Journalism
By
- ‘An Interview with Robert Saxton', Musical Opinion, July/August 2010, pp.20-1.
- ‘A Critic’s Collection’ [on Bayan Northcott’s The Way We Listen Now], May 2009.
- ‘A Critic’s Collection’ [on Bayan Northcott’s The Way We Listen Now], May 2009.
- ‘Tensions in the Territory’ [on Holloway and Wood’s collected essays], October 2008.
- ‘Musings on Williamson’, April 2008. read here
- ‘Timothy Craig Harrison: Christe qui Lux es et Dies’, Organ Magazine, March 2008, p.42.
- ‘Visions of Reality: David Matthews at 60’, The Musical Times, Spring 2003, pp.33-9. read
About
- Ben Hogwood, ‘Interview with Thomas Hyde', classicalsource.com, February 2010. read
- Jill Barlow, ‘Thomas Hyde’s ‘Stephen Ward’’, Tempo, January 2009, pp.67-8.
- Michael White, 'That Man Stephen Ward', Opera Now, September/October 2009, p.117.
- Nicholas Williams, ‘That Man Stephen Ward’, Opera, July 2008, pp.835-6.
- Shirley Radcliffe, ‘Thomas Hyde: A Little Invocation’, Choir & Organ, March/April 2007, pp.28-9.
- Kate Dixon, ‘Postcard Project’, Piano Professional, January 2006, pp.19-25.
Musings on Williamson
Malcolm Williamson – A Mischievous Muse
by Anthony Meredith and Paul Harris
Omnibus Press, 2007
On 14 September 1975, John Hawkins arrived at Malcolm Williamson’s London home for a composition lesson. There, he found the composer packing his bags to move out while his wife and their children were at the synagogue. It was the final act in a marriage that had been crumbling for several years, fuelled by Williamson’ fiery personality, overwork, alcoholism and homosexuality. Hawkins was left at the house to break the news to Dolly, Williamson’s wife. The next morning Dolly received a telephone call from Buckingham Palace inviting Williamson to be the next Master of the Queen’s Music.
Williamson’s acceptance of the post was the crucial event in the story of his professional career. At first it seemed like a chance to re-establish his reputation which had been sliding since the meteoric success and celebrity of the 1960s. As he launched himself on a new life with a new partner, Simon Campion, here was a post that promised to propel his professional standing upwards (the possibility of a knighthood particularly attracted him) allowing him to play to all his strengths as a serious composer with the ability to reach a wide audience of music lovers. Few of his contemporaries had Williamson’s ability to write a hum-able tune without resorting to cliché. The acceptance of the Royal appointment, as Dolly warned him, turned out to be disaster. It placed him in a media spotlight that his turbulent emotional character could not withstand. Only a few days after accepting the post he attended a reception where he ended up going down on his knees sobbing before a bewildered Peter Pears. Worse was to follow, including suicide attempts. The crises of subsequent years, particularly the notorious inability to complete the Fourth Symphony for the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, turned Williamson into a one-dimensional figure of fun. The image was so potent that it overshadowed any successes he had in the post (and there were some). A particularly cruel cartoon from The Times in December 1977 is reprinted in this new biography by Anthony Meredith and Paul Harris: ‘Currying favour with the Royals again I see, Malcolm…’ says a royal flunkey on the phone. Beside him a newspaper carrying the headline ‘Williamson Jubilee Symphony Cut’. By the time of his death in 2003 he was a largely ignored figure.
The story of a composer’s life is not the same as the story of the work produced. The two are linked, obviously, but the trajectory each follows can be widely different. Comparing Williamson’s life and music makes this point acutely. The emphasis in Meredith and Harris’s biography is definitely on the life of the man rather than the music. The spiral downwards that the media portrayed from the 1970s onwards, is here revealed as the last stage in a longer and sadder descent that began with bright hopes in the 1950s when Williamson first arrived in Britain from Australia. The music, however, tells a different, richer, and more profound story. His vast output, covering virtually every genre from opera to educational ‘cassations’, has its fair share of troughs as well as peaks. But comparing his last major work, A Year of Birds (1995) with the early orchestral overture Santiago de Espada (1956) it is hard to argue that there is a decline in invention or quality of ideas. Indeed, the music continues to make advances till the end.
The main reservation I have about this biography is that the balance is tilted too much in favour of the life to the extent that the music gets pushed to the sidelines. It is easy to see how this happened with a life so rich in anecdote and events and the authors have done much valuable research interviewing nearly all the main players in Williamson’s life. The result is a readable and compelling portrait of an extraordinary intelligent, gifted but troubled man. However, while one does not expect detailed technical analysis of the works, or even musical examples, in a book of this kind, one cries out nevertheless for some attempt at a judgement of the music itself. If they had done so, the authors would have started to bring into focus the more subtle, surprising and intriguing relationship between life and work that I feel Williamson’s output and career reveal.
Born in 1931 in Sydney, Williamson showed prodigious abilities from the start, inseparable from the piano by the time he was a toddler. His future prospects were fostered and propelled on by his dominating mother, Bessie who also showed a talent (as in the future many others would) for turning a blind eye to her son’s more awkward characteristics, accepting them as the price for his genius. His father, an Anglican curate, was pushed into the background, his easy-going manner a frustration to his wife’s ambitions for social advancement. By 1946, he had given up the ministry to play second fiddle to Bessie’s business projects. Like Mrs Britten, who was determined her son should be the ‘fourth B’ in musical history, Mrs Williamson planned on her son becoming the ‘Australian Beethoven’. And so, after studies in Sydney, the teenage Williamson and his mother were heading for Europe (the entire family are moved later) to allow Malcolm to try his luck outside the provinciality of Sydney.
Arriving in Britain he quickly made contact with Elizabeth Lutyens, thus beginning a vital relationship in his life. It is easy to see how her acerbic wit, drinking and approach to the craft of composition would have cast a spell over the younger composer. Through her, he also made friends with fellow young composers, most of whom admired him for the way that his provocative personality propeled him to strike out in new directions. His interest in medieval techniques pre-dated Maxwell Davies’s earliest works and the popular-side of his developing idiom made Richard Rodney Bennett an obvious ally. Soon his professional career took off with an ease that seems startling. Famous names and people with money cropped up constantly. He was aided by the versatility of his talent, of course; an excellent pianist, both of classical and contemporary works, he also played in nightclubs. Adrian Boult was an early champion and commissions flowed in, helped by support from Benjamin Britten (who commissioned a piano sonata for Aldeburgh) and Gerald Finzi. He also played the organ in a high-Anglican church presided over by a trendy vicar in jeans. He collaborated on some musicals with Ned Sherrin.
Beneath these early professional successes in the 1950s however, were the tensions that were to be constant throughout his life. Part of what makes this biography compelling, is wandering when and how the expected explosion and meltdown will happen, and the desperate hope that it might be avoided. One of Bessie’s reasons for heading to Britain in the first place was to get her son away from a home environment in which his behaviour had become increasingly erratic, not to mention several messy homosexual relationships. In England, Williamson himself seemed to embark on a serious pilgrimage of self-discovery, partly through periods of estrangement from Bessie, but also in turning to religion. Initially it was Roman Catholicism that appeared to provide an answer (Judaism became equally important in future years) and he became infatuated with the music of Messiaen whose influence can be heard in one of his best organ pieces, Vision of Christ Phoenix. But when he lost out to Alexander Goehr for a scholarship to study with Messiaen in Paris he took it badly. Before long, Williamson had settled into a pattern that would continue for much of his life: alternating periods of creative achievement with personal self-destruction, the latter often caused by drink. He became a regular figure in the Soho-Francis Bacon scene, playing the piano at the Colony Club where his preferred song was Doris Day’s ‘Secret Love’ – a warning sign if ever there was one. During these early nomadic years in Britain, Williamson was promiscuous and bi-sexual, ‘He would have a relationship with almost anything and anybody! In the end I gave up, because he was just as happy in a homosexual relationship as he was in a heterosexual one’ says Peter Pear’s niece Sue – and she should know because she was engaged to him at the time. After Sue had left, he moved onto a slim Brazilian called Lorenzo, to whom the organ piece Fons Amoris is, perhaps appropriately, dedicated. And then, as this tempestuous relationship broke-down, there was Dolly.
Williamson’s marriage to Dolly would launch a crucially productive period of his life, but one that turned-out to be delicately balanced. Having obtained domestic stability, including three children, he stopped drinking and works flowed prolifically: a cheeky second piano concerto, a three-movement Sinfonia Concertante, an Organ Concerto for the Proms (William Glock, initially wary of Williamson’s apparent rejection of serialism in favour of tonality was nevertheless won over) the moving Symphony for Voices and a Violin Concerto for Menuhin in 1965. And yet, the success of these early years of marriage proved to be not so much a ‘settling down’ but rather an expression of one side of his paradoxical personality. Marriage gave him security, convention - all of which he wanted – but they could not cancel out his need also for bohemian chaos and unconventionality.
So, do these tensions come across in the music? Are life and work so obviously linked at this point in his career? Meredith and Harris suggest so. As the fifties and sixties progressed, they state that the music was ‘characterised by a consistent determination to be inconsistent’. This is a fair point. I feel that the works of this period often fail to settle into a coherent unity. The composer’s talent and technique are never in doubt, but it is often moments and individual movements that delight and excite rather than the whole piece. It is easy to excuse the undigested nature of the influences in the Symphony No.1 ‘Elevamini’ (1956-7) - in which its central movement is a little too reminiscent of Copland via neoclassical Stravinsky - as youthful enthusiasm still in search of a voice. But what is one to make of the 1965 Sinfonietta which contains an unsettling and profoundly moving ‘Elegy’ but is then concludes with a Tarantella too flip and light-weight to do the work justice? One longs for the biographers here to cut out some of the anecdotes and focus for a moment on the music. What do they make of these perceived ‘inconsistencies’ in the context of the piece itself once they have stepped away from the circumstances of the life that produced them? Do they sound determined? And if not, are we damning Williamson for being too good at everything? Too musical!
The best outlet for such music was opera, where the portrayal of different dramatic situations and characters played to all the strengths of Williamson’s versatility. And it was the stage that provided him with his greatest successes of the period. Three superb operas followed in quick succession; the best-known, Our Man in Havana (1962) also contains his single best tune, the glorious waltz song for Milly in Act 1 in which he demonstrates an ability, similar to Prokofiev, to turn a simple tune into something special with a single harmonic twist. The successors, the chamber English Eccentrics (commissioned by Aldeburgh) and the large-scale The Violins of Saint-Jacques both burst with such inventive stage music that their absence from the repertoire of opera companies is hard to understand. But it was also an opera that proved to be a turning point and the start of the downward spiral that resulted in a terrifying loss of nerve, a return to drink and the beginning of the cracks in his personal life. With Lucky-Peter’s Journey (1969), Meredith and Harris declare that ‘Malcolm perpetrated one of the worst disasters in English operatic history’. Commissioned by English National Opera to produce a festive Yuletide work for all the family, Williamson delivered a ponderous and confused adaptation of a Strindberg play that played in London’s largest theatre to audiences in only double figures. A few years before, there had been a trip to the Canberra Festival in 1967, which had also been unsettling for Williamson, who found himself not welcomed back as the conquering hero he fancied himself to be. Roger Covell, critic at the Sydney Morning Herald, was particularly hostile, describing his idiom as a series of clichés borrowed from earlier composers. Whether this was a factor in tipping the balance one cannot say, but the relationship with Australia, and in particular contemporary Australian composers, is one area of this biography that I would have liked to have seen expanded. One is left wanting to know more about his relationship with Peter Sculthorpe or Ross Edwards for example.
I would argue that at this point – 1969/70 – the life and work start to go in different directions. The life becomes a tale of anguish, sadness and the loss of professional standing. Domestic stability is replaced by a lifestyle as a nomad; a compulsive pilgrim in search of fulfilment. Williamson was forever on the move, working his way around the world as performer, resident composer and ‘animateur’ of his educational cassations, which drained him of energy, time and money. His behaviour, fuelled by alcohol becomes more erratic and he visibly ages. At the premiere of Our Man in Havana the newspapers reported that he looked ‘more like a prosperous accountant than a talented musician’. He now resembled a ‘bad tempered garden gnome’. He has his testicles bitten by Heather Harper’s dog having brushed away the warnings with a cry of ‘Nonsense. Dogs all love me!’. He falls down stairs, wears a Gay rights badge to a Buckingham Palace garden party and friends resort to hiding booze in the garden shed. The troubles of his life and addictions made the process of composition harder. From now on missed deadlines, or working up-to-the-wire, became commonplace and sometimes in this biography the retelling of these disasters has a perverse humour. One of the Silver Jubilee works, the Mass of Christ the King is still incomplete on the day of its premiere and despite Williamson frantically writing in a side-room, three movements are dropped from the concert. On hearing the verdict, the composer had to be physically restrained and sedated only to reappear on stage at the end to receive his applause ‘ashen-faced, drawn and dishevelled, a cigarette hanging from his lips.’
Meredith and Harris tell the story of the 1977 Jubilee works in riveting detail. In a flurry of excitement, Williamson simply offered the Queen too many works, thereby placing his talents under excessive pressure. Furthermore, as he informed his son in a letter ‘a hell of a lot of it is ‘honour and glory’ stuff, i.e. no money attached’. He did his best in setting Betjeman’s awful Jubilee Hymn (‘like trying to knit with spaghetti’) but the pulling of the Fourth Symphony sunk his reputation for good. This event cancelled out successes like the pageant-opera The Valley and The Hill by 17,000 children in Liverpool and later musical achievements such as the tender Lament in Memory of Lord Mountbatten (1979). Nevertheless, many of the works that were completed, often away from the Royal post, show a deepening sensitivity and a greater profundity of utterance. Whether the tensions of his life produced these results or whether the needs of his creative spirit produced such a chaotic life, is impossible to know. Though his productivity decreases (could anyone have kept up such a rate of output?) there piles up a series of major works from 1974 until his death, which I would argue are his greatest achievements. This is partly because they contain a sense of synthesis and wholeness lacking in the earlier music. Consider the passionate honesty of Hamarskjöld Portrait (1974), an impressive cantata for the Proms premiered by Söderström; the taunt four-movement Seventh Symphony (1984) for strings with a particularly delicate Andante movement; the outstanding choral Requiem for a Tribe Brother (1992) and the final work, an Iris Murdoch cycle Year of Birds (1995), which, in its setting of ‘March’ in particular, demonstrates that Williamson had lost none of his ability to find freshness in a passionate melody clothed in opulent romantic orchestration. Even lightweight works carry with them a conviction and honesty that make them moving. A particular favourite of mine is the miniature Lento for Strings (1985). From reading the biography, one does not get enough of the sense that Williamson’s music gained in expressive power and achievement despite his life.
A Mischievous Muse is a hugely enjoyable read and well furnished with photographs and quotations. The authors have also included a fine list of works, which gives a brief description of each piece. This is particularly welcome, since this book’s real value will be if it helps to bring attention back to the composer’s music, which is virtually extinct from the concert hall. There are some promising signs for rehabilitation recently with two new orchestral discs from Chandos and reissues from Lyrita, not to mention a choral disc from the Joyful Company of Singers on Naxos. But it is astonishing how many major works still await a premiere: a fourth piano concerto, a flute concerto (with chorus!) and two of the symphonies for a start. Williamson is quoted in the forward to this biography as saying ‘I have not written in blood and sweat so that people should say “Isn’t he nice!”. This sense of a man always battling to remain in touch with his inner creative calling gives his life a nobility that it would otherwise lack and, captured well in this book, the life is a story worth being told. But let us hope that the music also has a future, because that is what really counts.
© Thomas Hyde, 2008