It must have been in
the summer of 1919 that I was invited to an evening party somewhere in
Kensington or Chelsea: I forget which. These localities always seemed to me, a
North Londoner at the time, so remote and foreign that whenever I emerged from
the Underground at High Street or Sloane Square I half-expected to hear the
aboriginals speaking an alien tongue.
Before starting out
that evening, I had become involved in a futile and miserable quarrel with an
old friend, and as I reached the doors of the house where the party was to be
given my mind was not a little disintegrated and I felt in no mood to entertain
or to be entertained. However, only a few minutes after my arrival I found
myself conversing appreciatively with as charming and as good-looking a young
officer as one could hope to meet. This was my first encounter with Jack Moeran
[1] and the beginning of a close friendship which was to continue unbroken
until the tragic day when his body was found in the Kenmare River. (It may be
mentioned that this is not, strictly speaking, a river at all, but a long arm
of the sea.)
At the time of our
earliest acquaintance he was about to be demobilized after serving in the army
all through the war and, in the course of it, suffering a head wound to the
after-effects of which may perhaps be attributed a certain instability in his
character later on.
He told me that he was
a pupil of John Ireland, whom he always declared to be a most painstaking and
conscientious teacher. Ireland himself reciprocated Moeran's respect and
thought very highly of the latter's gifts as a composer. He had every right to
be proud of his pupil. One of the first of Jack's works to be played and
published was the Sonata for Violin and Piano (1923) given at a recital by Désiré
Defauw [2] and Harriet Cohen. It was rehearsed one evening before a small
audience in Harriet's music-room in Wyndham Place, and amongst those present
was Arnold Bennett [3], a true and sensitive music-lover, though he had, I
think, no technical knowledge of the art. There came a moment in the rehearsal
when Moeran rose and diffidently interrupted the players in order to suggest
some slight alteration in the nuance of their interpretation. Hearing strange
sounds beside me I turned to Bennett and found him in the throes of his curious
stammer, his head thrown back, eyes closed, and one hand sawing the air gently
to assist articulation. Then shrilly: ‘He-e-e-e's m-making " (pause-and
with a rush) " a noise like a composer!’
Jack, in those earlier
days, was a steady and prolific worker. Later his composition became
intermittent, though when he did get down to it he filled the pages of his
scores with astonishing rapidity and ease. He was one of the last of the true
romantics. All his work from first to last is characterized by a deep love of
nature. Certainly he was often derivative, and from time to time Delius,
Vaughan Williams and Sibelius all held sway over his medium of expression. He
wrote so fluently that he probably did not realize his occasional indebtedness
to his predecessors. I well remember his perturbation when I pointed out to him
that a passage in his symphony bore a remarkable resemblance to the famous
whirlwind in Tapiola. [3] But he had
his own distinctive musical personality as well, witness the unworldly
Western-Irish lights that seemed to glimmer down upon the pages of that same
symphony, the second movement of the violin concerto, the piano piece ‘The Lake
Island'; and witness too the delicately distilled suggestions of native folk
idiom heard in these works.
Music
and Letters April 1952 with minor edits
Footnotes
[1]
Ernest John Moeran (1894 -1950) was generally known to his friends as ‘Jack.’
[2]
Désiré Defauw (1885-1960) Belgian conductor and violinist.
[3]
Arnold Bennett (1867-1931) English novelist and journalist. Noted for his evocative
novels set in The Potteries, Staffordshire.
[4]
Tapiola, Op.112 is a tone poem by
Jean Sibelius composed in 1926. Tapio
was the animating spirit of the forest.
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