England 1900-1930: A Musical Renaissance

England 1900-1930: A Musical Renaissance

Cavatina and Bagatelle for Violin and Piano

John Ireland

Born August 13, 1879 in Bowdon, Cheshire, England

Died June 12, 1962 in Rock Mill, Washington, Sussex

Composed in 1904 and 1911.

Duration: 5 minutes

The English composer John Ireland, the son of two writers, received an excellent general education before enrolling in 1893 at London’s Royal College of Music as a student of Charles Villiers Stanford. He left the RCM in 1901, and made his living as organist and choirmaster for several London churches, notably St. Luke’s, Chelsea, where he served from 1904 to 1926. It was during that time that he established himself in the front ranks of British composers with a style combining the melody and vigor of the English national school with the harmonic subtleties of French Impressionism. In 1923, he was appointed to the faculty of the RCM, where Benjamin Britten was among his pupils. Ireland retired from teaching in 1939. His subsequent residence on Guernsey was cut short by the German occupation of the Channel Islands in 1940, which forced him to move to west Sussex. Though ill health prevented him from composing much after 1946, his last years were cheered by the foundation of the John Ireland Society to promote the performance of his music.

Ireland’s Cavatina for violin and piano, composed in 1902, just after he had left the Royal College of Music, is well-crafted and already imbued with the composer’s characteristic melodic fluency. (The title is borrowed from the Italian term for a short, melodic aria in moderate tempo.) The Oxford English Dictionary traces the word “bagatelle” — “a trifle, a thing of little value or importance” — to the Italian root “bagata,” meaning “a little property.” (The OED speculates that the term “baggage” may have come from the same source.) Ireland wrote his genial Bagatelle in 1911 for violinist Marjorie Haywood in appreciation for giving the belated premiere of his Violin Sonata No. 1, winner two years before of the respected Cobbett Chamber Music Competition.

Quartet for Piano, Violin, Viola, and Cello

William Walton

Born March 29, 1902 in Oldham, Lancashire, England.

Died March 7, 1983 on Ischia in the Bay of Naples.

Composed in 1918-1919; revised in 1921 and 1975.

Premiered on September 19, 1924 in Liverpool by members of the McCullagh String Quartet and pianist J.E. Wallace.

Duration: 30 minutes

Sir William Walton (he was knighted in 1951) was the son of two musicians: his mother was a singing teacher and his father, the local church choirmaster. Reports have it (though, unfortunately, without corroborating details) that he was singing Handel anthems before he could speak. Piano and violin lessons followed. He was packed off to the Choir School at Christ Church, Oxford, when he was ten because his father knew the educational opportunities to be better there than in provincial Oldham, the family’s hometown. At age sixteen, Walton, already showing musical promise, was admitted to Christ Church College by the Right Rev. Thomas Banks Strong, Dean of the College, who also tapped the institution’s funds to be sure that the young student could meet his needs. Perhaps challenged by the Rev. Strong’s faith in him, or perhaps to fulfill an ambitious assignment from Hugh Allen, the noted organist and teacher who had just joined the Oxford faculty (he was knighted in 1920), sometime in 1918 Walton began a quartet for piano and strings, his first large-scale undertaking.

At just that time, the offspring of the wealthy, cultured, and well-placed Sitwell family — Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell — were trolling England’s campuses in search of youthful artistic genius (a sort of social compensation for their mother having recently been clapped into Holloway Prison for three months when her husband refused to honor her debts). The Rev. Strong pointed the Sitwells toward young Walton, who invited them to his rooms in February 1919. Osbert later recounted the meeting: “Our host, not quite seventeen years of age, we found to be a rather tall, slight figure, with pale skin and straight, fair hair…. Sensitiveness rather than toughness was the quality at first most apparent in him…. The atmosphere was not, however, easy; music showed a way out of the constraint, and after tea we pressed him to play some of his compositions to us. Accordingly, he sat down at the piano to play the slow movement from his Piano Quartet…. As he began to play, he revealed a lack of mastery of the instrument so that it was difficult to form an opinion of the music at first hearing. It was as impossible that afternoon to estimate his character or talents as it was to foresee that for the next seventeen years he would become an inseparable companion and friend.” Despite Walton’s poor showing at the keyboard, the Sitwells sensed that they have discovered an exceptional talent. Within a year, so absorbed in his musical studies that he failed all his other subjects, Walton left Oxford and moved in with his new family in London. Two years later he wrote Façade to Edith’s delightfully eccentric poems, and became a sensation at age twenty. The Piano Quartet also won him a certain notoriety when it was chosen by Hugh Allen, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Sir Henry Hadow for a Carnegie Trust Publication Award. In gratitude for his experiences at Oxford, Walton dedicated the score to Rev. Strong. The Quartet was premiered in Liverpool in September 1924 and first heard in London five years later, and at its occasional performances since has continued to excite admiration that it was the creation of a seventeen-year-old composer with almost no formal training.

The Quartet’s opening sonata-form movement takes as its main theme a modal tune seeded by the English pastoral tradition; the viola is entrusted with the complimentary subject, a quiet, arching, leisurely melody. The main theme passes through some agitated transformations in the development section before being returned in its original form to begin the recapitulation. The scherzo is built from three thematic ideas: a sharply rhythmic strain opposing strings and piano, a fugato for the strings based on the main theme of the opening movement, and a grand tune of Elgarian breadth announced by the unison strings above full chords in the piano. These elements are subjected to some development and then returned in order in the movement’s second half. The outer sections of the Andante are given over to a soft, muted theme, subtly harmonized, while the movement’s spacious central episode develops from a sweet, naive tune first sounded in the viola and includes reminiscences of the first movement’s main theme. The finale is a sonata-rondo, with a stamping dance melody as its returning theme and intervening episodes encompassing an expressive cello strain and an imitative passage based on a muscular subject for the strings.

Romance from the Suite for Viola and Piano

Benjamin Dale

Born July 17, 1885 in London.

Died there July 30, 1943.

Composed in 1906.

Duration: 11 minutes

Benjamin Dale showed musical promise early and entered the Royal Academy of Music (RAM) at age 15 to study composition with the German-trained Englishman Frederick Corder. Dale found his teacher’s late Romantic idiom congenial, and he espoused it in the Piano Sonata, Concertstück for Organ and Orchestra, and Suite for Viola and Piano that earned him a number of composition prizes and brought him his earliest acclaim. Dale’s 1906 Suite found its first advocate in Lionel Tertis (1876-1975), the foremost violist of his generation. “The art of playing the viola,” Tertis once said, “lies in the touch of a dove and the strength of an elephant,” qualities he found in the Romance from Dale’s Suite. This spacious movement comprises five large formal paragraphs: a dramatic accompanied soliloquy for viola, a dulcet episode of long melodic arches, a gently wistful dance that becomes more impassioned and rhapsodic, and the returns of the soliloquy and the dulcet episode.

Quintet in A minor for Piano, Two Violins, Viola, and Cello, Op. 84

Edward Elgar

Born June 2, 1857 in Broadheath, England.

Died February 23, 1934 in Worcester.

Composed in 1918-1919.

Premiered on May 21, 1919 in London.

Duration: 37 minutes

Elgar began the Piano Quintet in the summer of 1918 at Brinkwells, near the West Sussex village of Fittleworth, where he had settled to recover from the rigors of the war years. He worked on the Quintet throughout the rest of year simultaneously with the String Quartet and the Violin Sonata, and completed it early the following year. It was given a private performance in London on April 26, 1919, and received its public premiere at Wigmore Hall on May 21st. Billy Reed, second violinist in the Quintet’s early performances and a close associate of Elgar at that time, noted in his later writings about the composer the profound effect that the woody surroundings of Brinkwells had on the chamber works written there in 1918. Reed visited West Sussex frequently, trying out Elgar’s new music, offering advice on points of string technique, and joining the composer in his walks through the countryside. Standing in stark contrast to the largely halcyon environs of Brinkwells was a blasted plateau at Flexham Park, near Bedham, capped by an eerie copse of gnarled and twisted trees, struck by lightning, Reed judged, which produced “a ghastly sight in the evening.” Elgar, enthralled with misty legends and supernatural tales, saw some mystical significance in the strange trees, which his wife, Alice, described as “sad” and “dispossessed.” In his 1933 biography of Elgar, Basil Maine expounded a legend that he said was connected with the trees: “The withered trees near Elgar’s cottage in Sussex have inspired a legend in those parts. Upon the plateau, it is said, was once a settlement of Spanish monks, who, while carrying out some impious rite, were struck dead; and the trees are their dead forms.” Research has not revealed the existence of any ancient Spanish community in the area, though there was a nearby priory of Augustine monks in Medieval times. Not a scrap of evidence supports any factual basis for the old Sussex legend, but its haunted, romantic mood played strongly upon Elgar’s mind during the writing of the Quintet, and provided the emotional foundation upon which much of the music is based — the work is signed “Brinkwells” at the end, but “Bedham” following the first movement. “It is strange music I think & I like it — but — it’s ghostly stuff,” Elgar wrote in 1919 to the critic and writer Ernest Newman, to whom the composition was dedicated.

Alice Elgar commented to her diary about the “wonderful weird beginning [of the Piano Quintet] ... evidently reminiscence of sinister trees & impression of Flexham Park.” The movement follows a fully developed sonata form framed at beginning and end by a ghostly strain superimposing a slow-moving chant melody in the piano upon a spectral processional of thematic fragments in the strings. The main theme, given in a newly vitalized tempo by the full ensemble, is marked by troubled sentiments and implied tragedy. The second theme appears in an unsettled major tonality after a tiny but distinctive passage of saccharine harmonies in the strings. The development section, launched by the recall of the chant–introduction, incorporates all the principal thematic materials. The priestly procession hovers once again above the music to bring this strange and haunting movement to a mysterious close. The Adagio is tranquil and lyrical in its outer sections, and more animated and rhythmically intense in its central episode. The finale returns the woodland mood (and some thematic material) of the first movement, though it is more stridingly confident in nature and optimistic in outlook than the earlier music.