11.05.10
Foxy Lady: “Hang on a bit ... What d'you mean – 'Wales and the Great Composers'?
Are you trying to say we've no Great Composers of our own?”
Hecklephone: “Hmm... well, yes, I suppose...”
FL: “What about Vaughan Williams?”
H: “I understand your confusion when it comes to names, but I'm afraid VW just wasn't Welsh. In fact... I'm not sure how to put this to you, he was actually English. Worse, many say he was the most English of all.”
FL: “So be it: but I feel you're trying to outfox me here – what about Howells, Walford Davies, Bowen, Lloyd, Alwyn... I'm sure there were one or two others as well!”
H: “Let me put it this way. There once was an Emlyn Hughes who was captain of England at football, and a Mike England who was captain of Wales... Are you getting my drift?”
FL: “With England on our side, we probably won that match, then?”
The above is from a transcripted discussion with a bright and bushy-tailed Heckle- and-Hendrix-fan conducted in her fragrant den somewhere in Sir Benfro. My sharp-eared host and I got together to discuss why Wales counted for so little during “The Age of the GCs”. As my interlocutor reminded me, unpopulated Norway, otherwise silent under its permafrost, produced Edvard Grieg, a composer physically little larger than herself. Bohemia had Smetana (though he had to learn Czech); Poland had Chopin (though in exile from the age of twenty), Hungary had Liszt (who never got to grips with Magyar). They were all missionaries of “National Music”, exporting exotic illustrations of mother-cultures, seeking an empathetic resonance to national political programmes – missionaries but also emissaries – for to be on the musical map was to be on the map, full stop. All over Europe crowds flooded to see – as much as to hear – Liszt. More than 5000 punters once heard a Grieg gig at London's Crystal Palace, from the cheaper seats they probably couldn't see him.
Let me return to the already-mentioned irony that our beloved Mendelssohn was no fan of Welsh music. Now it can be revealed that it actually left him with painful dental problems. In one letter home he wrote in the dominant German key, though, of all places, he was staying in Llangollen at the time:
No national music for me! Ten thousand devils take all nationalism! Now I'm in Wales, and dear me! A harper sits in the hall of every so-called inn, ceaselessly playing so-called national melodies: that is to say the most shocking, vulgar, out-of-tune trash, with a hurdy-gurdy going on at the same time. It's already given me tooth-ache. Any like myself who cannot stand Beethoven's national songs should come here and listen to them bellowed out by rough nasal voices, accompanied in the most awkward manner. I'm getting angry, and will have to leave off writing for a while.
So by normative standards, our music was not only not music, it was anti-music. What masterpiece might the Meister have made without his molested molars? Those in search of a quiet drink and chat in your average Welsh boozer today may well resonate with furious Felix.
Yet by the 1880s, Wales seemed well placed in the race for national glory. It was indisputably a Land of Song, why not a Musical Nation? In Gwynedd there is hardly a village which doesn't boast its native composer of at least one hymn tune, once known all over Wales, and often complete with a main street monument to that effect. There was a revived ethnic culture, a legendary saga to match “Nibelungenlied” or “Kalevala”, an established canon of “folk music”, and great industrial wealth. Many of Wales's sons were trained in choral competition that proprietorial jealousy extended far from our shores. In his compelling new book, Dreaming a City, about John Hughes and the metallurgical empire he founded in the Ukraine, Colin Thomas tells of a Welsh attempt to steppe on the throat of local song. Music in Russia was then emerging as a potential rival to that of Germany. Through Mussorgsky her folk songs – and indeed her folk – made debuts on the operatic stage. Hughes's highly-paid skilled workers were mostly from his hometown Merthyr. They were "the aristocracy of labour", as snooty as Mendelssohn in their way. Hughes evidently shared their distaste for local music-making, and included “singing and whistling” in a list of shop-floor misdemeanours which attracted prohibitive fines.
So why did Wales fail to respond adequately – in a historic sense – to the challenge? For decades, Merthyr was the crucible of Wales's musical as well as industrial promise. Last time I wrote about Elgar as the English “One”. For a time, we too seemed to have a “One”– Joseph Parry, Merthyr-born, of Philadelphia fame. His opera Blodwen, the first set to a Welsh-language libretto, attracted huge initial acclaim, with dozens of domestic performances. Yet the other Hecklefan will note that my little vixen was cunning enough not to nominate Parry. You see, it's a name that goes without saying. There have been more Welsh composers called Parry than one could shake a baton at. Through many an effortful generation, using a time-honoured version of a familiar but unspoken process – attributed spuriously to the Bach family – the Parrys eventually delivered themselves of a musician with compositional talent allied to Bachian energy. But the genuinely popular hero turned out to be – as Gareth Williams memorably puts it – “Joseph Parry, alas!” This inarguable conclusion is arrived at by Professor Williams, author of the scholarly yet entertaining book Valleys of Song, in his frustrated quest for a Welsh GC. Our Parry had a contemporary, Hubert Parry, raised not too far from Merthyr, on the Saxon side of the Gwent-Gloucester border. Moreover, he was Joseph's English equivalent as a candidate for "Oneship". As his prize piece this Meistersinger wrote an "English Symphony". It was dismissed with Beckmesser-ish (in current mediaspeak, Cowell-ish) contempt by G. B. Shaw. Hubert's much-puffed reputation ended in the same deflationary mode as all previous Parrys, Welsh or otherwise.
Meanwhile, the victorious English “One” emerged. Sir Edward Elgar frequently found his muse apt to assist during Welsh holidays in places like “Llangringoggywoggypygwgssil” – as he amusingly referred to Llangrannog. Hence many bars of Falstaff (maybe including “The Boar's Head”), the famous “big tune” of Introduction & Allegro, and quite a few of The Apostles. For this last epic, Elgar chose as his inaugural “Christus” David Ffrangcon-Davies, the Bethesda-born tenor, who regarded it as the peak moment of a dizzy career. After that, "English Colonialism" was certainly a factor in the lento e morendo of music in Wales. From Cambridge, Sir Hubert Parry despatched Walford Davies to the chair of music at Aberystwyth in order to spread the message of an “English Musical Renaissance”. Edward Jones, like Davies born wrong side of the border, replaced his ancestral surname with a baptismal middle name of greater professional promise. Rebranded as “German”, he patented a popular version of bucolic English music. Remorse later stung him to write a stirring Welsh Rhapsody. Even Joseph Parry (alas!) christened his sons “Joseph Haydn Parry” and “Sterndale Bennet Parry”: the latter after an English composer who was one of many Mendelssohn epigones.
All was not lost – yet. In the early 1900s three pupils took lessons in the organ-loft of Gloucester Cathedral. Two achieved a certain fame as songsters in the “nest of singing birds” – as England was once described. Later, the other produced a hit number which boosted British morale during the Great War – “Keep the Home Fires Burning”. Later still he wrote an alternative National Anthem – “Rose of England”. The first two were Herbert Howells and Ivor Gurney, the third was (of course!) Cardiff's own Ivor Davies – aka Novello – born within shouting distance of the river Taff. What might our Ivor have achieved in “serious” music had he not become a spectacular product of twentieth-century media culture – Britain's first international film star, most fêted songwriter of his day, multi-talented West End sensation, creator of Gay's The Word, and the best-known habitué of His Majesty's Theatre ever to be a guest at His Majesty's Pleasure.
We've had other compensations. As early as the 1860s – Professor Trevor Herbert tells us – all the Beethoven symphonies were arranged and played by local musicians connected to the Crawshay brass band in Cyfarthfa (Merthyr). In 1929-30, the newly-formed National Orchestra of Wales gave the first complete cycle anywhere of Sibelius's symphonies. But it's no use pretending that things are not that bad. The truth is they're actually worse. On the first day of the first ever Test Match played in Wales, as Kevin and Colly held out against the might of Oz, a hymn of resistance rose spontaneously from supporters gathered on the banks of the Taff. It gradually became recognisable as a number long seen as the leading contender for an English National Anthem namely Jerusalem. Music by Parry... Hubert Parry, alas. It sums up the remote removes of Wales's relationship with the GCs. “And did those feet...?” Not in Wales, it seems: or in Fletch's answer to an embarrassing question: “What? - with these feet?” The fate of the Welsh music lover is still to bend the ear to alien corn, to lick the hand that pats us on the head.
Hecklephone
Sources cited:
G. Williams, Valleys of Song: Music and Society in Wales, 1840-1914 (University of Wales Press, 2003); C. Thomas, Dreaming a City: From Wales to Ukraine (Y Lolfa, 2009); T. Herbert, The British Brass Band: A Musical and Social History (Oxford University Press, 2000).