Francis Pott’s booklet Essay for Stephen Hough’s Hyperion CD release [1996]:
York Bowen music for piano solo,
Hyperion CDA 66838.
[Minor amendments have been made to the following text where these had become necessary by 2007.]
In a kinder economic age than ours it was relatively easy to find one’s way into print. In music this applied as much to writers about the subject as to composers, and there is no shortage of loosely compiled short volumes from the first decades of the twentieth century which purport to offer an instructive survey of developments at the supposed (or actual) ‘cutting edge’ of creativity. While these often achieved instead a ragbag of misinformation, personal prejudice and autobiographical self-advertisement, they frequently found some consensus in identifying exciting key figures at work in our own country. For this reason posterity has lent them a degree of vicarious poignancy; for there can be no more affecting way to confront a once-lauded artist’s descent from celebrity to obscurity than to read in such a context of heroic beginnings, then realise that one can go no further: the trail vanishes and the rest, it seems, is silence. While much is being belatedly rectified nowadays via the enterprise of certain recording companies, the passage of silent years compels one to wonder at the public assertion of no less a critic than Ernest Newman that Joseph Holbrooke’s Piano Concerto no. 1contained melodies to stir the very marrowin his bones and belonged on the same pedestal as Richard Strauss. Recorded performances of Holbrooke have nonetheless remained farmore the exception than the rule. Public ones areeven rarer; this applies more or less equally to Rutland Boughton, Granville Bantock, John McEwen, William Hurlstone and, amongst others, York Bowen.
Born on 22nd February 1884 at Crouch Hill, London, Edwin Yorke Bowen was the youngest of three sons. His mother was a musician and his father a founder partner in Bowen & McKechnie, whisky distillers, thereby conferringa pedigree comparable with that of Sir Thomas Beecham and the eponymous tablets (of which the conductor did not care to be reminded) or Cecil Armstrong Gibbs. After piano studies with Alfred Izard at the Blackheath Conservatoire, the young Bowen won the Erard Scholarship of the Royal Academy of Music in 1898, having already accumulated numerous other prizes and medals. After an initial reluctance to leave Izard he became a devoted student of the famously eccentric Tobias Matthay. Already a talking point among his peers and his seniors, he wasto gain a reputation as ‘a pianist of remarkable brilliance’ (Grove) which, for decades after his death, continued to eclipse his prestige as a composer, great though the latter had been during his apprenticeship at the RAM under Frederick Corder. Bowen was also an accomplished horn player and violist.
It is a mistake to assume that what we now accept as a British ‘renaissance’ in music, namely the awakening of a nationalism rooted in folksong and Tudor hymnody, marked the earliest rebirth in the twentieth century of indigenous creative fervour or high purpose. This is merely to perpetuate the obscurity from which the youthful Bowen and other more or less significant figures have suffered, without stopping to question its justice. While it is true that Teutonic influence still dominated the British musical establishment during Bowen’s student years, this in itself was divided into mutually inimical factions of either a Brahmsian or a Lisztian and Wagnerian tendency, as if in emulation of the slightly earlier status quo in Europe. As Lewis Foreman has pointed out in his definitive biography of Sir Arnold Bax (Scolar Press, 1983 & 1988; recently issued in its third edition), this divergence was epitomised by the RAM (then still in Tenterden Street, off Oxford Street, where it occupied three houses amalgamated in bizarre and labyrinthine fashion) and its junior cousin, the Royal College of Music in South Kensington. The RCM, whose staff both Parry and Stanford had joined in 1883, espoused Brahms (though this does scant justice to Parry’s personal liberality of outlook, which admitted some influence of Liszt). The RAM, directed from 1888 to 1924 by Sir Alexander Mackenzie, was of the other hue. Exceptions, such as the RCM-trained arch-Wagnerite Rutland Boughton, retained their identity despite rather than through Stanford’s ministrations.
When Bowen left the RAM in 1905 Liszt had been dead for only nineteen years and the reputations of many of his illustrious pupils were at their zenith. One must consider Liszt’s impact in terms both of pianistic innovation and of personal charisma, adding to that a sense of the heady aesthetic which had led to such conceptions as Liszt’s Faust Symphony,Wagner’s Tristan and the early tone poems of Richard Strauss. It is then easy to sense the zeal and excitement from a shared ideal which gripped many from Bowen’s generation. Disillusioning obscurity had not yet confronted them with Debussy’s prophetic rejection of the Wagnerian ideal as‘the twilight mistaken for the dawn’. Formal portraits for publicity purposes reflected these things, tending often towards either a ‘soft-focus’ or a studiedly farouche romanticism. Image-consciousness shows too in the names: Bowen dropped ‘Edwin’ and the ‘e’ of ‘Yorke’; Holbrooke Teutonised himself to ‘Josef’. An early photographic study of Bowen depicts a distantly high-minded gaze and a strong-featured young man, in profile not unlike that doyen of later Bloomsbury, Osbert Sitwell. At this point he was on the crest of a wave. Bax, one year his senior, was known at the RAM at this stage mainly as a pianistic and orchestral sightreader of incomprehensible brilliance, but not yet as a composer. Bowen was esteemed ‘the most remarkable of the young British composers’ by Saint-Saëns. The stage was his, and, lest it be thought that he squandered opportunity by confining himself to the piano solo output of which Stephen Hough’s recording provides a timely view, he responded with three piano concerti between 1904 and 1908, performing nos. 1 and 3 under Hans Richter in the Promenade Concerts at Queen’s Hall. By 1912 two symphonies had received favourable public notices.
Bowen’s pianistic distinction, which embraced the formidable demands of Liapunov’s Transcendental Etudes and of Liszt and Chopin in patrician style, remained a focus for adulation in many quarters -but not quite all:‘Immortal Beethoven...’, wrote the tragically short-lived pianist and composer William Baines (1899-1922) in his diary after attending a Promenade concert on 16th September 1921: ‘York Bowen played his [Beethoven’s] C major Concerto as if it was [sic] the most difficult thing in the world...’. In the intervening years since 1912 Bowen’s position as a composer had changed drastically. The European musical establishment had been rocked by the scandalous 1913 première of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printempsin Paris and by the advent of Schönberg’s then notorious Pierrot Lunairethe year before. Britain’s insularity might have put off the evil hour for latterday romantics such as Bowen but for the apocalyptic shadow of the Great War, which effectively silenced even so great a voice as Elgar’s. Those who could not or would not swim sank, while, perversely, a man with the moral courage and creative toughness of Frank Bridge must find himself ultimately marginalised for his newly uncompromising utterance by a society still unable to bear very much reality.
The Great War had seen Bowen (as horn player) in the regimental band of the Scots Guards, with which he served in France before being invalided home with pneumonia in 1916. He had probably confronted already the fact that his creative impulse turned upon abstract poetic romanticism rather than unflinching human and social commentary. His remaining decades (lived out in an almost wholly uneventful domesticity in the impersonal environs of Finchley Road) are portrayed in Monica Watson’s ‘York Bowen -a Centenary Tribute’ (Thames, 1984). Here one may discover a faintly bleak ménage dominated by spiritualism and faith healing, as well as an apparent conflict (denied by the author) between avowed Anglo-Catholicism and what seem to be aspects of Buddhist faith. Later years were to be clouded by financial anxieties not unconnected with Bowen’s son Philip, whose supposed healing gifts are ominously reported by Watson as having been ‘controlled’ by an Indian doctor. Philip subsequently lost these gifts and drifted through a variety of professions until his death in 1970. York Bowen himself continued to serve the Royal Academy faithfully as a Professor until 1959.
The sense of virtual exile which this melancholy summary conveys must invite passing comparison with the fate of the composer Nikolai Medtner (1880-1951), himself a refugee from Revolutionary Russia and domiciled in North London for the last sixteen years of his life. Like Bowen, Medtner was a pianist of the highest distinction. The piano is central to the output of both (especially to Medtner, who wrote for it almost as exclusively as Chopin). Moreover, both composers still espoused the same idiom and aesthetic in the
middle of this century as they had at its outset, and neither was afraid to air in print some serenely unrepentant views on the relative modernists of his time. Bowen’s music evinces a variable but still significant debt to the Russian Romantic piano tradition of Balakirev, Liapunov, Rakhmaninov and Medtner (whose G minor Sonata, opus 22, was in his repertoire), and it is possible to advance the Medtner comparison further on purely technical grounds. ‘...Too generous with his substance. He never seems to appreciate the value of’ repose’, reported the critic for The Spectator upon hearing Bowen’s Third Concerto in 1907. His colleague with the Sunday Timeshad already complained mildly of themes being ‘over-developed’ in the First Concerto (1903). Such criticisms have been levelled too at Medtner’s tendency to pursue every contrapuntal consequence of a theme to its ultimate conclusion, notably in such works as his Sonata in E minor, opus 25 (The Night Wind).While Medtner is a composer of greater structural resource, these similarities may go some way to explain the continuing obscurity of Bowen’s large scale works and the virtual disappearance of Medtner’s from his adoptive (and his native) country until quite recently. Both composers were stridently championed by Kaikhosru Sorabji, himself the iconoclastic composer of some of the most fearsome piano music ever written, to whom Bowen dedicated his Twenty-fourPreludesin 1950.
In view of all this it would be easy to read into the blunt northern honesty of William Baines an unwitting observation of shallow or meretricious artistry waxing histrionic in the face of worldly disappointments, as if in some misguided bid for attention; but this would be unfair. From Monica Watson’s observation of Bowen we gain insight into a stoically humorous personality who bore the undoubted bathos of his later years without bitterness and retained the affection and gratitude of many up to and beyond his death. As a pianist he belonged to the twilight of a romantic tradition which prized tonal beauty and patrician elegance in the face of all challenges and which had been able to embrace the theatrical instincts of a Liszt at the same time as the sober obsession of a Tausig with concealment of all physical effort. The duality of such an inheritance can be documented: Bowen recorded a selection of his own piano music for Lyrita in 1960, and despite some understandably strenuous moments (he was then in his mid-seventies) his playing reveals an honest clarity and strength which must have been all the more vivid in his younger days. Such virtues are the antithesis of mere posturing, -and yet an anecdote told by the distinguished British pianist Hamish Mime hints at underlying eccentricities: ‘I remember being taken as a fourteen-year-old to a soirée at his house where his pupils performed and he himself played Glazunov’s Theme and Variations in F sharp minor.He enunciated the theme (in single notes) with the second and third fingers of both hands on each note. Even at fourteen 1 thought this rather odd, although I sensed that it added a certain grandeur. His reply to my shy
question was “Four horns in unison, dear boy, -how else could one score it?”’ Such a piece of baroque eccentricity rooted in genuine musical percipience sounds like a possible legacy from student days with Matthay.
Bowen died suddenly in November 1961, active as a musician to the very last. The ensuing generation was, if anything, unkinder to his reputation than his later decades had been. It is only recently that a more liberal and curious musicalestablishment has begun to rehabilitate him and many of his contemporaries.
Twenty-four Preludes in all major and minor keys, opus 102:-
The Preludes,bearing the dedication ‘To Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji, 1950’, adopt the ascending key scheme used twice over by Bach in Das Wohltemperierte Klavier. Nonetheless, Bowen’s line of descent is from Chopin’s Preludes and Etudes, comparable cycles under the latter title by Henselt and, most directly, the Preludes and Etudes-Tableaux of Rakhmaninov (who esteemed Henselt’s and Chopin’s Etudes almost equally). Rakhmaninov is the mostdetectable and recurrent model: Bowen’s opening Prelude may enjoy a perceptibly different harmonic vocabulary, but its rhythmic and pianistic resources spring clearly from the piece in the same key which opens Rakhmaninov’s Thirteen Preludes, opus32. Coincidence of key and of a particular blend of pianistic and emotional resonance is yet more obvious in the case of Bowen’s Prelude in E flat major and its counterpart, Rakhmaninov’s opus 23 no.6. Significantly, perhaps, the E flat Prelude is one of Bowen’s happiest inspirations. Elsewhere, as in the C minor and G minor pieces, there is an intermittent modality much more in line with certain piano miniatures by Moeran, Ireland or, a touch ironically, some of Baines. These movements exhibit a welcome restraint and economy, thereby lending balance to a highly eclectic and atavistic - but still imposing - overall conception. Overt moments of virtuosity noticeably call forth a heightened terseness and astringency, typified by the Prelude in B flat minor and by the startling ferocity of the technically demanding octave study in G sharp minor which provides a fitting conclusion to the group of Preludes presented by Stephen Hough.
Sonata in F minor, opus72:-
Bowen composed no fewer than six solo piano sonatas, of which three remain unpublished. The Sonata in F minor,his fifth, was published in 1923 by Swan & Company and has some claim to be the most successful of the group. Its arresting triadic opening generates material not only for the first movement, a spaciously
dramatic conception with an angular melodic principal subject, but also (in altered guise) for the driving rhythms of the finale. Between these turbulent utterances comes a fragile idyll whose irregular five quavers to the bar cannot wholly dispel reminders of Edward Mac Dowell’s lyrical simplicity in similar contexts. (Indeed, the four sonatas of Mac Dowell bear comparison on other grounds, though relatively innocent of Bowen’s pianistic and harmonic sophistication.) The design of the Sonata as a whole might suggest an attempt to mirror the dramatic progress of Beethoven’s Appassionata in entirely personal terms (the two works are in the same key and both feature slow movements deliberately cowed into submission by what surrounds them). Bowen yields little to Beethoven in the sheer fury of his finale’s climactic coda (heard after a valedictory reappearance of the work’s opening triadic material), and the ending of this work is no less stirring than that of the G sharp minor Prelude. Presumably by coincidence, this peroration bears a strikingly close resemblance to the final pages of the Sonata, opus25 of 1954 by Bernard Stevens, a similarly neglected British composer of the generation after Bowen.
Toccata in A minor,opus155:-
Bowen composed a toccata in 1901 while still a student. Another constitutes the finale of his Suite no 3, opus 38of 1920, while the Toccata in A minor is his third and last (if one excepts the alla toccata final movement of the Sixth Sonata), and dates from 1957. The work shows its creator’s accumulated wisdom in a highly successful fusion of unaccustomed textural economy and an undiminished taste for exciting pyrotechnics. The effect is of notable cumulative force enhanced by a relentless rhythmic drive. The final assault on the piano’s lowest note by the player’s right hand may perhaps be an enthusiastic nod in the direction of Debussy’s L’Isle Joyeuse and its identical closing device.
Having initially hesitated as to the inclusion of this piece within his Hyperion programme, Stephen Hough later told the present author (who had enthusiastically recommended it on the basis of owning a photocopy of the manuscript) that on a teaching visit to the Juilliard School in New York he had been astonished to learn of no fewer than six students all learning the Toccata simultaneously from what was by then the published Weinberger edition.
Berceuse in D major, opus 83:-