Joseph Holbrooke

Whilst at the academy he composed several works, chiefly piano miniatures, songs and some chamber music, which were performed at student concerts:[9] at one recital, he substituted one of his own compositions in preference to Schumann's Toccata, incurring the wrath of the Principal, Sir Alexander Campbell Mackenzie.

In 1898 he undertook a tour of Scotland accompanying the music hall singer Arthur Lloyd,[16][17] but the venture failed and he was forced to return to live with his father in London.

Manns accepted the work for performance and gave the premiere on 3 March 1900, whilst later that same year the orchestral variations on Three Blind Mice were also heard (Queen's Hall Promenade Concert, conducted by Henry Wood, 8 November 1900).

Audiences would regularly find admonishing notes printed in their programmes: When war broke out in 1914 he turned his attention to vigorously denouncing both the lack of support given to British music and the continued favour afforded to that of other countries, especially Germany.

He published a series of five essays entitled British Music Versus German Music which appeared weekly in The New Age between 5 November and 3 December 1914: The personal tone which informed much of the writing was too strong for some commentators who saw it as blatant self-promotion: The fact that Holbrooke had recently issued a number of works[43] under a pseudonym was also seized upon and viewed with suspicion: Undoubtedly, Holbrooke was a difficult and prickly person to deal with professionally.

Shortly before a concert in Bournemouth on 22 February 1917, where the composer was to give a performance of his piano concerto Gwyn ap Nudd, the conductor Dan Godfrey was compelled to hastily insert apology slips into each of the programmes to the following effect: In fact, what had annoyed Holbrooke was the greater prominence which the printed advertisements gave to Vladimir Pachmann who was due to play two days later: he felt that this was yet another instance where a foreigner was being given undue celebrity to the detriment of a native pianist.

[46] Such outbursts of pique were characteristic and he gained the reputation of a troublesome and cantankerous eccentric: Following the First World War, with his own music increasingly side-lined,[49] Holbrooke continued ever more vehemently to berate his critics.

Holbrooke had spent extended periods of time at Harlech, Wales, since around 1915, Scott-Ellis having provided him with a number of residences, and in the early 1920s he moved with his family to a house which he appropriately named Dylan.

In the early hours of 9 November 1928, whilst the rest of the family were in London, fire broke out and the house was completely gutted:[57] Holbrooke sustained serious head injuries and his music library was destroyed.

The condition also served to curtail his career as a concert pianist: when Holbrooke revised his Piano Concerto The Song of Gwyn ap Nudd in 1923 it was for a performance given by Frederic Lamond.

Poe and a poem for chorus and orchestra The Bells), a ballet (The Masque of the Red Death), a multitude of chamber works (such as the Clarinet Quintet Ligeia, the Trio Fairyland and the Nonet Irene) and several piano pieces.

[74] Throughout his career he continually revised his compositions: titles were changed with an almost casual regularity (for instance, the opera Pierrot and Pierrette became The Stranger, the opera-ballet The Wizard became The Enchanter and the dramatic overture for brass band 1914 became Clive of India), many works were assigned several different opus numbers at different times, he borrowed music from one piece to another and recast works in different forms: for example, The Pit and the Pendulum draws its material from the opera-ballet The Enchanter, Symphony No.7 (Al Aaraaf) is a transcription for string orchestra of a String Sextet, The Masque of the Red Death which was originally another orchestral poem became a ballet, and what was illustrative of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's The Skeleton in Armour was seemingly also a close depiction of Byron's The Corsair, whilst several different versions of his orchestral variations on Auld Lang Syne exist with a number of the supposed 'musical portraits' apparently applicable simultaneously to different contemporaries.

His reputation for using outlandish instruments and inflated orchestral resources is, however, generally undeserved: most of his large-scale works are scored for the modern symphony orchestra as used in the early twentieth century.

This preference is shown in the frequent styling of his works as poems or fantasies, and the fact that virtually every single piece by him carries a descriptive or poetic title, often literary.

[87] The solo vocal writing in the mature operas, whilst not strictly comparable with verismo, is generally declamatory and follows naturalistic speech-rhythms: in this sense at least, along with many of his contemporaries, Holbrooke was indebted to Wagner although his musical idiom is more dissonant.

[103][104][105] Few of his works were commercially recorded in the three decades following the composer's death in 1958, notable exceptions being The Birds of Rhiannon[106] and The Song of Gwyn ap Nudd,[107] although the BBC did broadcast a number of studio performances.