Reginald Nettel
The year 1908 saw something of a stir around the Cathedral Music Festival of Norwich. The committee had offered two prizes for a new composition to be performed there. One prize of £25 was offered for a libretto for a cantata, and a further prize of £50 for a musical setting of the winning poem.
The prize for the libretto was won by the Manchester journalist Gerald Cumberland, for a poem in blank verse on the subject of The Vision of Cleopatra. A sample of Cumberland’s “poetry” may be gauged from this passage:
“Iris: And when with regal, arrogant step she passed across the portico, her white breasts gleamed; Her neck seemed conscious of its loveliness; Her lips, tired of tame kisses, parted with The expectancy of proud assault; She was as one who lives for a last carnival of love, In which she may be stabbed and torn by large excess of passion. Charmion: Oh! Our Queen Has wine for blood; her tears are heavy drops Of water stolen from some brackish sea Or murderous waves; her heart now leaps with life And now lies sleeping like a coiled snake. But in tonight’s cold moon she burns and glows; Her heart is housing many a mad desire. And she is sick for Antony. Iris: The day has gone, and soon they’ll drink the heady wine That sparkles in each other’s eyes. Once more Venus and Bacchus meet, and all the world Stands still to watch the bliss of living gods.”
Gerald Cumberland quoted this in a best-seller he wrote while on active service in the First World War [1], and went on: “There was a little more to the same effect, and when I wrote the stuff I thought it very fine and still think it rather pretty. But a section of the musical press attacked it violently, and for a couple of months I was quite a notorious person. I gathered from the articles and letters that appeared that my dramatic poem was not likely to engender music that would carry on the tradition of Mendelssohn’s Elijah. That had been my object (however) in writing it. I was sick of that tradition. I wished to help to break it,”
While this storm was still raging Cumberland received a letter from Sir Henry J. Wood who was to conduct the festival. He wrote: “Very much against my will, I am writing to ask you on behalf of the Committee of the Norfolk and Norwich Festival if it is possible for you to make an alternative version of the “two objectionable lines” (I fail to find them myself) in your libretto Cleopatra. From my point of view, the whole thing is absurd and ridiculous.” But Sir Henry had not mentioned which lines were being found “objectionable” and Cumberland could not find them, so he showed them to “the most maiden aunt” and watched for her blushes. But she let him down. She read It and said “Oh, Gerald, how nice’, I do think you have such pretty thoughts’.”
Meanwhile the prize for composition of the music had gone to Julius Harrison, who identified the offending lines. The committee objected to “Her white breasts gleamed” and also to “Her lips, tired of tame kisses, parted with The expectancy of proud assault”. Well, Cumberland never described himself as a genius with God-given authority. He wanted the lolly and he altered the lines. ln this form The Vision of Cleopatra was given with Julius Harrison’s music at Norwich and at Queen’s Hall, London, but never again. The runner-up in the contest was Havergal Brian; his version, not having had the honour of a cathedral festival performance, was left unshriven; in Cumberland’s original version, therefore, it appeared in the published edition of Bosworth, and was performed at Southport in 1909. This is the version with which we are here concerned. Brian was one of 70 composers led by the lure of Cleopatra and £50 to try his luck with a cantata on Cumberland’s Vision.
He, Brian, has told us how he had to work under difficulties, for he was then living in the terraced house at 11 Gordon Street, Hartshill, Stoke-on-Trent. In such houses privacy is difficult beyond a certain point, and music next door was tolerated to a greater extent then than now. The man next door decided on a course of scale practice on the piano - mostly glissandos - and Brian had to try to compose a Vision of Cleopatra against this noise. Of course he couldn’t; Brian was, in fact, more in need of silence than some other composers have been. Have you ever thought why one of his songs was composed sitting in the reading room at Stoke Public Library? Because there was a large notice on the wall commanding SILENCE, and this was strictly enforced. Such bliss could not be guaranteed in Hartshill with children in the house. Besides, at the time he was composing the Vision his wife was in hospital awaiting an operation. Brian therefore had to work through the night at his score, and it was finished only Just in time to reach the Norwich Committee on the last day fixed for the receipt of entries.
The committee in their wisdom had arranged with three independent Judges - Granville Bantock, Frederick Delius and Dr Ernest Walker. Then, in order to rule out favouritism among these distinguished men, they required that all entries should be identified by a pseudonym. Brian chose a rather phony Eastern name for himself - “Holy Pabrun”.
The correspondence between Bantock and Delius at this time shows light on the way these things worked out. On 16 December, 1907, Delius wrote: “By the way there are remarkably few gifted musicians in England, if I am to Judge from the scores that Wood has sent me for the prize cantata. Ye Gods. My lowest estimation seems to be considerably above their standard. Well you will see for yourself when you get them...yesterday and today I have been occupied with the cantatas and have sifted two big piles down to 3 or 4. I am awaiting another packet from Wood and also the full Orchestral scores.” This was followed on 2 January 1908 by “I want you to look at the Cantatas and choose the 3 or 4 you think the best & I will tell you which ones I have chosen 8: then we can pick the prize one.” A further letter of 2 February continues: “Has the prize cantata been decided yet - I am afraid they will give it to a mug. If they give it to any other than the 3 I picked out I shall protest as there is no question of the others.”
The three quotations given above are taken from Lewis Foreman’s book Havergal Brian and the performance of his orchestral music, (Thames Publishing, 1976), but I have seen in the Bantock-Delius correspondence (which I have not got by me at the moment) that Delius was troubled most by the fact that some of the candidates were well-trained but devoid of originality, while others had originality but lacked training. He mentioned that such a situation would not have occurred abroad (Delius was a dedicated Anglophobe at this time) but that in case of doubt he would probably plump for one with ideas which were not too badly expressed.
There is nothing in the correspondence to show on what point the two men disagreed, but Bantock could be as firm as Delius when his judgement was questioned, and the two men differed. As a result, Bantock withdrew from the panel of judges and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was appointed in his stead. Brian told me that they disagreed about the composition he had submitted, and I have no doubt this could be so. One must be very naive to believe that Bantock would not recognize the handwriting of some of his pupils and friends in the manuscripts submitted. Julius Harrison was a pupil of his and Havergal Brian a friend. Apart from that, the pseudonym “Holy Pabrun” must have hinted that here was someone having ideas like his own on Eastern lore. One can exonerate Bantock from favouritism, however, since he knew both the composers whose works were at the top of the list, but he did not tell Delius. Delius and he differed on the value of Brian’s work and that was the end. Coleridge-Taylor, according to Cumberland, recognized Harrison’s writing on his ms., and was in favour of this, but again, there is no need to suggest bias. Harrison got the prize.
A sequel came when the identity of the pseudonyms was revealed in the press, for Brian had done a lot to get decent performances of the music of Delius, and it is to the credit of Delius that he, who could be a difficult man, felt gratitude, for he wrote to Bantock: “To my astonishment I see from a paper cutting the “Holy Pabrun” was Havergal Brian’s. I am very sorry he did not get the prize - If Coleridge Taylor had only mentioned the “Holy Pabrun” he would have tied with the other & they would have been obliged to play them both and divide the prize.” Delius added that they would have to put a piece of Brian’s in the programme of the Musical League Festival to be given in 1909. This they did. It was Brian’s rescored setting of By the Waters of Babylon. You will find that this is reported in some quarters as the first performance, but this is not strictly so. A performance of this same work scored for an orchestra with double wind had taken place in Hanley In 1907; the Musical League performance in Liverpool in 1909 was only the first performance of the rescored version for triple wind. Brian told me this himself; the full scores of both the double and triple wind versions of Babylon have long been lost.
It would seem that Sir Henry Wood took a hand In the competition affair confidentially, for Brian received a cheque for £50 from the Norwich Festival Committee in appreciation of his setting of Cleopatra, and they mentioned that Wood had subscribed handsomely towards this sum. That was not all, Bosworth paid Brian £40 for the right of publication, and their vocal score can still be found in libraries. (It is virtually impossible now to tell what happened to the scores of Cleopatra and the two versions of Babylon after their performances. They could have been among the mss. given by the first Mrs. Brian to the local butcher after Brian left her in 1913, or they might have been with the publishers. Bosworth’s premises were bombed in World War Two and it seems likely that Cleopatra was destroyed at that time.) Brian thus got as much as Harrison in cash, and he had a performance too - not at the Norwich Festival but at Southport in 1909. Landon Ronald conducted, Phillis Lett sang the name-part, John Coates that of Antony, Maud Phillips that of Iris, and that of Charmion by Lillie Whiteside.
The reputation of this work was one of amazing difficulty in performance and intense passion in the audible effect. We can only tell now from the vocal score, but the work looks to me to be rather inclined towards Bantockery. Bantock, it should not be forgotten, was at the height of his fame in 1907 and he had influence. Julius Harrison later tried to throw off the influence of Bantock on his compositions; including The Vision of Cleopatra was a necessary move. Brian may have wanted with Cleopatra to please Bantock in particular, but one has to admit that he was not much good at it. I have often wondered at those who profess to see evidences of Elgar’s style in the early Brian works. No doubt Brian worshipped Elgar, but when he put pen to paper the result came out quite otherwise. It is one of the advantages of being awkward.
Some of the press notices that followed hearings of The Vision of Cleopatra are to be found in Lewis Foreman’s Havergal Brian and the performance of his orchestral music, my own Ordeal by Music and Havergal Brian, the man and his music, so there is no need to repeat them here. Arnold Bennett’s When the clock stopped in the Matador of the Five Towns volume can also be read with interest. He too said that the cantata had the reputation of being extremely difficult.
What is the bearing of all this on the development of Havergal Brian’s musical life? It happened at a crucial point. As we have seen, Brian was working under difficulties at Hartshill. It was in consideration of this, and of his merits as a composer, that a director of the famous potting firm of Minton’s came forward with the money to enable him to live a free life, devoting himself entirely to his music.
But let us look for a moment at the Influence of the Church. Brian had been brought up under the influence of the Church of England, had been educated in its schools, served as choirboy and organist, and accepted its principles and social environment, but he had written nothing for its ritual.What he had written to Biblical texts were the settings of Psalm 23 and Psalm 137, but both of these compositions, although based on the form of the Anglican Church anthem, were on too big a scale to be used in church. They could have been performed at a cathedral festival, but were not.
Brian’s first experience of a cathedral festival (as distinct from the Diocesan Festival he had attended in Lichfield as a choirboy) was at the Three Choirs Festival of 1905, where he went on the invitation of Elgar. He conformed to the custom of the times by appearing in Worcester in top hat and morning coat, only to find that Elgar alone among the elect of Worcester, wore loose tweeds. Elgar’s reputation in Worcester was so firmly established that he could get away with this. His native city honoured him that year by making him a Freeman, at a ceremony which Brian attended with some awe. There he saw that a prophet might, after all, be honoured in his own city and among his own people.
But Elgar’s tweeds were a protest. In the opinion of many of his musical friends, the cathedral festivals were too stuffy. Among these was Gerald Cumberland, who wrote: “They hate (or else they are afraid of?) every emotion that is not a religious emotion. They think that God made our souls and the devil our bodies. They may be right; if they are, it is clear that the devil is not lacking in consideration.”
The censoring of the “objectionable” lines in Cumberland’s libretto for The Vision of Cleopatra was what might have been expected. Indeed, the whole work was such as the Deans and Chapters of the Three Choirs and Norwich might object to. Cumberland knew this. His protest against the stuffiness of Deans and Chapters was one with Elgar’s tweed suit: “Music, an unwilling handmaid of charity, was ‘indulged’ in. One did not have music every day, for that would have been frivolous; but one had it in great lumps every twelve months, and had it, not because one cannot live fully and vividly without art, but because it made a good excuse for a social ‘occasion’. The music itself was excused - for in the minds of these people it required an excuse - by the fact that the whole festival was organised for charity, the vice that causes so many sins.”
True, not everything was suitable for performance in a “sacred edifice”, but that was taken into account. There was always a secular concert in the Town Hall, followed by a ball which was the social highlight of the week. It was for the secular concert that The Vision of Cleopatra, was intended. But Deans and Chapters were all the time inching into the secular programmes until they were treated almost as if they were cathedral performances. In fact, as Cumberland said: “Their ‘secular’ concerts are echoes of the concerts given in the cathedral”, and, as Cumberland wrote in a passage already quoted, he was sick of that tradition and, with Cleopatra, he was helping to break it. He must have expected some objection to be made to his libretto, and one feels that his use of a maiden aunt to test it was not so innocent as it seemed.
Cumberland admired Brian’s music enormously, but was cool towards Elgar’s. When he called Elgar “aristocratic” to his face, he thought of it as a French revolutionary might have done; but at the word “Elgar rose like a fat trout eager to swallow a floating fly”. It was Elgar’s loyalty (at that time) to the oratorio tradition which annoyed Cumberland, who followed Ernest Newman in believing that the English oratorio was played out. Brian was in the midst of these conflicts, and he was edging away from the Church tradition.
But it was not easy. Handel’s Messiah was annually gorged upon in Stoke-on-Trent, and Brian said nothing against it, but he was not led that way. Nor was Arnold Bennett. Brian, described by Cumberland as “a young fire-eating genius from the Potteries”, planned a meeting between Bennett and Cumberland In the interval of a Strauss concert, and Brian stood aside in amusement while Bennett cut Cumberland down to size. “I see”, said Cumberland, “that you continue writing for The New Age in spite of their violent attacks on you.” “Yea”, he (Bennett) answered laconically. Bennett, one of the highest paid writers in the world, wrote regularly for The New Age without payment. It was an honour. The editor, A. R. Orage, set the highest standard of journalism in the country and never lowered his sights. (He refused everything that Cumberland sent to him.) Lord Alfred Douglas, on the other hand, who edited The Academy, printed several of Cumberland’s poems, and it was probably through Cumberland that Brian began to take an interest in Lord Alfred Douglas’s own poetry. It was many years, however, before Brian’s admiration for Douglas’s poetry led him to his Fifth Symphony, with Douglas’s Wine of Summer for its theme.
There is in the Bantock correspondence a letter from Brian expressing his puzzlement at the contrast between Lord Alfred Douglas’s sensitive mind, as shown by his poetry, and the reputation by which Brian had formerly heard of him as the partner of Oscar Wilde in the offence for which Wilde went to prison. Amongst the working classes homosexuality is rare. It is a problem mainly for intellectuals. Brian knew the word “Oscarwilding” as smut, and smut alone, but now that he was among highly sensitive men (the “aristocrats” of culture), he was in a better position to understand the nature of sex iIn its various ramifications. (It should be remembered that although we are familiar with the work of the Viennese psychologists today, their writings were little known before the end of the First World War.) An English translation of Richard le Gallienne’s Little Sleeper, set to music by Brian, had been heard in concerts sung by John Coates without benefit of copyright. It was when the chance came for publication that Brian began to think of this, and got Cumberland to make a lyric that went with the music. This was published under the title of Soliloquy on a Dead Child, and had its origin in a poem by the Persian poet Hafiz, who lost his favourite boy at the age of 10, and each spring, on the boy’s birthday, visited his grave to pray. Could paederasty inspire so great a love? Brian was to learn that the working class outlook was not all. After Brian’s fall into disrepute in the Potteries, Arnold Bennett dropped him, but Lord Alfred Douglas - who had the reputation of being a very difficult man to get along with - became Brian’s pen-friend. I have in my possession a letter dated 15 February, 1937, from Douglas to Brian, in which he says: “Arnold Bennett always was one of my bêtes noires although I never spoke to him in my life. Had you written to me, I would have been pleased, and would have responded at once.”
No greater contrast in men can be found than between Brian and Cumberland. Both left for London in the same year. Brian burned his boats in the Midlands; Cumberland left his Manchester editor on excellent terms and continued to send London reports to him after the move. He earned £650 in his first London year, and could have made more, but would not make a slave of himself. Later he earned over £1000 a year - easily.
It was no surprise to Cumberland that Brian was not able to earn a living from his work as a composer. There was money to be made in this way, but everybody knew that Brian would not do it. There is a paragraph in Cumberland’s Set Down In malice which reports a conversation with the conductor Landon Ronald at Blackpool where Brian and Cumberland were in attendance. Ronald was a popular composer whose song, Down in the forest, was sung everywhere. “I sometimes feel a pig”, said Ronald, “making money by my trifles when so many men with much greater gifts can only rarely get their work performed and still more rarely get it published. You told us just now”, he said, turning to Brian “that you would like to make money by your compositions .Who wouldn’t? Well, it would be foolish of me to advise you to try to write more simply, with less originality, on a smaller scale. It would be foolish, because you simply couldn’t do it. No; you must work out your own salvation: it is only a matter of waiting: success will come,” As we all know, Brian worked out his own salvation and success came, but only after a very long wait.
And what of Cumberland? Would he be surprised to learn that in due course the only people to know anything of his lyrics would be those who listened to Brian’s settings of them? I think not. Cumberland was a realist. He never pretended that his poetry was for ever.
[1] CUMBERLAND, Gerald. Set down in malice. Grant Richards Ltd., November 1918; second edition, March 1919.
© 1978 Reginald Nettel
Newsletter, NL 18/19, 1978