HERMIT
AT HEART
Carolyn
Nott pays an eightieth birthday tribute
to her husband, the composer GERARD
SCHURMANN
It's
hard to believe that Gerard was eighty
on 19 January 2004. He seems no different
from when I met him almost forty years
ago, except that his hair is now white.
Dictionaries and magazines frequently
misquoted his age over the years. To
rectify this situation, Gerard allowed
me to give a copy of his birth certificate
to Nicholas Slonimsky as proof of the
right date for his Baker's Dictionary.
Believe it or not, even he still got
it wrong! Admittedly, the certificate
issued in the former Dutch East Indies
is confusing and reads like a book without
punctuation. Amidst a string of strange
and colourful names of towns, districts,
sub-districts, and residencies, sounding
like an Asian version of Tolkien's Middle
Earth, is a date not of Gerard's birth
but of its registration by his father,
Johan Gerhard Schurmann, then thirty-five
years old and an officer at a sugar
factory (subsequently he became the
proprietor of his own wine and cigar
import/export business). Rambling on
like a fairy tale, the saga goes on
to describe Gerard's birth as taking
place at a distance of more than ten
poles from the building where the certificates
of the Civil Registration were made
up - and finally we have the date -
on January nineteen, one thousand nine
hundred twenty-four, in the evening
at fifty minutes past seven.
After
wartime service in the RAF, Gerard lived
and worked as a composer and conductor
in England for over forty continuous
years, apart from a brief sojourn in
the Netherlands in his early twenties
when he was a resident conductor at
the radio in Hilversum. Born into a
highly cosmopolitan family, Gerard has
cousins on his father's side in Holland,
England, France, Sweden and America,
plus, on his mother's side in Holland,
Hungary and Scotland. His uncle, Carl
Schurmann, former senior Netherlands
Ambassador to the UN and in Washington,
married an English girl and educated
his three sons at Eton. I remember that
thirty years ago all three had Dutch
passports, yet spoke not a word of Dutch.
In England, during the war, Carl gave
a series of lectures on Dutch music
from the Old Netherlands School to the
present, illustrated by Gerard at the
piano
As Cultural
Attaché at the Netherlands Embassy
in London immediately after the war,
Gerard was instrumental in arranging
exchanges of musicians and art exhibitions,
as well as setting up scholarships between
England and Holland. This resulted in
numerous performances in the Netherlands
of music by Alan Rawsthorne (Gerard's
lifelong close friend and mentor), Benjamin
Britten and Michael Tippett, among others,
including the first post-war performance
of Tippett's A Child of our Time
in Arnhem. Gerard himself conducted
the first performance of Elizabeth Lutyens'
Concerto for String Quartet and Orchestra
and her Viola Concerto with the Radio
Philharmonic in Hilversum.
Gerard
was very homesick for England after
we moved to Los Angeles in 1981 and,
to this day, he regards England as his
true spiritual home. His only daughter
Karen, by his first marriage to the
violinist Vivien Hind, lives in the
north of England with her artist husband
and children, and runs a successful
alternative medicine practice. California,
on the other hand, instilled in us the
feeling that anything was possible.
We live perched on a promontory in the
Hollywood Hills where Gerard likes being
in a country setting among woods and
wild animals, yet at the centre of a
large, dynamic city. We regularly encounter
coyotes, racoons, possums, and snakes,
as well as deer that canter violently
past us chased by our dog. Most romantic
of all are the red-tailed hawks, which
circle and plummet into the valley between
our hill and the next. Somewhat of a
hermit at heart, Gerard enjoys the feeling
of isolation, as long as it is tempered
by occasional visits to festivals, orchestras,
and universities.
With
a body of work behind him before we
left England, culminating in his Opera/Cantata
Piers Plowman - a commission
from the Dutch Radio in Hilversum premièred
at the Three Choirs Festival in Gloucester
in August 1980 - Gerard has produced
a steady flow of compositions in California.
He has a 
reputation
for working slowly, but composition
occupies his mind consciously or sub-consciously
throughout the day, even - I suspect
- when he is eating or watching his
favourite British comedies on television!
When
we first arrived in Los Angeles, he
missed his soundproof London studio,
and it was three years before we were
able to build a similar workplace for
him among the trees on our land, a short
walk from the house. After our arrival,
he completed the Two Ballades for
Piano that he began in London, and almost
immediately he received a commission
from the violinist Earl Carlyss and
his wife, pianist Ann Schein, for a
violin and piano Duo, which they premièred
at the Library of Congress in Washington,
DC, and New York in March 1984. That
same year, Gerard received an award
from the US National Endowment for the
Arts, which, along with a number of
performances of his music in the US,
helped him to feel accepted and part
of the concert scene in America.
Quite
different, however, was the response
from the film industry, which in England
had provided an important source of
income. It seemed that because he came
with a reputation as a 'serious music'
composer, the film industry was not
interested. Gerard composed scores for
only two films after moving to America
and both of these were made outside
the US. The first, in 1984, was an Italian
film called Claretta, about the
last days of Mussolini and his mistress
Claretta Petacci, starring Claudia Cardinale.
The second, a treatment of Dostoyevsky's
autobiographical novella, The Gambler,
made in 1996, came to him because the
British producer did not want 'a typical
film composer'. A CD of the music was
subsequently issued on the Virgin Classics
label.
While
Gerard worked on Claretta, we spent
five months of fraught enjoyment in
Rome, staying at a hotel that possessed
one of the best restaurants in town.
However, for Gerard this pleasure was
tempered by the difficulty of working
with a hot-headed, musically ignorant
director who shot most of his scenes
containing dialogue with Wagner's music
playing in the background, in order,
as he explained, to create the right
atmosphere for the actors. In Italy,
it is usual for the original dialogue
track to be discarded and then re-recorded
in the studio. The music sessions for
the film were recorded in Rome with
Gerard conducting the Santa Cecilia
Orchestra, and an LP of the brooding,
emotionally charged score was issued
on CBS. Gerard had been an occasional
guest conductor with the orchestra in
the past, sometimes combining it with
an engagement in Naples and the Scarlatti
Orchestra. The album of Claretta
sold well, and the music continues
to have a life of its own.
In 1987,
Dennis Burkh,
Music Director of the Janáček Philharmonic
Orchestra in Czechoslovakia, had the
idea of commissioning Gerard to arrange
a set of Slovak Folk Songs for
his Slovak-born friend, Stephen Roman,
whose Company, Denison Mines in Canada,
controlled the largest uranium mine
in the world. Both Stephen and his wife
Betty shared a nostalgic enthusiasm
for Slovak folk music and, in order
for Gerard - who speaks no Czech or
Slovak - to become familiar with it,
they arranged for us to visit their
palatial home just outside Toronto where
they had invited a group of around thirty
Slovak men and women to give him a demonstration
of the Romans' favourite folk songs.
These they sang a cappella and
without harmony amid constant bickering
and arguments about the correct versions
of rhythm, words and often the vocal
line itself. All of this was recorded
on cassette and given to Gerard who
subsequently consulted a few additional
Slovak sources in an effort to resolve
the discrepancies. It took him almost
a year to complete a set of Nine
Slovak Folk Songs for Orchestra,
with soprano and tenor soloists. Unfortunately,
Stephen Roman died in 1988 and was never
able to hear this charming and popular
work.
Our
second decade in America, during the
nineties, saw us emerge gradually from
the initial struggle to acclimatize
ourselves and establish a secure financial
footing without Gerard's film work as
one of our main sources of income. We
survived our first major earthquake
in 1994, a terrifying event that shook
the house with a deafening roar and
flung its contents around like a poltergeist,
causing total disorder and minor structural
damage at four o'clock in the morning.
That same year, Gerard went into hospital
for a major operation. He recovered
well, but it took time. Before the operation,
he had received a commission from Lorin
Maazel and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra
to write a Concerto for Orchestra
for the occasion of the orchestra's
centenary. It was performed at Heinz
Hall in Pittsburgh in March 1996 and
many people, including those who have
written about the subsequent Chandos
CD of the work, performed by the BBC
Philharmonic with Gerard conducting,
have remarked on its fertile inventiveness
and orchestral mastery. I remember that
with health concerns behind him composition
appeared to go smoothly, and Gerard
was as happy and engrossed in his work
as I had ever seen him. On the same
CD is the Violin Concerto that he wrote
in 1978 for Ruggiero Ricci's fiftieth
jubilee as a solo violinist, a very
different story in terms of its compositional
progress, which took place over the
course of four years.
Perhaps
because we were more settled, and I
was out of the house working, the nineties
were fruitful years for Gerard's composition.
New works included The Gardens of
Exile for Cello and Orchestra, a
commission from the Bournemouth Symphony
Orchestra which premièred the
work in Poole, Bristol and Southampton
with Peter Rejto as soloist in 1990,
and two Piano Quartets (the first dating
back to 1986), both written for the
Los Angeles Piano Quartet and premièred
in the US almost a decade apart at the
Tucson Winter Chamber Music Festival
in Arizona. All three works are available
on CD.
At eighty,
Gerard shows no sign of slowing down.
If anything, his creative impulse is
stronger than ever. New works include
Gaudiana, a substantial set of
Symphonic Studies for large orchestra
and a tribute to the extraordinary architecture
of Antoni Gaudí in Barcelona,
Spain; a Trio for Clarinet Cello and
Piano to be premièred at the
Tucson Festival in March 2004; and Six
Songs of William Blake, written
to a commission from the Rawsthorne
Society. For the latter work, he used
some of the same poems and musical material
from a discarded earlier song-cycle
to poems of William Blake, which he
wrote in 1955 for Peter Pears and Benjamin
Britten.
As I
write, Gerard is finishing a String
Quartet to be premièred in 2004
by the Chilingirian Quartet. It is actually
his third work in the genre, but the
first two have been withdrawn by Gerard
along with many of his other early works.
There is an interesting history attached
to his first String Quartet, written
in 1943 when he was still in the RAF.
It was dedicated to HM Queen Wilhelmina
of the Netherlands, who lived in exile
in England during the Second World War,
and the work was first performed in
the presence of Her Majesty in London
by the Hirsch String Quartet, who played
it subsequently at many of their concerts.
Gerard's Second String Quartet, written
in 1946, was a ten-minute piece, composed
in response to competition guidelines
that required it to be a prelude to
Bartók's Third String Quartet.
It was performed by both the Dutch Sweelinck
Quartet and the Hungarian Quartet before
Gerard withdrew the work and subsequently
used some of its material for his chamber
orchestral work Variants in 1970.
Still
very much to the fore at eighty is Gerard's
sense of fun, along with his capacity
to enjoy life, whether it's his love
of reading, good food, travel, exploring
new things and our animals. He enjoys
listening to music by younger composers
and believes it is now their turn to
be given vital opportunities. Today,
mercifully free of former preoccupations
with prevailing musical fashions, Gerard
seems to be at his prime, confident
in his style, and ready to go on composing
new music for at least twenty more years.
©
19 January 2004 Carolyn Nott,
Los Angeles, USA
[Carolyn
Nott's tribute to Gerard Schurmann was
first published in the January/February
2004 issue of Musical
Opinion]
