Posted on 09/24/2006 7:06:42 PM PDT by dighton
Sir Malcolm Arnold, the composer, conductor and trumpeter who died on Saturday aged 84, blew like a fresh keen wind through British music when his compositions were first performed in the early 1950s.
At a time when critical opinion was becoming restless about Vaughan Williams, Walton and others and was hankering after serialist composers and Schoenberg followers, Arnold’s melodic music, full of diatonic gusto, unafraid of the occasional emotional cliché and standing aloof from “trends”, came as a disconcerting complication. A tendency to underrate him, to regard him as lightweight, began then and was never wholly corrected.
When the first of his nine symphonies was first performed at the Cheltenham Festival in 1951, many of the audience, while captivated by the bulky composer’s refreshingly direct style of conducting, wondered if the work was a spoof. Such jolly tunes, such bright colours, such a lack of fashionable angst — surely it could not be serious.
Yet there was a darker side to Arnold’s music, as there was to the man, and it took no less shrewd a judge than the late Hans Keller first to identify the complexity of his musical character, seeing behind the clown’s mask to the serious musician who refused to accept categorisation.
Arnold was not always the purveyor of simple delights. In his later works he had an ambivalent attitude to tonality, sharing with his friend William Walton an interest in Schoenbergian methods without slavish addiction to them. A work like his Second String Quartet (1975) has been compared with Britten and Shostakovich in its mastery of the medium as a means of deep personal expression.
He admitted once in an interview that the major influences on him had been Berlioz, Mahler, Sibelius, Bartók and jazz (he wrote a clarinet concerto for Benny Goodman). These adumbrate a style in which primary colours predominate, with added harmonic complexity and, most of all, a profound knowledge and understanding of the orchestra, deriving from his years as an orchestral player.
Like Mahler, he had no fear of introducing popular elements into his symphonies (such as a tribute to the jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker) or of juxtaposing apparently incompatible material.
The neglect of Arnold’s music was never more blatant than in the centenary season of the Henry Wood Promenade Concerts in 1995 when no work of his was included. The same thing occurred in 2001, the year of his 80th birthday, when the Proms ignored him (though the BBC Philharmonic performed all his symphonies later in the year).
This cold shoulder from the BBC followed the scandal of Arnold’s Ninth Symphony, which waited more than six years for its first performance. It was commissioned in 1984 by David Ellis, then head of BBC Music in Manchester. By the time it was finished, Ellis had left and his successor did not like the symphony, objecting especially to parts of the finale that were scored for only two instruments. The Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra withdrew from giving the premiere, and an Ulster radio performance failed to materialise.
The symphony was championed by the conductor Sir Charles Groves, who organised a performance by students which impressed performers and listeners. But BBC Radio 3 still refused to programme the work and claimed that Ellis had had no right to commission it. When the first performance was finally given, the work was recognised by many critics as almost equal to late Shostakovich in its expression of desolation and loneliness.
Arnold presented the public with few problems and he had the knack of writing “popular” and occasional music free from banality. His sets of English, Cornish and Scottish Dances are in the best tradition of English light music, as is his Padstow Lifeboat march for brass band. He composed several jokey pieces for the Gerard Hoffnung festivals that were popular in the 1950s at the Festival Hall.
These included a Grand Grand Overture for three vacuum cleaners, floor polisher, four rifles and orchestra, and a new Carnival of Animals and Toy Symphony. He also wrote a Fantasia for Audience and Orchestra for the Last Night of the 1970 Promenade Concert season which failed to dislodge the traditional Henry Wood Fantasia on British Sea Songs from the public’s affection.
Malcolm Henry Arnold was born at Northampton on October 21 1921. His father, a prosperous shoe manufacturer, was also a pianist and organist. His mother, also a pianist, was a great-grand-daughter of William Hawes, a Master of the Chapel Royal. Arnold’s father was a Primitive Methodist of whom his son spoke in later life with distaste. Malcolm did not go to school but had lessons from an aunt who also taught him the violin. Another aunt taught him the piano and he learned counterpoint from the organist of St Matthew’s church, Northampton.
At 12, Malcolm had a passion for jazz. Admiration for Louis Armstrong led to his learning the trumpet and at 15 he travelled to London for lessons with Ernest Hall, principal trumpet of the BBC Symphony Orchestra. In 1938 he won an open scholarship to the Royal College of Music where he continued tuition with Hall and studied composition with Gordon Jacob and William Lloyd Webber, father of Andrew and Julian. Lloyd Webber would only discuss the 12-note system of composition if a student made a determined request for information.
In 1940 Arnold won second prize in the Cobbett competition for composition with a string quartet. Rebelling against discipline, he eloped with a Welsh redhead and ran away to Plymouth. He was found by detectives playing in a dance band and was persuaded to return to the college.
Arnold left the RCM in 1942 to be second trumpet of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, later becoming principal. He played under many famous conductors and learned the orchestral repertory. His tone-poem Larch Trees was played by the orchestra in June 1943. A conscientious objector, he was directed into the National Fire Service but was exempted from other war work when he joined the LPO. In 1943 he changed his mind and volunteered to join the Army; he was directed into the Buffs’ band. To obtain his discharge when the war ended, he shot himself in the foot and spent four weeks in hospital.
He joined the BBC Symphony Orchestra in 1945 as second trumpet to Ernest Hall, but rejoined the LPO as principal until 1948, when he won the Mendelssohn Scholarship for composition and abandoned orchestral playing. He went to Italy, but not to study. Between 1943 and 1948 he had composed nearly 20 works, including the comedy overture Beckus the Dandipratt, which was recorded by the LPO under Eduard van Beinum, his First Clarinet Concerto and some chamber music. He was an enthusiastic supporter of Ruth Railton’s National Youth Orchestra from its inception and wrote a Suite for it which he conducted at its inaugural concert at the 1948 Bath Festival.
His First Symphony was completed in 1949, his Second in 1952. The latter was performed in May of that year in Bournemouth conducted by Charles Groves, who thenceforward championed his music. In 1953 Arnold was commissioned to write a ballet for Sadler’s Wells Ballet to perform in its Coronation season.
Homage to the Queen was first performed at Covent Garden at a gala on the night of the Queen’s Coronation, June 2. Margot Fonteyn was among the dancers, choreography was by Frederick Ashton and designs by Oliver Messel. Dame Ninette de Valois described it as “the best ballet music since Tchaikovsky”.
The Third, Fourth and Fifth Symphonies, all commissions, were composed between 1957 and 1961. The Fifth is perhaps his greatest, but was not at first recognised as such — 10 years elapsed between its first performance at Cheltenham and its London premiere. Its tragic tone, especially in the elegiac slow movement, arose because it memorialised several friends who had died young, among them the horn-player Dennis Brain, the clarinettist Frederick Thurston, and Gerard Hoffnung. This was a prolific period. Arnold wrote overtures, divertimenti, concertos, three more ballets for Covent Garden (one of them on the subject of Sweeney Todd) and a one-act opera, The Dancing Master.
He was also in demand as a composer of film music. Altogether he wrote the music for more than 80 films. He won an Oscar in 1957 for The Bridge on the River Kwai, and wrote the scores for Badger’s Green (his first, in 1948), Whistle Down the Wind and The Inn of the Sixth Happiness. In addition, he had many engagements as a conductor, mainly of his own music but also of works such as Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique.
During the 1960s, Arnold experienced the chill wind of critical disapproval because his music was not regarded as “serious” enough. But unlike some other composers who preferred to write diatonic music rather than atonal, he did not fall foul of William Glock’s reign as BBC Controller of Music, perhaps because of Hans Keller’s partiality for his music. Glock commissioned the Fourth Symphony. It was under Robert Ponsonby’s regime that his symphonies and concertos disappeared from the Proms and BBC programmes generally.
Personal problems loomed, too. Bouts of depression led to heavy drinking and to the break-up of Arnold’s first marriage. He left his home at Richmond, Surrey, to live first near Haslemere, then at St Merryn, Cornwall, with his second wife. He loved Cornwall, where the Padstow Lifeboat march became almost a Cornish national anthem. In 1968 he was made a Bard of the Cornish Gorseth.
It was while at St Merryn, after a round of the local pubs, that he told a journalist who asked if he felt bitter about the critics: “Only as bitter as a man who wants to stand up and walk down the street and doesn’t want people shouting offensive patronising remarks after him. The critics have to live, but for Christ’s sake why don’t they let me live too?” In later years, he maintained that he had been very lucky to have his music played at all because it was tuneful.
From 1972 to 1977 Arnold lived in Dublin. He wrote his Seventh Symphony and Second String Quartet during these years. He enjoyed a close friendship with Sir William Walton, another composer of tunes who was out of fashion. When Malcolm Williamson succeeded Sir Arthur Bliss as Master of the Queen’s Music, Walton wrote to Arnold that “they had got the wrong Malcolm”.
Arnold returned to England in 1977. Over the next nine years he wrote only three works, including the light-hearted Eighth Symphony (written for the Albany Symphony Orchestra of New York) and a trumpet concerto.
By now his second marriage had ended. He spent long periods in hospital, incapable of work. He settled at Wymondham, near Norwich, and although he worked on the Ninth Symphony and on concertos for the recorder virtuoso Michala Petri and for the cellist Julian Lloyd Webber, his health was still poor. In 1984 he was given two years to live and in 1992 two months.
He had a heart attack in 1988 and attempted suicide a few years later (“took every pill in the house and washed them down with a bottle of brandy”). Schizophrenia and manic depression led to a period in a mental institution. In his last years in the Norfolk village of Attleborough, he was looked after devotedly by a carer, Anthony Day, who also helped to straighten out his finances.
In 1991 Arnold’s 70th birthday was marked by an outburst of his music even on the BBC, which made him Composer of the Week on Radio 3. At the time of his 80th birthday a television documentary about him was shown, some of it dismayingly candid.
Orchestral works predominate in Arnold’s prolific output (well over 100 opus numbers). His inside knowledge of the orchestra made him a master of colour and striking effects. His comedy overture Tam O’Shanter (1955), after Burns, had an immediate success and became established in the repertory.
His numerous concertos include two apiece for clarinet, flute, and horn and examples for guitar, harmonica, oboe, two pianos, viola, two violins, organ and trumpet. Chamber works include a brass quintet, violin sonatas, a piano trio and a group of sonatinas. There are also vocal and choral works.
It was Arnold’s fate to be described as too populist. A critic once wrote of the Fifth Symphony, “the less said about it the better”. Many today would describe it as his masterpiece, unless they awarded the palm to the Seventh. The boisterous, exuberant side of his musical nature made a wide appeal, but percipient critics early perceived the deeper, melancholic side.
In 1955 Donald Mitchell identified Arnold’s “unique recovery of lyrical innocence”; in 1958 Hans Keller wrote of his “profundity”. It can be said of Arnold as it was of Mahler, whom he revered, that his time will come.
Malcolm Arnold was appointed CBE in 1970 and was knighted in 1993. He married first, in 1947, Sheila Nicholson; they had a daughter. By his second wife, Isabel, he had two sons.
Rest in peace.
Good Lord!
Another one of those TMI (Too Much Information) obits in which the British seem to revel.
Yuck.
De gustibus and all that.
Sure there is.
That is POOR taste.
Classical music ping!
I love these Brit obits. This one makes me wish my dad was still alive, I'm sure he'd be familiar with this fellow. Maybe I'll tune into WQXR tomorrow and see if they play any of his work.
Dear ecurbh,
Thanks for the ping!
Classical Music Ping List ping!
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Thanks,
sitetest
He died? Oh my! He was great. All those dance suites. And symphonies.
It's hardly surprising that this composer suffered from neglect -- though knighthood and scoring the Bridge on the River Kwai would hardly seem to qualify as neglect -- from the once vogue crowd of atonal acolytes. The man liked melody. Which only underscores the age-old truism: "when in Rome do as the Romans do," and in musical circles means to follow the leader, recite insipid compliments and hope they throw you a bone. Sigh. That is a sure prescription for musical death.
It seemed that the man defied death on many fronts and lived to ripe old age. A rich life, no doubt.
And thanks for the ping, sitetest. I listened to the Fourth and Fifth a day or two ago. It's strange to report, but I wondered about the state of his health, and even if I might have somehow missed an obituary.
By the way, the cycle of his symphonies on Naxos is well performed and well recorded, and cheap as always with the label. Some if not all of them were recorded in his presence, which is an interesting kind of imprimatur.
Whew!
I'm not claiming to be psychic, but I swear on Saturday I was reading a mini biography of Arnold and thinking he'd probably be another composer who composed only 9 symphonies.
Another composer is gone. Before long, the only people left alive will be the ones that can't write anything comprehensible.
Here’s a music obit from earlier this month, with links to four others, including two from the Telegraph.
Thanks for the extra links, too.
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