giving of himself to dancers. Before the curtain rises, that final
expectant moment before the screen between dancer and audience is
withdrawn, Ashton is always on the stage, moving from dancer to dancer:
“Cheer up”.... “Back straight, duckie”.... “Present yourself”.... “Chin
up, always chin up, darling.” ...
Personally, “Freddy” is an unending delight. Shy, shy, always shy, shy
like the shy sister he plays in _Cinderella_, he is always the good
colleague, evincing the same painstaking interest in the ballets of
others as he does in his own, something which I assure the reader is
rare. I have yet to see “Freddy” ruffled, yet to see him outwardly
upset. In his personal appearance he is always neat, carefully dressed.
Even in the midst of hectic dress-rehearsals and their attendant
excitements and alarums, I have never seen him anything but cool, neat,
and well-groomed. There is never a fantastic “rehearsal costume” with
“Freddy.”
The picture of “Freddy” that is uppermost in my mind is of him standing
in the “Crush Bar” at Covent Garden, relaxed, at ease, listening more
than talking, laughing in his self-deprecatory way, always alert, always
amusing.
Ashton lives in London in a house in a little street quaintly called
Yeoman’s Row, on the edge of Knightsbridge and Kensington. Here he often
does his own cooking and here he works out his ideas. It is a tiny
house, the work-center being a second-floor study, crowded with
gramophone records, books, photographs and statuettes, all of which
nearly obscure the red wall-paper. The statuettes are three in number:
Anna Pavlova, Fanny Ellsler, and Marie Taglioni. The photographs range
from good Queen Alexandra, through bull-fighters, to dancers.
The Sadler’s Wells hierarchy seems to travel in groups. One such group
that seemed inseparable included Ashton, “Bobby” Helpmann, Margot
Fonteyn, and Pamela May. Occasionally Constant Lambert would join in, to
eat, to drink, to have fun. For “Freddy” is by no means averse to the
good things of life.
“Freddy” Ashton is another of those figures of the dance who should
never regard the calendar as a measure for determining his age. I
believe the youthful spirit of Ashton is such that he will live to be a
hundred-and-fifty; that, in 2075, he will be the last survivor of the
founding of Sadler’s Wells, and will then be the recipient of a grand
gala benefit at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, where, that night,
he will share the Royal Box with the then reigning monarch.
_CONSTANT LAMBERT_
It is difficult for me to write without emotion of the third of the
trio, Constant Lambert, whose loss is deeply mourned by all who knew
him, and by many who did not.
A picturesque figure, Lambert was a great conductor, a great musician, a
composer of superior talents, a critic of perception, a writer of
brilliance and incisiveness, a life-long student of the ballet.
Lambert’s contribution to the making of the Sadler’s Wells Ballet has, I
suspect, been given less credit than it deserves. I have said that, in
my three decades-and-more of ballet management, I have never known a
ballet company with such high musical standards. These standards were
imposed by Constant Lambert. Not only did he compose ballets for the
company, but when music of other composers was used, it was Lambert who
provided the strikingly brilliant orchestral arrangements--witness, as a
few examples: _Les Patineurs_, _Dante Sonata_, _The Faery Queen_,
_Comus_, _Apparitions_, _Les Rendez-vous_, _Balabile_, in which he made
alive for ballet purposes the assorted music of Meyerbeer, Liszt,
Purcell, Auber, Chabrier, respectively.
Born in London, in 1905, the son of a painter, brother of a well-known
sculptor, he spent a substantial part of his childhood in Russia, where
his grandfather supplied the Trans-Siberian Railway with its
locomotives. He was a living proof of the fact that it was possible for
an Englishman to be a musician without being suspected of not being a
gentleman. His was an incisive mind, capable of quick reactions, with a
widely ranging emotional experience.
With the Camargo Society, Constant Lambert established himself not only
as a conductor, but as the musical mind behind British ballet. However,
it was not an Englishman who discovered him as a composer. That honor
goes to a Russian, Serge Diaghileff, who, when Lambert was bordering on
twenty-one, commissioned him to write a ballet for his company. No other
English composer shared that honor before Diaghileff died, although
Diaghileff did produce, but did not commission, Lord Berners’ _The
Triumph of Neptune_. And so Lambert stands isolated, with his _Romeo and
Juliet_, which was first produced at Monte Carlo, in 1926, with Lifar
and Karsavina as the protagonists; and his second ballet, _Pomona_,
which Bronislava Nijinska staged at the Colon Theatre, Buenos Aires, in
1927.
Constant Lambert’s English education was at Christ’s Hospital. Early in
his school days he underwent a leg operation that compelled him always
to walk with a stick. All his life he was never entirely free from pain.
At the Royal College of Music he was a pupil of Ralph Vaughan Williams.
Ballet came into his life at an early date, and remained there until his
untimely passing. To it he gave the best years of his life in acting as
a sort of hair-spring to Ninette de Valois’ mainspring in the
development of Sadler’s Wells. On his sound musical foundation Sadler’s
Wells rests.
It is not within my province to discuss Lambert as a composer; but his
accomplishments and achievements in this field were considerable. It is,
of course, as a musician he will be remembered. But I could not regard
Lambert as a musician pure and simple. He had a wide variety of
interests, not the least of which was painting. Both painting and
sculpture were in his family, and, from conversations with him I
frequently got the notion that, had his technical accomplishments been
other than they were, he would have preferred to have been a painter to
a musician. Much of his music had a pictorial quality, witness his
ballets, _Romeo and Juliet_, _Pomona_, _Horoscope_, and _Tiresias_;
observe his _Piano Concerto_, _Rio Grande_ (“By the Rio Grande, they
dance no Sarabande”), _Music for the Orchestra_, _Elegiac Blues_ (a
tribute to the American Florence Mills), the _Merchant Navy Suite_,
_Summer’s Last Will and Testament_, Hogarthian in color and treatment;
and the work I shall always remember him conducting as a musical
interlude in the first season in New York, the _Aubade Heroique_, the
reproduction in sound of a Dutch landscape, a remembrance of that dawn
in Holland when Lambert, a visiting conductor with Sadler’s Wells,
witnessed the invasion of The Hague by Nazi paratroopers.
It was as a conductor of Tchaikowsky that I feel he excelled. He was a
masterly Tchaikowsky interpreter. I should have loved to hear him play
the symphonies. I content myself, however, with his _Swan Lake_ and _The
Sleeping Beauty_, and the realization of how much these two Sadler’s
Wells productions owe to him. Never was the music for an instant dull,
for Lambert always conducted it with a fine ear for contrasts of brisk
with languid, happiness with _toska_.
Composer that he was, he devoted a large part of his life to conducting.
His recordings are to be treasured. Conducting to him was not merely a
source of livelihood, but a very definite form of self-expression, an
important part of him. In my experience, I have found that composers
are, as a rule, bad conductors, and conductors bad composers. Two
exceptions I can name. Both British. Lambert was well nigh unique in his
superlative capacity in both directions, as is Benjamin Britten today.
Lambert, I feel, was not only one of the most gifted composers of his
time, but also one of its finest interpretative artists. He had the
unique quality of being able to enter wholeheartedly into the innermost
essence of forms of art diametrically opposed to his own, even
positively unsympathetic to him personally, and giving superlative
performances of them.
Lambert was no calm liver, no philosophic hermit; a good deal of a
hedonist, he met life considerably more than half way, and went out to
explore life’s possibilities to the fullest. Moreover, he richly
succeeded in doing so. He was a brilliant wit, both in writing and in
conversation. His book, _Music, Ho!_, remains one of the most
stimulating books of musical commentary and criticism of our time. He
was the collector and creator of an innumerable number of magnificent
but unprintable limericks, in the creation of which he was a distinct
poet. He had composed a series of fifty on one subject--double bishops,
i.e., bishops having more than one diocese, like Bath and Wells. A
friend of mine who has heard Lambert recite them with that gusto of
which only he was capable, tells me that they are, without doubt, one of
the most brilliant achievements in this popular form.
Wit is one thing; stout-hearted, robust humor is another. Lambert had
both. There was also a shyness of an odd kind, when a roaring laugh
would give way to a fit of wanting to be by himself, wrapped in
melancholy. His was a delicately poised combination of the introvert and
the extravert, the latter expressing itself in the love of male company
over pots of ale and even headier beverages. He had a keen appreciation
of the good things of life.
This duality of personality was apparent in his physical make-up. There
was something about his appearance that, in a sense, fitted in with the
conventional portrait of John Bull. A figure of a good deal of masculine
strength, he was big, inclined to be burly; his complexion was pink. He
exhibited in himself a disconcerting blend of the most opposite extremes
imaginable. On the one hand, a certain morbidity; on the other, a bluff
and hearty roast-beef-and-Yorkshire Britishness. I have said that he
resembled, physically, the typical drawing of John Bull. As a matter of
fact, he bore an uncanny physical resemblance to Winston Churchill, and
had elements in common with G. K. Chesterton. And a Hollywood casting
director might have engaged him to play the role of the Emperor Nero, on
strict type casting. He had an alert face on which humor often played
good tunes, but on which, now and then, there used to settle a kind of
stern gloom, not to be dispersed by any insensitive back-slapping.
He was as much at home in France as he was in England. His late
adolescence and early manhood were spent in the hectic, feverish,
restless ’twenties, with the Diaghileff Ballet and the French school of
musical composition as the preponderant influences. As he grew older,
his Englishness, if I may call it that, grew as well. The amazing thing
to me was his ability to maintain such an even balance between the two.
Lambert had a passion for enigmas. He adored cats, and had a strange
attraction to aquariums, zoos, and their fascinatingly enigmatic
inhabitants. He was President of the Kensington Kittens’ and Neuter
Cats’ Club, Incorporated. An important club, a club with a President who
knew quite a lot about cats. There is a story to the effect that there
was once a most handsome cat at London’s Albert Hall who was a close
friend of Lambert’s, a cat called Tiddleywinks, a discriminating cat,
and a cat with a certain amount of musical taste. Lambert, the
President, would never proceed with the job he had to do at the Albert
Hall without a preliminary chat with Tiddleywinks. And all would be
well.
Constant Lambert was working on, among other things, an autobiography,
concerning which he one day inquired about completely inaccessible
places left in our shrinking world, particularly since the last war and
James Norman Hall have pretty well exposed the South Pacific islands.
What he actually wanted to know was an inaccessible place to which to
hie after its publication, “because,” he said, “I’m telling the truth
about everyone I know, including myself, and I shall have to flee the
wrath of my ‘friends,’ and find a safe place where the laws of libel
cannot reach me. You know, in my country at least, ‘the greater the
truth, the greater the libel.’”
There was an infinite variety in his “drive.” He conducted ballet at
Covent Garden; radio concerts at the British Broadcasting Corporation;
symphony concerts, with special emphasis on Liszt and Sibelius, with the
London Philharmonic Orchestra; made magnificent, definitive recordings;
recited the Sitwell poems in _Façade_ at every opportunity; composed
fresh, vital works; made striking musical arrangements. He was at once
composer, conductor, critic, journalist, an authority on railroad
systems, trains, and locomotives, a student of the atom bomb, and a
talker. There are those who insist he was not easy to get to know. It
could be. He was, as I have said, shy. He was a highly concentrated
individual, living a lot on his nerves. Despite this, to those who knew
him, he was the friendliest of good companions, a perpetual stimulus to
those who delighted in knowing him.
One had to be prepared, to be sure, to discover, in the middle of one of
one’s own sentences (and, frequently, one of his own) that he was--gone.
He would tilt his chin in the air, stare suddenly into far distant
spaces, turn on his heel with the help of his stick, as swiftly as a
ballet-dancer in a _pirouette_, and silently vanish. He was a good
listener--if one had anything to say. He did not suffer fools gladly,
and to bores--that increasing affliction of our times--he presented an
inflexible deafness akin to the switching-off of a hearing-aid, and a
truly magnificent cast-iron rigidity of inattention. The bore fled. So
did Lambert.
I have given some indication of the width of his interests. It was
amazing. His gusto for life was unquenchable, and with it was a wise,
shrewd appraisement of the human comedy--and tragedy. He was able to get
through an enormous amount of work without ever seeming to do anything.
Best of all, perhaps, he was able to enjoy a joke against himself. In
this world of the arts and artists, where morbid egotisms and too
exposed nerves victimize and vitiate the artist, it was a boon to him
and an extraordinarily attractive characteristic.
Above all, he had an undying belief in British Ballet.
The last performance I saw Lambert conduct was the first performance of
his last ballet, _Tiresias_, which was the occasion of a Gala in aid of
the Ballet Benevolent Fund in the presence of H.M. the Queen and
Princess Elizabeth, on the 9th July, 1951. _Tiresias_ was a work on
which Lambert had gone back to his collaboration with Frederick Ashton.
The story he had made himself; it was a sort of composite of the myths
about Tiresias; reduced to as much of a capsule as I can, it deals with
the duality of Tiresias--as man and woman--and how he was struck blind
by Hera, when Tiresias proves her wrong when she argues with Zeus that
man’s lot is happier than woman’s. It was, this ballet, a sort of family
affair in a sense; for Lambert’s wife, Isabel, designed scenery and
costumes, setting the three-scened work on the Island of Crete.
After the first performance, we met at a large party to which I had gone
with David Webster. Lambert and his wife, along with Ninette de Valois
and Lady Keynes (Lydia Lopokova), joined us at supper. The ballet had
been a long one, running quite a bit more than an hour, and there was
general agreement among us that the work would benefit from judicious
cutting. Lambert thoughtfully considered all the suggestions that were
proffered; agreed that, conceivably, a cut or two might improve it, but
the question was where and how, without damaging what he felt was the
basic structure of the whole.
Not long after this, Lambert and I met at the door of Covent Garden,
having arrived simultaneously. We had a brief chat, and he was his usual
vastly courteous and amusing self.
A few days later, at the Savoy, my telephone rang quite early in the
morning. “Madame’s” secretary, Jane Edgeworth, at the other end,
informed me Constant Lambert had just died. I was stunned.
It appeared that Lambert had been taken ill while at a party and had
been rushed to London Clinic, one of London’s most exclusive and finest
nursing-homes, on Sunday evening, the 19th August. It was on Tuesday
morning, the 21st August, that I received the news of his death. The
funeral was quite private, since the entire Sadler’s Wells company was
away from London performing at the Edinburgh Festival. Lambert was
buried from the Church of St. Bartholomew the Great, at Smithfield, in
the City of London. So private was the service that almost no one was
there, and there were no Pallbearers.
I was present at the Memorial Service, held at the famous Church of St.
Martin’s-in-the-Fields, at Charing Cross, overlooking the National
Gallery. There were gathered his sorrowing company, now returned from
Edinburgh, headed by Ninette de Valois, Frederick Ashton, and David
Webster. The address was given by the Reverend C. B. Mortlock. Robert
Helpmann, an old colleague, read the Lesson. The chorus of the Royal
Opera House, Covent Garden, sang Bach’s _Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring_.
At the close, John Churchill, one of Britain’s greatest organists and an
old friend of Lambert’s, played on the organ that elegiac work Lambert
had composed at the rape of Holland, and which he had conducted so
magnificently at the Metropolitan Opera House--his _Aubade Heroique_.
Here at St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields his colleagues paid him honor. I was
deeply moved. At the little funeral, I had been equally stirred. Here
before me was all that remained of the great man who never took his
greatness seriously; the man who would go to any trouble on behalf of
those who tried, but who, for those who were lazy, or cynical, or
thought themselves superior, and without justification, he had no use
whatever. Here was a man about whom there was nothing of the academic
recluse, but a man who loved life as he loved music, ballet, fully,
strongly, with ever-growing zest and with ever-deepening understanding;
the man who had done so much for ballet, its music, its standards; who
had been of such vital importance in the fashioning of Sadler’s Wells.
My thoughts went back to his creations, his arrangements. I was actually
conscious of his imprint on all ballet. Memories of his wit, his
brilliance, crowded into my mind.
I expected, I think, that with the sudden passing of a man of such fame,
there would be an outpouring of thousands for his funeral, to pay their
last, grateful respects. I was surprised. This was not the case, as I
have explained. A few close distinguished friends and colleagues
gathered beside the coffin in the Church of St. Bartholomew the Great,
in the City: Sir William Walton, Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell, Sir
Arthur Bliss, Edmund Rubbra, Alan Rawsthorne, Ninette de Valois,
Frederick Ashton, and Robert Helpmann who had hurried down from
Edinburgh.
The service was brief and hushed. I was indeed very sad, and my thoughts
traveled out to the little chapel in Golder’s Green, not so far as an
angel flies, where lay all that was mortal of another genius of the
dance and another friend, in the urn marked: “East Wall--No. 3711--Anna
Pavlova.”
As Lambert’s body was borne from St. Bartholomew the Great’s gothic
pile, I bowed my head low as a great man passed, a very lovable man.
_DAVID WEBSTER_
I have dwelt at some length on my impressions of the artistic
directorate of Sadler’s Wells. Beyond and apart from the artistic
direction of the Sadler’s Wells Ballet, but very much responsible for
its financial well-being, is David Lumsden Webster, the General
Administrator of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.
David Webster is not a head-line hunter. He is certainly not the
press-agent’s delight. He does not court publicity. He permits his work
to speak for itself.
On more than one occasion I have been appropriately chilled by a reading
of the impersonal factual coldness of the entries in that otherwise
useful volume, _Who’s Who_. The following quotation from it is no
exception:
_Webster, David Lumsden, B.A.--General Administrator Royal Opera
House 1946--Born 3rd July, 1903--Educated Holt School, Liverpool
University, Oxford University--President Liverpool Guild of
Undergraduates, 1924-25--General Manager Bon Marché, Liverpool,
Ltd., 1932-40--General Manager Lewis’s Ltd., Liverpool,
1940-41--Ministry of Supply Ordnance Factories, engaged on special
methods of developing production, 1942-44--Chairman Liverpool
Philharmonic Society, June 1940-October 1945._
To be sure, the facts are there. Not only is it possible to elaborate on
these facts, but to add some which may be implicit in the above
summary, but not apparent. For example, I can add that David Webster is
a cultured gentleman of taste, courage, and splendid business
perspicacity. His early background of business administration, as may be
gathered, was acquired in the fields of textiles and wearing apparel,
and was continued, during the war, in the highly important field of
expediting ordnance production.
Things that are not implicit or even suggested in _Who’s Who_ are the
depth and breadth of his culture, his knowledge of literature and drama
and poetry and music--his love for the last making him a genuine musical
amateur in the best sense of the term. It was the last that was of
immense value to him as Chairman of the Liverpool Philharmonic Society
in building it into one of Britain’s outstanding symphonic bodies. It is
understandable that there was a certain amount of pardonable pride in
the accomplishment, since Webster is himself a Liverpudlian.
At the end of the war, in a shell-shocked, bomb-blasted London, Webster
was invited to take over the post of General Administrator at Covent
Garden when the Covent Garden Opera Trust was formed at the time of the
Boosey and Hawkes leasehold. Since 1946, David Webster has been
responsible for the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden: for the Opera
entirely, and for the Ballet, in conjunction with Ninette de Valois.
During this time, he has restored the historic house to its rightful
place among the leading lyric theatres of the world; where private
enterprise and the private Maecenas failed, Webster has succeeded. By
his policies, the famous house has been saved from the ignominy of a
public dance-hall in off-seasons, for now there are no longer any
“off-seasons.”
David Webster is uniquely responsible for a number of things at Covent
Garden. Let me try to enumerate them. He has succeeded in establishing
and maintaining the Royal Opera House, Covent Carden, as a truly
national opera house, restoring this great theatre and reclaiming it as
a national center for ballet and opera, on a year-round basis. He has
succeeded in shaking off many of the hidebound traditions and
conventions of opera production. While the great standard works of opera
are an essential part of the operatic repertoire, he initiated a broad
policy of experimentation both in the production of standard works and
in new, untried operas. He has succeeded, through his invitation to the
Sadler’s Wells Ballet, in making ballet an integral and important part
of the Opera House and has helped it to become a truly national ballet.
In addition to striking national operas by Bliss and Vaughan Williams,
it was Webster’s courage that has provided a home for three unique
operas, _Peter Grimes_, _Billy Budd_ and _Gloriana_, great works by that
brilliant young British composer, Benjamin Britten. While it is true the
original commission for the former work came from the Natalie
Koussevitsky Foundation in America, it was Webster who had the vision
and courage to mount both great modern operas grandly. It was Webster
who had the courage to mount the latter, based on Herman Melville’s
immortal story, with Britten as conductor; and a magnificent one he
turned out to be.