CATHEDRAL MUSICAL FESTIVALS
No; I’m not going to be a chronicler in this chapter. It sounds a dull
subject, I know, but many things happened in Gloucester, Hereford and
Worcester in mellow September days that were vastly amusing and which
were not reported in the papers, and it is about these I am going to
tell you.
It used to be very charming to go to one of these cathedrals early
each autumn, drink cider, listen to music six hours a day, walk by
the river, have jolly “rags” in the hotel at night, and come home
again at the end of a week or ten days. September is a tired month,
I always think ... if not tired, a little languorous.... It has many
days in which one wants to walk about just quietly, enjoying being
alive. It would be wrong to fuss and work really hard. I suppose that
in all those wonderful places in which I have spent so many happy
weeks—Worcester, Lincoln, Gloucester, Hereford, Norwich—people ruminate
and browse at all times. Certainly I have seen them browsing in herds
in September days. I once watched the Bishop of Hereford browsing. He
stood perfectly still and seemed to be contemplating and measuring and
gently wondering about the growth of a healthy nasturtium.
Everybody used to migrate to these festivals. Well, not quite everybody
... but you know what I mean; just the very people you most awfully
wanted to meet again and talk to and hear music with: people like
Granville Bantock, Ernest Newman, Samuel Langford, John Coates,
Dr McNaught, Frederic Austin, Herbert Hughes. London used to send
thirty or forty critics, and the provinces about the same number. And
from the surrounding towns would pour in county families, middle-class
families anxious (poor deluded ones!) to keep abreast of the musical
times (or do I mean _The Musical Times_?), maiden ladies still and
for ever ecstatic over Mendelssohn’s poor old _Elijah_, fierce
choir-masters with ideas on choral singing, village organists who
really believed that Dr Brewer was the Last Word, immaculate young men
with æsthetic fever and a decided leaning towards Elgar’s _The Dream of
Gerontius_ (always alluded to by them as _The Dream_), very “nee-ice”
young ladies who when at home played the violin, and, last of all,
deans (oh yes, lots of deans), minor canons, slim curates, parsons of
all kinds, squires without money, squarsons.
It was hard for us musical critics to take these festivals quite as
seriously as the festivals expected us to do, for it always seemed
incredible to us that London or Birmingham or Glasgow should have the
least desire to know how the choruses of Handel’s _The Messiah_ were
sung in a little town like Gloucester. Moreover, many of us were amused
at the tragic seriousness of these age-old festivals—festivals at
which, as a rule, only two new works of any importance were produced
and over which old oratorios—an impossible form of art—hung like a
heavy cloud. So we used to amuse ourselves in our different ways, and
the ringleaders in our occasional rags were generally Granville Bantock
and Ernest Newman.
Almost every detail of one of these joyous occasions lingers in my
memory. Dr McNaught, the doyen of us all, an experienced critic, a
witty speaker, and a most profound musician, was the not unwilling
victim. Bantock or, to give him his full title, Professor Granville
Bantock, M.A., had brought from Birmingham two live eels in a tank.
When he bought these sturdy creatures, he must have had in his mind
some jollification or other, and when I met him in the streets of
Hereford (I think it was Hereford) during the morning of the Festival’s
first day, he asked me what was the most amusing thing I could think of
that could be done with two live eels.
“Eels!” exclaimed I, in amazement. “Do you mean to tell me that you
really possess two live eels?”
“Yes, here in Hereford. One gets a little dull here after a couple
of hours, and, after all, eels are very lively fry. They break the
monotony of life.” He paused a moment. “And,” he added rather dreamily,
“they swish their tails so busily. I suppose an eel’s tail is the
busiest thing in the world. Come and have a look; they’re in my room at
the hotel.”
And there they were in a tank: dark objects in dark water, swirling
about with enormous enthusiasm.
The day passed and no amusing idea occurred to me. Bantock conducted
one of his works in the cathedral that evening—a very important and
solemn occasion, and when we critics had left our “copy” at the
post-office for telegraphic transmission to our respective newspapers,
we foregathered in the hotel.
Now Dr McNaught had gone to spend the late hours with a friend and was
not expected back till nearly midnight; it became obvious, therefore,
both to Bantock and myself, that the eels must, in some way, be made to
surprise him on his return. We placed the slimy creatures in a washhand
basin in his bedroom, poured water upon them, and gazed down upon them
with knitted brows.
“It is enough,” said Bantock; “there is no need to think of anything
else. Listen.”
And, truly, there was a most stealthy and uncouth sort of noise. Eels
may have soft skins, but their muscles are hard and, as they careered
round the basin, one heard a continuous smooth sound as of people
going about some nefarious business in the dark, and now and again,
at unexpected moments, a loud thwack would be heard as one of the fish
threw his tail upon the side of the basin.
Newman and Frederic Austin and one or two others collaborated in
preparing our scheme. A female figure was made, carefully placed on the
middle of Dr McNaught’s pillow, and gently covered to the neck with the
bedclothes.
These elaborate arrangements for Dr McNaught’s entertainment were only
just completed when the doctor himself returned. We waited in dark
corners of the corridor for the result.
After an interval of a few minutes, a bell rang and a chambermaid
appeared.
“There is some mistake, I think,” said Dr McNaught genially. “Either
this room is a bedroom, a larder, or an aquarium; it would be most good
of you if you would decide as soon as possible which it really is.”
The chambermaid entered the bedroom and we could just hear her quiet
voice as, a moment later, she half whispered:
“But, sir, the room is already occupied. There is a lady in your bed.”
Of course, the psychological moment had arrived, and we strolled
casually into the bedroom to become witnesses of Dr McNaught’s
embarrassment. The jape was continued. McNaught was taken to the
smoke-room, solemnly tried by judge and jury for having murdered
a woman and concealed her body (it was at the time of the Crippen
affair), and sentenced to death. Newman brought a hatchet from the
cellar and, not long before dawn, the mock sentence was carried out
with elaborate pantomime....
“Very childish—just like schoolboys!” I hear a reader (not you, of
course) say, rather contemptuously. Yes, it was like schoolboys, and
substitute “-like” for “-ish” in “childish” and I agree with you most
heartily.
* * * * *
But not all our time was spent in this uproarious way. There were long
hours of talk, great talk from Langford of _The Manchester Guardian_,
a man of mature years whom to meet is a privilege and whom to know
intimately is a blessing; witty, rather cruel, but vastly entertaining
talk from Newman; pungent talk from Bantock; and general gossip from
all kinds of people.
I do remember so regretfully—regretfully, because I do not think a
like occasion can happen again—an afternoon that Langford and I spent
sitting at a little rustic table under a just yellowing grove of
poplars. Langford’s mind is spacious, most richly stored. Nothing can
happen that does not at once and without effort fit into his philosophy
of life, and though his talk is profound it is so greatly human
that, in listening to him, one feels completely at rest. He accepts
everything.... I daresay you have noticed that many people have tried
to describe the effect Walt Whitman’s personality has had on them, and
you will have observed how they have all failed. It is an impossible
task.... And I feel that in writing about Langford it is impossible to
convey to you what he stands for to his friends. I recollect Captain
J. E. Agate once saying to me: “I never come away from speaking to
Langford without feeling what an empty fool I am.” Yes, that is true;
yet, at the same time, you feel reconciled to your own empty folly;
besides, you know well enough that if you were a fool Langford would
not talk to you; he would just ask you to have a drink and then he
would fumble clumsily in his waistcoat pocket to find you a cigarette.
Langford will never be “successful” in the worldly sense. Perhaps he
looks with suspicion on success; certainly he has never attempted to
achieve it. I imagine that his nature is very like that of Æ, and if
what everyone says of Æ is true, one cannot conceive that anything
finer could be said of anyone than that he resembles the great Irish
poet.
It was these refreshing talks with various people that did something
to mitigate the severity of the atmosphere of conventionality, of
“respectability” in its worst sense, that made it rather difficult to
breathe freely in these cathedral cities. Everyone wore new clothes;
men perspired in kid gloves; girls carried prayer-books and copies
of _Elijah_; deans were dapper; ostlers were clean and profoundly
polite; and, wherever you went, you heard people saying that they had
seen Lord Bertie and Lady Jane, and had you noticed that the dear
Bishop had looked a little tired last evening? There was, too, about
these festivals an air as of a society function. Music, an unwilling
handmaid of charity, was “indulged” in. One did not have music every
day, for that would have been frivolous; but one had it in great lumps
every twelve months, and had it, not because one cannot live fully and
vividly without art, but because it made a good excuse for a social
“occasion.” The music itself was excused—for in the minds of these
people it required an excuse—by the fact that the entire festival was
organised for charity, that vice which causes so many sins.
I myself came into rather violent conflict with the Norfolk and Norwich
Musical Festival authorities on a question of artistic morality. Ten
or eleven years ago they offered a prize of twenty-five guineas for a
poem, and another prize of fifty guineas for the best musical setting
of the poem. I entered the former competition and secured the prize.
My “poem” was in blank verse and lyrics, its subject Cleopatra, and it
contained the following passage:
_Iris._ And when with regal, arrogant step she passed
Across the portico, her white breasts gleamed;
Her neck seemed conscious of its loveliness;
Her lips, tired of tame kisses, parted with
The expectancy of proud assault; she was
As one who lives for a last carnival
Of love, in which she may be stabbed and torn
By large excess of passion.
_Charmion._ Oh! Our Queen
Has wine for blood; her tears are heavy drops
Of water stolen from some brackish sea
Or murderous waves; her heart now leaps with life
And now lies sleeping like a coilèd snake.
But in to-night’s cold moon she burns and glows;
Her heart is housing many a mad desire,
And she is sick for Antony.
_Iris._ The day
Has gone, and soon they’ll drink the heady wine
That sparkles in each other’s eyes. Once more
Venus and Bacchus meet, and all the world
Stands still to watch the bliss of living gods.
There was a little more to the same effect, and when I wrote the stuff
I thought it very fine and still think it rather pretty. But a section
of the musical Press attacked it violently, and for a couple of months
I was quite a notorious person. I gathered from the articles and
letters that appeared that my dramatic poem was not likely to engender
music that would carry on the tradition of Mendelssohn’s _Elijah_.
That had been my object in writing it. I was sick of that tradition. I
wished to help to break it.
One day, while the little storm was still raging, I received a letter
from Sir Henry J. Wood, who was to conduct the Festival at Norwich
at which my work was to be given. (Mr Julius Harrison, who has since
become prominent as one of Sir Thomas Beecham’s assistant conductors,
had gained the prize for the musical setting of my poem.) In his letter
Sir Henry wrote: “Very much against my will, I am writing to ask you
on behalf of the Committee of the Norfolk and Norwich Festival if
it is possible for you to make any alternative version of the ‘two
objectionable lines’ (I fail to find them myself) in your libretto,
_Cleopatra_.... From my point of view, the whole thing is absurd and
ridiculous.”
I could not find the objectionable lines. I showed the poem to a most
maiden aunt and watched her as she read it, hoping to tell by her
sudden blush when her eyes had reached the evil place. She did not
blush; she simply read the thing and said: “Oh, Gerald, how nice! I do
think you have such pretty thoughts.” So did I.
A few days later Mr Julius Harrison came to my aid. The committee, it
appeared, objected to “her white breasts gleamed” and also to:
Her lips, tired of tame kisses, parted with
The expectancy of proud assault....
I changed those lines, and the work in due course was performed at
Norwich, and in Queen’s Hall, London. Later on, when my little poem was
sung in Southport in its original form, with Mr Havergal Brian’s music
(for he also had honoured me), Mr Landon Ronald conducting, the members
of the audience did not leave their seats when the “objectionable”
lines occurred; rather did they seem to lean forward a little and
listen more intently.
I have mentioned this incident, not because in itself it is important,
but because it so beautifully illustrates the point of view of our
Cathedral Festivals. Their “secular” concerts are echoes of the
concerts given in the Cathedral. They hate (or else they are afraid
of?) every emotion that is not a religious emotion. They think that God
made our souls and the devil our bodies. They may be right; if they
are, it is clear the devil is not lacking in consideration.
* * * * *
There is no doubt that our most ecstatic moments at the Cathedral
Festivals were supplied by Wagner’s _Parsifal_, which Mr J. F.
Runciman, in his little book on this composer, describes as “this
disastrous and evil opera.” Only excerpts from it, of course, were
given; all “objectionable lines” were cut out. If _Parsifal_ is to
be given on the platform at all—and, in view of the fact that we
seldom have it on the stage, why not?—then it had better be given on a
platform that has been erected in a spacious and beautiful cathedral.
I remember those white voices floating down from a place out of sight
near the roof, away above the clerestory. I always used to try to
obtain a seat near some dimly stained window so that it might for
me blot out the rather bewildered or consciously “rapt” faces of my
fellow-creatures, for, in listening to noble music, I invariably feel
much greater than, and curiously irritated by the presence of, other
people.
And it used to be so fine to come forth from the Cathedral at noon,
step into that mellow September English sunshine which I have not seen
for nearly three years, and walk by the river ... walk perhaps a mile
or so and come back to the hotel to eat cool meats and cool salads and
drink cool wine. It was at these times I used to sigh and long for
Bayreuth and wonder if I should ever see the grave of Wagner in the
garden of Villa Wahnfried in that little Bavarian town.
It was at Gloucester, I think, that one year I was pursued by a certain
hard-working, but not very talented, composer who, having gained a
most extensive “popular” public for his work, was now anxious to win
the suffrage of more cultivated people. Most unhappily for me, he took
it into his head that my musical criticism had some influence in the
north, and though he was quite wrong in this assumption, I was never
able to convince him of his error. Wherever I went, lo! he was there
with me. And always under his arm was a musical score, a score of his
own composition. Something new, he assured me; something really quite
modern. Would I look at it? I did. It was feeble, paltry and bombastic,
but I did not like to tell him so. But when he pressed me for an
opinion I said, what was near enough to the truth, that it was a great
advance on his previous work. This seemed to please him, and he took
to inviting me out to lunch. If ever I went into the hotel smoke-room
for a quiet pipe, I would invariably notice a vague but self-important
figure in the doorway, and presently would hear the unmistakable pop
that a champagne bottle so deliciously makes when it is opened. A
bubbling glass would be placed at my side.
“Now, Richard Strauss in his _Ein Heldenleben_ ...” his voice would
begin. And he would proceed to tell me all about _Ein Heldenleben_ and
its beauties. To bewilder him, I used to assert that _Carmen_ seemed to
me a much finer work than Strauss’s _Elektra_, and, because he was very
ignorant and because he had not the slightest appreciation of Strauss,
he used to look at me rather pitifully, and would eventually confess
that he too liked Bizet more than he liked Strauss and that, indeed, it
appeared to him that Arthur Sullivan....
One day, when we were alone, he asked me if I would write a series of
articles on his works. It was my turn to be bewildered.
“A series?” I asked, utterly stunned.
“Yes,” answered he, “a series. First of all, there are my part-songs.
Then there are my instrumental pieces. Last of all, my Cantatas.” He
pronounced cantatas with a capital C. “Just a short series: three
articles in all.”
I hesitated, but he looked at me most pleadingly. I tried a little
sarcasm, but that made him more pertinacious than ever. So then I
flatly refused, and kept on refusing, and did not stop refusing.
“Well, then,” said he at length, “will you put in writing and sign what
you said to me the other day about my new work? You will remember that
you said it was the best thing I had ever done, that it was original,
full of vigour, astonishingly fresh, subtle in harmony....”
“Oh, really,” I protested, “did I say all that?”
“Yes, indeed, you did.”
And then I became very, very rude indeed, and, after that, whenever we
met, we used to bow to each other most politely and say never a word.
This kind of man, and there is quite a handful of them, haunts the
more important Festivals, but it must be very rarely that one of them
obtains what he desires.
* * * * *
Can you recall the most curious and most unlikely sight you have
ever witnessed? Most of us, even in the course of a few years of a
very ordinary existence, witness many strange things, but of all the
strange things I have stumbled across nothing has been so wayward, so
_outré_, so fundamentally silly, as the forty organists I saw sitting
in one room at Worcester. One can imagine two, or even three, organists
sitting talking together, but forty, and fifteen of the forty Cathedral
organists, seems incredible.
Now, you have only to be fond of modern music to feel instinctively
that a man who is an organist and nothing else is sitting on the wrong
side of the fence. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred he is helping
to hold things back; he hates the rapid progress which music is making,
and he has as much imagination as the _vox humana_ stop.
Well, the forty organists were sitting and talking and smoking, and as
I looked at them and at their mild, but worried, faces, it seemed to me
and my companion that, in the interests of art, morality and ordinary
decency, some protest should be made. And we decided that we were just
the people to make it. We could have forgiven them if they had met
together to discuss some professional question—_e.g._ how to get their
salaries raised, how to get the better of their respective vicars,
or how they could expand their minds so as to be able to appreciate
Debussy or Ravel or even Max Reger. But they were gathered together
merely because they liked it, just for the sake of enjoying each
other’s society. Monstrous absurdity! Could they not see how ridiculous
they were? Forty organists in one room!—why, there ought not to be
forty organists in the whole world.
Fortunately the room was on the ground floor and the hour late. My
companion and I stepped outside the hotel, waited till the street was
quiet, and then rapped a series of three tattoos upon the window-pane
to secure silence within. We then sang in two parts, I in a high
falsetto and my friend in a lugubrious bass, the “Baal” Chorus from
_Elijah_. “Baal, we cry to thee! Baal, we cry to thee!”
We had not proceeded very far in this beautiful music—intended by the
dear, delicious Mendelssohn for a shout of savagery, but really a quite
charming cradle song—when a cry of delighted laughter came from the
room, and two or three of the organists, hatless and earnest, rushed
out into the street.
“Come inside!” they said; “come and join us. You belong to _us_!”
Too utterly flabbergasted at this invitation to make any reply, we
turned and fled, rushed back to our hotel, and ordered whisky-and-sodas.
The great musician to whom we told the story next day said:
“Well, once more, you see, the biters were bit.”
But my friend and I did not think so.