THE SIR ARNOLD BAX WEB SITE

A NOTE ON BAX’S NORTHERN BALLADS

by Graham Parlett

In about 1951 Bax was asked by Christopher Whelen whether he thought the two Northern Ballads ‘can or should be played together’ (see the questionnaire reproduced in Dennis Andrews, Cuchulan among the Guns, 1998, plate [15]). Bax replied laconically: ‘I think they might go well together’, which suggests that he had not originally thought of them as being a pair, much less the first two parts of a trilogy ending with the Prelude for a Solemn Occasion. Some Bax experts, including Lewis Foreman, Colin Scott-Sutherland, and Vernon Handley, do indeed regard the Prelude as a ‘Third Northern Ballad’, but, having listened to all three works played one after the other, as in the Radio 3 broadcast on 19 December 2006, I remain unconvinced by the view that they constitute a trilogy or even, as Vernon Handley has suggested, a quasi-symphony; in fact I find it difficult to hear the Prelude as a tone-poem at all. If Bax had wanted to give the title ‘Northern Ballad No.3’ to anything, the Legend of 1944 would have been a much better candidate.  

My views on the matter are also based on the chronology of the surviving manuscript scores. British Library Additional Manuscript 54750 consists of the short (or piano) scores of what became the First Northern Ballad and the Prelude for a Solemn Occasion. The Prelude was the first to be composed: it is dated at the end ‘Oct 26th | 1927’, while the Ballad is dated ‘Nov 1927’. The two scores are thus contiguous and written on the same kind of manuscript paper but on separate sections of conjugate leaves. The Ballad has no title and comprises six folios of paper, i.e. twelve pages, though they are unpaginated. The Prelude is headed ‘III’ and also comprises six folios: twelve pages, which are paginated from 31 to 42. The ‘III’ suggests that the score was intended as the third movement of a three-movement work. That the short-score Ballad was intended as the first movement of such a work seems to me doubtful. For a start, it postdates ‘III’, though that in itself is not an insuperable problem since Bax did occasionally write multi-movement works in which the movements were composed in a different order from how they appear in the final score: the third movement of the Concertante for Three Solo Instruments and Orchestra (1948-9), for example, was written before the second movement. But since the Ballad is unpaginated, it is unlikely to be part of a score containing a movement (‘III’) that is paginated 31-42; Bax must surely have had two other paginated movements already completed in order to know that the first page of ‘III’ should be paginated ‘31’. Furthermore, if the Ballad, which occupies twelve pages, is taken as the first movement, then the missing second movement would have had to be paginated 13 to 30, i.e. eighteen pages, which would have made it three times as long as, for instance, the piano-score slow movement of the Fifth Symphony. This suggests that the first movement of the work of which ‘III’ was intended as the finale would have been much longer than the First Northern Ballad.  

For the record, the chronology of the orchestral versions is as follows:

Northern Ballad No.1: The manuscript full score is undated but the work is listed in the fifth edition of Grove as ‘1931’ and it was first performed on 14 November that year.

Prelude for a Solemn Occasion: The full score is dated at the end: ‘Morar. | Feb 1933’. The first performance did not take place until nearly thirty years after Bax’s death, on 23 September 1982 . It was around this time that the name ‘Northern Ballad No.3’ first came into circulation, though Colin Scott-Sutherland, in his 1973 biography of Bax (p.149), does refer to ‘The Northern Ballad marked III’.

Northern Ballad No.2: The full score is dated at the end: ‘Morar | Dec-1933 | Jan 1934’. It is unfortunate that the short score of this work is missing. Bax generally did his orchestrations in Morar, but there is no way of knowing when the work was originally composed: it may have been in 1933 or it may have been earlier.  

Despite my opinion that the Prelude for a Solemn Occasion is no Northern Ballad, I do concede that its title is unfortunate and may lead the unwary listener to expect something gloomier than is in fact the case. One of the Oxford English Dictionary’s definitions of ‘solemn’ is indeed ‘grave, sober, deliberate, slow’, which may suit the earlier parts of the score; but the work becomes more animated as it progresses, and here we should bear in mind that another of the OED’s definitions is ‘festive’. The mood is in fact quite similar to Glazunov’s Solemn Procession of 1907, which is jubilant and celebratory throughout, and to his Cortège solonnel of 1910, which is more ponderous but again not remotely sombre. Nevertheless, I suspect that the name ‘Northern Ballad No.3’ will be impossible to dislodge, having by now become what the great lexicographer Henry Fowler would have called a ‘sturdy indefensible’.  

Copyright Graham Parlett