Introducing Patrick Hadley’s The Trees So High (1931) Part I

In his thesis, Jonathan Daniel Strommen Campbell (2015, p.9) suggests that the impact of Delius on the music of Patrick Hadley “is more often in his themes of nature mysticism and the nostalgic love of the landscape of Britain. But there are concrete, musical examples of Delius’s influence….”

In 1931, Hadley completed his first important essay, the Symphonic Ballad in A minor: The Trees So High. Despite not being either a pastiche or a parody of Delius, it exhibits several fundamental characteristics of the elder man.

This essay is not an analytical study, but an attempt to characterise various responses that include references to the music of Fred. Delius. I include a brief biography of Patrick Hadley, as well as an overview of his catalogue.

The Composer

Patrick (“Paddy”) Arthur Sheldon Hadley was born in Cambridge on 5 March 1899. His father, William Sheldon Hadley, was at that time a fellow of Pembroke College. His mother, Edith Jane, was the daughter of the Rev. Robert Foster, Chaplain to the Royal Hibernian Military School in Dublin.

Patrick studied initially at St Ronan's Preparatory School at West Worthing and then at Winchester College. The First World War interrupted his education. He enlisted in the army and was commissioned as a 2^nd Lieutenant in the Royal Field Artillery. He managed to survive unscathed until the last weeks of the war when he received an injury that resulted in his right leg being amputated below the knee. This had a profound effect on his confidence. It led him to drink more than was wise; alcohol functioned as relief for the considerable pain he was constantly in.

After the War, Hadley went up to Pembroke College, Cambridge. He was fortunate to study with both Charles Wood and the sadly undervalued English composer, Cyril Rootham. He was awarded Mus.B. in 1922, and an MA in 1925. Hadley then went to the Royal College of Music (RCM) in London. Here he came under the influence of Ralph Vaughan Williams for composition and Adrian Boult and Malcolm Sargent for conducting. He won the Sullivan prize in 1924, at that time the princely sum of £5 (about £250 now). His contemporaries at the RCM included Constant Lambert and Gordon Jacob.

Hadley became a member of the RCM staff in 1925 and taught composition. He became acquainted with Delius (see below), E.J. Moeran, Sir Arnold Bax, William Walton, Alan Rawsthorne and Herbert Howells. In fact, his friends were a litany of all that was best in English Music at that time.

In 1938 he was offered a Fellowship of Gonville and Caius College in Cambridgeshire and a position as lecturer at Cambridge University. A great deal of his time was spent administrating the music faculty. However, there was still time available for composition.

During the Second World War, Hadley deputised for Boris Ord (who was on active service) as conductor and director of the Cambridge University Music Society. There he introduced numerous works, including Delius' Appalachia and The Song of the High Hills. He was keen to promote a wide range of music - including the formation of a Gilbert and Sullivan Society.

Hadley was elected to the Chair of Music at Cambridge University in 1946. He retained this post until his retirement in 1962. Several of the students he taught have gone on to remarkable things: choirmaster and academic, Philip Ledger, conductor, choirmaster and organist, David Lumsden and the musicologist, Peter le Huray. In 1962 he retired to his house at Heacham. He wished to pursue his interest in folk song collection. Latterly he struggled with throat cancer, and this caused many of his activities to be suspended. Patrick Hadley died on 17 December 1973: he was 74 years old.

The Music

Patrick Hadley’s catalogue of published music is small. His best-known pieces are the anthems My Beloved Spake (1936) for choir and organ (or orchestra), and I sing of a Maiden (1936). His large-scale works include the present The Trees So High, (1931), and the cantata setting Keats’s La Belle Dame sans Merci, (1935). Hadley’s magnum opus is The Hills (1944), featuring his own text for soprano, tenor, baritone, choir, and orchestra. Other significant achievements include the incidental music for Sophocles’ Antigone (1939), One Morning in Spring: sketch for small orchestra (1942) and the cantata Fen and Flood (1955). In 2019, the early unpublished tone poem Kinder Scout (1923) was released on the Chandos label. One of his major tasks were arrangements made for the Caius Chorus. These extended from Verdi's Stabat Mater to Waltzing Matilda. As Eric Wetherell explains (1997, p.171), the list of these is “inevitably incomplete. [Hadley] dashed them off and later discarded them.”

Patrick Hadley absorbed a number of influences. He was a confirmed “Wagnerite” coupled with an appreciation of Debussy and Ravel. The impact of the latter is often heard in his orchestration and “harmonic colouring” (Wetherell, 1997, p.51). It is hardly surprising that his composition teacher at the RCM, Vaughan Williams, had a bearing on his style. Nevertheless, Hadley never fully subscribed to the folk song revival. His works were never simply “fantasias” on folk tunes, played again, louder. He often used the musical characteristics of folk song but developed them with subtlety and originality. Hadley’s compositions are typically lyrical in sound and rarely rely on angular melodies or sharp dissonances for effect. Modernist techniques derived from Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School and their post-War successors, find no place in his achievement. 

Another crucial influence on Hadley was the landscape, especially the Fen Country, the Peak District, and parts of Ireland. Nature mysticism was a characteristic he shared with Delius.

Hadley and Delius

Eric Wetherell (1997, p.25f) explains that Hadley first met “the composer whose music always meant so much to him” at the Delius Festival in London held during October 1929. Delius was on one of his rare trips to England. He was staying in the Langham Hotel, Langham Place. Composer and impresario, Balfour Gardiner took Hadley to the hotel to meet him. Wetherell explains that the following spring, during the Easter Break, he contrived to visit Delius at Grez-sur-Loing, once again in the company of Balfour Gardiner. Eric Fenby (1936, 1981, p.92f) recorded that “it was decided that we should bottle the white wine, so Balfour Gardiner with boyish enthusiasm, sat on a log pouring out the wine…whilst Hadley corked [the bottles] with a machine, and I wired them.” And then there was “a dangerous escapade involving the removal of an unsightly branch overhanging the river.” (Wetherell, 1997, p.25)

Hadley’s chief service to Delius was his recovery of the full score holograph and orchestral parts of Koanga. It had been taken to London during 1914 and was subsequently mislaid. That said, there seem to be various versions of this story, involving other people. Giving Hadley the benefit of the doubt, it was found by him in 1930. He explains in a letter to William Randall:

There is not much to tell about my running to earth the score of Koanga. I had been staying at Grez where I managed to elicit all the remembered data about when & where it was last seen et cetera. I forget most of the details, but I do remember putting two & two together and putting the chances fairly high that it might be amongst the extensive stock of the Goodwin & Tabb Hire Library. I happened to be in constant touch with this Firm & its personnel, so on return to London I hastened to 34 Percy Street W.C.1, their then premises, and expatiated the situation. They wouldn't let me search in person, but they put 2 or 3 men onto it who laid their hands on it after a weekend's hunt. I post-hasted over by that night's boat and delivered it the following mid-day. (Letter from Hadley to William Randel, 24 December 1962, cited Randel, 1971, p.153).

 

Wetherell elaborates the story by explaining that Hadley in fact made two trips to Grez, the first with the parts and a second two weeks later with the full score. (Wetherell, 1997, p.26).

On 23 April 1930, Jelka Delius wrote to Percy Grainger: “We had an amusing visit from Balfour and Patrick Hadley, the young composer, whom we liked very much.” She recounted to Grainger the story of the recovery of the Koanga score but suggested that Peter Warlock had found the parts and that May Harrison had brought over the score when she visited Grez to play through the Violin Sonata in the presence of Delius. (Carley, 1988, p.365). It is a mystery that may never be fully resolved.

Finally, Balfour Gardiner and Hadley were due to visit the Delius household again in the spring of 1932: this had to be abandoned because of an outbreak of influenza at Grez.  

Bibliography:

1. Campbell, Jonathan Daniel Strommen, The Choral Music of Frederick Delius (1862-1934) And its Influence on the Choral Music of Early Twentieth-Century British Composers: A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the North Dakota State University of Agriculture and Applied Science, Fargo, North Dakota, 2015.
2. Carley, Lionel, Delius: A Life in Letters, 1909-1934, Scolar Press, Aldershot, 1988.
3. Fenby, Eric, Delius as I Knew Him, Dover Edition, London, 1936, 1981.
4. Palmer, Christopher, “Patrick Hadley: A Note on the church music,” Musical Times, November 1973.
5. Palmer, Christopher, “Patrick Hadley: The Man and His Music,” Music & Letters, April 1974.
6. Palmer, Christopher, Delius: Portrait of a Cosmopolitan, Duckworth, London, 1976.
7. Randel, William, “‘Koanga’ and its Libretto,” Music & Letters, April 1971.
8. Wetherell, Eric, Paddy: The Life and the Music of Patrick Hadley, Thames Publishing, London, 1997.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to MusicWeb International where the biographical details of Patrick Hadley were first published during 2000.

With thanks to the Delius Society Journal Autumn 2023, No.174: 19-28 where this essay was first published.

To be continued…