S o n g ������������������������������������������������������������������� i n �������������������������������������������������������������������� G ������������������������������������������������������������������� o l ��������������������������������������������������������������������� d ����������������������������������������������������������������������� P a ������������������������������������������������������������������ v i �������������������������������������������������������������������� li o �������������������������������������������������������������������� n s ���������������������������������������������������������������� ������������������������������������������������������������������� ���������������������������������������������������������������������� �������������������������������������������������������������������������� R �������������������������������������������������������������������� o n ������������������������������������������������������������������������ a l ���������������������������������������������������������������� d S ������������������������������������������������������������������� t e ����������������������������������������������������������������� v e ������������������������������������������������������������������� n s ��������������������������������������������������������������������� o n ��������������������������������������������������������������������� o ����������������������������������������������������� n M u ������������������������������������������������������������������ s i c �������������������������������������������������������������������� ��������������������������� ��������� SSoonngg iinn GGoolldd PPaavviilliioonnss Ronald Stevenson on Music Editor CHRIS WALTON Song in Gold Pavilions – Ronald Stevenson on Music (The title of this book is derived from a line in Stevenson’s song cycle Border Boyhood to texts by Hugh MacDiarmid.) Published by SUN MeDIA Stellenbosch Copyright © 2009 Ronald Stevenson All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic, photographic or mechanical means, including photocopying and recording on record, tape or laser disk, on microfilm, via the internet, by e-mail, or by any other information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission by the publisher. First edition 2009 ISBN: 978-1-920109-68-4 e-ISBN: 978-1-920109-69-1 DOI: 10.18820/9781920109691 Cover artwork: Ronald Stevenson by Victoria Crowe, oil on paper. Reproduced with the kind permission of the artist. Cover design by Ilse Roelofse Typesetting by SUN MeDIA Stellenbosch Publisher: Liezel Meintjes Set in 10/12 RotisSerif SUN PReSS is an imprint of SUN MeDIA Stellenbosch. Academic, professional and reference works are published under this imprint in print and electronic format. This publication may be ordered directly from www.sun-e-shop.co.za. Printed and bound by SUN MeDIA Stellenbosch, Ryneveld Street, Stellenbosch 7600. www.africansunmedia.co.za www.sun-e-shop.co.za RRoonnaalldd SStteevveennssoonn CCoonntteennttss ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ........................................................................................................ i INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................................................... iii STEVENSON ON STEVENSON The Passacaglia on DSCH ..................................................................................................... 1 Stevenson’s Fugue on a Fragment of Chopin; Symphonic Elegy for Liszt ..................... 4 Purcell Washed Whiter?: Reflections on my Purcell transcriptions ............................... 6 One Pianist’s Credentials and Credo .................................................................................... 8 Composing a Song Cycle: Border Boyhood ........................................................................ 10 A Composer Loyal to his Principles: Stevenson in Interview with Martin Anderson .................................................................................................... 14 Ronald Stevenson and Art: Stevenson in Interview with Philip Hutton ....................... 20 STEVENSON ON BRITISH COMPOSERS Edward Elgar, Panjandrum and Poet .................................................................................. 27 Edward Elgar: Whimsy and Spleen ..................................................................................... 28 Frederick Delius and the Wisdom of Life ........................................................................... 31 Delius’s Sources ...................................................................................................................... 33 Francis George Scott (1880-1958) ....................................................................................... 37 Percy Grainger: Music’s Mowgli .......................................................................................... 39 Alan Bush: Committed Composer ........................................................................................ 42 Alan Bush in the 70s ............................................................................................................. 65 William Walton’s Extravaganza .......................................................................................... 69 Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem ......................................................................................... 70 Britten at Aldeburgh .............................................................................................................. 73 Bernard Stevens ..................................................................................................................... 74 STEVENSON ON SCOTS MUSIC Heifetz in Tartan .................................................................................................................... 79 Gaelic Music ........................................................................................................................... 80 Harps of their Own Sort: The Clarsach ............................................................................... 82 STEVENSON ON THE CONTINENTAL TRADITIONS Franz Schubert ....................................................................................................................... 89 Robert Schumann’s Romantic Selves .................................................................................. 91 Discovering Meyerbeer .......................................................................................................... 92 On the Nature of Music: Towards an Understanding of Music in Relation to the Absolute .................................................................................................................... 94 Sergei Rachmaninov, Nightingale and Raven ................................................................... 99 Szymanowski at the Piano ................................................................................................... 100 Leopold Godowsky ................................................................................................................. 105 Maurice Emmanuel: a Belated Apology ............................................................................. 106 Igor Stravinsky, Hedonist and Ritualist .............................................................................. 116 Gian-Carlo Menotti’s Seasonal Verismo ............................................................................. 117 An Introduction to the Music of Roman Vlad ................................................................... 119 INDEX OF NAMES AND WORKS ........................................................................................ 133 AAcckknnoowwlleeddggeemmeennttss FF irst and foremost, I wish to thank Marjorie and Ronald Stevenson for their constant encouragement and support. Joel Flegler of Fanfare Magazine, Malcolm MacDonald of Tempo, Antony Bye of the Musical Times, Harry Winstanley of the Godowsky Society and Will Scott of the Newsletter of the Stevenson Society have all generously allowed articles from their journals to be reprinted here, while Philip Hutton and Martin Anderson displayed the same generosity in allowing me to publish here their interviews with Ronald. Victoria Crowe kindly let us use her beautiful portrait of Ronald as the cover of this book, and I owe both her and Ken Gray much gratitude. I believe that I have made all reasonable efforts to notify the publishers of the original articles of our desire to republish here, though since some journals no longer exist and the ownership of them has since changed hands several times, this proved difficult in some cases. The examples of Bernard Stevens’s music are given by kind permission of Lengnick Publications, Bertha Stevens and the Bernard Stevens Trust. The copyright of Roman Vlad’s works lies with SUGARMUSIC S.P.A. (Milan), and I am grateful to them and to Alessandro Savasta for permission to quote from them here. The music examples from Alan Bush’s works are given by kind permission of his heirs, represented by his elder daughter, Rachel O’Higgins. My research assistant Annemie Stimie in Pretoria was responsible for typing the greater part of the first draft, and also – together with Karien Labuschagne – for typesetting the music examples; I owe them much gratitude. I further wish to thank the following individuals whose assistance and encouragement have proven vital to this project: Derek Watson, Isobel van der Walt of the University of Pretoria Library; Chats Devroop and Gerhard Swart of the University of Pretoria; Wikus van Zyl of SUN PReSS; Stephanus Muller; and – for their constant patience and support – my wife Riëtte and our children Isa, Elza and Alvaro. CHRIS WALTON ii IInnttrroodduuccttiioonn TT here is an undeniable fascination in reading the words that composers write. Whenever a composer puts finger to typewriter rather than pencil to manuscript paper, we inevitably hope that he might proffer us some insights into the workings of the creative musical mind – that source of much mystery since the act of composition left the realm of low artisanship for that of High Art some two or three centuries ago. Composers who deal with words as naturally as they write notes are, however, a breed of exceeding rarity. Ronald Stevenson belongs amongst them: and the proof of it is to be found amply in the present book. Stevenson was born in 1928 into a working-class Lancashire family of mixed Scots and Welsh descent. He studied with Iso Elinson in Manchester at what is now the Royal Northern College of Music, he was imprisoned on account of his pacifism and his concomitant refusal to do military service, he worked in a colliery school in County Durham, then subsequently reaffirmed his Celtic roots by moving to a tiny cottage in West Linton in the Scottish borders. With the exception of two years spent lecturing in Cape Town in the early 1960s, he has remained in Scotland, faithfully ‘local’ in that oddly cosmopolitan, internationalist manner that the best Scots creative artists have somehow always managed to attain. He and his wife, Marjorie, still live in that same cottage, half an hour’s bus ride from Edinburgh – though for the visitor, its smallness somehow evaporates once inside, revealing instead the far greater scope of the minds and hearts that reside in it. Ronald Stevenson is a man possessed of multifarious gifts, though he has been most prominent as a pianist and composer in whom virtuosity and musicality are paired in equal measure. He has performed and lectured in many of the most prestigious venues that the musical and academic worlds have to offer, from the Royal Albert Hall to the Juilliard School of Music, but nevertheless eschewed the customary travelling concert career that was the lot of his performing friends (John Ogdon foremost amongst them). He also (with that Capetonian exception) avoided the route into academia that has been the bread-and-butter choice of many of his fellow composers. Stevenson’s compositional oeuvre is vast, encompassing almost every genre from instrumental miniatures to large-scale concertos and choral pieces, and his works have been commissioned and performed by artists of renown, ranging from Peter Pears to Yehudi Menuhin. He is probably best known for the work that is the topic of the first essay in this book: his remarkable Passacaglia on DSCH for piano, which is cited just about everywhere as being the longest single-movement work in the piano literature. At about eighty minutes in length, it might well be. But it is in fact only the tip of the iceberg – albeit a very large, impressive, craggy one. The catalogue of his works in iiiiii SSoonngg iinn GGoolldd PPaavviilliioonnss a recent volume on his life and music is in fact almost eighty pages in length.1 And besides his original compositions, Stevenson is a master of the art of transcription, one worthy to be ranked alongside Busoni and Grainger. Stevenson has been hardly less prolific in writing words than in writing notes. For composers to write about music has in fact been something of a sine qua non for well over a century now. As in so much else, we can put the blame squarely on Richard Wagner. While other composers before him had achieved prominence as critics – Robert Schumann is the obvious example – it was Wagner above all who awakened the public’s expectations that a composer should express his opinions on life, the world and his art in prose. This was for a long while – predominantly, though not exclusively – a German phenomenon, where even those composers with the least to say would insist on doing so at length; furthermore, German academia has long distinguished between that which is ‘musical journalism’ and that which is ‘proper’ musicology – with the implication, of course, that the former is comprehensible but flimsy and throwaway, while the latter, being for longer- term consumption, need not be so immediately intelligible. If there is a single major difference between the Germanic and the Anglo-Saxon musicological traditions, then it is surely that this distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ has ever been blurred in the latter. In his own implicit disdain for such attitudes of altitude and affectation in his approach to prose, Ronald Stevenson has remained decidedly ‘British’; and that he has much of import to say will be clear enough to the reader of this book. To be sure, there are ample products of his pen from the past half century that even the most Teutonic of commentators would happily stamp as ‘scholarly’ – his Western Music: An Introduction,2 his contributions to the study of Ignaz Paderewski, Bernhard Ziehn or Alan Bush, or his articles on poets such as Hugh MacDiarmid and Sorley Maclean. But he has also penned many shorter pieces that were intended for more immediate consumption. Here, his regular column on ‘last week’s broadcast music’ for The Listener in the 1960s and ’70s comes to mind, which allowed him to comment directly on matters of the day, musical and otherwise. But regardless of whether he is writing for the scholar, the student or the homely listener in his comfy chair by the wireless, Stevenson never looks down on his reader, nor dumbs down to him, but looks him straight in the eye, inviting him, too, to do the same back. And, just as Stevenson the composer is seemingly incapable of writing a brief canon or an Albumblatt without displaying his mastery of form, structure, art and artifice, and just as his recordings of the technically straightforward repertoire exude the same musicality as do his virtuosic pyrotechnics, so too do his many occasional prose pieces show en miniature the 1 See Colin Scott-Sutherland, ed.: Ronald Stevenson: The Man and his Music. London: Toccata Press, 2005, pp. 381-459. 2 Ronald Stevenson: Western Music: An Introduction. London: Kahn & Averill, 1971. New edition currently in preparation. iivv