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Sir
Arnold Bax Website
EDITORIAL
January
20, 2007
A
NOTE ON BAX’S NORTHERN BALLADS
by
Graham Parlett
In
about 1951 Bax was asked by Christopher Whelen whether he thought the
two Northern Ballads ‘can
or should be played together’ (see the questionnaire reproduced in
Dennis Andrews, Cuchulan among
the Guns, 1998, plate [15]). Bax replied laconically: ‘I think
they might go well together’, which suggests that he had not
originally thought of them as being a pair, much less the first two
parts of a trilogy ending with the Prelude for a Solemn Occasion. Some Bax experts, including Lewis
Foreman, Colin Scott-Sutherland, and Vernon Handley, do indeed regard
the Prelude as a ‘Third
Northern Ballad’, but, having listened to all three works played one
after the other, as in the Radio 3 broadcast on 19 December 2006, I
remain unconvinced by the view that they constitute a trilogy or even,
as Vernon Handley has suggested, a quasi-symphony; in fact I find it
difficult to hear the Prelude as a tone-poem at all. If Bax had wanted to give the title
‘Northern Ballad No.3’ to anything, the Legend
of 1944 would have been a much better candidate.
My
views on the matter are also based on the chronology of the surviving
manuscript scores. British Library Additional Manuscript 54750
consists of the short (or piano) scores of what became the First Northern Ballad and the Prelude
for a Solemn Occasion. The Prelude
was the first to be composed: it is dated at the end ‘Oct 26th |
1927’, while the Ballad is
dated ‘Nov 1927’. The two scores are thus contiguous and written
on the same kind of manuscript paper but on separate sections of
conjugate leaves. The Ballad has no title and comprises six folios of paper, i.e. twelve
pages, though they are unpaginated. The Prelude
is headed ‘III’ and also comprises six folios: twelve pages, which
are paginated from 31 to 42. The ‘III’ suggests that the score was
intended as the third movement of a three-movement work. That the
short-score Ballad was
intended as the first movement of such a work seems to me doubtful.
For a start, it postdates ‘III’, though that in itself is not an
insuperable problem since Bax did occasionally write multi-movement
works in which the movements were composed in a different order from
how they appear in the final score: the third movement of the
Concertante for Three Solo Instruments and Orchestra (1948-9), for
example, was written before the second movement. But since the Ballad is unpaginated, it is unlikely to be part of a score
containing a movement (‘III’) that is paginated 31-42; Bax must
surely have had two other paginated movements already completed in
order to know that the first page of ‘III’ should be paginated
‘31’. Furthermore, if the Ballad,
which occupies twelve pages, is taken as the first movement, then the
missing second movement would have had to be paginated 13 to 30, i.e.
eighteen pages, which would have made it three times as long as, for
instance, the piano-score slow movement of the Fifth Symphony. This
suggests that the first movement of the work of which ‘III’ was
intended as the finale would have been much longer than the First
Northern Ballad.
For
the record, the chronology of the orchestral versions is as follows:
Northern
Ballad No.1: The manuscript full score is undated but the work is
listed in the fifth edition of Grove as ‘1931’ and it was first
performed on 14 November that year.
Prelude
for a Solemn Occasion: The full score is dated at the end:
‘Morar. | Feb 1933’. The first performance did not take place
until nearly thirty years after Bax’s death, on
23 September 1982
. It was around this time that the name ‘Northern Ballad No.3’
first came into circulation, though Colin Scott-Sutherland, in his
1973 biography of Bax (p.149), does refer to ‘The Northern
Ballad marked III’.
Northern
Ballad No.2: The full score is dated at the end: ‘Morar |
Dec-1933 | Jan 1934’. It is unfortunate that the short score of this
work is missing. Bax generally did his orchestrations in Morar, but
there is no way of knowing when the work was originally composed: it
may have been in 1933 or it may have been earlier.
Despite
my opinion that the Prelude for
a Solemn Occasion is no Northern
Ballad, I do concede that its title is unfortunate and may lead
the unwary listener to expect something gloomier than is in fact the
case. One of the Oxford English Dictionary’s definitions of
‘solemn’ is indeed ‘grave, sober, deliberate, slow’, which may
suit the earlier parts of the score; but the work becomes more
animated as it progresses, and here we should bear in mind that
another of the OED’s definitions is ‘festive’. The mood is in
fact quite similar to Glazunov’s Solemn
Procession of 1907, which is jubilant and celebratory throughout,
and to his Cortège solonnel
of 1910, which is more ponderous but again not remotely sombre.
Nevertheless, I suspect that the name ‘Northern Ballad No.3’ will
be impossible to dislodge, having by now become what the great
lexicographer Henry Fowler would have called a ‘sturdy
indefensible’.
Copyright
Graham Parlett
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