This is a whopping
great book – in all senses - for a very
small price. Here is the definitive
voice on Bax and his music for £30.
In real and possibly absolute terms
this biography is now available at its
most inexpensive price ever.
Of course it is not
unfamiliar to Baxians or at least those
who were around and taking an interest
in 1983 and 1987 when the first and
second editions came out. This is the
third edition since Bax’s centenary
year in 1983 almost a quarter century
ago.
The story of the life
and the music is woven together. The
golden years of youth and the hectic
musical and literary creativity were
aided by his affluent family circumstances.
He could choose to do whatever he liked
and did so. Youth was a grail for Bax
and when it left him he was bereft.
Commissions and duty were uncongenial
and the results showed this. His music
for various films cost him dear as it
did for his friend John Ireland. Speaking
of Ireland, Bax’s circle is fully tackled:
Paul Corder, his brother Clifford, Moeran,
Ireland and Vaughan Williams among many
others. There’s a considerable amount
of new material incorporated since the
last edition. Although I would have
preferred to have heard more about Mr
Foreman’s preferences and enthusiasms
among the Bax works one can just about
detect these.
In these pages Bax's
exuberantly passionate love life is
melded into his musical life. Harriet
Cohen straddled the two worlds. His
compulsion to compartmentalise life
is brought out. He was to find compelling
reasons for not introducing his love
of mid-later years Mary Gleaves to his
mother. The Cohen collection shows Bax
in 1931 writing to both Mary and Harriet
in erotic terms playing back their sensual
encounters. Foreman tellingly quotes
from a letter to Mary in which ecstatic
references to lovemaking in the sea
make explicit the psychological connection
between the sea and sex. Bax's works
are replete with sea music (Tintagel,
Fourth Symphony) and this perhaps reminds
us of Hugo Alfvén’s Fourth Symphony
in which a Straussian orchestra is swelled
by two vocalising voices - male and
female. What a work Bax would have made
of such a symphony.
What has changed since
1987 and the second edition? Quite a
lot. The number of entries in the Bax
CD catalogue has for example increased
exponentially. There are now three complete
cycles (Thomson, Handley, Lloyd-Jones)
of the symphonies ... two on Chandos;
the other on Naxos. Chandos have been
reissuing their Thomson cycle at midprice
while Naxos are at bargain price. The
part cycle (1, 2, 5, 6, 7) from Lyrita
is out on CD or will be by 2008. Even
the pioneering Fourth Symphony and Symphonic
Variations (Hatto, Guildford PO, Handley)
are out on Concert Artist. Naxos, ASV,
Dutton and others have swelled the representation
of chamber music, piano solos and songs.
It has been an extraordinary
renaissance by any measure and it shows
no sign of slackening. Bax is however
a resolutely rare presence in the concert
hall. CDs - yes; studio recordings -
yes. Broadcasts - yes. Concert promoters
still steer clear although the 2007
Three Choirs has the First Symphony
as does the Bristol University SO and
earlier this year the Ealing SO did
the very rare The Tale the Pine Trees
Knew.
There is no Bax Society
although there was one from circa 1964
to 1972. Tintagel gets a look
in on concert programmes but little
else. The major transforming factor
for the new edition is the opening up
to Bax scholars of the Harriet Cohen
papers at the British Library. Foreman
makes liberal use of this seeming mass
of material. He is well placed to make
the linkages having interviewed pretty
well everyone he could track down with
Bax connections. Quotes from those interviewed
are valuably and liberally used.
Cohen does not emerge
well - her precious expressions might
be a feature of their time but the suffocation
and suppression of performances by others,
especially a younger generation of artists,
stamped down on Bax's grave just as
grievously as the concert hall neglect
about which she wrote in protest to
the Daily Telegraph in 1965. Similarly
the destruction of Bax's letters to
his wife Elsita and to Mary Gleaves.
Foreman writes well
and has the intellectual reach and command
to synthesise a seething archive of
written and recorded material. In addition
his perspective is naturally wide as
his research from the 1960s onwards
has covered the entirety of the British
classical music scene from the 1870s
to the present day; he is by no means
a Bax exclusive. His librarian degree
dissertation was on the sources of British
music research – and remains an invaluable
source for researchers.
So good is this book
that it's only downside is that it tends
to discourage other studies. It is as
if all the Baxian oxygen has been drained
off.
A fully reliable guide,
this book does not set out to be everything
although it manages to be most things
and manages each task extremely well.
Of course the book has blind spots.
The post-1953 history
of the revival of Bax's music is insufficiently
detailed. I wanted to know more about
the Bax Society and its personalities.
The weaknesses of many of the Bryden
Thomson Chandos recordings of the symphonies
pass without mention. Yet these CDs
time after time raised and smashed my
hopes in the early CD era.
I hope we will not
forget the work of Colin Scott-Sutherland
as writer of numerous articles and of
the first Bax biography right at the
crest of the revival wave in the early
1970s. It is of course in the bibliography
but it does not feature prominently
in the story of the early 1970s revival.
Although a very different, more philosophical
and more musico-poetic book, indulgently
laced with literary parallels by the
score, it was frustrating in its scant
attention to biographical detail. It
was important. It was the book which
in my early twenties I rushed out and
ordered from a Totnes bookshop and eagerly
read, struggling and failing to understand
the musical analyses and frustrated
that I could hear only a small fraction
of the works listed and referred to
by the author. I cannot have been alone.
Another author hardly mentioned
in the revival chapter is Peter Pirie
a staunch Baxian whose much denigrated
book The British Musical Renaissance
still has much of value to tell
us about Bax, Bridge and others even
if his treatment of other Brits such
as Finzi and Howells is dismissive.
Material only available
on websites is treated as ephemeral
and not cited. Of course I have an interest
but this judgement is to my mind misconceived
or at least inconsistent. Newspaper
and magazine articles are ephemeral
yet they are listed and are inaccessible
to most readers. There is a problem
of course – which I must concede - in
that websites can disappear when the
owner dies or can no longer afford the
webspace. If the author loses interest
they can become out of date very soon
but not as easily as printed books.
Yet CDs are deleted, magazines go out
of print. For all its occasional lack
of rigour and academic peer review, the
internet is the first and often
only source of reference for young and
old enquirers and enthusiasts. The fire
of enthusiasm catches most readily from
the enthusiasm of others. A shame to
slam the door on the legion of young
music-lovers who are the next and sustaining
generation of Baxians. A list of websites
should have been given. At the very
least readers should have been pointed
to Richard Adams' splendid and still
growing Bax
site here on MusicWeb and Graham
Parlett's online Bax
catalogue.
What happened to the
foreword to the second edition of this
book. The first - from Felix Aprahamian
– is reproduced.
There is one typo -
I found one on p.352 where Vernon
Handley became Veron Handley.
These are superficial
cavils against the background of such
a superbly written and presented book.
First impressions are crucial so the
cover of the book is well chosen – a
brooding and intense experimental colour
photograph of Bax at the age of 24 taken
by Paul Corder.
This is a solidly and
extensively detailed book. It will for
most practical purposes be all you will
ever need on Bax and first-time curious
readers will come away from the experience
wanting to hear the music (1).
Rob Barnett
Chapter titles
1 1883-1900: The Background
2 1900-1905: The Royal Academy of Music
3 1905-1909: Many Influences
4 1909-1910: Ireland and Russia
5 1910-1911: Marriage
6 1912-1914: Rathgar and London
7 1914-1916: The Great War
8 1916-1918: Harriet Cohen
9 1918-1920: Peace and Success
10 1921-1923: Triumph
11 1924-1925: Crisis
12 1926-1928: New Directions
13 1928-1929: Dreams and Reality
14 1930-1932: Going Northern
15 1933-1936: Past Fifty
16 1937-1939: `I can't grow up'
17 1939-1945: The Second World War:
Storrington
18 1945-1953: Last Years
19 After 1953: Decline and Revival
20 Appendix A: Dermot O'Byrne
21 Appendix B: King Kojata
22 Appendix C: The Happy Forest
by Herbert Farjeon
23 Appendix D: Bax's Symphonies at the
Proms
24 Appendix E: Felix Aprahamian's Foreword
to the First Edition [1982]
(1) For anyone exploring
Bax for the first time let me make my
own recommendations of works to seek
out:-
November Woods
Symphonies Nos. 2, 4, 5, 6
Piano Quintet
String Quartet No. 1
Winter Legends for piano and orchestra
Mater Ora Filium – motet
