Echoes of England, Music, and Mischief: Debussy’s 1909 Concert in London

J.C. Squire was a spirited figure in early 20th-century British literary circles - part poet, part critic, part cricket enthusiast. Born in Plymouth in 1884, he studied history at Cambridge and quickly made a name for himself with witty parodies and sharp reviews. He was a key player in the Georgian poetry movement, favouring traditional forms and lyrical style over the experimental trends of modernism. His own verse, often satirical or nostalgic, reflected a love of English countryside and classical themes.

Squire edited the influential London Mercury from 1919 to 1934, shaping literary tastes and championing emerging writers. He also wrote under the pseudonym Solomon Eagle, offering biting commentary in the New Statesman. Though his popularity waned as poetic fashions shifted, he remained a spirited voice in literary debates.

Outside the written page, Squire was known for his cricket team of literary ‘Invalids’ (made up of men who had been injured during the First World War) and his fondness for beer and banter. Knighted in 1933, he lived a colourful life that blended intellect with irreverence. J.C. Squire died in 1958. His collected poems were published posthumously in 1959, with an introduction by John Betjeman.

Sir John Squire’s The Honeysuckle and the Bee (1937) is a memoir disguised as a leisurely walk from London to Devonshire, where the journey meanders through memories rather than miles. Eschewing chronology, Squire lets recollections surface spontaneously – an inn conversation conjures Mussolini, a glimpse of Bath recalls Irish journalist and politician, T.P. O’Connor’s gossip, and a Cardiff tramp who ranks Keats alongside the English novelist Marie Corelli. The book is populated with a whimsical cast: Sibelius, Rupert Brooke, Schoenberg, beetles, and bar-room philosophers, all drifting in and out of the narrative like figures in a dream.

The charm lies not in structure but in tone - gracious, nostalgic, and distinctly English. Squire’s reflections evoke countryside lanes, hearty meals, and eccentric characters met along the way. When the final page turns, what lingers is not a timeline but a mood: of good talk, gentle landscapes, and the “rolling English road” that winds through memory as much as geography.

Squire writes here about a concert given by the Queen’s Hall Orchestra on 27 February 1909. The audience heard Beethoven’s Coriolan Overture, Siegfried’s Funeral March from Wagner’s Götterdämmerung and Brahms’s Violin Concerto, with Henri Marteau as the soloist. These were conducted by Henry Wood. Debussy conducted his own L’Après mid d’un Faune and the Three Nocturnes.

The author begins his description of the concert, by reminding the reader that he had been walking from Wells to Glastonbury, past the Tor…:

“The Tor with its monument can be seen all the way, and the expectation of that ancient place felt. But, as I cast my eye to east and west, and thought of the antiquity of the land, the pallid and urban, tense, and bearded face of Debussy came between me and the fields and hills; for I had once seen him. One thing leads to another. It was some day in the lost time before the war, and at the Queen’s Hall, that Debussy appeared to conduct a concert of his own works. The place was full, and somebody had taken me to a box whence the conductor’s face could be seen in profile. The year I do not know, nor whether it was after or before that first production of Pelléas et Mélisande at Covent Garden, [1] a perfect marriage of words and music which seems to memory to have been one monotony of pale arms under dark trees by old crumbling towers or in torchlit cavernous corridors, with wan voices lamenting over an existence in which the blind lead the blind from one dread enigma to another.

At any rate, L’Apres midi d’un Faune had for some years been familiar to the adherents of Sir Henry Wood, [2] joining that company of popular favourites, such as 1812, Finlandia, L’ Apprenti Sorcier, the Casse-Noisette Suite [3] and the tone-poems of Richard Strauss, which still stoutly hold the Promenade fort to-day. For some years, fascinated by what seemed the revolutionary extension of symbolism and impression from literature to music (for music crossed the Channel slowly then), young women, with mildly Socialist opinions and hair parted Madonna-wise, had been yearningly playing, in the candle-lit, brown-paper-walled drawing-rooms of Hampstead and Chelsea, those wistful. Mysterious piano pieces about cathedrals under the sea and rain falling on places that never were, full of the sound of elfin horns, muffled bells and little winds wandering about the whole tone scale. [4] At any rate, London was ready for him.

The place was packed, and the orchestra crowded in their serried tiers; amid a roar of applause Debussy stepped down to his desk, and the impression his face and mien made on me was unforgettable, there was such an intensity about him. He stood rigidly and his head was black and ivory, a wave of black hair falling over his right brow, his moustache and beard black, his face chiselled in ivory - deep sunken eyes with shadows under them, hollow shadowed cheeks, set mouth - a face bearing the marks of illness, of incessant labour, of passionate exactitude.

After a few bars of one of the “items ” (perhaps the first, but certainly one of those short pieces such as Nuages, Fétes and La Mer) [5] his face suddenly contorted, he flung his baton on the ground, and simultaneously spat out some expression, undoubtedly contumelious, but inaudible in detail and probably incomprehensible to the orchestra, who were English. There was a pause as heart-stopping as a scream; and then the audience rustled like reeds. An appalling mistake had been made. Somebody, let us say the tenth bassoon, had either missed a note, played the wrong note, or played the right note in the wrong place. If that unhappy instrumentalist is still alive I daresay he is the only man except myself who remembers the disaster.

But I remember also, when the baton had been resumed, the pale face composed, and the piece started all over again, thinking to myself, “How dreadful it must be to take things so seriously! And, my unhappy genius, who on earth in the audience would have noticed or minded such an error in such a shimmering tissue of sound any more than he would notice in a reproduction of a landscape by Monet if one pale pink spot had appeared in a corner instead of one pale green one.

Sir John Squire, The Honeysuckle and the Bee, Evergreen Books, 1940, p.212f

Notes
[1] The premiere of Debussy’s opera Pelléas et Mélisande at Covent Garden was given on 21 May 1909.
[2] Henry Wood had conducted the first performance of L’Apres midi d’un Faune on 20 August 1904 during a Promenade Concert at the Queen’s Hall.
[3] By Jean Sibelius, Paul Dukas and Pyotr Tchaikowsky, respectively.
[4] Patronisingly refers to Debussy’s Preludes published in 1910.
[5] Probably Squire meant to write Sirènes, the third movement of the Three Nocturnes. The mistake referred to in the text, occurred during Fétes.