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Published: Friday, 08 November 2024 at 10:24 AM
Lord Berners: a true English eccentric
In 2018 we’re far from the heyday of the 19th-century Romantic age, when the image formed of the great artist as a tormented genius. When it comes to classical composers, though, old notions can still linger at the back of our minds.
Shouldn’t a real composer live in a garret, be dirt poor, with a bothersome family and some fatal infirmity, and forever be kicking against society, battling to get the music out to an uninterested, uncomprehending world? You could label this characterisation an example of the Beethoven syndrome, with maybe some of Schubert thrown in.
Yet if this is the lurking caricature of an artist, what do we do with the peacock figure of Lord Berners, the fastidious British composer, writer, painter and all-round eccentric aristocrat? He doesn’t fit the picture at all. Born in 1883 as Gerald Hugh Tyrwhitt, he ascended to the family’s baronetcy in 1918 when three intervening uncles fell off a bridge after attending a funeral.
Who was Lord Berners?
Well, the above story was what Lord Berners once spread abroad… but it wasn’t true. But then so many facts about Berners’s life still read like fiction, lifted perhaps from his amusing novels, in one of which, Far from the Madding War, our hero pops up as Lord FitzCricket – a dilettante composer, writer and painter who was ‘astute enough to realise that, in Anglo-Saxon countries, art is more highly appreciated if accompanied by a certain measure of eccentric publicity’.
Berners certainly achieved a good deal of that before and after his death in 1950. There are the pigeons he dyed in different colours to prettify the grounds of his estate in Faringdon, Oxfordshire, and chime with the monochrome hues he supposedly chose for specific meals – pink, say, or blue. There’s the clavichord wedged inside his Rolls Royce, to satisfy urges to compose on the move.
There are the pigeons he dyed in different colours to prettify his grounds
There are also the disconcerting masks he wore (‘I get very bored with my own face’), or his pet giraffe; and the time he painted a friend’s beloved horse in his drawing room, or jumped at Salvador Dali’s suggestion to put the grand piano in the swimming pool, each black note decorated with a chocolate éclair.
Eccentric… but also a true musical talent
But if Berners’s creative output consisted solely of memorable remarks and dotty party tricks, he’d quickly be boring to contemplate. Nearly 70 years after his death, he remains significant because his music, modest in size but not in quality, is so satisfyingly individual.
It certainly delighted Stravinsky, who once declared him to be the best 20th-century British composer. It pleased Diaghilev, too (he of the seminal Ballets Russes ballet company), who in 1926 commissioned a ballet from him, The Triumph of Neptune.
Berners’s music changed in temper over the years, but the key ingredients, some contradictory, always remained: avant-garde grit meets traditional craftsmanship; cosmopolitan flamboyance runs alongside English reserve; stylistic satire is warmed by affection; and humour comes tinged with nostalgia, sometimes melancholy. If we cherish Satie, as we do, we should definitely cherish Lord Berners as well.
- ‘His music could have come from another planet’: how French composer Erik Satie liberated music
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An early epiphany
Lord Berners’s early years, described in his autobiographical book First Childhood and its successors, were not very nourishing. His father, Captain Hugh Tyrwhitt, was mostly absent on naval duties. His mother liked culture in the superficial way common among upper-class Victorians, but saved her real passion for horses and field sports, which tended to bore the young Gerald.
His own cultural interests went much deeper, and it’s striking how his feelings for music, literature and the visual arts went hand-in-hand from the start. He became fascinated by the look of musical notation on paper, dancing over the staves; also by a book’s tantalising description of Wagner’s operas.
Then, aged 14 or so, he saw the score of Wagner’s Das Rheingold in a shop. Bull’s eye. ‘There they were,’ he later wrote, ‘the Rhinemaidens swimming about in shimmering semi-quavers, Alberich clambering up from the depths of the Rhine…’ He was hooked for life; not on Wagner – that passion faded, along with any clamour for the grandiose – but certainly on music and its prime place among the arts.
‘Call a halt to this stupid cleverness in music’
By then Berners was at Eton, wilting under a conventional public school regime. His best education came when his mother cut Eton short and packed him off to France and Germany to develop the linguistic skills required in the diplomatic service, the career path chosen for him. Continental life and culture considerably widened his horizons. In 1909 he began as an attaché at the British Embassy in Constantinople.
By 1911 he was in Rome where, after only ad hoc instruction, he began to make his name as a composer of gnarled, futuristic piano pieces. Kindly received by Stravinsky and Alfredo Casella, they were not always cherished when they reached audiences at home. The composer Joseph Holbrooke labelled his early music ‘an insensate din’, while the distinguished critic Ernest Newman thwacked it away in 1919 by announcing that it was high time to ‘call a halt for this rather stupid sort of cleverness in music’.
When Newman wrote that, the big upheaval of 1918 had just happened: not the end of the First World War, but the metamorphosis of Gerald Tyrwhitt into the 14th Baron Berners, wealthy master of Faringdon House and several country estates. As such, he had no financial need for any career, neither as a diplomat or a professional composer.
Parties, luncheons, surreal soirées
But he certainly had social responsibilities, generally executed with panache. Into the grounds of Faringdon for parties, luncheons, and surrealistic soirées came many of the most fashionable among Europe’s cultural and political élite, bastions of the advanced in music, art and literature.
Among his various friends and associates, Lord Berners could number several of the leading artistic and academic figures of his day. There were, for instance, the scribbling Sitwell siblings, Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell, and the politically variegated Mitford sisters, one of whom, Diana, commissioned him to write a ‘Fascist March’.
Other associates include eccentric fashionista Elsa Schiaparelli; acidulous novelist Evelyn Waugh; classicist and wit Maurice Bowra; experimental wordsmith Gertrude Stein, and the inevitable Salvador Dali. All of these, plus many besides, added their own definitive hue to the composer’s already colourful existence.
A crammed, complicated life
And from 1932 onwards, around and about, there was always Berners’s companion Robert Heber Percy: almost 30 years younger, handsome, a daredevil, nicknamed ‘The Mad Boy’. What with composing, writing and painting mixed in, alongside bouts of depression, this was a crammed, complicated life.
Some friends were useful subjects for teasing, like the composer William Walton, the former bright spark who in Berners’s eyes seemed in danger of turning into the new Elgar. Other relationships went through cold spells, as with photographer and designer Cecil Beaton, one of the characters naughtily featured in Berners’s parody lesbian novel, The Girls of Radcliff Hall.
Berners’s output… small, but distinctive
As it drew to a close, according to Heber Percy, Berners continually mused over what he saw as lost chances: ‘If I hadn’t been asked out to lunch every day I’d have written better music. If I’d been poor I’d have written much better music.’ Had he been a professional composer and nothing else, the volume of his output might well have increased: even with lost or incomplete works added, the catalogue list assembled by the Berners champion Peter Dickinson only stretches to 37 items. But it is questionable whether the music itself would have packed the same originality or offbeat charm.
And it’s not as if the works created – piano sets, songs, five ballet scores, a one-act opera, music for three films, a handful of short orchestral pieces – were ever flimsy, undernourished, or ‘amateur’. He worked hard at his craft, selecting his material, designing and polishing, just as he did with the quiet, clear writing of his books or the best of his delicate landscape paintings (influenced by the French painter Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot).
No other British composer wrote music like this
An early avant-garde piano piece like Le Poisson d’Or of 1915, Stravinsky’s favourite, might not sound like a jewel; but a jewel it remains with its intricate juggling of repeated phrases, circling round like the goldfish in its bowl. No other British contemporary composer wrote music like this, or approached the dissonant bombardments of the extraordinary Fragments psychologiques – music brutally chiselled, without one wasted note.
He was equally unique in his sophisticated satire and humour, famously audible in the Trois petites marches funèbres of 1916, a set topped by gleeful cascades illustrating the funeral of a wealthy aunt. Every work from his years in Rome established a distinctive musical personality: quizzical, unsentimental, in love with repeated patterns but also disruptions and shifting keys; mindful of Stravinsky and Schoenberg; cosmopolitan, not English.
Berners’s ballet music: charming, ironic, chromatic
As Faringdon replaced Rome, and Tyrwhitt became Berners, surface changes occurred. The 1919 Fantaisie espagnole, a friendly parody of Spanish colourings and rhythms, started the process. The pivotal work, however, is the Diaghilev ballet, The Triumph of Neptune: a triumph, as well, of reaching out to wider audiences, and putting his gifts for parody and pastiche – his musical masks – to dramatic use.
Berners was made for the ballet world. Four other theatre scores followed, crowned by the unique A Wedding Bouquet (1937), spattered with sung words by Gertrude Stein with a nod in the background to Stravinsky’s Les Noces. The ballet music, charming, ironic, peppered with characterisically cockeyed chromatics, continued into the 1940s, Berners’s most difficult decade. He felt the war badly and felt his world collapsing, along with his health. By the time of his death, even his close friends could recognise that he’d outlived his time.
But the music has not. Nor have his books, all back in print. His spirit of gaiety and personal accoutrements still linger too. Only this April remnants of his Faringdon possessions went before the auctioneer’s hammer. These included a four-poster bed with fancy glass pillars; a gramophone
with a gaudy green horn; Stravinsky’s music proofs; decorous watercolours; Victorian wax animals; rococo armchairs. This wasn’t Beethoven’s world, or Schubert’s. But it still produced art that matters.
How to get into Lord Berners’s strange and captivating world
Until the 1970s, the small field of Berners recordings was dominated by Thomas Beecham’s two accounts of the suite from The Triumph of Neptune: music that still provides the friendliest entry point for Berners’s delightful art. There’s a spirited 1986 account of the suite by Barry Wordsworth and Liverpool forces (Cala), with sparkling earlier orchestral scores in support; the complete ballet is available from David Lloyd Jones in the series of Berners CDs issued some 20 years ago by Marco Polo.
Others, conducted by Kenneth Alwyn, offer convenient if not stellar accounts of his later ballets, including the idiosyncratic A Wedding Bouquet. For the more avant-garde core of Berners’s output, Heritage’s two-disc Lord Berners Collection is indispensable, uniting the contents of two splendid surveys of his piano music and songs from Peter and Meriel Dickinson (1977) and Felicity Lott and Peter Lawson (1996).
Berners books
Nor should you forget Berners’s books. The most immediately beguiling are First Childhood, A Distant Prospect, The Chateau of Résenlieu and Dresden, four small, drily observant and witty autobiographical volumes. Sample sentence: ‘The English are seldom at their best at breakfast time and when they are it is even more depressing.’ The same American publisher, Turtle Point Press, also offers his Collected Tales and Fantasies, a handy bundle of six entertaining short novels, variously concerned with a camel, a composer’s problem finishing a symphony, and Cleopatra’s nose.
Reading about Berners’s life and circle is also essential. Mark Amory’s Lord Berners: The Last Eccentric is an elegant, sympathetic biography. Sofka Zinovieff’s lavishly appointed The Bad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother and Me, a wider family history, enjoyably expands our knowledge (sometimes alarmingly, too). And there are multiple insights in Peter Dickinson’s Lord Berners Composer, Writer, Painter, a wonderful compendium of comment, facts, facts, fascinating interviews, and 32 colour pages of Berners’s art.