The esteem in which Violet Gordon Woodhouse was held
didn’t much survive her death. Though she was the first major instrumentalist
to record on the harpsichord, was the seemingly unlikely dedicatee of
Delius’s Dance for Harpsichord, was lionised by Osbert Sitwell
and T. E. Lawrence to the point of idolatry, played recitals with Tertis,
broadcast widely and was a superb exponent of the literature for her
instrument, she became known, if at all, for her tangential relationship
to a scandalous double murder and for her extraordinary domestic arrangements,
which culminated in a simultaneous marriage blanche and ménage
a Cinq. see
Violet Gordon Woodhouse was born in 1871 into a musical
environment. Adelina Patti was a family friend and at sixteen Violet
began to be taught by pianist Oscar Beringer and later by Augustin Rubio,
dashing Spanish émigré pianist. Violet, nee Gwynne, married
Gordon Woodhouse to further her musical ambitions knowing that otherwise
a performing career would be difficult for her, if not impossible. It
was Arnold Dolmetsch who introduced her to early music in 1895 and Bernard
Shaw encouraged her; with the harpsichord, clavichords, spinet and a
set of virginals purchased from Dolmetsch she began to carve out the
beginnings of a drawing room career for herself.
Gordon Woodhouse lost his money after the First War
but in 1926 his sisters were murdered by their butler and his finances
were once more transformed and restored, allowing Violet more or less
to retire from public performance. She continued to perform in her salon
and gradually gravitated more and more to the clavichord (in the 1941
BBC recordings she plays, for the only time in her recorded career,
a clavichord in the first Prelude and Fugue of the "48").
Her repertoire embraced the accustomed baroque suites
– especially Couperin – and in particular music from the Fitzwilliam
Virginal Book as well, obviously, as Bach, Handel and Scarlatti. As
Pearl’s splendid booklet notes relate – biographer Jessica Douglas-Home
on the life, Richard Luckett on the music – there are idiosyncrasies
in this disc more than those merely of her private life. The sound of
the harpsichords used on the 1920-28 recordings will be the first to
strike the ear. Luckett notes that Dolmetsch tinkered with a vibrato
effect in his instruments. Gordon Woodhouse relied strongly on Dolmetsch’s
copies and the effects of his compensative and imaginative reconstructions
are certainly individual although not always entirely attractive. The
necessarily compromised frequencies of the acoustic discs, in particular,
means that one often has to listen through the exigencies of instrument
and acoustic to reach the mind behind them. What emerges here, however,
is a musician of consistently superior gifts, of digital accuracy, broad
textual fidelity (matters of repeats aside) and constant avoidance of
the motoric-metronomic impulses once associated with the instrument.
Maybe the Purcell Gavotte has a rather stolid quality
to it but the Rameau makes up for it – entirely winning playing, vigorous
and insinuating. She’s not technically immaculate in the Farnaby Gigge
– but employs tremendous subtleties of rubato in even so obvious a piece
as the Harmonious Blacksmith. Comparison with her great continental
rival, Wanda Landowska and her industrial sized Pleyel, shows a number
of clear differences. Landowska’s projection and tremendous zest were
fused with her means of expression, a massive harpsichord, whereas Gordon
Woodhouse favoured degrees of intimacy which led eventually to the clavichord.
In the Harmonious Blacksmith for example Landowska is hard driven, exultant,
breathlessly exciting whereas Gordon Woodhouse favours a different aesthetic;
with her, wit resides in the sublimation of virtuosity and hers is a
performance that lives from the inside out, as it were. The Byrd selections
are more evidence of her understanding of the English Virginalists and
her own place in the vanguard of early instrumental performance practice.
But there is evidence everywhere of her understated but profoundly thought-through
musicianship, not least in the Italian Concerto where comparison once
more with Landowska reveals more points of difference. Gordon Woodhouse’s
accelerandos, crescendos and decrescendos are certainly more frequent
and superficially disruptive than Landowska who, in comparison, appears
more obviously linear in conception. There is an inevitability about
the shaping of Landowska’s lines that Gordon Woodhouse doesn’t attempt;
the English player is far more involved in tempo-rubato in her playing,
is more pianistic, and the smaller instrument allows her metrical flexibilities
with which to imbue her playing.
Not least the most fascinating feature of this disc
is the survival of a 1941 BBC broadcast – which contains her clavichord
playing, the only known example. The short-sightedness of the BBC in
its inability or unwillingness to preserve recordings of this kind –
or to dispose of or destroy them – is well enough known and this excerpt
from the fifteen minutes (it wasn’t possible to include all for reasons
of length) shows what we now lack. She plays the first Prelude and Fugue
from the "48" and a piece from the Strallock Manuscript and
we can hear her speaking voice, in one of those famously awful scripted
interviews. A privilege nonetheless. Recorded in her home, Nether Lypiatt
Manor, Gloucestershire, in the height of the War she must already have
seemed something of an antique. But this disc resoundingly demonstrates
the significance of her place in the history of the rediscovery of early
music and its first remarkable appearance on disc.
Jonathan Woolf
Violet Gordon Woodhouse,
harpsichord and clavichord