My first introduction to Joseph
Holbrooke’s music was his tone poem The
Birds of Rhiannon, op.87 (1925). This had been
released on a Lyrita record in 1979 coupled with Cyril Rootham’s Symphony No.1
(SRCS103 LP: SRCD269 CD). It was a number of years before I heard anything else
from his pen. In the meantime, I had discovered a copy of the composer’s
polemical study of Contemporary British Composers (1925) which I read
avidly. It is a book that I enjoyed in spite of its eccentricities and
intellectual confusion.
Back in 1979 it was difficult to
find out much about Holbrooke. There were the usual entries in Grove’s and
other musical dictionaries and encyclopaedias. I was fortunate in being able to
borrow G. Lowe’s Josef Holbrooke and his
Work (London, 1920) from the library. Yet this book had been written some
38 years before the composer’s death, so it could hardly claim to be up to
date. I had a copy of Sydney Grew’s Our Favourite
Musicians, from Stanford to Holbrooke
(Edinburgh, 1922) in my collection, which was interesting, but again only
covered the first half of his life, in a popular manner. In 1937 Josef Holbrooke: Various
Appreciations by Many Authors was published by the then-extant Holbrooke
Society. The contents included a selection of reprints from contemporary
journals as well as some specially written. They featured one or two famous
names including Ernest Newman and the composer Richard H. Walthew. It is a volume that I have not seen and is
scarce.
In
the post-war year’s interest in Holbrooke seems to have evaporated, with little
written in the academic or popular press. The first stirring of a revival
appeared in 1974 when Lewis Foreman and Graham Parlett produced a contemporary
discography published in Antique Record. It was not until the
nineteen-nineties that some articles began to appear in the musical press,
especially the British Music Society Journal and Newsletters. Rob Barnett has contributed an important appreciation
on MusicWeb International as well as publishing two major essays by
Michael Freeman – ‘Joseph Holbrooke Incognito’ and ‘Joseph Holbrooke and Wales’.
An interesting note by Philip Scowcroft examined the composer’s
light music. Since that time there has been a small number of CDs issued
dedicated to his music.
It
is possible to find countless contemporary references to Holbrooke in the
musical press as well as in many contemporary arts’ journals and daily newspapers.
However, there has been no previous attempt to give an overview of the
composer, his music and his musicological and political endeavors.
Joseph
Holbrooke: Composer, Critic and Musical Patriot is the first book to provide a detailed examination
of the composer.
There
is no need to present a detailed biographical sketch of Joseph Holbrooke in
this review. Nevertheless, it would not be amiss to give the briefest of
overviews which quotes part of the entry in Percy Scholes’ eternally useful Oxford
Companion to Music.
Holbrooke
was born in Croydon in 1878. He studied at the Royal Academy of Music and
continued with a busy professional life of ‘great activity and variety.’ His catalogue of music has works in every
genre including the major opera trilogy The Cauldron of Anwyn. Scholes concludes with a very astute
sentence: [Holbrooke] ‘has composed fluently and ably… sometimes without
sufficient self-criticism. As a controversialist he used to be both vigorous
and even violent. He found both creation and destruction agreeable diversions
and aimed at possessing a string of critics scalps as long as his list of opus
numbers.’ The composer died, virtually forgotten, in 1958.
The
first section of this book is one of the most valuable: the massive chronology
of ‘Holbrooke’s Life and Music’ assembled by Rob Barnett. It extends to more
than 30 pages. As an example, the entry for ‘August 1915’ notes the premiere of
The Enchanter, op.70 in Chicago,
a performance of the Imperial March, op.26 at Bournemouth under
Dan Godfrey and the a fugitive Romance op.59b for viola and piano in the
Wigmore Hall. Generally, entries include
details of when works were begun and completed, the composer’s travel
arrangements and holidays at home and abroad and the death of people associated
with Holbrooke. Naturally, any reception
history of Holbrooke’s music will have to be cross-checked with contemporary
programmes, adverts and reviews, but this chronology is critical to all
subsequent study of the composer.
The
first chapter, also by Rob Barnett, gives a concise overview of the composer,
both biographical and musical. It is essential reading before beginning to
explore the more specific and detailed essays in the remainder of this book.
Barnett has been an enthusiast of Holbrooke’s music since hearing the tone poem
Ulalume in 1984 and has spent much time researching and writing about
the composer and compiling a catalogue of his music.
David
Craik has investigated Holbrooke’s ‘Friendship with Granville Bantock.’ This
chapter examines this relationship by way of some 150 letters in the Bantock
Collection at the University of Birmingham. Holbrooke was fortunate in having
such a friend who was not fazed by his outbursts and often outrageous polemic.
Craik writes that Bantock ‘exercised a paternalistic and fraternal relationship
with Holbrooke’ from the first meeting at Liverpool in 1895 until Bantock’s death on 1946. Although the two composers had widely varying
musical aesthetics, both loved North Wales and represented this in their music.
Bantock ‘remained a bedrock of almost unconditional encouragement and affection
for Holbrooke throughout [his] turbulent career’. One (of many) interesting
things I learnt in this chapter was Holbrooke’s intention to write a biography
of Bantock. It is not known if the book was completed or if the draft survives.
Anne-Marie
Forbes, as well as being one of the book’s editors has contributed a chapter on
Joseph Holbrooke’s relationship with Thomas Evelyn Scott-Ellis, Eighth Lord
Howard de Walden. This larger than like ‘boy’s own’ character who had fought in
the Boer War, at Gallipoli, sailed yachts, raced speedboats, retained
racehorses, owned a Scottish island and some Kenyan forest and was passionate
about medieval history and Welsh culture. He became a patron of the composer
who himself was deeply influenced by Celticism. Ellis was to provide Holbrooke
with the libretto for his operatic trilogy. Equally important, he was to offer
financial security, opportunity for holidays in the Mediterranean and travel to
Africa and South America. It was Ellis’
influence on Holbrooke that caused the composer to write many Welsh works.
These are listed in Appendix 2. Through Ellis, Holbrooke came to share ‘a
romantic vision of an unspoiled land…populated with the heroes of mythology and
legend’.
This
chapter includes a major analysis of Holbrooke’ overblown, heart on sleeve, but
ultimately beautiful Piano Concerto: The Song of Gwym ap Nudd, which was
based on a poem by Ellis.
Joseph
Holbrooke’s chamber music is the subject of Paul Hopwood’s chapter which
examines its neglect and the influence of ‘mass-culture’. After noting the vast
amount of chamber music in Holbrooke’s catalogue, Hopwood laments that lack of
currently available recordings of these works. He considers that this music
suffers almost total neglect. Part of this may be down to the composer’s
difficult attitude towards performers and concert promoters. Hopwood argues that the problem is that the
chamber works may have been backward looking, reflecting a kind of ‘deliberate antiquarianism’
but further submits that it reflects the ‘emergence of music produced for the
mass consumer market. It is for that reason it came to be ‘disparaged and
ignored by the majority of the musical establishment.’ After a section on contemporary
critical response Hopwood examines the ‘Fantasie’ String Quartet no.1 in D
(op.17b) (1906) and the Clarinet Quintet in G major, op.27 no.2 (1910) in some
considerable technical detail complete with musical examples.
He
concludes with a section on Holbrooke’s ‘Time and the Rise of Mass Culture’
which sets the composer in the context of cheap music, the invention of the
gramophone, the ‘gothic’ literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. He considers that at this time there was a ‘crack’ opening up
between what was popular and what was regarded as being highbrow. It was Joseph
Holbrooke’s problem that to a large extent he sat on the ‘border between elite
and mass culture...’
To be continued...
Joseph
Holbrooke: Composer, Critic and Musical Patriot
Paul Watt and Anne-Marie Forbes, eds:
pp.380, published 2015
ISBN: 9780810888913
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Hardback £49.95 ($75.00)
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