herbert Howells: A Centenary Celebration (London: Thames, 1992), 183. 314 Jonathan Clinch

In this guise of familiar sentimentality polytonality can be at home in all the Night Clubs of Europe and America.23 This gives one of very few clues to Howells’s view of popular music. More importantly, he is reinforcing a view of the English as moderates pursuing a sensible, tempered modernism (which even has historical precedent in one of the finest of English composers, Purcell). In Howells’s own music the use of polytonality was restricted to moments of maximum intensity, of which the finest example is possibly the opening ofHymnus Paradisi. This was surely just the sort of ‘sober beauty’ which he had in mind when he wrote:

I believe polytonality to be the less terrifying aspect of modernity. Unbelievers can – at worst – laugh at it. And in this country we soon learn to love the things we laugh at. Polytonality can hold both its sides with laughter. And in its quieter ways – as I shall try to show you in later talks – can reveal a sober beauty.24 Howells was less sympathetic of the ‘extreme’ modern usage of certain other devices, such as the canon, which violated his desire for aural comprehensibility:

Ever since one or two people singing the same tune tried to ‘catch up’ with the other, canon has been a normal device in music – at once fascinating and logical. Tallis and Schoenberg provided examples for us last week … Modernity delights in canon. And when the outline of the theme is not too remote from melodic experience there is an easy appeal in it. But many a canon in extreme atonal surroundings is about as distinguishable as a green lizard on a green twig.25 However, the majority of Howells’s other examples are found in abundance in his own music, perhaps none more frequently than the use of common tones within smooth modulations:

Sometimes a point of contact can be found in one note, held or repeated through succeeding harmonic changes. Such a note has been the Waterloo of many a Napoleonic organist accompanying the ‘Lord’s Prayer’. But it has often been a source of loveliness. Do you remember this in Brahms? (quote.) Or that miraculous episode in ‘Tapiola’, where Sibelius allows a double note to take possession of us? (note. Record: p.14 in score.)

23 Lecture 1. 24 Lecture 1. 25 Lecture 4. Herbert Howells, Alban Berg and ‘The Modern Problem’ 315

There are other means of ‘anchorage’ for the listener if he’s ploughing through rough tonal seas. An ‘ostinato’ for example: a brief pattern of notes in the bass-repeated several times while harmonics and tunes above it change the shape and sequence. Stravinsky has a trick of throwing us an ostinato bone whenever we begin to look like a set of poor hungry dogs. Here’s one: (Quote – p.115 Petruchka) Howells expands his discussion of common tones to include pedal points, allowing the inclusion of an example from the opening of Walton’s recent First Symphony (1934/5), a work for which Howells had the greatest admiration:

Our great grandfathers; in reckless mood, would say ‘Give us a Tonic or Dominant pedal, and a fig for the consequences’. Bach has provided thrills for their grandchildren. Round about 1812 Beethoven’s pedal-points and Napoleon’s artillery stirred Europe equally: and sometimes were scarcely distinguishable. (Sonata ‘Pathetic’:) We’ve become willing to drive perilous bargains with contemporary composers who will give us long-enough pedal-points. A double one sent musical Europe temporarily mad in 1930 or thereabouts. It was called ‘Bolero’ and Ravel made it last about ten minutes – a world’s record. It was a mixture of Tonic and Dominant, disguised as a guitar. But you heard greater things last Sunday, in Mr. Walton’s symphony …26 The essence of Howells’s argument, that there is little originality in the basic techniques of the modernist composers (only within their usage of them), allows him to articulate ways in which the listener might approach this novel sound-world, while continuing to undermine Continental modernism itself: ‘my point here is, that if the superimposed harmonies above the pedal-notes were ten times more “advanced” in modernity, we should still experience the traditional illusion of security and logic’.27 Howells’s use of modality can be traced back to the influence of Vaughan Williams, but was not fully absorbed into his characteristic musical language until the late period. Howells was aware, however, that ‘composers, today, are nothing if not pluralists in the matter of key’.28 Of itself, this did not present problems to him:

If, then, we can accustom ourselves as usual successions of different keys, in which change from one to another is swift rather than slow and spacious, we can establish new friendships in many modern quarters … The streets of modern

26 Lecture 4. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid. 316 Jonathan Clinch

music are full of homeless tunes – but they’re often vitally interesting – and friendly when you know them.29 In terms of Howells’s own compositional development, it is interesting that he highlights the method of ‘new scale-formations’ at this time (by considering Vaughan Williams’s Fourth Symphony), but waits many years before using the technique himself (e.g. in his own Partita).

There is another direction in which contemporary composers seek and achieve melodic and harmonic novelty – and that is in the exploitation of new scale-formations. The results are often astonishingly beautiful. Think for a moment of the possible journeys you might make from any note to its octave. You all know the major and minor and chromatic scale-journeys. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner and others used them to the everlasting glory of the human mind. And many of you will know also the so-called Ecclesiastical modes, on which music was based during its earlier centuries of existence. To these we could theoretically add innumerable other scales – and in cold blood I could now travel by a dozen different paths from middle C to its octave. Come with me! (Play 12 differently constituted scales) But let us be clear about one thing. If every composer in the world sat down tonight and formulated twelve new scales, and left things at that, the art of music would not be advanced one iota. But if one such scale happens to be the product of melody, which is itself the product of creative imagination, then music may very well have added something unto itself.30 Whilst Howells was highly assured technically, here he distances himself from technical assurance. Technique was merely a means to an end, and in this lecture the apparent artifice of Schoenberg’s ‘method’ is used as a warning to those who might see it as the ultimate object of modern composition. Note that in the following example it is the scale that emerges from the slow movement and not vice versa:

By proceeding backward and downwards – as it were – from the living expression of things to the abstract formula underlying it, we can find new scales. Here, for instance, is one that emerges from the slow movement of Dr Vaughan Williams’ ‘F minor Symphony’ A (play the scale: F G A B C d e F) Another – stranger, and more lovely – finds imaginative life in the first movement.

29 Ibid. 30 Lecture 2. Herbert Howells, Alban Berg and ‘The Modern Problem’ 317

B (play the scale d c a G F f d downwards) We’ll spend two or three minutes with these. First with this series of intervals. (Scale (A)) Here is the tune that sanctions the abstracted scale (play the theme of slow movement) This tune breeds harmony and texture. So we find a ground bass. Tune and ground bass are close-knit as Siamese twins. So here again, melody and harmony are one: and harmony and counterpoint are but two aspects of one and the same thing …

And here is the whole coda as it stands – as far as the black-and-white speech of the piano can utter it. But only our grandchildren will hear gardeners and errand boys humming these strange beauties.31 Howells’s belief that it would take future generations time to assimilate such melodic complexities is curious; but it may be that he himself was not then fully convinced of Vaughan Williams’s methods of expression, given that he did not use those techniques himself until 1971 (with the Partita). Ultimately, it is the desire for ‘the traditional illusion of security and logic’ that drives Howells’s exploration of technique, and, although his examples are very up-to-date, the central anti-theoretical paradigm comes directly from Stanford’s earlier teaching:

The composition of music is no more an exact science than the painting of a picture. No rules can be laid down for it, no canons save those of beauty can be applied to it; and as invention, without which it cannot exist, may be said to be infinite, so there are no fixed bounds to its capabilities.32 And of all Howells’s pronouncements on the logic of modern music, none seems to go further than his own teacher’s original statement of 1911: ‘A new form in music may require study and frequent hearing to understand it, but if it is logical and founded on a thorough knowledge and control of means, time will endorse it.’33 A major element of Howells’s lectures was the promotion of modern British music. No opportunity was lost to demonstrate how indigenous composers were incorporating the positive aspects of modernism, and Howells frequently used older composers to demonstrate a lineage for such development. This

31 Ibid. 32 Stanford, Musical Composition: A Short Treatise for Students (New York: Macmillan, 1911), 1. 33 Ibid., 76. 318 Jonathan Clinch principle was rooted in a deeper notion that local experience was of primary importance within musical education:

I would be sorry to let you down by dragging in the ‘-isms’ of musical jargon – even the one called ‘Nationalism’. But I’m convinced that if English listeners want to set up friendship with modern counterpoint, it’s best they should study it in their own composers – for in them, melodic shapes are nearer to our own experience.34 Howells reinforced this idea with historical precedents, for example in Purcell:

Purcell ought to be with any normal Englishman whose mind is on counterpoint – as mine will be for a few minutes tonight. For no other English composer ever had a graver beauty in his counterpoint than Purcell had in his: nor a more ‘modern’ voice. In Purcell, details of harmony, arising out of the clash of melodic lines, still have power to surprise us. And that power is shared by many composers today … after a lapse of two hundred and fifty years.35 In contrast to this local view, the dangers of modernism were often couched in anti-foreign language:

The harmonic and rhythmic stuff of music has a perilous way of becoming inter- nationalised ‘common property’.36 Nationalism is a gory battle-arena. But if you and I can sit down in peace with Vaughan Williams, Bartók, Kodály, Sibelius and others, we can afford to leave the polemical dead wherever they have fallen.37 Interestingly, Howells makes no references whatsoever to his own music or status as a composer (he is just one of the ‘ordinary listeners’), and this is partly what gives his speech such authority. At the same time, his choice of examples reveals much about his personal tastes, with a particular reliance on Vaughan Williams, Walton and Holst, whose works are often cited alongside more mainstream foreign composers in a manner that suggests credibility by association. Howells also makes a brief, interesting comment on the pastoral influence, which is not expanded: ‘Now, we can’t expect the European mental configuration to transform its Matterhorns and Ural mountains into Worcester Beacons and Cotswold Hills.’38

34 Lecture 5. 35 Ibid. 36 Lecture 6. 37 Lecture 1. 38 Lecture 5. Herbert Howells, Alban Berg and ‘The Modern Problem’ 319

Despite positioning himself as a sort of arch-critic of all musics, Howells continues to claim ignorance as merely one of the ‘ordinary listeners’ (‘you and I’) throughout. While his thesis is clear (and musicologically very interesting), the degree to which Howells removes himself from this picture to create a pseudo-objectivity is remarkable and undoubtedly highly influential: it creates a distance between himself and the various postulated theories of aesthetics, asserting his empirical view of beauty and truth – a dismissal of mind in favour of heart. Howells must have seen himself as a leading figure in the next generation of the English Musical Renaissance, his establishment position confirmed by his RCM post, his Oxford DMus and his reputation as a composer (particularly following his contribution to the 1937 Coronation) and now broadcaster.

❧❧ The Characterization of ‘Extremist’ Atonality At the heart of Howells’s discussion of the modern is a belief in England’s cultural self-sufficiency; and while he may outwardly protest about the use of concepts such as nationalism in relation to music, his artistic dedication was to people and places, demonstrating an inherent localism. The traditions of institutions, be they sacred (in the form of the cathedrals and churches which fostered his early musical studies) or secular (within the universities and the Royal College of Music), were very important to Howells because they were the vehicles for the transmission of the ‘immemorial’ within the national culture. Howells’s empirical approach to composition characterizes a whole manner of thinking which could be seen as typifying ‘Englishness’: that evolutionary process which stems from trial and error, observation and evaluation. In the lectures Howells’s characterization of Continental modernism as centring on ‘extremist’ atonality is fundamentally at odds with this viewpoint. He even goes as far as presenting the idea in geographical terms which invite direct segregation from the Continental: ‘Tonality – represents, as it were, a well- known country; while to many of us the second – Atonality – stands for a dark and unmapped region.’39 Howells maintains his stance that Continental modernism is something from which one should recoil, while often incorporating some sort of nationalist sentiment: ‘I shall be chiefly concerned with Atonality: that is, with stark tonal revolution – revolution as severe as the idea of running Great Britain on tidal energy, and as startling as a proposal to change the immemorial taste of beer.’40 Again, Howells’s rhetoric casts his theme as a matter of national importance in the face of a ‘revolution’, a startlingly political

39 Lecture 3. 40 Lecture 1. 320 Jonathan Clinch style for a man who was decidedly apolitical in the rest of his writings and teaching. Despite the humour of Howells’s populist analogy (with the taste of beer), his overall ambition in these lectures was obviously much more serious. With the deaths of all of the previous generation of ‘renaissance’ composers, such as Parry, Elgar and Stanford (all of whom he knew well), he clearly felt that it was his duty to pick up their educational mantle in a similar way to that expressed in Vaughan Williams’s National Music (1934) and George Dyson’s The New Music. Given how much some of Howells’s own works (especially the post-war orchestral ones) were influenced by Debussy and Stravinsky, this demonstrates how much his thinking has changed and suggests that the acceptance of heritage and tradition were becoming more pressing aims. Certainly the ‘vague atmosphere’ he critiques in Debussy has an outward parallel in the ‘moods’ he sought to create in his re-envisaged sonata structures of the First Violin Sonata and Second Piano Concerto; their rejection for a tighter formal scheme in later works confirms this shift in aesthetic and formal technique. Howells’s concern was for the extreme:

Those who hail the Stravinsky procession are not so ready to notice another severer retinue that for long had fewer members and camp-followers. Yet, while Debussy was exalting Harmony at expense to Rhythm, and Stravinsky promoting Rhythm at more than a little cost to Melody, Arnold Schoenberg was moving on as it were in a series of forced night-marches against the ancient citadels of Classical Tonality. By 1912 he had become the arch-type of revolutionary and is now the High Priest of the Atonal Creed. Those who identify modernity with him and the atonalists are by way of giving the most extreme answer to our question ‘What is modern music?’41 Howells’s narrative, and particularly his religious metaphor for Schoenberg (the so-called ‘High Priest of the Atonal Creed’) make light of such work as mere folly. At the same time, in contrast to the ‘disruptive trinity’, Howells’s powerful writing constantly reinforces his own down-to-earth, good, honest, ‘democratic’ British position (the shared position of ‘you and I’), while never actually mentioning it overtly. The medium of radio was, of course, perfect for promulgating this message to the masses. It was clearly a means to an end, however, allowing Howells to articulate the importance of his conservative viewpoint to a large audience. Howells reaches a peak in his critique of atonality when he begins ‘If Atonality means anything’, while at the same time raising his political and social rhetoric to a level that seems particularly extreme to modern ears: his

41 Ibid. Herbert Howells, Alban Berg and ‘The Modern Problem’ 321 linguistic parallel of ‘atonality’ to ‘a-moral’ [sic] is no accident. It is also possible that Howells was having a stab at Holst’s late pieces, such as the Terzetto (in three distinct keys), Egdon Heath and Hammersmith:

Finally, music has reached Atonality. And that forces you and me, for a few moments to-night, to sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of Tonics, Dominants and Sub-dominants. If Atonality means anything, it means no-Tonality. In the sphere of morals we can talk of a state of things as being a-moral; that is, without an accepted code of morality. We know symmetry where we meet it: by its complete absence we might recognise its opposite – something which would be a-symmetrical. So, in Atonality, the centuries old principle of a related system of keys seems now to be put aside. And in the pretence of atonal works we feel ourselves to be without known conventions and values. In effect such works banish Tonic and Dominant as centres of key feeling – that is of Tonality. Atonality seeks to establish the reign not of one kingly Tonic but of a committee of twelve hard-working semitones. (scale) Of these twelve no one must enjoy precedence over another. Nor may three or four form a Cabal within the committee. And the predominance of any one chord would be accounted a ‘social’ outrage, as it were.42 Howells uses what he perceives as atonality’s own rules (their ‘theoretic obligations’) against it, to suggest that composers are forced into certain transformations:

If I went into the details of the iron theory of Atonality I should need far more than my modest twenty minutes, and you listeners would require more than your proverbial patience. And in the end, I daresay we’d all agree that that theory is as cold-blooded as any other body of academic rules. And if we added to it all the complications of canons and inversions, and all the quips and cranks of contrapuntal ingenuities, we might find ourselves pining for the scarlet excitements of logarithms, acrostics, and Chinese conundrums.43 His emphasis suggests that such ‘iron theory’ is needlessly complicated, and in doing so he allows himself then to present tonality as not merely the more sensible choice, but also as one that is not bound by rules (and is therefore preferable for both listener and composer). Indeed, Howells is saying that the invented systems, such as dodecaphony, actually dictate the creative process rather than permitting freedom for creativity. This mistrust of theory, which we have seen earlier in his rejection of ‘-isms’ (and especially literary theory),

42 Lecture 3. 43 Ibid. 322 Jonathan Clinch of the perceived need to reinvent sonata form, and now within compositional technique related to serialism, is a recurring element in Howells’s career. It is interesting to note that while those around him (for example, R. O. Morris, H. K. Andrews and E. Rubbra) wrote academic texts on compositional technique, Howells was committed to teaching composition through the more pragmatic ‘hands-on’ analysis and criticism of scores. It was ultimately the aesthetic experience that he sought:

But music lives in its sounds, not in its theories. Here’s a short Prelude, made in accordance with Atonal rules. Forget the rules, and concentrate on this forty seconds-long Prelude: (play ‘Prelude’) Now if ever you drink to the health of Atonality you must couple with the toast the name of Arnold Schoenberg. Worse luck for you, Schoenberg’s own brand of it is the extremist kind. In the propounding of problems it may seem to you that he has got Torquemada ‘beaten to a frazzle’. Take his melodic lines. In shape they will seem so remote from music’s vocal origins as to forbid familiar approach. If Schoenberg suddenly ‘telescopes’ melody, using some of its notes simultaneously – in a chord, and then claims that that is actually a highly-concentrated melodic substitute, you may begin to feel as you would if the cow you were driving across the field were suddenly changed into a bottle of Beef Extract.44 Howells’s criticism of Schoenberg, and the ‘myth’ of total thematicism, could not be more scathing, reinforcing once again the idea that he was an extremist ‘propounding’ the problem. By now Howells has constructed this dialectic so well that the listener takes in such mockery without necessarily questioning it:

It’s one thing, moreover, to follow the gentle Tallis in his canon (11) (Tallis) But can you hear this one of Schoenberg’s with complete ease? (12) (Quote 17th piece: ‘Pierrot Lunaine’ [sic]) That’s from ‘Pierrot Lunaine’ – a work that contains such complicated canons that only close scrutiny of the written score can reveal all their ramifications. ‘Pierrot Lunaine’ may – in effect – be the masterpiece many musicians believe it to be. But study of the score would give you a tolerable idea of what it must feel like to be a signal-man at Clapham Junction during rush-hour.45 Howells’s misspelling of ‘Lunaire’, leads us to wonder how well he actually knew the work. Essentially he is saying that Schoenberg’s events (for example

44 Lecture 3. 45 Ibid. Herbert Howells, Alban Berg and ‘The Modern Problem’ 323 in the Chamber Symphony) happen with such velocity that we have no hope of perceiving them. Again, his attitude to the score itself is suggestive of an anti-intellectual standpoint in relation to this music. Overall, what Howells refers to as ‘the modern problem’ can be seen as one of aural comprehension. He comes at this from two directions, one of which covers the understanding of what it is that is new about modern music, and the other covering methods of gaining an understanding of it – the what and how of modern listening. However, this problem is not limited to the dangers of Continental modernism, but also extends to recorded media and broadcasting:

I have a suspicion that in these noise-laden days, easy mechanical communica- tions are likely to corrupt good ears. In the ordeal-by-sound the ear may be the decisive factor in our ultimate victory or defeat. The ear clamours for a six-hour day, but works a hard twenty. The new music asks much, and asks bluntly. It makes many demands. Howells’s anxiety over the corruption of good ears stems from his belief that England’s musical understanding was rooted in its traditions of singing. This belief is especially apparent in his own music of the late period, as his predilection for contrapuntal writing in all genres becomes a common feature, suggestive of a vocal mode of thought: ‘I want to stress that epithet “singable”. And I want to underline the phrase, “harmonic background”. For these touch upon two of your chief difficulties when you approach modern melody’.46 This belief, that the British were a nation of singers and that it was this culture, principally through the English choral tradition, that shaped their comprehension (and therefore taste) in music is quite understandable when one considers the lack of a native choral tradition surviving through to the present day in most European countries. It was partly an innate simplicity of writing that appealed to Howells:

There’s no denying that even in these days of multiplied complexities, most of us instinctively look for a song-basis in music generally, and in melody particularly. If a tune is queer-shaped, angular, or violently un-smooth: if in an imaginative sense, it is extremely unvocal, something deep down in us sets up a certain amount of opposition … Up to a point this habit of harmonic-association in our melody-listening is a potential insurance against perplexity and frustration. If melody were still vocal in method as it certainly is in origin, then the enforced limitation to range, shape and pace in it could make man monarch of all he hears.47

46 Lecture 2. 47 Lecture 2. 324 Jonathan Clinch

Ultimately the ‘problem’ was to be solved through educated listening and compromise, even if ‘we are made painfully aware that the points of contact between us and the makers of contemporary music have become few and ineffective’.48 The sentiment is expressed most clearly in the first lecture:

But I would like to help soften any feelings of antagonism felt generally towards the new expressions. I’d like to search for some point of ‘reconciliation’. Without reasonable open-mindedness it’s useless for us to listen to new music, or look at an unfamiliar painting, or read a poem in which method and expression are alike alien to our inherited notions of these things.49 Howells’s compositional career could be summarized as this search for a ‘meeting place’. The combination of his historical awareness, technical fluency, flair for pastiche exercises and open-minded attitude to new music suggests he had all of the right ingredients, and it may be that he simply lacked confidence in his early career, or merely did not have the serendipity of composers who ultimately became more prominent. What is interesting here, then, is that there is absolutely no lack of confidence in the lectures; this is powerful rhetoric for the masses – a middlebrow agenda, in more recent terminology. One such point of ‘reconciliation’ was the music of Alban Berg:

Schoenberg and von Webern are Atonality’s extremes. I would advise Alban Berg’s companionship for those who would seek friendship with its sounds. Once upon a time even Berg saw Eternity in Schoenberg’s theories. But in the end he was no rabid atonalist. For he became the symbol of compromise – compromise between the chromaticism of ‘Tristan’ and the theories of Schoenberg. Berg’s opera ‘Wozzeck’, one of the masterpieces of contemporary music, carries in it a host of devices and procedures common to music that acknowledged Tonality. But he was a man who never divorced his best work from emotion. His appeal was always powerfully emotional … Berg was compromise. He refused to be petrified by the new process. He might have taught so much of grammar and syntax in the new language. But he is dead – and one wonders who else has power to do what he might have done. Howells’s modernism was all about compromise. That is why Alban Berg, conceived as the face of compromise, was his ideal (in sharp contrast with Schoenberg’s ‘extremism’). This appraisal of Berg is commonplace now, for example in Douglas Jarman’s description of him as ‘At once a modernist and

48 Lecture 1. 49 Ibid. Herbert Howells, Alban Berg and ‘The Modern Problem’ 325 a Romantic, a formalist and a sensualist’;50 but following Berg’s death in 1935, Howells would have been one of the first to articulate this position. Howells clearly knew Berg’s music well. References to his works, for example the Violin Concerto and the Lyric Suite, recur in Howells’s teaching for the rest of his career. In his own copy of George Dyson’s New Music (from which he took several themes for the radio lectures), he notes that ‘the common chord has a new significance: a violent expletive (in Schoenberg!), a symbol of dross (exchange of money in “Wozzeck”)’. Elsewhere, in a section on Schoenberg, Howells pencils ‘Schonberg – no local speech. Intellectualism’, and then next to the line ‘One is gradually but inexorably drawn towards a goal which is outside previous experience’, Howells writes ‘cf: Allegro misterioso in Berg’s “Lyric S u i t e”’. 51 All this suggests that Berg occupied a central position in Howells’s thoughts about the musical future, and presents a significant challenge to the prevalent image of Howells the teacher as a conservative traditionalist whose default methods relied on anecdotal reminiscences of his own education with the grand figures of the RCM’s past. It is important to note that, firmly rooted as Howells was in the achievements of the English musical renaissance, these lectures demonstrate that he was also keenly aware of the current position of music within his own country and on the Continent, and was also philosophical about the future:

In earlier talks I have asked questions – even as to the tunes you sing in your bath. If Dr. Johnson had been among my listeners he could have rebuked me, magisterially pointing out that ‘among gentlemen, the asking of questions is not a basis for conversation’. To which I would have answered: ‘Sir, I was but hint- ing that when the tunes of Berg, Bartók, Schoenberg and Stravinsky shall have entered our bathrooms their melodic terrors will have vanished into the light of common day, and our listeners will have to look in new directions for the hobgoblins and foul fiends of music’. It happens equally in politics and art, that today’s foul fiend becomes tomor- row’s firm friend. Our trite saying – ‘Familiarity breeds Contempt’ – has an alarming possible application to modern music. There is something depressing in the thought that Berg and Bartók and Schoenberg may become a trio of domestic pets – no longer alarming either to ear or mind. This awareness and understanding that music had a need to alarm is very important, because it is significantly at odds with the common viewpoint of English music during this period.

50 Douglas Jarman. ‘Berg, Alban’, Grove Music Online / Oxford Music Online [accessed 3 April 2017]. 51 Dyson, The New Music, 110. 326 Jonathan Clinch

It was the need for aural comprehension that was sacrosanct, because for Howells it was that factor, more than any other, which allowed the public to make sense of a musical work:

No chord is modern. No musical fact, in isolation is anything at all … The Modern Problem is, in fact, less the problem of what is being composed than the problem of what is being heard. And further, it is less a question of what is being heard than the degree of perception in our listening. Strange sounds have an initial hostility: but our ears soon accept what they cannot easily reject. For every frightened ear that goes into Queen’s Hall, there go a dozen terror-stricken minds. If Atonalism repels, it is less because the meaning of it is hard to find. Science has contrived that the whole world’s sounds shall soon be the possession of Everyman. Everyman, on his part, must ruthlessly limit the amount of his listening, and courageously extend the quality of it. And when he turns to contemporary music, let him listen not so much for the fierce extremes as for what lies this side of extremity. For the rest, let time and an open mind give him the help no other agencies can afford him … And if these fail, let him whistle any tune he likes in his bath, and be thankful.52 While the majority of Howells’s arguments in ‘Music and the Ordinary Listener’ are based on his own dislike of serial music (and his castigation of Schoenberg and Webern), his larger narrative of musical modernism makes the lecture series of unique importance. It is also an important moment for musical criticism, as the lectures would have reached a far wider audience than anything published even in such popular musical periodicals as The Musical Times or Musical Opinion. Yet, as with his work as a composer, Howells never sought to push his professional persona and was content to remain within the familiar confines of the RCM, while accepting outside engagements when they came up. From the lectures, we see a composer deeply concerned with tradition and, in general, distrusting of Continental modernism. But Howells goes much further than that in stressing the importance of empiricism (the abjuring of the theoretical over the pragmatic) in order to consider the musical consequences of modernism, rather than relegating it to a mere definition. By stressing the importance of the listener Howells was highlighting the dangers of an apparent severance of composer and audience, and that of course has much wider implications in the history of English music. To quote Arnold Whittall, writing in The Blackwell History of Music in Britain:

It is tempting to argue that the reason for this failure of a British modernism based on European models to take root was not musical but political: the First

52 Lecture 6. Herbert Howells, Alban Berg and ‘The Modern Problem’ 327

World War; but the tendency to shun all things radical, as well as all things German was already well established before 1914, and on balance it would seem that the War merely reinforced it.53 Intellectually, the position of Dyson and Howells makes perfect sense within a classical conservatism which ‘doesn’t reject change, per se, but insists that changes be organic, rather than revolutionary’. But there is little room for that position within Whittall’s analysis, which perpetuates a ‘failure’ narrative. Recently he mocked a ‘desire to talk up Howell’s [sic] radicalism’ in a book review, as though such a figure as Howells has no claim to any ‘radical’ status.54 We talk of ‘neglected works’, but perhaps a more honest appraisal would term them ‘rejected works’, works which vanished in the politics of a post-war period that generally lacked a politically balanced critical voice, and defined itself in opposition to the perceived cultural conservatism of the RCM school. My focus has been on a very specific form of modernism and the musical education of the masses. These had widespread implications, underpinning the establishment role of institutions like the BBC, RCM and OUP and thus validating (for a short time) the continued conservatism of composers such as Howells and Dyson. But, more importantly, this view of modernism influenced the subsequent critical reception of modernist works in Britain. Paradoxically, the reaction was often to rebel. The age of liberalism fostered by the RCM, which was ignited by Parry and Stanford and continued by Dyson and Howells, was over. In many ways the broadcasts of Antony Hopkins (‘Talking about Music’), who had come under Howells’s influence at the RCM, took up the mantle.

53 Arnold Whittall, ‘Modernism and the British Intellectual Climate’, in Stephen Banfield, ed., The Blackwell History of Music in Britain, Vol. VI: The Twentieth Century (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 13. 54 The Musical Times 155/1926 (Spring 2014), 106. Chapter 14 Hans Keller: The Making of an ‘Anti-Critic’

Patrick Zuk

n Britain, as elsewhere, the post-war years brought a far-reaching transfor- I mation in the intellectual and artistic climate. Its effects were equally felt in musical life: despite the continued creative activity of Vaughan Williams, Walton, and other composers who had dominated the scene during the 1920s and 1930s, by the late 1940s there were already signs of a shift in tastes and attitudes that would become increasingly pronounced over the next decade. The causes of this change of outlook were complex, but an important factor was the presence of a community of émigré musicians who had fled Nazi persecution. In their capacities as composers, performers, journalists, scholars, pedagogues, and administrators, members of that community exerted an influence far out of proportion to its comparatively small size, in some cases making exceptional contributions to the cultural life of their adopted country. One such was Hans Keller (1919–85), whose activities as a writer on music, broadcaster and teacher enriched and enlivened the British musical scene for almost four decades. Although a number of publications have appeared since Keller’s death that illuminate aspects of his life and work (notably, those by Christopher Wintle and Alison Garnham), the task of appraisal is still far from complete – especially when it comes to his copious writings. The nature of his output places considerable practical obstacles in the way of anyone wishing to get to grips with his thought, as much of it comprises fairly brief articles (often under 1,500 words in length) contributed principally to popular magazines and periodicals.1 Only a small proportion of these have been republished (in this respect, the collections edited by Christopher Wintle have rendered Keller

1 A partial bibliography of Keller’s writings compiled by Renée Atcherson and Celia Duffy is included in a memorial symposium published in Music Analysis 2/3 (1986), 407–40. See also the interim list of publications housed in the Hans Keller Archive at Cambridge University Library prepared by Alison Garnham and Susi Woodhouse, https://musicb3.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/pubished-articles- handlist-for-ul-website-sept-2015.pdf [accessed 17 February 2017]. Garnham and Woodhouse estimate that Keller’s output of articles alone runs to over 1,300 items. 328 Hans Keller: The Making of an ‘Anti-Critic’ 329 an especially valuable service),2 and although some of the journals in which the articles appeared can now be consulted in digital repositories, this is by no means universally the case, and many items are not so easily accessible. The only extended book-length treatment of any topic that he published in his lifetime, the idiosyncratically titled 1975 (1984 minus 9), did not appear until 1977, eight years before his death. (It was posthumously reissued under the new title of Music, Closed Societies and Football.) While this corpus of writing is unified by the exploration of recurrent themes, the reader has to piece together Keller’s ideas from his fragmentary exposition of them. Some of his acutest insights are conveyed in throw-away passing remarks – intellectual promissory notes to offer a more extended treatment of subjects which he never got around to honouring. And although Keller had a gift for lucid exposition, he is by no means an easy writer. His essays vary considerably in density and substance, but even the most concise of them sometimes require repeated re-readings before the ramifications of the ideas become fully evident. He showed little inclination to present these ideas in a more focused and systematic fashion, or to develop them at greater length. In the present essay, I will endeavour to trace some of the main currents of his thought in the late 1940s and early 1950s, an important formative phase of his career during which his central intellectual preoccupations began to crystallize. The son of a prosperous Jewish architect, Keller fled to England in December 1938 at the age of nineteen, after a protracted ordeal that had commenced the previous March with the Nazi invasion of Austria.3 Although his English brother-in-law had helped him to procure a British visa, Keller spent months desperately trying to obtain a passport – a process greatly complicated by the death of his father during the intervening period. Even though his father disclosed his assets in compliance with hastily enacted legislation stripping Jews of their civil rights, the local Nazi authorities suspected that he had neglected to declare his wealth in full – which meant that as the only son and heir, the young man faced certain arrest. In November he was detained in a random round-up of Jewish citizens and imprisoned for almost a week, undergoing

2 Hans Keller, Essays on Music, ed. Christopher Wintle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Music and Psychology: From Vienna to London, 1939–52, ed. Christopher Wintle (London: Plumbago Books, 2003); and Film Music and Beyond: Writings on Music and the Screen, 1946–59, ed. Christopher Wintle (London: Plumbago Books, 2006). 3 The summary of Keller’s early career presented here draws on Alison Garnham’s Hans Keller and the BBC (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003) and Hans Keller and Internment: The Development of an Emigré Musician, 1938–48 (London: Plumbago Books, 2011). 330 Patrick Zuk a harrowing ordeal of physical and psychological torture that he recalled in a moving talk broadcast in 1974 on BBC Radio 4.4 He was fortunate to be released on a caprice of his captors, who were unaware that a warrant had been issued for his arrest. After several more nerve-wracking weeks, he managed to assemble the necessary travel documents and leave the country to join his rela- tives in London, managing to evade the Gestapo’s attention through a mixture of chance and luck. Keller had only just finished secondary school and apparently hoped to become a professional violinist. After a period of internment as an ‘enemy alien’ in 1940–1, he resumed his studies for the Royal Academy of Music’s licentiate diploma. Over the next few years, the range of Keller’s interests broadened to include psychoanalysis and social psychology, and he began to try his hand at writing on these subjects, encouraged by professional practitioners of his acquaintance. When the War ended, he chose to remain in Britain and applied for naturalization. A chance occurrence in the summer of 1945 proved of decisive importance for the future: having come to Sadler’s Wells one evening in the expectation of attending Così fan tutte, he instead became acquainted with Peter Grimes, which initiated a lifelong fascination with Britten’s music. This experience, it seems, was largely responsible for his resolve to turn to music journalism as a means of supporting himself. Early in 1946 he began to produce a regular column for National Entertainment Monthly. Geoffrey Sharp was sufficiently impressed by what he saw of Keller’s writings to engage him as a regular contributor to Music Review in late 1947. By the following year, he was working regularly for a range of music and film periodicals, earning his living solely by his pen. Keller’s involvement with Music Review led to a friendship with Donald Mitchell, a fellow contributor six years his junior, who was impressed by the erudition, intimate knowledge of the repertoire, and keenness of perception evinced in Keller’s reviews. Seeing in him a kindred spirit, in February 1949 Mitchell invited him to co-edit Music Survey, a journal which he had founded the previous year.5 It proved a short-lived venture (it ceased in 1952), but was undoubtedly among the most enterprising periodicals in the history of British writing on music. Published quarterly and produced on a shoe-string, the

4 This talk was reprinted in a slightly revised form as the chapter ‘Vienna, 1938’ in Hans Keller, Music, Closed Societies and Football (London: Toccata Press, 1986), 28–48. 5 For an account of Mitchell and Keller’s collaboration on Music Survey, see the Preface to the collected edition, Donald Mitchell and Hans Keller, eds, Music Survey: New Series 1949–1952 (London: Faber, 1981); and Donald Mitchell,‘Remembering Hans Keller’, in Mervin Cooke and Christopher Palmer, eds, Cradles of the New: Writings on Music, 1951–1991 (London: Faber, 1995), 461–80. Hans Keller: The Making of an ‘Anti-Critic’ 331 issues typically ran to seventy or eighty closely printed pages densely packed with substantial essays and reviews of concerts, operatic performances, gramophone recordings, new books and even film music – a subject on which Keller wrote extensively during these years. The authors included many prominent figures of the period, among them Winton Dean, Robert Donington, Paul Hamburger, Arthur Hutchings, Humphrey Searle, Robert Simpson and Harold Truscott, as well as foreign contributors including Luigi Dallapiccola, René Leibowitz and Arnold Schoenberg. The contents were generally lively and engaging, and the standard of writing was consistently high. Mitchell and Keller allowed their contributors considerable latitude of approach: the essays ranged from opinion pieces and discussions of contemporary musical developments to material that would not have been out of place in a musicological journal: an examination of features of Bach’s fugal writing by A. E. F. Dickinson, an account by Denis Stevens of a part-book dating from the reign of Henry VIII, or an article on the dating of Bruckner’s Symphony in D minor (‘Die Nullte’) by Hans Redlich, to give only a few examples. The predominant focus, however, was on contemporary music. Of the eleven issues that they co-edited, two were devoted exclusively to Britten and Schoenberg,6 and seven more carried at least one substantial contribution dealing with one or other of these composers, and sometimes essays on both. Shortly after Music Survey folded in 1952, the two men also brought out a symposium volume entitled Benjamin Britten: A Commentary on his Works from a Group of Specialists, a comprehensive survey of Britten’s output to date, which Mitchell described as ‘a vastly inflated issue’ of the periodical.7 This overriding interest did not preclude discussion of music by others: Hindemith, Bartók and Stravinsky were also the subject of sympathetic, if less extensive commentary, while another special issue (vol. 3, no. 4 of June 1951) focused on native and immigrant British composers, including Elgar, Richard Arnell, Lennox Berkeley, Benjamin Frankel, Mátyás Seiber and Bernard van Dieren. And although these articles were of a popularizing nature and aimed at a general readership, the discussions were by no means unsophisticated, and they did not eschew consideration of technical matters. In the context of British musical life of the day, Music Survey was a brave pioneering venture. Mitchell and Keller had two principal aims: first, to champion composers both historical and contemporary who had been unjustly ignored or underestimated in Britain; and second, to raise the professional standards of British musical journalism, much of which they found sloppily written, poorly informed and lacking in substance. Moreover, they regarded

6 Volumes 2/4 (1950) and 4/3 (1952), respectively. 7 Garnham, Hans Keller and Internment, 270. 332 Patrick Zuk the attitudes espoused by prominent critics of the day to be incorrigibly provincial: in a joint interview in 1980, they recalled Frank Howes, the chief music critic of The Times, pronouncing Schoenberg unworthy of being called a composer, and Eric Blom, who reviewed for The Observer, declaring that ‘we just don’t want Mahler here’.8 In no small part, the pugnacity of some of their own contributions to Music Survey was provoked by a wholly understandable impatience with views of this kind. With hindsight, however, their youthful impressions of the insularity and intellectual complacency of British music criticism of these years seem rather unbalanced. Blom, after all, was a scholar of considerable note who had edited the extensively revised and expanded fifth edition of Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1954). His dislike of Mahler notwithstanding, he can hardly be characterized as a narrow-minded ignoramus. Similarly, Howes had written a pioneering book on William Byrd and was a notable champion of Vaughan Williams, Walton, and other contemporary British composers. Nonetheless, even if Keller and Mitchell’s comments about fellow critics often sound rather superior and self-regarding, one must balance this against their manifest idealism and skilful advocacy of work that aroused their enthusiasm. Keller’s involvement with Music Survey and the Britten symposium proved a valuable formative experience, as it allowed him more scope to explore subjects that interested him – and not merely the work of composers whom he admired, but also broader problems of contemporary musical culture. By the time he met Mitchell, he had developed an impressive command of his second language, although his style was not yet as polished it would later become. In his pieces for Music Survey, his prose was at times rather stilted and wordy – defects that he later overcame, achieving a much greater concision and elegance of expression. Brief though many of his contributions to Music Survey are, they are invariably stimulating and provocative, and broach subjects that would remain of central concern to him for the remainder of his life. His first piece, an editorial entitled ‘On Musical Understanding’ in the first issue of 1949, reads like a manifesto, raising fundamental issues about music criticism – ‘questions which each of us must decide in his own mind before he can claim the right to criticise’. In characteristically combative fashion, Keller declared most music criticism to be a ‘racket’, anticipating his description of it as a ‘phony profession’ in his posthumously published book, Criticism (1987). Adducing a recent review that had inaccurately impugned Britten’s version of the Beggar’s Opera as ‘keyless’, he underlined the absurdity of engaging review- ers whose musical training and perceptions were so patently deficient:

8 Preface, Music Survey: New Series 1949–1952, iv, vi. Hans Keller: The Making of an ‘Anti-Critic’ 333

The point I wish to make is that a leading critic can, without an uproar on the part of the general musical public, criticise harmonies without (amongst other blunders) noticing the presence of keys; and that, when one points this out, he is still allowed to believe that he sufficiently understands the stuff to criticise it. The gravity of such a symptomatic incident can hardly be overestimated, once we are agreed that wherever the proof of the music is to be found, it does not lie in the ear of the deaf.9 But while a good ear and technical knowledge were self-evidently indispensible, Keller paradoxically argued that they were insufficient for complete musical understanding: it was possible, he contended, to be intimately familiar with a piece of music and have a detailed appreciation of its technical aspects, but still fail to grasp its import. His view of what constituted genuine musicality was unashamedly elitist:

[Only] a small minority of us is musical through and through, and the understanding of great art is at the time of writing limited to a spiritual aristocracy. How far this regrettable state of affairs may be improved through changes in early upbringing remains to be seen; that it cannot be improved by adult education is obvious from the established fact that character formation is determined in childhood. Here and elsewhere, Keller’s polemics on the poor quality of music journalism recall the essays of Karl Kraus (1874–1936), a prominent and controversial figure in Viennese intellectual life. A preoccupation with the deleterious effects of bad writing pervades many articles that Kraus contributed to Die Fackel [The Torch], the famous satirical magazine that he founded and edited. Over the three decades of its existence, it served as a platform for what became a veritable one-man crusade against the misuse of language to dishonest ends – whether encountered in the vapid productions of contemporary belle let- tres, the bogus claims of advertising, or the duplicities and cant mouthed by politicians. Although Keller’s attitude to Kraus was ambivalent,10 his contributions to Music Survey show unmistakable signs of Krausian influence – not least, a shared predilection for aphorisms (Keller’s editorial in the second 1949 issue, entitled ‘Short and Bitter’, comprises a set of aphorisms on the difference between talent and genius and the reception of works of genius) and for anat- omizing the flaws of sub-standard writing. In his essays and reviews, Keller remorselessly exposed the inadequacies of authors who incurred his ire on account of their lack of understanding of great music or their denigration of it on the basis of prejudices and unexamined assumptions.

9 Music Survey: New Series 1949–1952, 8. 10 See, for example, his article ‘Freud and Anti-Freud’, The Spectator (27 May 1977). 334 Patrick Zuk

A striking instance is furnished by his article ‘Schoenberg and the Men of the Press’, published in the March 1951 issue,11 in which he took Gerald Abraham and Winton Dean severely to task for their accounts of Schoenberg’s compositions and prose writings, prompted by the recent appearance of an English translation of Style and Idea. The article’s opening remarks are distinctly reminiscent of Kraus’s rhetoric at its most grandiloquent:

Nothing is easier, and nothing more convincing to the ignorant, than to sweep over the deep. Nothing is more relieving than to talk about what one doesn’t know, for it’s the easiest thing to be done about it; besides, it promotes solidarity among the light-minded, promotes that jolly good highbrow fellowship which keeps the music critic’s conscience ever supple and easy. … Genius tends to be a disturbing phenomenon for the critic, for its recognition depends on the creation of new standards of evaluation. Music criticism justifies itself where an inspired vision of the future supersedes all acquired illusions of the past. Otherwise, it merely judges itself: perhaps it is because the critic criticizes himself that he doesn’t want to be criticized by anybody else. Or perhaps it is because he feels more certain than secure. In any case, one has to grant him that his certainty is based upon his professional knowledge; but, alas, most professionals who construct this body of knowledge are amateurs. Although this passage leaves one in little doubt about his estimate of the competence of British music critics, Keller’s account of the reviews themselves makes it unsparingly explicit as he proceeds to pick them apart. Abraham’s piece is impugned for its ‘radical fallacies’ and ‘howlers’, while Dean’s is held to demonstrate such ‘staggering ignorance of every aspect of Schoenberg’s work, mind, and background’ as to necessitate ‘the ungrateful task of teaching the editor of a leading musicological journal mores’ for having commissioned Dean to write it in the first place. While one may agree with Keller’s general strictures on music criticism and, in many cases, with his analyses of the writings that he singles out for discussion, his combative and disputatious tone becomes rather tiresome – and was found objectionable at the time.12 Laments about the inadequacies of music critics are as old as the profession itself, and it hardly needed Keller to point them out. Rather than dwelling on them at such length, it is regrettable that he did not channel his indignation to more productive ends, such as writing his own, more informative account of Style and Idea. As Keller got older, he learnt

11 Music Survey: New Series 1949–1952, 160–8. 12 For a discussion, see Garnham, Hans Keller and the BBC, 23–4. Hans Keller: The Making of an ‘Anti-Critic’ 335 to argue his point of view with greater urbanity and humour, without seeming to demean the target of his censure.13 At this stage of Keller’s career, however, a high-minded earnestness was the quality most in evidence: he seems to have viewed writing on music almost as a spiritual vocation and an activity fraught with an onerous moral responsibility. Although it would be easy to dismiss such an outlook as an affectation, in Keller’s case this would be unwarranted: one should not underestimate the extent to which his worldview was shaped at an absolutely fundamental level by his narrow escape from incarceration in a Nazi concentration camp. By his own admission, he found his encounter in 1938 with ‘indiscriminate, enthusiastic, collective sadism’ so deeply traumatic that his emotional responses to it remained permanently repressed: almost forty years later, he remarked, ‘I am just as incapable of appreciating this level of reality emotionally as I would have been if I had never experienced it.’ Moreover, it was not merely a personal trauma occasioned by a close brush with death, but a collective trauma that he aptly described as ‘the death of a world’.14 In view of this, it is scarcely surprising that one of the central themes of his work is the vital importance of safeguarding one’s individuality against pressures to collective conformity, and above all, from pressures to surrender one’s individual conscience and independence of ethical judgement. This preoccupation explains a great deal about Keller’s interests, as well as his overriding concern with authenticity of communication, both verbal and musical. At this stage of his career, two of the dominant presences in his intellectual and artistic firmament were fellow Viennese, Freud and Schoenberg, whom he revered as geniuses who had courageously pursued their creative paths in the face of fierce opposition, emblematizing a supreme assertion of individuality in defiance of the collective. For Keller, both personified the fearless pursuit of truths about the human condition – in Freud’s case, through scientific enquiry, in Schoenberg’s, through his art. Keller’s interest in Freud developed after his arrival in England and was probably aroused by fellow émigrés whom he met in the internment camps.15 After his release, he made a detailed study of the psychoanalytic literature and claimed to have conducted an intensive self-analysis (as Freud had done) for several years. Although these activities were undertaken initially in an attempt to alleviate personal difficulties, there would seem little doubt that Keller, like

13 Sensibly, he also abstained from the invective encountered in his earlier work – such as his distasteful reference to the ordinary cinemagoer as a sus domesticus (‘domestic pig’), or his dismissal of other critics as ‘idiots’. 14 Music, Closed Societies and Football, 47, 51. 15 Garnham, Hans Keller and Internment, 191. 336 Patrick Zuk many others at this period, also turned to Freud in search of explanations for Germany’s descent into barbarism under Nazi rule. In such a context, it is not difficult to comprehend the intellectual appeal of Freud’s insistence on man’s animal nature and his tragic vision of the inherent fragility of civilization, whose survival depended on man’s perennially uncertain capacity to sublimate powerful sexual and aggressive drives that blindly sought only their own satisfaction. This made the pursuit of self-knowledge an ineluctable ethical obligation, even if Freud suggested that we are innately averse to confronting the truth about ourselves, and can only do so after overcoming self-deceptions and inner resistances of formidable tenacity. Although Keller’s interest in psychoanalysis subsequently waned, the Freudian worldview remained a strong influence on his intellectual outlook up to the end of his life. When the focus of his interests as a writer began to shift away from psychology in the mid-1940s, Keller initially hoped to develop a new branch of applied psychology, using psychoanalytic approaches to investigate ‘the psychology, not only of the composing process, but of the actual elements of musical structure and texture’.16 Unsurprisingly, this ambitious aim remained unrealized: even if one accepted the validity of Freud’s model of the mind, it is difficult to see how music could be plausibly explicated in the light of classical drive theory. On the whole, the results of Keller’s efforts to develop a psychoanalytical musical hermeneutics are not very convincing. The most substantial of them, ‘Three Psychoanalytic Notes on Peter Grimes’ (1946), remained unfinished; moreover, it focuses almost exclusively on the libretto rather than the music.17 Keller analyses Grimes’s character in terms of unresolved Œdipal conflicts, placing considerable emphasis on his ‘unusually active Œdipus complex’ and his supposed fixation at the anal phase of psychosexual development. The discussion proceeds on predictable lines, like the mechanically schematic psychoanalytic interpretations of literature that appeared in the wake of Ernest Jones’s seminal essay ‘The Œdipus Complex as an Explanation of Hamlet’s Mystery’, and it is doubtful that it adds much to our understanding of the opera. An article of 1947, ‘Mozart and Boccherini’, represented Keller’s first notable attempt at a psychoanaytical investigation of the creative process.18 Here, he attempted to demonstrate that Mozart’s envy and resentment of Boccherini led him in several works to subject a motif that he supposedly appropriated without acknowledegment from the latter’s String Quintet in C major to particularly elaborate treatment in his own String Quartet in D major, K 575,

16 ‘Musical Self-Contempt in Britain’ [lecture delivered to members of the British Psychological Society, 4 November 1950], Music and Psychology, 197. 17 Ibid., 121–45. 18 Ibid., 176–85. Hans Keller: The Making of an ‘Anti-Critic’ 337 prompted by a desire to demonstrate his compositional superiority over his rival. As the motif in question is a commonplace tag comprising two chromat- ically decorated stepwise ascents, the reader wonders whether it is Keller’s conclusion that might be psychologically ‘over-determined’ rather than Mozart’s employment of this particular musical idea. When it came to demonstrating how psychoanalysis could explain ‘elements of musical structure and texture’, Keller made equally little headway, though his essays from these years contain some suggestive observations on the psychological and cultural significance of such phenomena as the tendency of modern composers to suppress the fundamental lyrical character of stringed instruments, which he interpreted as a manifestation of sadism,19 or the practices of musical quotation and caricature.20 Although these explorations did not prove fruitful, Keller’s interest in the psychology of composition, performance, and reception would ultimately prove far more so, even if, here too, the results of his first experiments are not wholly successful. It was inevitable that he would bring psychoanalytic theory to bear on a phenomenon to which he repeatedly adverted in his early writings – critics’ underestimation of outstandingly gifted composers or performers, Schoenberg, Britten and Furtwängler being instances in point. Keller suggested, not unreasonably, that covert psychological factors were sometimes at work. His most extended essay on the subject from this period is ‘Resistances to Britten’s Music: Their Psychology’, published in the Spring 1950 issue of Music Survey.21 In this, he suggested that hostility to Britten’s work arose from the operation of the ‘Polycrates complex’, the psychoanalyst J. C. Flügel’s designation for what he claimed to be a universal unconscious desire for punishment arising from guilt at possessing talents or aptitudes out of the ordinary. Drawing on supplementary concepts deriving from the work of Ernest Jones and Ernst Kris, he went on to elaborate:

By making Britten the scapegoat for our own unconscious guilts (which are the source of the need for punishment), we are by no means freeing ourselves from self-punishment. Quite apart from the fact that the projection of guilt which is the basis of vicarious punishment might in itself be regarded as a special form of identification (Jones), ‘the public puts itself’, on any but the most primitive level of aesthetic experience, ‘at least for a moment, in the artist’s place, identifies with him to however a slight degree’ (Kris). By depreciating Britten, we punish

19 ‘The Musical Character’, in Benjamin Britten: A Commentary on his Works from a Group of Specialists, ed. Donald Mitchell and Hans Keller (London: Rockliffe, 1952), 337. 20 ‘The Question of Quotation’, in Film Music and Beyond, 30–2. 21 Reprinted in Essays on Music, 10–17. 338 Patrick Zuk

ourselves for identifying with his presumptuous music: a special manifestation of the general law according to which the critic criticizes himself. As soon, however, as something seems manifestly ‘wrong’ with a Britten work, the Polycrates complex relaxes its hold over the critic’s judgement, since Britten no longer pre- sumes above his station. This convoluted explanation is not very coherent, and Keller’s command of the ideas strikes one as less than assured. His approach here is open to question on several counts – including the validity of such amateur ‘psychoanalysis at a distance’ and his assumption that the negative responses to Britten’s work had only one cause. However laudable Keller’s aims in seeking to defend Britten’s music against its detractors, his recourse to psychoanalytic theories for this purpose was intellectually illegitimate: he used them to discredit those holding points of view with which he disagreed, and to present his own position as one of enlightened superiority. To be fair, he seems to have realized this, and in later life decried the ‘psychological degradation of intellectual opponents’ and ‘the psychoanalyst’s habitual argumentum ad hominem’ as ‘irrational and contemptible’.22 More persuasive was the final section of his essay, in which he discussed the striking phenomenon of ‘British musical group self-contempt’, which led British musicians to disparage music by native composers seemingly for no other reason than it was British and failed to accord with ill-defined notions of ‘Continental’ compositional sophistication. Keller’s title (‘Resistances to Britten’s Music: Their Psychology’) intention- ally played on the dual signification of the word ‘resistance’, for reasons that become clear in the light of remarks made in other writings. In this regard, his contribution to the Britten symposium, one of his most extended and ambitious pieces from this period,23 is of particular interest for what it reveals about his intellectual outlook during these years, and about the influence of psychoanalysis on his thinking about music. A considerable portion of this essay comprises a lengthy disquisition on the contemporary cultural context and its implications for the development of musical composition. He suggested that the artistic pursuit of beauty was superfluous in the anxious uncertainty of the ‘rotten’ modern age, and had of necessity been superseded by the quest for truth:

[The] loss of religion … has robbed us of our security which the new and often equally emotional religions, whether Sciences or States, can only very partly

22 Music, Closed Societies and Football, 127. 23 The essay was an expanded version of an article entitled ‘Britten and Mozart: A Challenge in the Form of Variations on an Unfamiliar Theme’, Music & Letters 1 (1948), 17–30. Hans Keller: The Making of an ‘Anti-Critic’ 339

restore. Hence unprecedented frustration, hence unprecedented neurosis and aggression. …

[The] surest sign of our age’s aggressive search for ‘the real facts’ is that every illusion, every perversion and lie which was previously promulgated in the name of God or Goodness, is nowadays promulgated for the sake of truth, realism, or utility …

One of the reasons why we tend to consider Mozart’s truths beautiful, and Bartók’s full of many other things besides and above and opposed to beauty, is that by this late time in our culture most pleasant truths have been discovered and it remains the unpleasant task of our geniuses to unearth repressed material which the conscious mind duly regards as ugly. It needs more courage today than ever to be a good artist, and more cowardice than ever to be a bad artist; nor is it surprising that there are so few people left who have the courage not to be artists at all.24 Several key ideas emerge from this passage. Keller intimates that in the twentieth century, the worthiest artistic creation has become akin to psychoanalysis in being a fearless search for truth. Like psychoanalysis, it discloses the unconscious and confronts us with unpalatable facts about human nature, especially our aggressive instincts and the sadism to which they give rise. Authentic modern art faithfully mirrors these ugly truths; and the aggression that it evinces is both a reflection of the aggression that modern man displays and with which he is surrounded, and an expression of the aggression necessary to overcome resistances (in the psychoanalytic sense) against acknowledging such realities. Rejection of the work of Bartók and other modern musical geniuses is similarly a manifestation of resistance. By implication, Keller saw analysing and dispelling the resistances that hindered appreciation of the work of modern musical geniuses as one of the critic’s most important tasks, much as the psychoanalyst had to analyse the analysands’ resistances against confronting the contents of the unconscious. Needless to say, such assertions invite many questions – not least, when it comes to Keller’s understanding of the nature of artistic creation and the problematic concept of ‘artistic truth’, particularly if that truth is held to be absolute. Keller was by no means alone in espousing views of this kind (their congruence with aspects of Adorno’s thinking on twentieth-century music is immediately apparent, for example), and they are very much of their period. They certainly help to explain Keller’s attitude to Schoenberg, whose cause

24 ‘The Musical Character’, 336–9. 340 Patrick Zuk he promoted then and subsequently with an almost evangelical fervour.25 Indeed, his obituary notice published in the October 1951 issue of Music Survey employs a soteriological metaphor to convey his estimate of Schoenberg’s world-historical significance: ‘[A] dying culture can, if it will, see the light beyond its grave. Will it? There is nothing so painfully morbid as health to the moribund. Otherwise it would by now be common knowledge that Einstein, Freud, and Schoenberg are the discoverers of the future.’ In a lecture delivered the previous year to members of the British Psychological Society, he hailed Schoenberg as a genius whose influence on the course of musical history was only beginning to be felt, predicting that ‘the revolution he is bringing about is up against every possible kind of violent, or irrelevant resistance, so that his followers will for a long time remain a persecuted group’.26 While one can readily see how Keller could adduce Schoenberg as a para- gon of the modernist composer, it was less clear how Britten conformed to his model, especially as, in Keller’s words, Britten contrived ‘to make his truths “beautiful” or at least – in the case of such “ugly” material as emerges … – un-ugly, “fascinating” and indeed “well-sounding” to even the conservative, “beauty”-starved listener’. This presented him with a quandary, since the entire point of his essay was to establish Britten’s exceptional stature as a creative artist. (His strategy of drawing parallels between Britten’s work and Mozart’s was felt by many to be ill-advised and, predictably, proved highly controversial.)27 He accounted for the apparent anomaly by claiming that the beauty of Britten’s work derived partly from his exploration of the ‘more pleasant aspects of the child’s mind’ which had remained ‘musically undiscovered’, and partly from the ‘violent repressive counter-force against his sadism’ that he held to be a conspicuous feature of the composer’s psychological make-up, and which supposedly led Britten to become a ‘musical pacifist’ as well as a political pacifist. The fundamental problem with all writing of this kind, of course, is that it consists of little more than a tissue of assertions whose truthfulness can never be demonstrated or critically tested. It is not difficult to imagine how another writer less well-disposed to Britten could have drawn on psychoanalytic concepts to offer a very different interpretation and declared the fundamentally triadic and diatonic harmonic language of his earlier work to be symptomatic

25 Lionel Salter recalled that when Keller joined the BBC in 1959, ‘he annoyed everybody by this mania he had – no other word for it – he was an absolute fanatic about spreading the gospel of Schoenberg’. Robert Layton, another BBC colleague, was similarly struck by the intensity of Keller’s ‘Schoenberg worship’: ‘Schoenberg could do no wrong … If Schoenberg had given something his imprimatur, that was OK’. Quoted in Garnham, Hans Keller and the BBC, 90–1. 26 ‘Musical Self-Contempt in Britain’, 202. 27 See Garnham, Hans Keller and the BBC, 17–19. Hans Keller: The Making of an ‘Anti-Critic’ 341 of regressive tendencies and infantile fixations. The most valuable part of Keller’s essay is his discussion of technical and stylistic features of Britten’s music, which is both informative and insightful. The vaporous psychoanalytic theorizing and woolly generalizations about the contemporary state of Western culture, on the other hand, are unpersuasive. On the whole, these early attempts to apply psychoanalytic theory to music strike one as dated and of limited interest. Not only have key tenets of classical Freudian theory come to appear questionable in the light of modern research in neuroscience and child-development studies, but they have also been sub- jected to far-reaching revision within the field of psychoanalysis itself under the influence of attachment theory, object-relations theory, and other developments. As with Schoenberg, Keller’s view of Freud was heavily idealized and lacking in critical distance: up to the end of his life, he persisted in viewing Freud’s model of the mind as ‘a single man’s discovery of world-shaking truths’, even if he grew suspicious of psychoanalysis as an institutionalized therapeutic practice.28 Nevertheless, psychoanalysis played an indisputably valuable role in his intellectual development, stimulating him to think about important issues pertaining to musical composition and performance, and to the problems of writing about music. Keller’s understanding of great music as a quasi-psychoanalytic search for truth reinforced his passionate conviction that holding one’s own individuality sacrosanct was a supreme ethical obligation in artistic matters no less than in our quotidian dealings with our fellow human beings. In later life, he wrote: ‘Your self is the only thing that you have, and once you lose it, you cease to respect other selves and their singularity, and even proceed to ignore the highest level of individualism, that of genius and its new insights.’29 Attempting to formulate his sense of what constituted ‘unmistakable greatness or genius in music’, he spoke of its ‘revelatory quality, of its direct disclosure, convincing at once, of a plane of reality of which, otherwise, I have no knowledge’.30 As he repeatedly emphasized, new artistic truths could only be disclosed by people

28 Music, Closed Societies and Football, 87. In view of Keller’s concern in later life about the therapeutic misapplication of psychoanalysis and its seeming intellectual ossification, it is curious that he seems to have shown little interest in the innovative contributions of Ronald Fairbairn, Donald Winnicott, John Bowlby and other British psychoanalysts of the period, whose work proved a major force for theoretical and methodological renewal. Moreover, the work of Winnicott in particular engaged with concerns that were very germane to his own – the factors that hindered the natural development of the personality in childhood and the price that frequently had to be paid in adulthood for the compliant ‘false self’. 29 Ibid., 244. 30 Ibid., 254. 342 Patrick Zuk who were individuals in the fullest sense, with the courage to pursue their independent vision regardless of how their endeavours would be viewed by others. Many would no doubt dismiss such a heroic envisioning of the artist as a dubious relic of Romanticism, but whether one agrees with Keller or not, the fact remains that his subsequent explorations of this issue touch on complex questions concerning the legacy of musical modernism that have lost none of their pertinence. As early as the mid-1950s, Keller drew attention to the problem of the ‘dodecaphoneys’, composers who adopted dodecaphony merely because it had become fashionable, rather than out of any creative necessity. As he argued forcefully in several essays that are undoubtedly among his most thought-provoking and important (including ‘Principles of Composition’ (1960)31 and the lengthy chapter entitled ‘Music, 1975’ in Music, Closed Societies and Football), Schoenberg’s abandonment of tonality had precipitated a crisis of communication of traumatic proportions; and while Schoenberg himself had managed to avert the threat of incomprehensibility, many of those who subsequently adopted atonality and serialism had not. In his view, the problem had been exacerbated with the advent of the generation of Boulez and Stockhausen: he suggested that much contemporary composition essentially comprised sequences of sound effects and was musically incoherent, even if its underlying organizational principles were often highly elaborate. Such works were incomprehensible because they had no intrinsic content – in the sense of a meaningful, intentional communication – for listeners to comprehend. He argued that the breakdown of generally agreed criteria of competence and the absence of stable commonalities of compositional practice against which composers could confidently assert their individuality had given rise to chronic insecurities, anxieties and inhibitions: a fear of being perceived as insuffi- ciently ‘up-to-date’ or intellectually unsophisticated led composers to abnegate their creative individuality and instead write in ways that would win validation from fellow composers and critics to whom they had given their psychological allegiance. Moreover, in a climate where the significations of the words ‘music’ and ‘composition’ had been extended to encompass even contingent, random noise, there could be no meaningful criticism, and by implication, no such thing as a bad or incompetent piece. Keller deplored what he described as the ‘de-musicalisation of music’ into ‘unmusic’, and hoped that contemporary composers might yet recapture ‘the dignity of the art we recognize as soon as it says something to us when it speaks, and says it with the voice of irreplaceable authority’.32

31 Reprinted in Essays on Music, 212–32. 32 Music, Closed Societies and Football, 268–9. Hans Keller: The Making of an ‘Anti-Critic’ 343

It is important to emphasize that Keller was by no means unsympathetic to new music: his criticisms were motivated by the dangers, as he saw them, of the growing pressures to conformity in a sphere where individuality of expression should have been paramount. A similar concern with the preservation of individuality informs his comments about the inherently authoritarian nature of much composition teaching, which he believed had become impossible, or his dismay at the growing tendency of performers to imitate renditions of works on gramophone recordings, rather than evolve interpretations on the basis of their own intellectual and imaginative engagement with the musical text. Keller’s views on these and on other issues often make for uncomfortable and unsettling reading, and it not surprising that some commentators have preferred to ignore his ideas rather than engage with them. To take a noteworthy case in point: in a rather petulant review of the posthumously published collection Essays on Music edited by Christopher Wintle, the composer Robin Holloway averred that Keller mostly alternated ‘between emphasizing the obvious and emitting hot air’, and that his writings contained little of enduring interest or value.33 Such a sweeping dismissal is manifestly unjust, based as it is on a superficial and highly partisan appraisal of Keller’s extensive output – but Holloway’s sneering, intemperate response suggests that, ten years after his death, Keller had lost little of the ability to antagonize and provoke that he had displayed abundantly during his lifetime. He is still very much worth reading, even if one often finds oneself in disagreement with him, and a comprehensive critical appraisal of the themes explored in his work would be a valuable undertaking. With time, Keller matured into an important thinker, and his reflections on the problematic history of musical modernism and on artistic individuality, adumbrated in the early writings discussed here, represent important and original contributions to British writing on music. In raising these issues, he showed considerable courage and independence of mind: his considerations of them remain highly relevant and deserve the attention of a new generation of readers.

33 ‘Keller’s Causes’, London Review of Books 15 (1995), 13.

Select Bibliography

The bibliography is representative rather than comprehensive. It does not comprise all cited sources, but seeks to capture the major texts informing each chapter, and to give a broad sense of the primary and secondary literature in the fields of British music criticism and its intellectual and cultural history across the book’s chronology.

Ablow, Rachel, 2007: The Marriage of Minds: Reading Sympathy in the Victorian Marriage Plot (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press) Abraham, Gerald, 1927: Borodin: The Composer & His Music (London: William Reeves) ____, 1935: Studies in Russian Music (London: William Reeves) ____, 1938: One Hundred Years of Music (London: Duckworth) ____, 1943: Eight Soviet Composers (London: Oxford University Press) ____, 1944: Tchaikovsky: A Short Biography (London: Duckworth) ____, ed., 1945: Tchaikovsky: A Symposium (London: Lindsay Drummond) Adams, Byron, 1996: ‘Scripture, Church and Culture: Biblical Texts in the Works of Vaughan Williams’, in Alain Frogley, ed. Vaughan Williams Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 99–117 ____, 2013: ‘Vaughan Williams’s Musical Apprenticeship’, in Alain Frogley and Aidan J. Thomson, eds,The Cambridge Companion to Vaughan Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 29–55 Adorno, Theodor W., 1992:Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press) Allen, Peter, 1986: ‘The Meanings of “an Intellectual”: Nineteenth- and Twentieth-century Usage’, University of Toronto Quarterly, 55/4, 342–58 Ampère, Jean-Jacques, 1841: Histoire de le littérature française au moyen âge comparée aux littératures étrangères (Paris: Tessier) Anderson, Julian, 2004: ‘Sibelius and Contemporary Music’, in Daniel M. Grimley, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Sibelius, 196–218 Anderson, Perry, 1964: ‘Origins of the Present Crisis’, New Left Review23, 26–53 ____, 1968: ‘Components of the National Culture’, New Left Review 50, 1–57 Annan, Noel, 1955: ‘The Intellectual Aristocracy’, in J. H. Plumb, ed., Studies in Social History (London: Longmans), 241–87 Ap Ivor, Denis, 1987: ‘Bernard van Dieren: Search and Rescue One Hundred Ye a r s o n’, The Music Review, 47/4, 254 Armbruster, Emil, 1946: Erstdruckfassung oder ‘Originalfassung’? Ein Beitrag zur Brucknerfrage am fünfzigsten Todestag des Meister (Leipzig: Jost)

345 346 Select Bibliography

Arnold, Matthew, 1965: Culture and Anarchy, in The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. R. H. Super, Vol. V (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press), 85–256 Arrandale, Karen, 2011: ‘Artists’ Rifles and Artistic License: Edward Dent’s War’, First World War Studies 2/1, 7–16 Asmussen, Kirstie, 2016: ‘Hubert Foss and the Politics of Musical Progress: Modernism and British Music Publishing’ (PhD diss., University of Queensland) Bahners, Patrick, 2000: ‘“A Place Among the English Classics”: Ranke’s History of the Popes and its British Readers’, in Benedikt Stuchtey and Peter Wende, eds, British and German Historiography, 1750–1950: Traditions, Perceptions, and Transfers (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press), 123–57 Bain, Alexander, 1865: The Emotions and the Will, 2nd edn (London: Longman’s) ____, 1870/1873: Logic, 2 vols, 2nd edn (London: Longman’s) Banfield, Stephen, 1995: ‘Aesthetics and Criticism’ in Nicholas Temperley, ed., The Romantic Age (London: Loan Press), 455–73 ____, ed., 1995: The Blackwell History of Music in Britain: The Twentieth Century (Oxford: Blackwell) Barker, Ernest, 1927: National Character and the Factors in its Formation, 3rd edn (London: Methuen) ____, ed., 1947: The Character of England (Oxford: Clarendon Press) Barry, Charles, 1887: ‘Richter Concerts’, The Musical Times 28, 342 Bartók, Béla, 1928: ‘The National Temperament in Music’, The Musical Times 69/1030, 1079 Bashford, Christina, 2003: ‘Not Just “G”: Towards a History of the Programme Note’, in Michael Musgrave, ed., George Grove, Music and Victorian Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), 115–42 Bassnett, Susan, 1993: Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell) Bátonyi, Gábor, 1999: Britain and Central Europe, 1918–1933 (Oxford: Clarendon Press) Beaumont, Anthony, 1985: Busoni the Composer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press) Bekker, Paul, 1922: Die Symphonie von Beethoven bis Mahler (Berlin: Schuster and Loeffler) Belloc, Hilaire, 1937: An Essay on the Nature of Contemporary England (New York: Reed and Ward) Bentley, Michael, 1999: Modern Historiography: An Introduction (London: Routledge) Bertensson, Sergei, and Jay Leyda, 1956: Sergei Rachmaninoff: A Lifetime in Music (New York: New York University Press) Blackman, R. D., ed., 1885: Deacon’s Composition and Style: A Handbook for Literary Students with a Complete Guide to All Matters Connected with Printing and Publishing, 5th edn (London: C.W. Deacon & Co.) Select Bibliography 347

Blamires, Harry, 1982: Twentieth-Century English Literature (London: Macmillan) Bledsoe, Robert Terrell, 1998: Henry Fothergill Chorley: Victorian Journalist (Aldershot: Ashgate) Bloom, Harold, 1973: The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press) Bonds, Mark Evan, 1996: After Beethoven: Imperatives of Originality in the Symphony (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press) Bradley, R. N., 1926: Racial Origins of English Character (London: Allen and Unwin) Bribitzer-Stull, Matthew, 2015: Understanding the Leitmotiv: From Wagner to Hollywood Film Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) Brodbeck, David, 2007: ‘Dvořák’s Reception in Liberal Vienna: Language Ordinances, National Property, and the Rhetoric of Deutschtum’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 60/1, 71–132 ____, 2013: ‘The Symphony after Beethoven after Dahlhaus’, in Julian Horton, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Symphony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 61–95 Brody, Elaine, 1996: ‘The Russians in Paris (1889–1914)’, in Malcolm Hamrick Brown, ed., Russian and Soviet Music: Essays for Boris Schwarz (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press), 157–83 Brogan, D. W., 1943: The English People: Impressions and Observations (London: Hamish Hamilton) Brotman, Charles M., 2005: ‘The Power of Sound: Evolutionary Naturalism and Music in Anglo-American Victorian Culture’ (PhD diss., University of Rochester) Bullock, Philip Ross, 2009: Rosa Newmarch and the Reception of Russian Music in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century England (Farnham: Ashgate) ____, 2011: ‘Sibelius and the Russian Traditions’, in Daniel M. Grimley, ed., Jean Sibelius and His World (Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press), 3–57 ____, ed. and trans., 2011: The Correspondence of Jean Sibelius and Rosa Newmarch, 1906–1939 (Woodbridge: Boydell) ____, 2013: ‘Tsar’s Hall: Russian Music in London, 1895–1926’, in Rebecca Beasley and Philip Ross Bullock, eds, Russia in Britain, 1880–1940: From Melodrama to Modernism (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press), 113–28 Burstein, Poundie, 1997: ‘Lyricism, Structure and Gender in Schubert’s G major String Quartet’, The Musical Quarterly 81/1, 51–63 Calvocoressi, M. D. 1933: Musicians’ Gallery: Music and Ballet in Paris and London (London: Faber and Faber) Calvocoressi, M. D., and Gerald Abraham, 1936: Masters of Russian Music (London: Duckworth) Carner, Mosco, 1952: ‘The Orchestral Music’, in Gerald Abraham, ed., Schumann: A Symposium (London: Oxford University Press), 176–244 348 Select Bibliography

Chadwick, Owen, 1975: The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) Chambers, Robert, 1844: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (London: John Churchill) Charle, Christophe, 1992: ‘Academics or Intellectuals? The Professors of the University of Paris and Political Debate in France from the Dreyfus Affair to the Algerian War’, in Jeremy Jennings, ed., Intellectuals in Twentieth-Century France: Mandarins and Samurais (London: Palgrave Macmillan), 94–116 Chassé, Charles, 1908: ‘La Musique anglaise moderne: une interview avec Mrs Rosa Newmarch’, Bulletin français de la S.I.M., 4, 556–62 Chissell, Joan, 1960: ‘Schumann: Miniaturist or Symphonic Master?’, The Musical Times 101/1408, 353–5 Chorley, Henry F., 1841: Music and Manners in France and Germany: A Series of Travelling Sketches of Art and Society (London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green and Longmans) ____, 1854: Modern German Music (London: Smith, Elder & Co.) ____, 1862: Thirty Years’ Musical Recollections (London: Hurst and Blackett) Clarke, Eric, 2007: ‘The Impact of Recording on Listening’, Twentieth-Century Music 4/1, 47–70 Cohn, Richard, 1999: ‘“As Wonderful as Star Clusters”: Instruments for Gazing at Tonality in Schubert’, 19th-Century Music 22/3, 213–32 Colley, Linda, 1992: Britons: Forging the Nation, 1701–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press) Collini, Stefan, 1992: ‘Intellectuals in Britain and France in the Twentieth Century: Confusions and Contrasts – and Convergence?’, in Jennings, ed., Intellectuals in Twentieth-Century France, 199–225 ____, 2006: Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press) Collini, Stefan, Donald Winch and John Burrow, eds, 1983: That Noble Science of Politics: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Intellectual History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) Collins, Brian, 1996: Peter Warlock the Composer (Aldershot: Scolar Press) Collins, F. Howard, 1889: An Epitome of The Synthetic Philosophy (London and Edinburgh: Williams and Norgate) Collins, Sarah, 2013: ‘Practices of Aesthetic Self-Cultivation: British Composer- Critics of the “Doomed Generation”’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association 138/1, 85–128 ____, 2015: ‘The Composer as “Good European”: Musical Modernism, Amor fati and the Cosmopolitanism of Frederick Delius’, Twentieth-Century Music 12/1, 97–123 Colls, Robert, and Philip Dodd, eds, 2014: Englishness: Politics and Culture 1880–1920 (London and New York: Bloomsbury) Select Bibliography 349

Comte, Auguste, 1848: General View of Positivism [being the Preface to Part III of the Second System, Système de Politique Positive] (Paris: Republic of the West-Order and Progress) Cook, Nicholas, 2007: The Schenker Project: Culture, Race, and Music Theory in fin de siècle Vienna (Oxford: Oxford University Press) Cooke, Deryck, 1962: ‘Delius and Form: A Vindication’, The Musical Times 103, 392–3 ____, 1962: ‘Delius and Form: A Vindication II’, The Musical Times 103, 460–5 ____, 1962–3: ‘Delius the Unknown’, Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, 17–29 ____, 1966: ‘Anton Bruckner (1824–96)’, in Robert Simpson, ed., The Symphony, Vol. I: Haydn to Dvořák (Harmondsworth: Pelican), 283–306 ____, 1969: ‘The Bruckner Problem Simplified 1: Sorting Out the Confusion’, The Musical Times 110/1511, 20–2 ____, 1969: ‘The Bruckner Problem Simplified 2: The F minor, Nos 0, 1 and 2’, The Musical Times 110/1512, 142–4, ____, 1969: ‘The Bruckner Problem Simplified 3: Symphonies 3 and 4’,The Musical Times 110/1514, 362–5 ____, 1969: ‘The Bruckner Problem Simplified 4: Symphonies 5 to 9’, The Musical Times 1515, 479–82 ____, 1980: ‘Bruckner, Anton’ in Stanley Sadie, ed., The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians Vol. III (London: Macmillan), 352–71 Copley, I. A., 1979: The Music of Peter Warlock: A Critical Survey (London: Denis Dobson) Crump, Jeremy, 2014: ‘The Identity of English Music: The Reception of Elgar, 1898–1935’, in Colls and Dodd, Englishness: Politics and Culture 1880–1920, 189–216 Culshaw, John, 1949: Sergei Rachmaninov (London: D. Dobson) Da Fonseca-Wollheim, Corrina, and Zachary Woolfe, 2017: ‘When a Composer Just Doesn’t Do It for You (no Matter how Much You Listen)’, New York Times (30 January), https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/30/arts/music/bruckner-barenboim-staatskapelle-berlin-carnegie-hall.html?mcubz=1 Dahlhaus, Carl, 1989: Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. J. Bradford Robinson (Berkeley: University of California Press) Dale, Catherine, 2003: Music Analysis in Britain in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (Aldershot: Ashgate) Daverio, John, 1997: Robert Schumann: Herald of a New Poetic Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press) Davison, Henry, 1912: From Mendelssohn to Wagner, Being the Memoirs of J. W. Davison (London: William Reeves) Davison, J. W., 1844: ‘An Amateur Critic’, The Musical World 19, 403–5 ____, 1845: ‘Enlargement of the Musical World’, The Musical World 20, 1 Dean, Winton, 1976: ‘Edward J. Dent: A Centenary Tribute’, Music & Letters 57, 353–61 350 Select Bibliography

Dekkers, Odin, 1998: J. M. Robertson: Rationalist and Literary Critic (Farnham: Ashagte) Deneke, Margaret, 1951: Ernest Walker (Oxford: Oxford University Press) Dent, Edward J., 1902: ‘The Operas of Alessandro Scarlatti’, in Sammelbände der Internationalen Musikgesellschaft 4, 143–56 ____, 1905: Alessandro Scarlatti: His Life and Works (London: Edward Arnold) ____, 1907: ‘Music in Berlin’, Monthly Musical Record 36, 29–30 ____, 1909: ‘Busoni on Musical Aesthetics’, Monthly Musical Record 39, 197–8 ____, 1910: ‘The Baroque Opera’ Musical Antiquary 1, 93–107 ____, 1911: ‘Italian Chamber Cantatas’, Musical Antiquary 2, 142–53 ____, 1911: Mozart’s Opera The Magic Flute: Its History and Interpretation (Cambridge: W. Heffer & Sons) ____, 1913: Mozart’s Operas: A Critical Study (London: Chatto & Windus) ____, 1913: ‘Notes on Leonardo Leo’, Musical Antiquary 3, 193–201 ____, 1915: ‘Academic Teaching: A Defence and a Criticism’, The Musical Times 56, 269–71 ____, 1916: ‘The Pianoforte and Its Influence on Musical Composition’, The Musical Quarterly 2, 271–94 ____, 1917: ‘The Alleged Stupidity of Singers’, The Musical Times 58, 443–5 ____, 1920: ‘Revaluations’, The London Mercury, 619–62 ____, 1921: ‘Young England’, The Nation & the Athenaeum, 744 ____, 1926: Terpander: Or Music and the Future (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co.) ____, 1928: Foundations of English Opera: A Study of Musical Drama in England during the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) ____, 1930: ‘Engländer’, in Guido Adler Handbuch der Musikgeschichte Vol. II: Die Moderne (seit 1880) (Berlin: Wilmersdorf), 1044–57 ____, 1937: Authority and the Individual (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press) ____, 1945: A Theatre for Everybody: The Story of the Old Vic and Sadler’s Wells (London: T. V. Boardman & Co.) ____, 1946: ‘Corno di Bassetto’, in Stephen Winsten and Sir Max Beerbohm, eds, G.B.S. 90: Aspects of Bernard Shaw’s Life and Work (London: Ardent Media), 122–30 Dibble, Jeremy, 1992: C. Hubert H. Parry: His Life and Music (Oxford: Clarendon Press) ____, 2002: Charles Villiers Stanford, Man and Musician (Oxford: Oxford University Press) ____, 2005: ‘Elgar and his British Contemporaries’, in The Cambridge Companion to Elgar, eds Daniel M. Grimley and Julian Rushton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 15–23 ____, 2007: John Stainer: A Life in Music (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press) Select Bibliography 351

____, 2017: ‘Lambert, Constant.’ Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/ article/grove/music/15883 Dixon, W. Macneille, 1931: The Englishman (London: Edward Arnold) Doebel, Wolfgang, 2001: Anton Bruckner in Bearbeitung: die Konzepte der Bruckner-Schüler und ihre Rezeption bis zu Robert Haas (Tutzing: Hans Schneider Verlag) Dörffel, Alfred, 1882: Geschichte der Gewandhausconcerte zu Leipzig bis vom 25. November 1781 bis 25 November 1881 (Leipzig: Breitkopf and Härtel) Drabkin, William, 2002: ‘Heinrich Schenker’, in Thomas Christensen, ed., The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 812–43 Dunsby, Jonathan, and Arnold Whittall, 1988: Music Analysis in Theory and Practice (London: Faber and Faber) Dyson, George, 1924: The New Music (London: Oxford University Press) ____,1932: The Progress of Music (London: Oxford University Press) Earle, Ben, 2016: ‘Modernism and Reification in the Music of Frank Bridge’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association 141/2, 335–420 Eatock, Colin, 2010: ‘The Crystal Palace Concerts: Canon Formation and the English Musical Renaissance’, 19th-Century Music 34/1, 87–105 Ekman, Paul, 2010: ‘Darwin’s Compassionate View of Human Nature’, Journal of the American Medical Association, 303/6, 557–8 Elgar, Edward, 1968: A Future for English Music and Other Lectures, ed. Percy Young (London: Dobson) Ellis, William Ashton, 1906: Life of Richard Wagner (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1906) Esty, Jed, 2004: A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press) Evans, Edwin, 1915: ‘The Emancipation of Music’,The English Review (September), 178–87 ____, 1925: ‘A Survey Without Names’, The Sackbut 6, 36–8 Evans, Richard J., 2009: Cosmopolitan Islanders: British Historians and the European Continent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) Finson, Jon W., 1989: Robert Schumann and the Study of Orchestral Composition: The Genesis of the First Symphony, Op. 38 (Oxford: Clarendon Press) Foss, Hubert, 1950: Ralph Vaughan Williams: A Study (Oxford: Oxford University Press) Frogley, Alain, 1996: ‘Constructing Englishness in Music: National Character and the Reception of Ralph Vaughan Williams’, in Frogley, ed., Vaughan Williams Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 1–22 Galloway, William, 1910: Musical England (New York: John Lane) Ganz, A. W., 1950: Berlioz in London (London: Quality Press) Garnett, Richard, 1991: Constance Garnett: A Heroic Life (London: Sinclair-Stevenson) 352 Select Bibliography

Garnham, Alison, 2003: Hans Keller and the BBC (Aldershot: Ashgate) ____, 2011: Hans Keller and Internment: The Development of an Emigré Musician 1938–48 (London: Plumbago Books) Garnham, Alison, and Susi Woodhouse, 2015: Cambridge University Library Hans Keller Archive, https://musicb3.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/pubished- articles-handlist-for-ul-website-sept-2015.pdf Gault, Dermot, 2010: The New Bruckner: Compositional Development and Dynamics of Revision (Farnham: Ashgate) Gilliam, Bryan, 1997: ‘The Annexation of Anton Bruckner: Nazi Revisionism and the Politics of Appropriation’, in Paul Hawkshaw and Timothy L. Jackson, eds, Bruckner Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 72–90 Gillies, Malcolm, 1982: ‘Bartók, Heseltine and Gray: A Documentary Study’, The Music Review, 43/3–4, 177. Gold, Ernest, 1955: ‘The New Challenge’, The Score and I. M. A. Magazine14, 36–40 Golding, Rosemary, 2013: Music and Academia in Victorian Britain (Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate) Gooch, G. P., 1965: History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century (Boston: Beacon Hill) Goodlad, Lauren M. E., 2000: ‘“A Middle Class Cut into Two”: Historiography and Victorian National Character’, ELH 67/1, 143–78 Goss, Glenda Dawn, ed., 1996: The Sibelius Companion (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press) Gosse, Edmund, 1891: ‘The Science of Criticism III’, New Review 6, 408–11 Gould, Stephen Jay, 1977: Ontogeny and Phylogeny (Cambridge MA and London: Harvard University Press) Gray, Cecil, 1924: A Survey of Contemporary Music (London: Oxford University Press) ____, 1934: Peter Warlock: A Memoir of Philip Heseltine (London: Jonathan Cape) ____, 1935: Sibelius: The Symphonies (London: Oxford University Press) ____, 1937: ‘Van Dieren: The Modern Leonardo’, Radio Times, 2 April, 6 ____, 1945: Sibelius (London: Oxford University Press) ____, 1948: Musical Chairs: Or Between Two Stools, Being the Life and Memoirs of Cecil Gray (London; Home & Van Thal) Gray, Pauline, 1989: Cecil Gray: His Life and Notebooks (London: Thames Publishing) Grierson, Mary, 1952: Donald Francis Tovey: A Biography based on Letters (London: Oxford University Press) Grimley, Daniel M., ed., 2004: The Cambridge Companion to Sibelius (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) Grimley, Matthew, 2007: ‘The Religion of Englishness: Puritanism, Providentialism, and “National Character”, 1918–1945’, Journal of British Studies 46/4, 884–906 Select Bibliography 353

Groote, Inga Mai, 2014: Östliche Ouvertüren: Russische Musik in Paris 1870–1913 (Kassel: Bärenreiter) Grove, Sir George, 1878–90: ‘Mendelssohn’, in A Dictionary of Music and Musicians Vol. II (London: Macmillan), 293. ____, 1887: A Short History of Cheap Music (London and New York: Novello, Ewer and Co.) Hadow, W. Henry, 1911: Studies in Modern Music: Hector Berlioz, Robert Schumann, Richard Wagner (London: Seeley and Co., Ltd.) Hamrick Brown, Malcolm, 1999: ‘Tchaikovsky and His Music in Anglo- American Criticism, 1890s–1950s’, in Alexander Mihailovic, ed., Tchaikovsky and his Contemporaries: A Centennial Symposium (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press), 61–73 Harper-Scott, Paul, 2008: ‘Our True North: Walton’s First Symphony, Sibelianism, and the Nationalization of Modernism in England’, Music and Letters 89/4, 562–89 Harrison, Julius, 1934: ‘The Orchestra and Orchestral Music’ in D. L. Bacharach, ed., The Musical Companion (London: Gollancz), 127–284 ____, 1966: ‘Robert Schumann (1810–1856)’, in Robert Simpson, ed., The Symphony, Vol. I (Harmondsworth: Penguin), 246–61 Haward, Lawrence, 1956: Edward J. Dent: A Bibliography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for King’s College) Hawkshaw, Paul, 1997: ‘The Bruckner Problem Revisited’, 19th-Century Music 21, 96–107 Hennequin, Emile, 1982 [1888]: La critique scientifique (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag) Hepokoski, James, 1993: Sibelius: Symphony No. 5 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) Herbert, Christopher, 2001: Victorian Relativity: Radical Thought and Scientific Discovery (Chicago IL and London: University of Chicago Press) Hermelink, Heinrich, 1955: Das Christentum in der Menschheitsgeschichte (Stuttgart: Wunderlich Verlag) Heseltine, Nigel, Capriol for Mother: A Memoir of Philip Heseltine (Peter Warlock) (London: Thames Publishing, 1992) Heseltine, Philip, 1998: The Occasional Writings of Philip Heseltine (Peter Warlock), Vol. III: Musical Criticism (2), ed. Barry Smith (London: Thames Publishing) Hesketh, Ian, 2011: The Science of History in Victorian Britain: Making the Past Speak (London: Pickering & Chatto) Heuffer, Ford Madox, 1907: England and the English (New York: McClure) ____, 1907: The Spirit of the People: An Analysis of the English Mind (London: Alston Rivers) Heyck, Thomas William, 1982: The Transformation of Intellectual Life in Victorian England (Bechenham: Croom Helm) 354 Select Bibliography

____, 1998: ‘Myths and Meanings of Intellectuals in Twentieth-Century British National Identity’, Journal of British Studies 37/2, 192–221 Hickox, M. S., 1986: ‘Has There Been a British Intelligentsia?’, British Journal of Sociology 37, 260–8 Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger, eds, 1983: The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) Hogarth, George, 1835: Musical History, Biography and Criticism (London: J.W. Parker, 1835) Horton, Julian, 2004: Bruckner’s Symphonies: Analysis, Reception and Cultural Politics Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) Horton, Peter, 2016: ‘An Obsession with Perfection’, Nineteenth-Century Music Review 22, 257–87 Houghton, Walter E., 1952: ‘Victorian Anti-intellectualism’, Journal of the History of Ideas 13/3, 291–313 Howe, David, 2013: Empathy: What It Is and Why It Matters (Houndsmill: Palgrave Macmillan) Howes, Frank, 1980: ‘Gray, Cecil’, in Stanley Sadie, ed., The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Vol. VII (London: Macmillan), 650 Howie, Crawford, Paul Hawkshaw and Timothy L. Jackson, eds, 2001: Perspectives on Anton Bruckner (Aldershot: Ashgate) Hudson, Frederick, 1980: ‘Stanford, Sir Charles Villiers’, in Stanley Sadie, ed., The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians Vol. XVIII (London: Macmillan), 70–4 Hughes, Meirion, 1989: ‘“The Duc d’Elgar”: Making a Composer Gentleman’, in Christopher Norris, ed., Music and the Politics of Culture (Chadwell Heath: Laurence and Wishart), 41–68 Hughes, Meirion, and Robert Stradling, 1993: The English Musical Renaissance 1840–1940: Constructing a National Music (Manchester: Manchester University Press) Hughes, Michael, 2009: ‘Searching for the Soul of Russia: British Perceptions of Russia during the First World War’, Twentieth-Century British History 20/2, 198–226 Huss, Fabian, 2009: ‘The Construction of Nature in the Music of E. J. Moeran’, Tempo 63/248, 35–44 Hutchings, Arthur, 1948: Delius: A Critical Biography (London: Macmillan) ____, 1963: ‘The Heseltine-Warlock Nonsense’, The Listener 70/1788, 34 Hyland, Anne M., 2014: ‘The Tightened Bow: Analysing the Juxtaposition of Drama and Lyricism in Schubert’s Paratactic Sonata-Form Movements’, in Gareth Cox and Julian Horton, eds, Irish Musical Studies, Vol. XI: Irish Musical Analysis (Dublin: Four Courts Press), 17–40 Iggers, Georg G., 1966: The German Conception of History (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press) ____, 1997: Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge (Hanover: University Press of New England) Select Bibliography 355

Jacobs, Arthur, 1994: Henry J. Wood: Maker of the Proms (London: Methuen) Jarocinski, Stefan, 1976: Debussy: Impressionism and Symbolism (London: Eulenberg Books) Karnes, Kevin C., 2000: Music, Criticism, and the Challenge of History: Shaping Modern Musical Thought in Late Nineteenth-Century Vienna (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press) Keith, A. Berriedale, W. A. Robson et al., 1942: British Life and Thought (London: Longmans Green) Keller, Hans, 1948: ‘Britten and Mozart: A Challenge in the Form of Variations on An Unfamiliar Theme’, Music and Letters 1, 17–30 ____, 1956: ‘K. 503: The Unity of Contrasting Themes – I’, Music Review 17, 48–58 ____, 1986: Music, Closed Societies and Football (London: Toccata Press) ____, 1994: Essays on Music, ed. Christopher Wintle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) ____, 2003: Music and Psychology: From Vienna to London, 1939–52, ed. Christopher Wintle (London: Plumbago Books) ____, 2006: Film Music and Beyond: Writings on Music and the Screen, 1946–59, ed. Christopher Wintle (London: Plumbago Books) Kenyon, John, 1983: The History Men: The Historical Profession in England since the Renaissance (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson) Kerman, Joseph, 1977: ‘Tovey’s Beethoven’, in Alan Tyson, ed., Beethoven Studies 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 72–91 Kidd, Benjamin, 1894: Social Evolution (London: Macmillan) Kildea, Paul, ed., 2003: Britten on Music (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press) Korstvedt, Benjamin, 1996: ‘Anton Bruckner in the Third Reich and After: An Essay on Ideology and Bruckner Reception’, The Musical Quarterly 80, 132–60 ____, 1996: ‘The First Published Edition of Anton Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony: Collaboration and Authenticity’, 19th-Century Music 20/1, 3–26 ____, 1997: ‘“Return to the Pure Sources”: The Ideology and Text-Critical Legacy of the First Gesamtausgabe’, in Hawkshaw and Jackson, eds, Bruckner Studies, 91–121 ____, 2000: Bruckner: Symphony No. 8 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) ____, 2004: ‘Bruckner Editions: The Revolution Revisited’, in John Williamson, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Bruckner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 121–37 ____, 2011: ‘Constructing the “Bruckner Problem”’, The Bruckner Journal 15/3, 23–32 Kramer, Lawrence, 2002: ‘Powers of Blackness: Africanist Discourse in Modern Concert Music’, Black Music Research Journal, 22/1, 197–214 Krummacher, Friedhelm, 1974: ‘Zur Kompositionsart Mendelssohn’, in Carl Dahlhaus, ed., Das Problem Mendelssohn (Regensburg: Bosse), 169–84 356 Select Bibliography

____, 1978: Mendelssohn – der Komponist: Studien zur Kammermusik für Streicher (Munich: Wilhelm Fink) Kumar, Krishan, 2003: The Making of English National Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) Lambert, Constant, 1948: Music Ho!: A Study of Music in Decline (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books) Landormy, Paul, 1927: A History of Music, trans. Frederick H. Martens (New York: Charles Scribner’s) Langley, Leanne, 1983: ‘The English Musical Journal in the Early Nineteenth Century’ (PhD diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) ____, 1988: ‘Italian Opera and the English Press, 1836–1856’, Periodica Musica 6, 2–10 ____, 1990: ‘The Musical Press in 19th-Century England’, Notes: Quarterly Journal of the Music Library Association 46, 584–91 Laurence, Dan H., ed., 1960: How to Become a Musical Critic (London: Rupert Hart-Davis) ____, ed., 1981: Shaw’s Music: The Complete Musical Criticism in Three Volumes (London: the Bodley Head) Laurence, Felicity, 2008: ‘Music and Empathy’, in Olivier Urbain, ed., Music and Conflict Transformation: Harmonies and Dissonances in Geopolitics (London: I. B. Tauris), 13–25 Leerssen, Joep, 2000: ‘The Rhetoric of National Character: A Programmatic Survey’, Poetics Today 21/2, 267–92 LeGouis, Catherine, 1997: Positivism and Imagination: Scientism and Its Limits in Emile Hennequin, Wilhelm Scherer, and Dmitri Pisarev (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press) Levy, Paul, 1981: Moore: G. E. Moore and the Cambridge Apostles (Oxford: Oxford University Press) Lewes, George Henry, 1874–9: Problems of Life and Mind, 5 vols (London: Trübner) Lewis, Wyndham, 1938: The Mysterious Mr. Bull (London: Hale) Lloyd, Stephen, 2014: Constant Lambert: Beyond the Rio Grande (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press) Lockspeiser, Edward, 1945: ‘Tchaikovsky the Man’, in Abraham, ed., Tchaikovsky: A Symposium, 9–23 Lowe, Brigid, 2007: Victorian Fiction and the Insights of Sympathy: An Alternative to the Hermeneutics of Suspicion (London, New York and Delhi: Anthem Press) Mackerness, E. D., 1964: ‘Edward Holmes (1797–1859)’, Music and Letters 45, 213–27 Mak, Su-Yin, 2010: Schubert’s Lyricism Reconsidered: Structure, Design and Rhetoric (Saarbrücken: Lambert) Mandler, Peter, 1999: ‘England, Which England?’, Contemporary British History 13/2, 243–54 Select Bibliography 357

____, 2001: ‘The Consciousness of Modernity? Liberalism and the English “National Character”, 1870–1940’, in Bernhard Rieger and M. J. Daunton, eds, Meanings of Modernity: Britain from the Late-Victorian Era to World War II (Oxford: Berg), 119–44 ____, 2006: ‘What is “National Identity”? Definitions and Applications in Modern British Historiography’, Modern Intellectual History 3/2, 271–97 Maxwell Davies, Peter, 1956: ‘The Young British Composer’, The Score and I.M.A. Magazine 15, 84–5 McAlpin, Colin, 1917: ‘Musical Criticism’, The Musical Times 58/895, 397–9 McColl, Sandra, 1992: ‘Positivism in Late Nineteenth-Century Thought about Music: The Case of Richard Wallaschek’, Studies in Music 26, 34–47 ____, 1996: Music Criticism in Vienna, 1896–1897: Critically Moving Forms (Oxford: Clarendon) McKenna, Wayne, 1990: W. J. Turner, Poet and Music Critic (Gerrard’s Cross: Colin Smythe) McVeigh, Simon, 2000: ‘The Society of British Musicians (1834–1865) and the Campaign for Native Talent’, in Christina Bashford and Leanne Langley, eds, Music and British Culture, 1785–1914 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press), 149–68 Meisel, Martin, 1963: Shaw and the Nineteenth-Century Theater (Princeton: Princeton University Press) Mill, James, 1829: Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind, 2 vols, 2nd edn (London: Baldwin & Cradick) Mitchell, Donald, 1995: ‘Remembering Hans Keller’, in Mervin Cooke and Christopher Palmer, eds, Cradles of the New: Writings on Music 1951–1991 (London: Faber), 461–80 Mitchell, Donald, and Hans Keller, eds, 1981: Music Survey: New Series 1949–1952 (London: Faber) Montagu-Nathan, M., 1914: A History of Russian Music: Being an Account of the Rise and Progress of the Russian School of Composers, with a Survey of Their Lives and a Description of Their Works (London: William Reeves) ____, 1914: ‘The Influence of Women on the Russian School’, The Musical Times 55/857, 442–4 ____, 1916: An Introduction to Russian Music (Boston: Le Roy Phillips) ____, 1917: Contemporary Russian Composers (London: Cecil Palmer and Haywood) Morgan-Browne, H., 1932: ‘Vulgarity and Music’, British Musician and Musical News 8/81, 194–5 ____, 1932: ‘Vulgarity and Music II’, British Musician and Musical News 8/82, 226–7 Muns, Lodewijk, 2010: ‘Schumann’s First Symphony: “The Nightwatchman”’, The Musical Times 151/1911, 3–17 Nettleship, J. L., 1897: ‘The Value of Theory’, in A. C. Bradley and G. R. Benson, eds, Philosophical Lectures and Remains Vol. I (London: Macmillan), 125 358 Select Bibliography

Newman, Earnest, 1897: Pseudo-Philosophy at the end of the Nineteenth Century (London: University Press) ____, 1956: Essays from the World of Music: Essays from The Sunday Times, ed. Felix Aprahamian (London: John Calder) ____, 1972: Berlioz, Romantic and Classic: Writings by Ernest Newman, ed. Peter Heyworth (London: Gollancz) Newman, Gerald, 1987: The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History 1780–1840 (New York: St Martin’s Press) Newmarch, Rosa, 1900: Tchaikovsky: His Life and Works, with Extracts from His Writings and the Diary of His Tour Abroad in 1888 (New York: Bodley Head) ____, 1908: ‘Rimsky-Korsakov: Personal Reminiscences’, Monthly Musical Record 38, 172–3 ____, 1908: ‘Russian Opera in Paris: Moussorgsky’s Boris Godunov’, Monthly Musical Record (July), 147–9 ____, 1913: ‘Moussorgsky’s Operas’, The Musical Times (July), 433–9 Nicolson, Harold, 1937: The Meaning of Prestige (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) Offer, John, 1983: ‘An Examination of Spencer’s Sociology of Music and Its Impact on Music Historiography in Britain’, International Review of Aesthetics and the Sociology of Music 14/1, 33–52 ____, 2010: Herbert Spencer and Social Theory (Houndsmill: Palgrave Macmillan) Orwell, George, 1947: The English People (London: Collins) ____, 1961: The Road to Wigan Pier (New York: Berkley Pub. Corp.) ____, 1982: The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (London: Penguin) Palmer, John, 1914: ‘The Uses of Vulgarity’, Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art (25 April), 530–1 Panchen, Alec L., 1992: Classification, Evolution, and the Nature of Biology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) Parry, C. Hubert H., 1884–5: ‘On Some Bearings of the Historical Method upon Music’, Proceedings of the Musical Association 11, 1–17 ____, 1904: The Evolution of the Art of Music 4th edn (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co. Ltd.) ____, 1905: Summary of the History and Development of Mediæval and Modern European Music, rev. edn (London: Novello) ____, 1911: Style in Musical Art (London: Macmillan) Passmore, John, 1966: A Hundred Years of Philosophy, 2nd edn (London: Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd.) Pear, T. H., 1955: English Social Differences (London: Allen & Unwin) Pears, Iain, 1993: ‘The Gentleman and the Hero: Wellington and Napoleon in the Nineteenth Century’, in Roy Porter, ed., Myths of the English (Cambridge: Polity Press), 216–36 Priestly, J. B., 1973: The English (London: Heinemann) Select Bibliography 359

Radcliffe, Philip, 1976: E. J. Dent: A Centenary Memoir (Rickmansworth: Triad Press) Reed, John, 1997: ‘Schubert’s Reception History in Nineteenth-Century England’, in Christopher H. Gibbs, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Schubert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 254–62 Rehding, Alexander, 2009: Music and Monumentality: Commemoration and Wonderment in Nineteenth-Century Germany (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press) Remak, Henry H., 1961: ‘Comparative Literature, Its Definition and Function’, in Newton P. Stallknecht and Horst Frenz, eds, Comparative Literature: Method and Perspective (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press), 3–37 Riley, Matthew, 2007: Edward Elgar and the Nostalgic Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) ____, ed., 2010: British Music and Modernism, 1895–1960 (Farnham: Ashgate) Riley, Matthew, and Anthony D. Smith, eds, 2016: Nation and Classical Music: From Handel to Copland (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer) Robertson, John M., 1902: Letters on Reasoning (London: Watts & Co.) Romani, Roberto, 2002: National Character and Public Spirit in Britain and France, 1750–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) Ross, Alex, 2007: The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (London: Fourth Estate) Royle, Edward, 1980: Radicals, Secularists and Republicans: Popular Freethought in Britain, 1866–1915 (Manchester: Manchester University Press) Rupprecht, Philip, 2008: ‘“Something Slightly Indecent”: British Composers, the European Avant-garde, and National Stereotypes in the 1950s’, The Musical Quarterly 91/3–4, 275–326 ____, 2015: British Musical Modernism: The Manchester Group and Their Contemporaries (Cambridge University Press) Runciman, John, 1895: ‘English Music and English Criticism’, Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art 80, 542–3 ____, 1895: ‘Vulgarity in Music’, Monthly Musical Record 25, 267–9 Rushton, Julian, 2008: ‘Elgar and Academe (1): Dent, Forsyth, and What is English Music?’, The Elgar Society Journal 15/4, 27–32 Rylance, Rick, 2000: Victorian Psychology and British Culture 1850–1880 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press) Said, Edward W., 1978: Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books) Salzer, Felix, 1928: ‘Die Sonatenform bei Schubert’, Studien zur Musikwissenschaft 15, 86–125 Sampson, Anthony, 1962: Anatomy of Britain (New York: Hodder & Stoughton) Samson, Jim, 2013: Music in the Balkans (Boston: Brill) Samuel, Raphael, ed., 1989: Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity, 3 vols (London and New York: Routledge) Sayers, Dorothy L., 1941: The Mysterious English (London: Macmillan) 360 Select Bibliography

Scaife, Nigel Clifford, 1994: ‘British Music Criticism in a New Era: Studies in Critical Thought 1894–1945’ (PhD. diss., University of Oxford) Schenker, Heinrich, 1912: Beethovens neunte Sinfonie (Vienna: Universal Edition) Schopenhauer, Arthur, 1969: The World as Will and Representation 2 vols, trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover) Scruton, Roger, 2009: Understanding Music: Philosophy and Interpretation (London: New York: Continuum) Secord, James A., 2000: Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press) Sessa, Anna Dzamba, 1979: Richard Wagner and the English (London: Associated University Presses) Shaw, George Bernard, 1960: ‘Sir Edward Elgar’, in How to Become a Musical Critic, ed. Dan H. Laurence (London: Rupert Hart-Davis), 309–16 ____, 1981: ‘The Perfect Wagnerite (1898)’, in Dan H. Laurence, ed., Shaw’s Music: The Complete Musical Criticism in Three Volumes (London: the Bodley Head) ____, 1984: John Bull’s Other Island, ed. Dan H. Laurence (Harmondsworth: Allen Lane) ____, 1986: Major Critical Essays (Middlesex: Penguin) Simpson, Robert, 1967/1992: The Essence of Bruckner: An Essay Towards an Understanding of His Music (London: Gollancz) Sitwell, Osbert, 1950: Nobel Essences, or Courteous Revelations (London: Macmillan) Smith, Barry, 1994: Peter Warlock: The Life of Philip Heseltine (Oxford: Oxford University Press) ____, 2000: Frederick Delius and Peter Warlock: A Friendship Revealed (Oxford: Oxford University Press) Solvik, Morten, 1998: ‘The International Bruckner Society and the N.S.D.A.P.: A Case Study of Robert Haas and the Critical Edition’, The Musical Quarterly 83, 362–82 Spencer, Herbert, 1882: ‘Progress: Its Law and Cause’, Humboldt Library of Popular Science Literature 17/1, 234 ____, 1902/1907: Facts and Comments (London: Williams & Norgate) ____, 1904: An Autobiography, 2 vols (New York: D. Appleton and Co.) ____, 1951: Literary Style and Music: Including Two Short Essays on Gracefulness and Beauty (New York: Philosophical Library) Spitzer, Michael, 2005: ‘Tovey’s Evolutionary Metaphors’, Music Analysis 24/3, 437–69 Stainer, John, The Present State of Music in England (Oxford: Horace Hart, 1889) Stanford, Sir Charles Villiers, 1911: Musical Composition: A Short Treatise for Students (New York: Macmillan). Stradling, Robert, 1989: ‘On Shearing the Black Sheep in Spring: the Repatriation of Frederick Delius’, in Norris, ed., Music and the Politics of Culture, 69–105 Select Bibliography 361

Taruskin, Richard, 1998: ‘Let’s Rescue Poor Schumann from his Rescuers’, New York Times (17 May), repr. in The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2010), 124–8. ____, 2010: The Oxford History of Western Music 5 vols (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press) Tawaststjerna, Erik, 1997: Sibelius, Vol. III: 1914–1957, trans. Robert Layton (London: Faber) Taylor, Hugh, ed., 1979: Edward J. Dent: Selected Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) Thomas, David Wayne, 2004: Cultivating Victorians: Liberal Culture and the Aesthetic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press) Thompson, E. P., 1965: ‘The Peculiarities of the English’, Socialist Register 2, 311–62 Thomson, Aidan, 2007: ‘Elgar’s Critical Critics’, in Byron Adams, ed., Elgar and His World (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 193–222 Tomlinson, Fred, 1978: Warlock and van Dieren, with a van Dieren Catalogue (London: Thames Publishing) Tovey, Donald Francis, 1928: ‘Tonality’, Music and Letters 9/4, 341–63 ____, 1935: A Companion to Beethoven’s Pianoforte Sonatas (London: Associated Boards of the Royal Schools of Music) ____, 1935: Essays in Musical Analysis, Vol. I: Symphonies (London: Oxford University Press) ____, 1935: Essays in Musical Analysis, Vol. II: Symphonies (II), Variations and Orchestral Polyphony (London: Oxford University Press) ____, 1936/1966: ‘The Classical Concerto’, in Essays in Musical Analysis, Vol. III: Concertos (London: Oxford University Press), 3–27 ____, 1939: Essays in Musical Analysis, Vol. VI: Miscellaneous Notes, Glossary and Index (London: Oxford University Press) ____, 1944: Musical Articles from the Encyclopedia Britannica (London: Oxford University Press) ____, 1949: The Main Stream of Music and Other Essays (London: Oxford University Press) Toye, Francis, 1910: ‘The Prospects of English Music’, English Review (December), 206–15 ____, 1931: ‘Studies in English Music – IV’, The Listener (24 June), 1057 Trevelyan, G. M., 1926: History of England (London: Longman) Troughton, Walter, 1938: ‘Herbert Spencer’s Last Years: Some Personal Recollections’, Rationalist Annual, 59–65 Trowell, Brian, 1993: ‘Elgar’s Use of Literature’, in Raymond Monk, ed., Edward Elgar: Music and Literature (Aldershot: Scolar Press), 182–326 van Dieren, Bernard, 1935: Down Among the Dead Men (London: Oxford University Press) 362 Select Bibliography van Thal, Herbert, ed., 1962: Testament of Music: Essays and Papers by Ernest Newman (London: Putnam) Vaughan Williams, Ralph, 1934: ‘Should Music Be National?’, in National Music (London: Oxford University Press), 3–22 ____, 1996: National Music and Other Essays (Oxford: Clarendon Press) ____, 2008: Vaughan Williams On Music ed. David Manning (Oxford: Oxford University Press) ____, 2008: Letters of Ralph Vaughan Williams, 1895–1958, ed. Hugh Cobbe (Oxford: Oxford University Press) Vaughan Williams, Ursula, 1964: R.V.W. (London: Oxford University Press) Vaughan Williams, Ursula, and Imogen Holst, eds, 1974: Heirs and Rebels: Letters Written to Each Other and Occasional Writings on Music by Ralph Vaughan Williams and Gustav Holst (New York: Cooper Square) Villemain, Abel François, 1830: Cours de littérature française: Tableau de la lit- térature au moyen âge en France, en Italie, en Espagne et en Angleterre, 2 vols (Paris: Pichon et Didier) Vitercik, Greg, 1989: ‘Mendelssohn the Progressive’, Journal of Musicological Research, 333–74 von Baer, Karl Ernst, 1828: Uber die Entwickelungsgeschichte der Thiere: Beobachtung und Reflexion, Scholium 5: Ueber der Verhältniss der Formen, die das Individuum in den verschiedenen Stufen seiner Entwicklung annimmt (Königsberg: Bornträger) von Riesemann, Oskar, 1934: Rachmaninoff’s Recollections, Told to Oskar von Riesemann, trans. Dolly Rutherford (London: George Allen & Unwin) Wagner, Manfred, 1980: Der Wandel des Konzepts: zu den Verschiedenen Fassungen von Bruckners Dritter, Vierter und Achter Sinfonie (Vienna: Musikwissenschaftlicher Verlag) ____, 1996: ‘Response to Bryan Gillliam regarding Bruckner and National Socialism’, The Musical Quarterly 80, 118–31 Wagner, Richard, 1913: Opera and Drama, 2 vols, trans. Edwin Evans (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons and London: William Reeves) Walker, Ernest, 1905: Beethoven (London: John Lane, the Bodley Head) ____, 1907: A History of Music in England (Oxford: Oxford University Press) ____, 1946: Free Thought and the Musician (Oxford: Oxford University Press) Wallaschek, Richard, 1886: Ästhetik der Tonkunst (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer) Walsh, Stephen, 2015: ‘“Let’s to Billiards”, Review of Stephen Lloyd, Constant Lambert: Beyond the Rio Grande’, London Review of Books, 37/2, 28–9 ____, 2017: ‘Stravinsky, Igor’, Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/ grove/music/52818pg3 Warlock, Peter (Philip Heseltine), 1952: Frederick Delius (London: The Bodley Head) Watkins, Holly, 2011: Metaphors of Depth in German Musical Thought: From E. T. A. Hoffman to Arnold Schoenberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) Select Bibliography 363

Watt, Paul, 2017: Ernest Newman: A Critical Biography (Martlesham: The Boydell Press) Weingartner, Felix, 1901: Die Symphonie nach Beethoven (Leipzig: Breitkopf and Härtel) Weintraub, Stanley, 2002: ‘Elgar: Shaw’s Musician’, in Shaw, the Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 22, 1–18 Weisstein, Ulrich, 1973: Comparative Literature and Literary Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press) Wellek, René, and Austin Warren, 1986: Theory of Literature: A Seminal Study of the Nature and Function of Literature in all its Contexts (Harmondsworth: Penguin) White, Harry, 2008: Music and the Irish Literary Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press) Williams, Raymond, 1989: ‘Metropolitan Perceptions and the Emergence of Modernism’, in Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists (London: Verso), 37–48 Williamson, John, ed., 2004: The Cambridge Companion to Bruckner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) Wintle, Christopher, 1983: ‘“Humpty Dumpty’s Complaint”: Tovey Revalued’, Soundings 11, 14–45 Wolff, Larry, 1994: Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press) Woolf, Virginia, 2001: A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas (London: Vintage) Worsfold, Basil, 1903: The Principles of Criticism: An Introduction to the Study of Literature (London: George Allen) Zon, Bennett, 2007: Representing Non-Western Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press) ____, 2009–10: ‘From Great Man to Fittest Survivor: Reputation, Recapitulation and Survival in Victorian Concepts of Wagner’s Genius’, Musicae Scientiae 13/2, 415–45 ____, 2014: ‘The Non-Darwinian Revolution and the Great Chain of Musical Being’, in Bernard Lightman and Bennett Zon, eds, Evolution and Victorian Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 196–226 ____, 2017: Evolution and Victorian Musical Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)

Index

Ablow, Rachel, 44 Balfe, William, 30 Abraham, Gerald, 3–4, 141, 187, 188–93, The Bohemian Girl, 31 334 Balliol College, Oxford, 64, 65, 69 n. 13, Adès, Thomas, 6 83, 119, 125 n. 7 Adler, Guido, 3, 84, 97, 98 Balliol Concerts, 64, 77 Der Stil in der Musik, 99 Barclay Squire, William, 71, 76 n. 38 Handbuch der Musikgeschichte, 5, Barker, Harley Granville, 114, 77, 116, 169–70, 221–2 Barnett, Morris, 24, 33, 34 Methode der Musikgeschichte, Barrett, William, 36 99 BBC (British Broadcasting Albert, Prince, 21–2 Corporation), 7, 77, 157, 168, 178, Alexander, Mrs C. F., 16 n. 27 193, 253, 304, 307, 308, 327, 330, Allen, Hugh, 64, 78, 82 n. 69 340 n. 25 Ampère, Jean-Jacques, 94 Beecham, Thomas, 3, 165–6, 178–9, Anti-intellectualism, 4, 7, 46, 199–234, 220, 241 271 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 14, 18, 29, 42, Arnold, Frank, 99 43, 49, 53, 69–70, 75, 78, 80, 84, Arnold, Matthew, 94, 205, 209–10, 221 86, 92 n. 24, 100, 102, 104, 105, n. 69, 229 107, 109, 110, 115, 116, 123–7, 128, Auber, Daniel F., 28 129, 131, 132, 136, 138, 139, 151, 152, Ayrton, William, 11–12, 26, 32 153, 191, 226, 250, 251, 257, 260, Musical Library, 11 261, 263, 264, 265, 270, 271, 272, The Harmonicon, 11, 13 308, 315, 316 The Examiner, 12, 13, 18, 21, 27, 30 Adelaide, 43, 46, 257 The Morning Chronicle, 11, 12, 13, 33, Eroica Symphony, 20 34, 130 F major String Quartet, Op. 135, 264 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 73, 75, 80, 82, Fidelio, 26, 86 86, 99, 109, 110, 139, 171, 206 n. First Symphony, 292 16, 252, 260 n. 27, 265, 270, 271–3, Fifth Symphony, 264 313, 315, 316, 331 Septet, 46 Bacon, Richard Mackenzie, 11 Ninth Symphony, 21, 25, 80, 100, Quarterly Musical Magazine and 102, 124 n. 6, 132, 139, 255, 263 n. Review, 11 37, 264, 292 Baer, Karl Ernst von, 40 Violin Concerto, 98 Bain, Alexander, 45, 46, 49 Bekker, Paul, 97–8 Baldwin, James Mark, 51 Benedict, Julius, 27 Balet, Leo, 99 The Lily of Killarney, 31

365 366 Index

Bennett, Joseph, 36 Busoni, Ferruccio, 6, 155–6, 157, 159, Bennett, William Sterndale (see 161–2, 168, 169, 236, 237, 238, 239, Sterndale Bennett) 248, 251–2 Bentley, Michael, 88 Berg, Alban, 6, 248, 298, 299, 311, Calvocoressi, Michel-Dmitri, 3–4, 324–5 185–8, 191, 192, 193 Berlin, 159, 167 Cardus, Neville, 1 n. 1, 101 Berlioz, Hector, 14, 17, 20, 21, 24–6, 29, Carlisle, Janice, 44 42, 78, 84, 92, 95, 105, 153, 190, Carlyle, Thomas, 206 n. 15, 208, 209 237, 249, 254, 290 Carpenter, William, 51 Benvenuto Cellini, 26 Chambers, Robert, 40 Romeo and Juliet, 25 Cherubini, Luigi, 42, 148, 265 The Damnation of Faust, 25 Chopin, Frédéric, 42, 75, 86, 178 Writings, 24–5, 70 Chorley, Henry, 3, 4, 7, 9 n. 1, 14, 15–16, Biedermeier, 5 18, 19, 20, 21, 23–4, 25, 26–31, 32, Birmingham, 17, 35, 80, 176, 178, 226, 33, 34–5, 36, 60 232 n. 101, 246 The Athenaeum, 14, 18, 20, 21, 23, 25, Birtwistle, Harrison, 6, 301 26, 27, 28, 30–1, 33, 34, 35 Bizet, Georges, 113 Modern German Music, 14, 15–16, 20 Carmen, 113 Music and Manners in France and Blackman, R. D., 93 Germany, 15 n. 22 Bosanquet, Bernard, 51 Thirty Years’ Musical Recollections, Bowler, Peter, 57 15 n. 22, 26 Bradlaugh, Charles, 87 Church Music Society, 74 Bradley, F. H., 65 Clarke, Charles Cowden, 12 Brahms, Johannes, 3, 4, 6, 7, 69, 80, Clarke, Eric, 57–8, 302 n. 42 103–4, 105, 108–11, 115, 124, 125–7, Colles, H. C., 1 n. 1, 77, 79 132, 138, 139, 140, 143, 153, 180, Comte, August, 84, 85 237, 249, 310, 314 Costa, Michael, 19 Influence in Britain, 108–11, 115, 126 Covent Garden (also Royal Opera n. 9, 178, 182, 231 House), 22, 26, 164, 166 n. 50, 169 Organicism, 67–8 n. 61, 178 Bribitzer-Stull, Matthew, 53–4 Crystal Palace, 35, 130, 138 n. 40 Bridge, Frederick, 74, 82 n. 69, 302 Britten, Benjamin, 6, 82, 215, 296, Dannreuther, Edward, 69, 183 301–2, 330, 331–3, 337–8, Darwin, Charles, 58, 85 340–1 Influence of evolutionism, 2, 40, 56, Brotman, Charles, 39 57, 58, 65 Bruckner, Anton, 124, 125 n. 6, 127, Davey, Henry, 70 138–50, 151, 152, 153, 249, 331 History of English Music, 70 Buckingham Palace, 21 Davison, J. W., 3, 4, 6, 7, 9–10, 12, 13, 14, Bücken, Ernst, 101 19, 24–5, 25–6, 27, 28, 29, 31, 32, Buckle, Henry, 88 33, 35, 36, 37, 59, 129, 130 n. 22, Burney, Charles, 70, 73 130 n. 27 Index 367

Editor of The Musical World, 9–10, Elgar, Edward, 3, 4, 5–6, 75, 77, 84, 103 12, 16, 17–18, 19, 20, 22, 27, 28, 29, n. 2, 104, 111 n. 20, 114–17, 124, 33, 35, 36 125 n. 6, 158, 169–70, 202, 206, The Times, 12, 19, 21, 23, 25, 31, 33, 36, 207, 217, 221–7, 248, 263, 293, 301, 129 320, 331 From Mendelssohn to Wagner, 9 n. 1, Eliot, George, 23, 38, 48–9, 53, 181, 213, 15, 23, 27, 35 229, 266 On Schumann, 17–19, 129–30 Ella, John, 12 n. 15, 14, 32, 36 On Wagner, 16, 20–3, 129–30 Musical Union, 14, 17 n. 29, 36 Debussy, Claude, 68, 78, 116, 185, 219, Empiricism, 2, 4, 125, 216 n. 55, 326 248, 268, 281, 283–6, 289, 290, Tradition in Britain, 2, 125–6, 323–7 295, 299, 310, 312, 320 Evans, Edwin, 1 n. 1, 54 n. 72, 78, 168, Delius, Frederick, 4, 202, 207, 218–21, 217, 231, 233 241–2, 243, 244, 248, 279, 293, 294, 295, 301, 302 Fabian Society, 106, 110, 217 Deneke, Margaret, 64 Farmer, John, 64, 67, 79 DeNora, Tia, 57–8 Fellowes, Edmund, 72, 244 Dent, Edward, 2, 3, 5, 7, 64, 65, 83, 116, Ferneyhough, Brian, 6 117, 154–73, 194, 206, 207, 210 n. Finnissy, Michael, 6 32, 213, 221–5, 227, 232–3, 269 n. Forbes, Avary William Holmes, 51 67 Fox Strangways, A. H., 1 n. 1, 77 Descartes, René, 87, 257 n. 9 France, 1, 28, 83, 89, 90, 92, 157, 181, 185, Dibble, Jeremy, 2, 3, 51, 108 n. 16, 111 186, 208, 209, 213 n. 43, 220, 241, n. 22, 125 n. 7, 126 n. 9, 222 n. 72, Modernism, 6, 77–8, 286, 290 279 n. 3 Fuller Maitland, J. A., 1 n. 1, 68, 70, 79 Dieren, Bernard van, 5, 6, 198, 235–54, 331 Ganz, A. W., 24 n. 63, 25 n. 72, 26 n. 74 Dodecaphonicism (see Serialism) Gauntlett, Henry, 12, 14 Dolmetsch, Arnold, 113 Germany, 1, 81, 89, 90, 92, 98, 113, 156, D’Ortigue, Joseph, 24 157, 161, 167–8, 176, 178, 184, 192, Dresden, 20 231, 328, 336 Drury Lane Theatre, 23, 24, 179 Conservatism, 3 Dry, Wakeling, 69 Formenlehre, 5 Dunstable, John, 71 Modernism, 6, 130 Dvořàk, Antonin, 3, 124, 125 n. 6, 127 n. Musical processes of thinking, 2, 67, 14, 153, 178 69 Dyson, George, 96–7, 304–6, 327 Progressivism, 4, 56 The New Music, 279, 305, 306, 320, Gilbert, W. S., 35, 73–4 325 Glinka, Mikhail, 3, 181, 186, 188, 291, The Progress of Music, 96–7, 279 292, 294 Glover, Howard, 21, 26 Eaglefield-Hull, Arthur, 1 n. 1, 77, 78, Gluck, Christoph Willibald, 42, 43, 46, 162, 186 86, 89, 90, 91, 101 Ekman, Paul, 58 Goehr, Alexander, 6 368 Index

Gosse, Edmund, 92–3 Hennequin, Émile, 84, 85 Gould, Stephen J., 40 Helmholtz, Hermann L. F., 45, 51 Gounod, Charles, 15, 17, 26–8 Her Majesty’s Theatre, 27, 30 n. 106 Faust, 27, 113 Herbarth, Johann Friedrich, 51 Mors et Vita, 19 Herbert, Christopher, 44, 47 n. 37 Sapho, 26, 27 Heseltine, Philip, 5, 6, 72, 83, 196, 207, Gray, Cecil, 5, 6, 77, 197, 199 n. 2, 220, 220, 222, 235, 236, 237, 238, 240, 221 n. 69, 235, 236, 237, 238, 240, 241–5, 246, 249 n. 47, 252, 253 242, 243, 244, 245–54, 279, 281, Hogarth, George, 13, 15, 16, 18, 21, 25, 283, 284 n. 12, 302 33, 34, 36 Great Exhibition (1851), 24 Holmes, Edward, 9 n. 1, 12, 12 n. 15, 13, Green, T. H., 65 14, 25, 32, 36 Grove, George, 17, 70, 76 Holroyd, Michael, 105 n. 6, 110, n. 19, 111 Beethoven and His Nine Symphonies, Howe, David, 58 70 Howells, Herbert, 4, 82, 276, 304–27 Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Howes, Frank, 48, 55, 254, 332 4, 15, 17 n. 28, 68, 70, 180, 183, The English Musical Renaissance, 48 266, 332 n. 39 Gruneisen, Charles Lewis, 5, 10, 13, 23, Hullah, John, 28, 38 24, 25, 32, 33, 34, 36 Hume, David, 2, 65 The Morning Post, 10, 13 Gurney, Edmund, 42, 51, 57 Intellectualism, 4, 48, 50, 199–200, 203–4, 206–16, 325 Hadow, Henry, 2, 55–7, 58, 69 n. 13, 75, Italy, 1, 29–31, 89, 90, 157 78, 82 n. 69, 118 ‘The Balance of Expression and Janàček, Leos, 3, 178, 184, 191 Design in Music’, 55 Joachim, Joseph, 80, 115, 125, 126 n. 9, Oxford History of Music, 69, 70 231 Haeckel, Ernst, 40 Joseph Williams (publisher), 68 Handel, Georg Frederic, 2, 29, 42, 43, Jullien, Louis-Antoine, 24 46, 72–3, 75, 86, 160, 161, 162 n. 38, 168, 171, 191 Kant, Immanuel, 51, 87 Hanslick, Eduard, 51, 79, 83, 97, 139 Keats, John, 14 Vom Musikalisch-Schönen, 67 Keller, Hans, 5, 7, 123, 219, 277, 328–43 Hardie, W. R., 65 Kennedy Scott, Charles, 74–5 Haweis, Hugh Reginald, 58 Kerman, Joseph, 123 Hawkins, John, 70 Kistler, Cyrill, 112 Haydn, Joseph, 18, 42, 75, 265 Seven Last Words, 46 Lamb, Charles, 14 Hazlitt, William, 14 Lamb, Mary, 14 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 2, Lambert, Constant, 6, 7, 253, 263, 275, 51, 125 278–303, 305 Influence on British Idealism, 65–6, Music Ho!, 6, 278–303, 305 67 Landormy, Paul, 95–6 Index 369

Langford, Samuel, 1 n. 1 Morrell, J. D., 51 Leeds Triennial Festival, 34, 77 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 18, 29, 42, Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 87 43, 53, 75, 84, 98, 103, 105, 110, 111 Leigh Hunt, J. H., 14 n. 20, 124, 155, 156, 159, 161, 172, Leipzig, 15, 131, 137 262, 265, 316, 336, 337, 339, 340, Lewes, George H., 49, 53 Addio, 43 Problems of Life and Mind, 49 n. 46, Don Giovanni, 103 n. 4, 111, 114 49 n. 48, 49 n. 50, 53 n. 65 Idomeneo, 162 n. 38 Lindpainter, Peter, 20 ‘Jupiter’ Symphony, 313 Liszt, Franz, 17, 23–4, 84, 126, 129, 130 Sonatas, 43, 86 n. 22, 151, 153, 170, 186, 222, 225, String Quartet in C major, K 465, 262 265 String Quartet in D major, K 575, 336 Locke, John, 2, 51, 65, 257 n. 9 The Magic Flute, 155, 156 n. 9, 161, 165 n. 49 McAplin, Colin, 93 Munich, 158 Macfarren, George, 12 n. 15, 33–4, 232 Musical Union, 14, 17 n. 29, 36 n. 101 King Charles II, 13, 33–4 Nagel, Wilibald, 70 Mahler, Gustav, 6, 77, 111 n. 22, 132, 153, Geschichte der Musik in England, 70 158, 248, 332, National Secular Society, 87 Mainzer, Joseph, 12 Naumann, Emil, 70 The Musical Times, 12 Musikgeschichte, 70 Marx, Karl, 51, 211 Nettleship, R. L., 65–6 Mascagni, Pietro, 112 Philosophical Lectures and Remains, Maxwell Davies, Peter, 6, 216, 301 65–6 Mendel, Gregor, 57 Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, 22, 157 Mendelssohn, Felix, 2, 6, 14, 15, 17, 18, Newman, Ernest, 3, 5, 7, 64, 65, 68, 75–6, 27, 29, 42, 80, 86, 105, 110, 115, 78, 82, 84–101, 102, 120, 247 n. 38 124, 124 n. 6, 130, 130 n. 27, 131 n. A Study of Wagner, 94 27, 153, 285 Gluck and the Opera: A Study of Methuen (publisher), 75, 187 Musical History, 89–90, 101 Merton College, Oxford, 65 History of Music, 95–6 Meyerbeer, Giacomo, 15, 17, 28–9, 31, National Secular Society, 87 36, 42, 55, 112, 237 Objectivism, 3 Les Huguenots, 28 The Life of Richard Wagner, 84 L’Étoile du Nord, 28–9 Unconscious Beethoven, 100 Mill, James, 44–5 Newmarch, Rosa, 3, 136 n. 36, 180–4, Mill, John Stuart, 65, 85, 208 185, 186, 188, 191, 192, 193, 195 Utilitarian Rationalism, 2 New Philharmonic Society, 20 n. 39, Modernism, 6, 83, 130, 153, 200, 202, 21, 25 203, 204, 215, 216, 217, 221, 223, Nottebohm, Gustav, 70 234, 268, 273, 297, 299, 304, 305, Beethoveniana, 70 311, 312, 314, 315, 317, 318, 319, 323, Novello, J. Alfred, 12 324, 326, 327, 342, 343 Novello, Vincent, 14 370 Index

Offenbach, Jacques, 105, 110 n. 19 Purcell, Henry, 70, 72, 73, 75, 76 n. 38, Offer, John, 39 115, 161, 162 n. 38, 168, 291, 313, Oxford, 2, 38, 48, 50, 64, 65, 69 n. 13, 71, 314, 318 76, 77, 78, 79, 82, 92, 94, 112 n. 24, 125 n. 7, 168, 169, 176, 232, 319 Rebling, Eberhard, 99 Influence of evolutionary thinking, Robertson, John M., 87–8, 88 n. 12, 89 40–57 Letters on Reasoning, 87 ‘School of Musical Criticism’, 38–58 National Reformer, 87 Tradition of British Idealism, 2, Rossini, Gioachino, 15, 28, 29, 36, 105 65–7, 69, 83, 125 Royal Academy of Music, 33, 35, 229, 330 Oxford University Musical Club, 64 Royal College of Music, 5, 6, 126, 230, Oxford University Press, 64, 70, 215, 256, 304, 319 215 n. 51, 236 Royal Italian Opera, 26 n. 76, 27 n. 80, 27 n. 83, 28 n. 94, 29, 30, 31 n. 112, Paganini, Niccolò, 42 31 n. 113 Paris, 13, 24, 25, 28, 185, 211, 212 n. 41, Royal Musical Association, 67, 68, 180, 220, 287, 295, 310 193, 219 Opera in, 28, 185 Rubinstein, Anton, 153, 181, 183, 184 Parratt, Walter, 64 Ruskin, John, 65, 71, 213, 221 n. 69 Parry, C. Hubert H., 2, 3, 4, 5, 51–5, 56, Ryan, Desmond, 13, 27 n. 88, 29, 34, 36 57, 58, 63, 64, 65, 69, 69 n. 13, 70, Rylance, Rick, 49 71, 75, 78, 80, 82, 107, 107 n. 11, 107 n. 13, 108, 108 n. 16, 110, 115, Sainton, Prosper, 20 116, 125, 126 n. 9, 170, 177, 178, Scandinavia, 174 179, 182, 222, 255, 259, 262, 265, Nordic modernism, 299–300 268, 304, 308, 320, 327 Schenker, Heinrich, 3, 100 ‘On Some Bearings of the Historical Schiller, Friedrich, 51 Method upon Music’, 51 n. 59 Schoenberg, Arnold, 4, 6, 7, 84, 103, The (Evolution of the) Art of Music, 204, 207, 219, 221 n. 68, 241, 248, 51 n. 58, 52, 53 n. 63, 53 n. 66, 65, 259, 268, 281, 283, 285–6, 298, 69, 265 n. 48 299, 310, 312, 314, 316, 320, 322, Studies of Great Composers, 65 324, 325, 326, 331, 332, 334, 335, Style in Musical Art, 54 n. 70, 54 n. 337, 339, 340, 341, 342 74, 177 n. 8 Scholes, Percy, 170, 269 Pattison, Mark, 92 Oxford Dictionary of Music, 4 Philharmonic Society, 17, 19, 21, 129, Schopenhauer, Arthur, 106, 258 179 Schubert, Franz Peter, 53, 75, 86, 105, Plato, 66, 106, 107, 253, 258 124, 126–7, 130, 131, 132, 136, 148, Pole, William, 51 150, 152, 153, 191, 218 Praeger, Ferdinand, 22, 31 n. 115 Schumann, Clara, 102, 115, 231 Prokofiev, Sergei, 6, 187, 192, 193, 248 Schumann, Robert, 14, 17–19, 22, 24, Promenade Concerts (Proms), 77, 178 26, 36, 75, 80, 86, 105, 115, 124, Prout, Ebenezer, 4 125 n. 7, 126, 127, 128–38, 139, 148, Puccini, Giacomo, 6, 158, 237, 248 150–1, 153, 191 Index 371

Das Paradise und die Peri, 17, 19 Spinoza, Baruch, 87, 257 n. 9 Scottish Enlightenment, 2, 65 Spohr, Louis, 18, 20, 153 Serialism, 285, 299, 321, 322, 342 Stainer, John, 2, 3, 48–51, 53, 56, 57, 58, Shakespeare, William, 103 n. 2, 257 62, 64 n. 2, 70, 74 The Tempest, 35 ‘The Principles of Music Criticism’, Shaw, (George) Bernard, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 48, 51 7, 67, 102–17, 121, 170, 172, 206, Music in its Relation to the Intellect 222 and the Emotions, 48, 50, 51 On Brahms, 4, 6, 103, 104, 108–9, Stanford, Charles Villiers, 3, 5, 104, 107, 110, 111, 115 107 n. 11, 108, 110, 111–12, 116, 170, On Elgar, 3, 6, 104, 111 n. 20, 114–17, 222, 232 n. 101, 255, 257, 304, 306, 206 317, 320, 327 On Mozart, 103, 105, 111–14, 172 Stephen, Leslie, 66 On Parry, 107–8, 110, 115, 116 Essays on Freethinking and On Stanford, 104, 107, 108, 110, Plainspeaking, 66 111–12, 116 Sterndale Bennett, William, 18–19, 28, On Wagner, 2, 103–4, 105, 106, 107, 33–5, 110 108, 109, 110, 111, 113, 114, 206 The May Queen, 34 The Perfect Wagnerite, 102, 103, 108, Strachey, Lytton, 6, 238, 241 111 n. 20, 114 Stravinsky, Igor, 3, 6, 116, 166 n. 51, 192, Sibelius, Jean, 4, 6, 78, 124, 125 n. 6, 153, 238, 248, 268, 281, 282, 283, 284, 184, 191, 248, 250–1, 254, 270, 281, 285, 287, 288, 289, 291, 292, 294, 294, 298–300, 310–11, 314, 318 295, 297, 299, 309, 310, 312, 313, Sloper, Lindsay, 17 n. 29 315, 320, 325, 331 Smart, George, 22 Sullivan, Arthur, 35, 36, 73–4, 110 n. 19, Smart, Henry, 12 n. 15, 14, 21, 22, 31, 32, 160 36 Kenilworth, 35 Berta; or the Gnome of Hartzberg, The Sapphire Necklace, 35 22, 31–2 The Tempest, 35 Smith, Adam, 57 Sully, James, 51 The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 57 Spencer, Herbert, 2, 38–58, 61, 65, 85, Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich, 3, 105, 124, 87, 213, 248 125 n. 6, 136, 153, 178, 179, 180, Social Darwinism, 2, 48–57, 57–8, 65 181, 182, 183, 184, 186, 189, 190, Facts and Comments, 38 n. 1, 42, 43 191, 192, 249, 291 n. 20, 55 Terry, Charles Sanford, 99 First Principles, 41 Terry, Richard, 244, 245, 250 ‘On the Origin and Function of Three Choirs Festival, 77 Music’, 40, 41, 42 Tippett, Michael, 6 Principles of Psychology, 52 Tovey, Donald Francis, 2, 3, 4–5, 69 n. ‘Progress: Its Law and Cause’, 42, 56 13, 70, 75, 83, 122, 123–53, 170, 223, n. 82 238 n. 9 See Oxford, ‘School of Musical Essays in Musical Analysis, 5, 77, Criticism’ 123–53 372 Index

Turner, W. J., 1 n. 1, 165 n. 47, 166 n. 50, Die Meistersinger, 269 167 n. 54, 169, 249 n. 47 Leitmotif, 53–4, 140 Lohengrin, 17, 18, 20, 21, 22 Van Ranke, Leopold, 88 Opera and Drama, 54 n. 72, 54 n. 73 Vaughan Williams, Ralph, 3, 4, 6, 77, Tannhäuser, 18, 20, 21, 22 82, 153, 162, 199, 201 n. 7, 202, 207, Tristan und Isolde, 113, 260 n. 27, 214–15, 220, 221, 233, 248, 255–73, 262, 324 274, 293, 300, 301, 305, 306–7, Rienzi, 20, 23 308, 310–11, 313, 315, 316, 317, 318, Walker, Ernest, 2, 3, 64–83, 125, 230 320, 328, 332 A History of Music in England, 65, Verdi, Giuseppe, 15, 17, 27, 29–31, 36, 70, 75, 76 n. 38, 230 105, Free Thought and the Musician, Don Carlos, 31 79–80, 82 Ernani, 29 Musical Gazette, 19 n. 33, 67, 68, 79 Il Trovatore, 30 On Beethoven, 69–70 La Traviata, 30, 31 On Brahms, 67–8 Les Vêpres Siciliennes, 29 Wallace, William, 31 Véron, Louis, 51 Maritana, 31 Victoria, Queen, 28 Wallaschek, Richard, 84 Villemain, Abel François, 94 Ästhetik der Tonkunst, 85 Vuoskoski, Jonna, 57 Walton, William, 6, 153, 170, 222, 248, 278, 279, 297, 300, 301, 308, 311, Wagner, Richard, 2–3, 6, 14, 16, 17, 315, 318, 328, 332 19–23, 24, 26, 27, 29, 31, 36, 43, Weber, Carl Maria von, 14, 159, 265 50, 52, 53–4, 56, 70, 84, 86, 91, 92, Webern, Anton, 6, 248, 268, 298, 324, 94, 102–14, 126, 129, 130 n. 22, 137, 326 138–50, 151, 152, 153, 179, 185, 189, Weimar, 20, 23, 24, 167 206, 206 n. 16, 226, 237–8, 239, Wesley, Samuel, 12 n. 12 249, 262, 265, 270, 316 Westrup, Jack, 72, 75 Bayreuth, 23, 104 n. 5, 111 n. 20, 139, Whythorne, Thomas, 72, 245 166 Wilbye, John, 74, 270 Cult of in Britain, 2, 102–14 Wolf, Hugo, 75, 77, 84 Der fliegende Holländer, 20, 22, 23 Worsfold, Basil, 93 Der Ring des Nibelungen, 23, 108, Wood, Henry, 3, 178–9, 183, 186 109, 110, 139 Wylde, Henry, 25 n. 72 Titles listed here were originally published under the series title Music in Britain, 1600–1900 issn 1752-1904

❧ Lectures on Musical Life: William Sterndale Bennett edited by Nicholas Temperley, with Yunchung Yang

John Stainer: A Life in Music Jeremy Dibble

The Pursuit of High Culture: John Ella and Chamber Music in Victorian London Christina Bashford

Thomas Tallis and his Music in Victorian England Suzanne Cole

The Consort Music of William Lawes, 1602–1645 John Cunningham

Life After Death: The Viola da Gamba in Britain from Purcell to Dolmetsch Peter Holman

The Musical Salvationist: The World of Richard Slater (1854–1939) ‘Father of Salvation Army Music’ Gordon Cox

British Music and Literary Context: Artistic Connections in the Long Nineteenth Century Michael Allis ❧ New titles published under the series title Music in Britain, 1600–2000 issn 2053-3217

❧ Hamilton Harty: Musical Polymath Jeremy Dibble

Thomas Morley: Elizabethan Music Publisher Tessa Murray

The Advancement of Music in Enlightenment England: Benjamin Cooke and the Academy of Ancient Music Tim Eggington

George Smart and Nineteenth-Century London Concert Life John Carnelley

The Lives of George Frideric Handel David Hunter

Musicians of Bath and Beyond: Edward Loder (1809–1865) and his Family edited by Nicholas Temperley

Conductors in Britain, 1870–1914: Wielding the Baton at the Height of Empire Fiona M. Palmer

Ernest Newman: A Critical Biography Paul Watt

The Well-Travelled Musician: John Sigismond Cousser and Musical Exchange in Baroque Europe Samantha Owens

Music in the West Country: Social and Cultural History Across an English Region Stephen Banfield ❧ INTELLECTUAL THOUGHT BRITISH MUSICAL CRITICISM AND

JEREMY DIBBLE is Professor of Music at Durham University. JULIAN HORTON is Professor of Music at Durham University.

Britain as well as to music enthusiasts attracted to AND standard works of popular music criticism. JULIAN HORTON JEREMY DIBBLE

(EDS) INTELLECTUAL

MUSIC IN BRITAIN, 1600–2000 AND

THOUGHT

1850–1950