Introducing Constant Lambert Part I

On the evening of Monday 27 February 1928, the audience of the BBC wireless service heard the premiere performance of Constant Lambert’s The Rio Grande. The composer conducted the Wireless Chorus and Orchestra with the piano obligato played by Angus Morrison. This was part of ‘A Light Orchestral Concert’ which included works by Ambroise Thomas, Giuseppe Verdi and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.

The contemporary Radio Times explained to the readers that this new work is “a setting of a poem by Edith (sic) Sitwell, beginning – ‘On the Rio Grande/They don’t dance no Sarabande.’ What they dance instead is suggested in the music which, we are told, brings in fox-trot and Charleston rhythms.” Apart from a misquote of the poem and naming the wrong poet, it was in fact Sacheverell Sitwell, this is a succinct precis of this remarkable piece.

What was extraordinary about The Rio Grande was that Lambert had managed to synthesise several stylistic parameters: “African American music, including ragtime and blues, Latin American music, and exoticism.”  Biographer Richard Shead notes the “obvious” influences such as “jazz, Spanish military marches and tangos, Stravinsky in the rhythms and Delius in the harmonies.” It is not surprising that a link is made to George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. This had been first heard in Great Britain on 15 June 1925, in a live BBC broadcast from the Savoy Hotel with Gershwin as soloist and accompanied by the Savoy Orpheans and the Savoy Havana Band. It is not known if Constant Lambert heard this transmission, however two years later, he was to take the American’s “attempts to amalgamate elements of jazz and symphonic music” and create a new-minted British work.

Hubert Foss, in the programme note for the London public concert premiere of Rio Grande wrote: “The words are used as a background of atmosphere. They are something for the chorus to sing in the musical part it plays in the work. They are even subjected occasionally to word painting. Their picture is the picture the music gives: that is their whole connection, a very close one, with the music." Elsewhere Foss stated that in The Rio Grande there is “something more than English in this music, a feeling of the South and its blazing sun. He has his feet on English soil, but his mind escapes.”

Constant Lambert, with his The Rio Grande, had written one of two game changing British works of the 1930s. The other was William Walton’s Belshazzar’s Feast (1930-31).

Brief Biography of Constant Lambert:

• [Leonard] Constant Lambert was born at the St Clement's Nursing Home, Fulham, London, on 23 August 1905.
• Educated at Christ’s Hospital, Horsham, Sussex, between 1915 and 1922.
• Won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music, attending between 1922-25. His teachers were Herbert Fryer, piano, Ralph Vaughan Williams and R.O. Morris, composition, and Malcolm Sargent, conducting.
• Wrote his first major ballet score, Romeo and Juliet for Diaghilev. It was premiered in Monte Carlo on 4 May 1926.
• Best-known work, The Rio Grande for chorus, piano and orchestra was premiered on 27 February 1928.
• Appointed conductor of the Camargo Society in 1930. This lasted until June 1933 when the society was disbanded.
• Married Florence (Flo) Chuter on 5 August 1931. The only child, Christopher (Kit), was born on 11 May 1935.
• His idiosyncratic but lively and provocative study of the then-contemporary scene, Music Ho! A Study of Music in Decline was published during 1934.
• Lambert conducted the Vic-Wells (later the Sadler's Wells) from 1935 to 1947.
• His choral magnum opus, Summer’s Last Will and Testament was premiered on 29 January 1936, at the Queen’s Hall, London.
• Began an affair with the ballet dancer Margot Fonteyn in 1937. It lasted until 1947.
• The ballet Horoscope was premiered on 27 January 1938, at the Sadler’s Wells Theatre.
• Escaped capture in the Netherlands whilst on tour with the Sadler’s Wells ballet in 1940.
• Was associated with E.N.S.A. (Entertainments National Service Association) during the Second World War. In 1942, he was on the C.E.M.A. (Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts, predecessor of the Arts Council of Great Britain) music panel.
• Married his second wife, Isabel Agnes Delmer, née Nicholas, on 7 October 1947.
• Last major composition, the ballet Tiresias, first performed on 9 July 1951.
• Constant Lambert died at the London Clinic, 20 Devonshire Place, London on 21 August 1951. Cause of death was “broncho-pneumonia and undiagnosed diabetes mellitus,” complicated by acute alcoholism.

Constant Lambert was a complex character, who excelled in numerous different fields: composition, art appreciation, literature, and practical musicianship. In all he exhibited exceptional talent. Sadly, his composing was interrupted by his extensive conducting duties and the writing of a considerable amount of journalism.

Lambert’s tastes ranged widely and embraced Liszt, Meyerbeer, Purcell, Sousa, and jazz. As a conductor he interpreted a wide range of scores, in the ballet theatre as well as the concert hall. He was especially fond of encouraging less well-known composers.

His personal life gave him many problems, especially ill health, overindulgence in alcohol and difficulties with personal relationships. Yet, despite this, his legacy is secure as a major-minor composer. Furthermore, Lambert’s impact on English ballet was immense and ought not to be ignored by historians.

Exploring Constant Lambert’s Music

Constant Lambert’s catalogue is quite limited in extent, with around only twenty works published. He destroyed many of his student efforts. His earliest surviving piece is the Two Songs on poems by Sacheverell Sitwell, written in 1923. They remain in manuscript.

Lambert’s first ballet score, Prize Fight: Realistic Ballet in one act is less ‘realistic,’ but nods to the music hall or the “aesthetics” of Erik Satie and Jean Cocteau. Despite being completed, it was never presented as a ballet. Its first performance had to wait until 1969, when it was heard during that year’s Bromsgrove Festival.

Subsequent ballet scores followed. The great impresario Sergei Diaghilev commissioned the 20-year-old Lambert to compose a major score for the Ballets Russes. Romeo and Juliet was penned between 1924-25 and was premiered on 4 May 1926, by the Diaghilev Ballet company at Monte Carlo. There were disagreements between Lambert and Diaghilev over a change of scenario, the sets, and the costumes. He tried to withdraw his score; it had to be placed under police guard until after the premiere.

There was less controversy over Pomona: a ballet in one act (1926) which was first heard as a Divertimento at the Chelsea Music Club on 16 November 1926. The premiere of the ballet was given in Buenos Aires, Argentine on 9 September 1927. The book was based on the classical Ovidian story of Pomona and Vertumnus. Ten years later, Lambert finished his ballet, Horoscope (1937) (see below). His final original ballet score was Tiresias (1950-51), commissioned for the Festival of Britain. This was an exploration of various classical themes of sexual ambiguity, shape shifting and an argument about which of the sexes enjoys the “physical act” the more. It is scored for an orchestra without strings, which enhances its acerbic sound. It was premiered at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden on 9 July 1951 by the Sadler’s Wells Ballet.

Other contributions to the ballet repertoire were arrangements of many other composers’ music. These include Harlequin in the Street (Couperin), Apparitions (Liszt), Les Patineurs (Meyerbeer) and Ballabile (Chabrier).

Lambert wrote little for the piano. Best known is the jazz infused, lugubrious, Elegiac Blues (1927) dedicated to the American cabaret singer Florence Mills. Jazz does pervade the Piano Sonata (1928-29) but reflects the “outbursts of violence” and the “melancholy” side of that genre. It is powerful and displays considerable invention and formal subtlety.

In 1924, Lambert was busy on his Concerto for piano, two trumpets, timpani, and strings. It remained incomplete at the time of his death. The sketches were edited by Giles Easterbrook, and Edward Shipley. It was premiered at St John’s Smith Square, London on 2 March 1988. Ian Lace (MusicWeb International) discerned the influence of Prokofiev, Ravel, Poulenc, Stravinsky, and Delius. This is a remarkable effort for a nineteen-year-old “college boy.”  It is a vibrant work that deserves its place in the repertoire. Seven years later, Lambert would finish his Concerto for piano and nine instruments (1931). This was a tribute to Peter Warlock who had died the previous year. Listeners looking for a reprise of his more popular jazzier inspirations may be disappointed. To be sure, the Manchester Guardian reported that it “[comes] recognisably from the pen that wrote The Rio Grande, but with added maturity and astringency which will probably prevent it from becoming popular.”  The Concerto, which is in three movements, is unusual in that the finale is, in fact, the slow movement. The overall sweep of the work is from high spirits to gloom.

Summer’s Last Will and Testament: A Masque for orchestra, chorus, and baritone solo (1932-35), is one of Lambert’s most important works. It sets texts by the Elizabethan author Thomas Nashe. Richard Shead has explained that Nashe’s text is “ostensibly concerned with the seasons, but their underlying theme is the precariousness of life in Elizabethan London and the ever-present danger of the Plague.”  Historically, Summer’s Last Will got off to a bad start. It was premiered on 29 January 1936, only nine days after the death of King George V. The public and the critics were in no mood for what appeared a long morbid take on “mortality.” It has languished ever since: it was given its one and only recording in 1991.

Other important orchestral pieces were a Aubade Héroïque for orchestra (1942) which was inspired by Lambert’s experience of waiting to be evacuated from Holland in 1940. Its mood owes much to Ralph Vaughan Williams. Richard Shead explains that the Music for Orchestra (1927) is one of the few examples of Lambert’s genuinely abstract works. Despite its dull title, this two-movement symphonic study is full of romance, imaginative scoring, and supressed intensity.

Towards the end of his life, Lambert composed music for the film industry: the documentary Merchant Seamen (1940) and the feature Anna Karenina (1947).

To be continued…

With thanks to the English Music Festival’s journal, Spirited, where this essay was first published.