In this review of classical music composed in the year 1950, we focus on British composers, all taking inspiration from music of past centuries. We end with an Eastern-European composer and one of the best-known trumpet concertos in the instrument’s literature. Let us start with one of Britain’s main figures in 20th-century music.
Benjamin Britten – Reflections on a Song of John Dowland
In the ten-year period between 1944 and 1954, Benjamin Britten was mostly occupied with writing operas. During that time he completed, among others, the operas The Rape of Lucretia, The Beggar’s Opera, Billy Budd and The Turn of the Screw. He still found time during that productive period to write a number of vocal and instrumental compositions.
In 1947, when Britten completed another opera, Albert Herring, he was seeking funds for the staging of the opera’s production. A handsome sum was contributed by Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst of Dartington. The two were both botanists and had gardens at their estate, Dartington Hall. Three years later Britten wrote Five Flower Songs, Op. 47, a set of five part-songs set to poems in English by four authors. The songs were written for four voices – soprano, also, tenor and bass. Britten composed the music to commemorate the generous couple’s 25th wedding anniversary, explaining: “They were written about flowers because they are both amateur botanists.” The song cycle was premiered by a student choir in July 1950, conducted at Dartington Hall by Imogen Holst.
Each of the five pieces was set to flower-related poems, as follows:
To Daffodils, by Robert Herrick
The Succession of the Four Sweet Months, by Herrick
Marsh Flowers, by George Crabbe
The Evening Primrose, by John Clare
The Ballad of Green Broom, anon.
Here is the slow movement, the Evening Primrose:
Benjamin Britten – Lachrymae
In May 1950 Britten added to his impressive catalog of works a duet for viola and piano – Lachrymae, Reflections on a Song of John Dowland. Both instruments were close to his heart, having studied them as a young child. Britten composed ten variations around a work by one of Brittain’s primary composers of the Renaissance period. ‘If my complaints could passions move’ was written by John Downland as a galliard dance for the lute, included in his First Book of Songs, dated 1597. The variation cycle evolves around the first eight bars of Dowland’s piece, along the way picking up a reference to another Dowland song, ‘Flow, my tears’, before it concludes with an unembellished interpretation of the original. Britten would return to this structure in 1963 with the composition ‘Nocturnal After John Dowland’, Op. 70, written for master guitar player Julian Bream.
Lachrymae was composed when Britten was in the midst of writing his Opera Billy Budd. Two years earlier he was one of the founders of the Aldeburgh Festival. The annual event featured opera productions, readings of poetry, literature, drama, lectures and exhibitions of art. For the 1950 edition, Britten tried to recruit the great Scottish viola player William Primrose. Britten met Primrose in 1949 during his first American tour with tenor Peter Pears. In a letter dated October 24, 1949, Primrose wrote, “Thank you for your heartwarming compliment the other evening at the Hawkes’ when you said I was ‘needed’ at Aldeburgh. Believe me I would regard it as a privilege, without a viola piece from you, but with it my cup would indeed overflow.”
Short of funds to afford the master, Britten enticed him with a promise of a piece suitable for his virtuosic playing. But with his mind set on the opera, Britten forgot his promise, only to be reminded on a phone call from Primrose. ‘It’s in the post’ he replied with no hesitation and finished writing Lachrymae overnight. Primrose later wrote that Lachrymae is, “a series of quite remarkable, highly original, and devilishly ingenious variations.”
Lachrymae premiered at the third Aldeburgh Festival, on 20 June 1950, performed by William Primrose and the composer playing the piano. A day later The Guardian covered the event, saying this of the performance: “It falls into a slightly disjointed series of episodes which are not easy to appreciate at first hearing. They resolve happily enough into a fairly Dowlandish conclusion, but up to that point the unfamiliar ear cannot pick out any effective connecting thread. On paper, one presumes, it is there, but it does not make itself felt.”
Later in his career, in the spring of 1976, Britten orchestrated the piano accompaniment of Lachrymae for strings.
Ralph Vaughan Williams – Concerto Grosso
After completing his highly praised yet unsettling symphony no. 6 in 1948, Ralph Vaughan Williams dedicated his composing skills to performers of lesser skills, writing large scale works for amateur orchestras and soloists. Since the beginning of his career as a composer, he believed that music should be a reflection of the community’s life and that it should be accessible to everyone. His deep research of folk songs amounted in 800 traditional songs and carols intended for community singing. In 1949 he wrote the cantata Folk Songs of the Four Seasons for women’s voices with orchestra, based on traditional English folk songs. The work was commissioned by the National Federation of Women’s Institutes (NFWI) and was performed at the Royal Albert Hall in June 1950 by 3,000 members of the institute.
In 1950 Vaughan Williams was approached by the Rural Music Schools Association, who asked for a composition that can be played by music students for the 21st anniversary of the organization. As in his earlier work ‘Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis ‘, the composer took his inspiration from early classical music traditions, this time looking at Baroque music. The concerto grosso was a composition style made popular by composers like Corelli and Handel, where a small group of soloists is backed by a full orchestra. Some of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos are also written for that setup. Vaughan Williams took the form and extended it to three parts, with amateur musicians in mind. The Concertino part for the group of soloists was written for skilled musicians. The ripieno and tutti parts for the larger group were suitable for the semi-skilled. And finally, the Ad Lib parts were added by the composer with the exclusive use of open strings for pure beginners. That last section can be omitted when performed at more professional engagements.
The premiere performance of the Concerto Grosso took place at the Albert Hall in London on November 18, 1950. A 400-musicians-strong string orchestra performed on stage, conducted by Sir Adrian Boult.
Malcolm Arnold – English Dances
1950 started for Malcolm Arnold with a frenzy of activity. He wrote two light orchestral pieces, Divertimento no. 2 Opus 24 for the National Youth Orchestra, and Serenade for Small Orchestra, Opus 26. For St Matthew’s Church in his hometown Northampton, he wrote Psalm 150: Laudate Dominum, Opus 25. Arnold had the utmost respect for all members of the orchestra, having played as second and then first trumpet at the London Philharmonic Orchestra in the 1940s. He later said: “You must have respect for every player in the orchestra, the rank-and-file strings, not just the principles. It is like writing a very large string quartet. All orchestral music is in fact chamber music.”
Arnold suffered for most of his life from a depressive illness, fueled by reliance on alcohol. This pattern got worse after a period of heavy workload with very little sleep and increased stress. Later in 1950, after a year and a half of composing film scores and other works with tight deadlines, Arnold attacked his wife Sheila with a knife. He was confined in an asylum for three and a half months, subjected to insulin and electroconvulsive shock therapies.
Amazingly, after going through these horrific therapy experiences, within a month of being released Arnold wrote one of his best-known compositions. It was the most successful of his works at the time. English Dances Opus 33 was commissioned by his publisher Alfred Lengnick & Co. The request was to write a popular work that resembled Dvorak’s Slavonic Dances or Bartok’s Romanian Folk Dances, both well-known favorite classical pieces of audiences around the world. Arnold set to create a composition, that even though does not include any specific melodies from the rich repertoire of British folk music, manages to capture the spirit of the English landscape.
The first set included four dances. They became immediately popular, easily whistleable. The set was premiered on 14 April, 1951 by the London Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Sir Adrian Boult. The publisher came back for more, and Arnold provided the goods with a second set of four more dances.
Over the years these popular pieces have been used in various television programs and films. The first dance in the second set, Allegro non troppo, was selected as the theme music for the popular BBC television series ‘What the Papers Say’. Parts of the third movement of the first set, Mesto, were used in the main title of Maurice Jarre’s Oscar-winning music for David Lean’s 1965 film Doctor Zhivago. For many people the music of his English Dances IS Malcolm Arnold, for they may have never heard his major ‘serious’ work and his symphonies.
If you are a rock fan and classical music in not on your music menu, you still may have listened to his work. Arnold was the orchestra conductor in the Concerto for Group and Orchestra, performed in 1969 by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and the rock band Deep Purple.
Alexander Arutiunian – Concerto for Trumpet and Orchestra
The last composer in this review was born in Armenia in 1920, the year the Republic of Armenia became part of the Soviet Union. Alexander Arutiunian graduated from the Music Conservatory of Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, just before the outbreak of World War II. After the war he moved to Moscow and studied at the Moscow Conservatory, where he graduated in 1948. During his studies he wrote the cantata Motherland, for which he was awarded the Stalin Prize.
Back in 1943, Arutiunian conceived the main theme for a concerto. Zolak Vartasarian , a longtime friend who was the principal trumpet in the Yerevan Opera Orchestra, encouraged him to complete the composition, but sadly died in the war the same year. In 1950 Arutiunian completed the work as a concerto for trumpet, a favorite instrument of his since childhood. It was premiered by trumpeter Aykaz Messlayan in Moscow. Written as a single-movement concerto, it features seven sections which are all performed without a break. They conclude with a virtuoso cadence – a variation of the main theme, which was written by famed trumpeter Timofei Dokschitzer.
As in many of his other compositions, Arutiunian incorporated into the trumpet concerto melodic and rhythmic ideas based on the ashugh tradition of Armenian folk song which flourished in the 18th century. One can hear passages of Gypsy and Russian music interspersed throughout, although he avoids using any actual folk tunes. When Dokschitzer immigrated to the United States in 1954, he brought Arutiunian’s trumpet concerto to concert halls around the world. It became one of the most important works in the trumpet literature, a virtuoso showpiece for master trumpeters, and Arutiunian’s most famous composition.
Many have likened the concerto to Haydn’s Trumpet concerto, another famous composition in the trumpet repertoire. When asked about the similarities in structure, Arutiunian replied: “I wrote the piece without even knowing at the time about the concerto of Haydn and can surely state that no other influences were there while writing this concerto.”
Sources
Benjamin Britten: A Biography, by Humphrey Carpenter
Journal of the American Viola Society, Volume 33 Summer 2017: Understanding Britten’s Lachrymae through Billy Budd
Vaughan Williams (Composers Across Cultures), by Eric Saylor