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THE SYMPHONIES OF ARNOLD BAX
A Radio Talk by Peter J.
Pirie
THE SIR ARNOLD BAX WEB SITE
Last Modified September 27,
1998
Note: This talk was
broadcast by BBC Radio 3 in 1973 to mark the 20th anniversary of the
death of Bax in October 1953. The talk preceded a broadcast of a
studio recording by Norman Del Mar and the BBCSO of Bax's First
Symphony.
Peter J. Pirie on Bax's
Symphonies
If I was speaking ten or fifteen
years ago, I would probably have begun by trying to disassociate Bax
from romanticism altogether, so damaging was the label 'a brazen
romantic' that Bax himself tied around his own neck. But today we
have seen such a fantastic revival of the fortunes of romantic music
that to do so would appear almost perverse. Yet I think that Bax's
reckless remark is still a dangerous half-truth. And those who
approach his music in the hope of hearing something picturesque and
easy to listen to will be badly disappointed and very puzzled. The
critics who seized on this phrase in ignorance of his music were
taken aback by the actual sound of it when the
majority of his orchestral works came out on record and especially
by the sound of the slow movement of the first symphony.
A self-indulgent romantic,
belated or otherwise, could not have written this bleak expansive
music which makes Holst's Egdon Heath sound overpopulated and almost
lush. Again here was an English composer in 1922
writing a symphonic finale with some affinity to Stravinsky's then
new and revolutionary Le Sacre du Printemps. Bax was in fact an
enormously complicated man and a very complex composer and any sort
of pigeonholing
will only result in doing him less than justice.
Most of his music does not
sound particularly English if we take Vaughan Williams and John
Ireland as typical English composers. Perhaps this difficulty of
placing him is one reason why he has been consistently
underestimated from the beginning. You have only to listen to the
stark challenge of the opening of the First Symphony to realise that
here is a charlatan or a very big man. By its very scope and power
and the enormity of its gestures, the music seems to make tremendous
claims and to admit any of those claims is to place him amongst the
greatest of English composers by the side of Elgar and Vaughan
Williams and I think that this is in fact where he belongs. Although
his First Symphony is the first of a numbered sequence of seven, it
was not the first to be written. There were two youthful symphonies
before it. This is important since Bax found it difficult to find
direction to begin with and these early works which include a
Symphony in F absorbed in other things and a symphony called Spring
Fire which is still extant together with his most popular work, the
symphonic poem Tintagel, indicate that his musical options
were open in 1916 and he might have taken another path. But the
strident and desolate First Symphony with its savage conflict marks
the spot where Bax traumatically found direction.
Three things happened to him
and the one that had the most bearing on this Symphony was the
Easter Rising. Bax was not Irish and had no Celtic ancestry. He came
of Surrey Quaker stock, though his family was originally
of Flemish origin, but one of his youthful enthusiasms was the
Celtic revival and this brought him into contact with several of the
leading figures of the Irish rebellion in those early years. Like
Yeats, he saw it through romantic
eyes -- imagining that he walked where motley was worn. Then the
romantic dream turned to terrible reality that Easter of 1916 and
his friend Padraig Pearse was shot with the other rebels at the end
of the rising. Bax was shaken
to the foundations of his personality. As far as he was concerned
the terrible beauty that was born was that of the First Symphony. So
Bax came into his own as a composer by way of the most dramatic
possible example of a
conflict that was to haunt him all his life. The sudden incursion of
tragic reality into romantic dreams …. into beauty …. into art.
This is not the romantic
vision which dwells in unreality to the end. Bax was a realist and a
most compassionate man and the violent death of his friend coincided
with the breakdown of his marriage and his realisation that his
great technical fluency was a trap as well as a tool. The
austerity of his First Symphony was as much an attempt to deal with
his over-elaborate technique as it was a symptom of inner conflict
and a memorial to outer strife. A
journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step and Bax's
initial step, which was to take him on a spiritual journey through
seven symphonies over seventeen years, was the short pregnant theme
of five notes with which the
First Symphony begins. This theme also forms the basis for the grim
march with which it ends. It was to haunt his music for the rest of
his life
No other set of symphonies by
any other composer forms such a psychological and musical unity. In
the first two symphonies, Bax establishes several types of themes
which recur throughout the seven -- not transcribed
exactly but a set of types which recur in many forms - most
important is the type known to Bax as 'liturgical' which sounds like
a scrap of Gregorian chant. Another is a rising figure of more than
an octave in the bass which
serves to start the process of development and another is a purely
rhythmic figure derived from the basic rhythm of some principal
theme. This latter is seen most clearly in the First and Third
Symphonies when we add to this the
typical Baxian lyrical melody often of poignant beauty and various
permutations of the theme which opens the First Symphony we have a
fairly comprehensive roll-call of Bax's theme types. They appear as
if persons in a
drama in all the symphonies except perhaps for the last. The
conflict which is exposed in the first rages throughout the Second
which ends in an upheaval of total destruction. It is muted and
veiled in the lovely Third which ends in
troubled peace. The Fourth symphony ends in a triumphal march which
seems to be a kind of interlude outside the main drama.
In the Fifth the conflict
begins to storm again and in its finale, two elements collide: pagan
abandon and Bax's most extensive use of a liturgical theme. The
liturgical theme wins in an epilogue in which it is shouted by the
whole
orchestra. I have always thought that it is a bit like being bawled
out by a bishop
The climax of all his
symphonies comes in the Sixth. The conflict rages unchecked until it
bursts in the last movement with a sound like the passing of worlds.
There follows an epilogue in which the striving and liturgical
themes are united in a peace so final that one feels that there is
nothing more to be said.
The Seventh, somewhat
incongruously commissioned by the American people for the World Fair
of 1939, contains the usual fingerprints only as passing shadows and
is calm and serene in mood. It is itself an epilogue.
Don't believe that when the
terrible march has thundered itself to an end in the [First
Symphony] that you are about to hear that this was indeed any sort
of end. It was only the beginning of one of the most eventful
journeys in
music.
Peter J. Pirie
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