Arnold Bax

In the years before the First World War he lived in Ireland and became a member of Dublin literary circles, writing fiction and verse under the pseudonym Dermot O'Byrne.

The establishment was run – "with considerable personal pomp", according to Bax – by Cecil Sharp,[6] whose passion for English folk-song and folk-dance excited no response in his pupil.

[7] An enthusiasm for folk music was widespread among British composers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including Parry, Stanford, Vaughan Williams and Holst;[8] Sullivan and Elgar stood aloof,[9] as did Bax, who later put into general circulation the saying, "You should make a point of trying every experience once, excepting incest and folk-dancing.

[7] Although Bax won a Macfarren Scholarship for composition and other important prizes, and was known for his exceptional ability to read complex modern scores on sight, he attracted less recognition than his contemporaries Benjamin Dale and York Bowen.

[16] The Times considered that Bax's independence and disinclination to heed his teachers ultimately damaged his art, because he did not develop the discipline to express his imagination to the greatest effect.

[17] After leaving the Academy Bax visited Dresden, where he saw the original production of Strauss's Salome, and first heard the music of Mahler, which he found "eccentric, long-winded, muddle-headed, and yet always interesting".

[14] Influenced by Yeats's The Wanderings of Oisin, Bax visited the west coast of Ireland in 1902, and found that "in a moment the Celt within me stood revealed".

In 1908 he began a cycle of tone poems called Eire, described by his biographer Lewis Foreman as the beginning of the composer's truly mature style.

The first of these pieces, Into the Twilight, was premiered by Thomas Beecham and the New Symphony Orchestra in April 1909, and the following year, at Elgar's instigation, Henry Wood, commissioned the second in the cycle, In the Faëry Hills.

The Manchester Guardian's reviewer wrote, "Mr Bax has happily suggested the appropriate atmosphere of mystery";[22] The Observer found the piece "very undeterminate and unsatisfying, but not difficult to follow".

[n 6] Bax and his wife lived first in Chester Terrace, Regent's Park, London,[29] and then moved to Ireland, taking a house in Rathgar, a well-to-do suburb of Dublin.

[31] Bax became known in Dublin literary circles under the pseudonym "Dermot O'Byrne"; he mixed with the writer George William Russell and his associates, and published stories, verses and a play.

Banfield had better things to say of the later poems, where Bax "focuses matters, whether laconically and colloquially upon the grim futility of the 1916 Easter Uprising ... or pungently upon his recurrent disillusionment about love.

[1][14] At a time when fellow composers including Vaughan Williams, Arthur Bliss, George Butterworth and Ivor Gurney were serving overseas, Bax was able to produce a large body of music, finding, in Foreman's phrase, "his technical and artistic maturity" in his early thirties.

[39][40] In a study of Bax in 1919 his friend and confidante, the critic Edwin Evans, commented on the waning of the Celtic influence in the composer's music and the emergence of "a more austere, abstract art".

[17] After the Second World War began, Bax moved to Sussex, taking up residence at the White Horse Hotel, Storrington, where he lived for the rest of his life.

Walton commented, "an important cricket match at Lord's would bring him hurrying up to town from his pub at Storrington with much greater excitement than a performance of one of his works".

[60] In 1950, after hearing his Third Symphony played at Bournemouth, he said, "I ought perhaps to be thinking of an eighth", but by this time he had begun to drink quite heavily, which aged him rapidly and impaired his ability to concentrate on a large-scale composition.

Yet there is no mistaking the Bax physiognomy or psychology: always through the gloom and thickets of the symphonies the warm rays of an approachable, lovable man and nature may be felt.

[81] Bax's last concertante piece was a short work for piano and orchestra (1947) written in his capacity as Master of the King's Music, marking Princess Elizabeth's twenty-first birthday.

The orchestral piece that was neglected longest was In memoriam (1917), a lament for Patrick Pearse, who was shot for his part in the Easter rising; the work was not played until 1998.

The first was for a short wartime propaganda film, Malta, G. C.. A four-movement suite was published after the release of the latter,[83] containing what The Penguin Guide to Recorded Classical Music calls "a notable March with a genuine nobilmente theme in the best Elgarian tradition".

"[92] The choral works with religious texts include his largest-scale unaccompanied vocal piece, Mater ora Filium (1921), inspired by William Byrd's Five Part Mass; it is a setting of a medieval carol from a manuscript held by Balliol College, Oxford.

[93] Bax's other choral works include settings of words by Shelley (Enchanted Summer, 1910), Henry Vaughan (The Morning Watch, 1935), Masefield (To Russia, 1944), and Spenser (Epithalamium, 1947).

Sir John Barbirolli wrote, "I think he felt keenly that his richly wrought and masterly scores were no longer 'fashionable' to-day, but nothing could deter him from the path of complete honesty and sincerity in his musical thought.

He had always sustained a Romantic outlook, distancing himself from musical modernism and especially Arnold Schoenberg's serialism, of which Bax wrote in 1951: I believe that there is little probability that the twelve-note scale will ever produce anything more than morbid or entirely cerebral growths.

Kennedy estimates that it took "twenty painful years" before the music of the British romantics including Bax made headway against the dominance of modernism.

[101] In 1985 the Sir Arnold Bax Trust was established to promote the composer's work including the sponsoring of live performances and recording and publication of his music and writings.

[108] Of the tone poems, Eugene Goossens conducted the first recording of Tintagel, in 1928;[109] twenty years later a set of The Garden of Fand with Beecham and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra was released by HMV.

Russell himself portrayed Bax and Glenda Jackson, in her final role before leaving acting for 23 years to pursue her political career, appeared as Harriet Cohen.