Hugh Evelyn Wortham (1884–1959) was a British biographer, journalist, and music critic known for his wide-ranging cultural commentary and historical insight. Educated at King's College, Cambridge, Wortham began his career as a foreign correspondent in Egypt before becoming a prolific author and columnist. His writings spanned biography, politics, and religion, with notable works including A Musical Odyssey (1924), reflecting his deep engagement with music criticism. From 1934 until his death, he penned the "London Day by Day" column in the Daily Telegraph under the pseudonym "Peterborough," blending wit with sharp observation.
The present essay was published in the Apollo journal, published during August 1928. This is a leading monthly art magazine, founded in 1925, covering visual arts from antiquity to contemporary, with scholarly depth. It features exhibition reviews, art-world news, collector profiles, interviews, and expert commentary, serving as a vital resource for art historians, curators, and enthusiasts.
THE remark of a Viennese, to whom I was recently talking about music, that he considered John Ireland to be the most characteristically English of our composers induces me to devote these lines to his work, the more readily since Ireland has never been estimated quite at his true worth. At one time he enjoyed what was perhaps an excessive popularity through some of his songs, which showed the influence of his master, Stanford, [1] himself the greatest song-writer this country has produced, certainly since Arne and probably since Purcell, and through one or two piano pieces - Chelsea Reach [2] being the best known - of an impressionist tendency. Fame, however, which is easily won is as easily lost, and John Ireland, who has not, I think, produced any best-sellers comparable with these written a decade ago, has never escaped association with the rather facile success he then achieved. The result is that an extremely conscientious and painstaking artist has been, to a certain extent, misjudged by the smaller public upon which ultimately rests the responsibility of making reputations. Yet, in many ways there is no more interesting composer in England today. He is more definitely in the main stream of our music than any of his contemporaries, more definitely than Bax, Holst or Vaughan Williams; he is more typically English than any of these, and hence perhaps the growing popularity of his chamber music, of which the two sonatas for piano and violin enjoy already a European reputation. [3] Their melodic freshness, their clear, logical construction, based on a style which in these examples at any rate avoids either intense emotionalism (a German foible) or over-elaboration of craftsmanship (a French weakness), make them attractive to any audience at a first hearing, and further acquaintanceship only strengthens one’s first pleasurable feelings.
One of the reasons why John
Ireland is apt to be undervalued is that the bulk of his music is small; he has
not a great number of published works above his name. For a man of fifty [4]
this may be, and often is, put down to a weakness in the inspirational impulse.
Fecundity in the past has always been looked on as a merit, whether the
offspring were of a man’s loins or a man’s brains. But when one looks through
the catalogues of the masters, and thinks of the long “opus” list, with its
consequent lack of self-criticism, that has marked almost every composer, both
great and small, one begins to see that birth-control might be as usefully
applied in the one case as in the other. How much better it would have been for
music if Schubert had halved his work and given nothing to the world that had
not the true impress of his genius! What is true of the mightiest is still
truer of the second raters, amongst whom move Schumann, and truest of all of
the great crowd of composers whose music has returned to the quarry of silence
from which they hewed it so easily. How many of Raff’s two hundred odd works
[5] have you ever heard? Do you know that Spohr, once the idol of his age,
wrote nine symphonies, seventeen violin concertos, and thirty-three string
quartets? [6] With these examples before one, the restraint of John Ireland in
having suppressed all the work he composed before he was thirty-four seems
highly commendable. He understands, at any rate, that self-criticism is a
valuable asset in the artist. What he wrote in early manhood his more mature
judgment found wanting. So, he withdrew it, and the consequence is that we have
practically nothing of his published which was composed more than some sixteen
years ago. Amongst this collection there are only two orchestral pieces, a
prelude dating from 1913, The Forgotten Rite, [7] which is an example of
the “nature-worship mood” that has almost degenerated into a convention amongst
modern English composers, and a symphonic rhapsody, Mai-Dun, [8] written
eight years ago, that does not often, however, find its way into the programmes
of our symphony concerts. Ireland, so far, has not shown himself to have any
great interest in the problems of colour and timbres which present themselves
to the symphonist, and so he does not take kindly to the orchestra.
To be concluded…
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