Michael Trend

This book is valuable for its attempt to show English composers in their context, in both the musical world and the wider context of English society. This provides a useful perspective that is necessarily lacking, or at least peripheral, in biographies of single composers such as Elgar or Vaughan Williams, and also allows coverage of minor figures who may never receive full biographical coverage, such as Joseph Holbrooke or C.W. Orr. It shows a little of how the English musical renaissance which began with Elgar had its roots both in the Victorian age of Parry and Stanford and in the sincere and generally unchauvinistic musical nationalism of the later 19th and early 20th century. It tracks the development of individual talents within this milieu, showing the personal relationships which supported it. Alongside the (necessarily brief) discussion of major figures such as Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Holst, Bax, and Bliss, Trend gives a matter-of-fact assessment of the gifts and failings of briefly noted but ultimately less successful composers such as Cyril Scott, Granville Bantock, Balfour Gardiner, and Ethel Smyth, as well as those whose reputation is now beginning to revive, such as E.J. Moeran and Ivor Gurney. He reviews without excess the bizarre stories of Peter Warlock and Percy Grainger, and makes the inevitable sad reference to the lost talents of George Butterworth and the even more obscure William Hurlstone. He discusses the failure of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor to fulfil his early promise, and the success of William Walton in outgrowing his early role as enfant terrible. Throughout, he assesses the contribution to English music of the twin urges of tradition and rebellion, and the succession which led each generation of rebels to become the bedrock for the next, and he considers the social changes which drove the success or failure of many 20th-century musical movements and careers, especially the increasing professionalization of music-making.

There are one or two curious omissions. He notes the continued reputation of the church music of Edmund Rubbra, but manages to discuss Herbert Howells without mention of that composer's even more popular and enduring church music. He dispels the common misperception that Stanford and Parry were the only composers of their day by mention of Alexander Mackenzie. However, he perpetuates the similar misperception that there are only two modern English composers, Britten and Tippett: surely his most significant omission is that of Lennox Berkeley (born 1903, only two years after Rubbra and Finzi), whose work is certainly due for a revival of interest. But on the whole I find this book an invaluable handbook to the history of 20th century English music. I could do with a similar book to take the story on past Britten to include younger composers such as Peter Maxwell Davies and Harrison Birtwhistle: but perhaps that is the point at which the coherent narrative of the musical renaissance unravels in the chaos of late 20th-century cultural upheaval.

MB 6-i-2012… (mehr)