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Francis Pott’s booklet Essay for Stephen Hough’s Hyperion CD release [1996]:
York Bowen music for piano solo,
Hyperion CDA 66838.
[Minor amendments have been made to the following text where these had become necessary by 2007.]
In a kinder economic age than ours it was relatively easy to find one’s way into print. In music this applied
as much to writers about the subject as to composers, and there is no shortage of loosely compiled short
volumes from the first decades of the twentieth century which purport to offer an instructive survey of
developments at the supposed (or actual) ‘cutting edge’ of creativity. While these often achieved instead a
ragbag of misinformation, personal prejudice and autobiographical self-advertisement, they frequently
found some consensus in identifying exciting key figures at work in our own country. For this reason
posterity has lent them a degree of vicarious poignancy; for there can be no more affecting way to confront
a once-lauded artist’s descent from celebrity to obscurity than to read in such a context of heroic beginnings,
then realise that one can go no further: the trail vanishes and the rest, it seems, is silence. While much is
being belatedly rectified nowadays via the enterprise of certain recording companies, the passage of silent
years compels one to wonder at the public assertion of no less a critic than Ernest Newman that Joseph
Holbrooke’s Piano Concerto no. 1 contained melodies to stir the very marrow in his bones and belonged on
the same pedestal as Richard Strauss. Recorded performances of Holbrooke have nonetheless remained far
more the exception than the rule. Public ones are even rarer; this applies more or less equally to Rutland
Boughton, Granville Bantock, John McEwen, William Hurlstone and, amongst others, York Bowen.
Born on 22nd February 1884 at Crouch Hill, London, Edwin Yorke Bowen was the youngest of three sons.
His mother was a musician and his father a founder partner in Bowen & McKechnie, whisky distillers,
thereby conferring a pedigree comparable with that of Sir Thomas Beecham and the eponymous tablets (of
which the conductor did not care to be reminded) or Cecil Armstrong Gibbs. After piano studies with Alfred
Izard at the Blackheath Conservatoire, the young Bowen won the Erard Scholarship of the Royal Academy
of Music in 1898, having already accumulated numerous other prizes and medals. After an initial reluctance
to leave Izard he became a devoted student of the famously eccentric Tobias Matthay. Already a talking
point among his peers and his seniors, he was to gain a reputation as ‘a pianist of remarkable brilliance’
(Grove) which, for decades after his death, continued to eclipse his prestige as a composer, great though the
latter had been during his apprenticeship at the RAM under Frederick Corder. Bowen was also an
accomplished horn player and violist.
It is a mistake to assume that what we now accept as a British ‘renaissance’ in music, namely the awakening
of a nationalism rooted in folksong and Tudor hymnody, marked the earliest rebirth in the twentieth century
of indigenous creative fervour or high purpose. This is merely to perpetuate the obscurity from which the
youthful Bowen and other more or less significant figures have suffered, without stopping to question its
justice. While it is true that Teutonic influence still dominated the British musical establishment during
Bowen’s student years, this in itself was divided into mutually inimical factions of either a Brahmsian or a
Lisztian and Wagnerian tendency, as if in emulation of the slightly earlier status quo in Europe. As Lewis
Foreman has pointed out in his definitive biography of Sir Arnold Bax (Scolar Press, 1983 & 1988; recently
issued in its third edition), this divergence was epitomised by the RAM (then still in Tenterden Street, off
Oxford Street, where it occupied three houses amalgamated in bizarre and labyrinthine fashion) and its
junior cousin, the Royal College of Music in South Kensington. The RCM, whose staff both Parry and
Stanford had joined in 1883, espoused Brahms (though this does scant justice to Parry’s personal liberality
of outlook, which admitted some influence of Liszt). The RAM, directed from 1888 to 1924 by Sir
Alexander Mackenzie, was of the other hue. Exceptions, such as the RCM-trained arch-Wagnerite Rutland
Boughton, retained their identity despite rather than through Stanford’s ministrations.
When Bowen left the RAM in 1905 Liszt had been dead for only nineteen years and the reputations of many
of his illustrious pupils were at their zenith. One must consider Liszt’s impact in terms both of pianistic
innovation and of personal charisma, adding to that a sense of the heady aesthetic which had led to such
conceptions as Liszt’s Faust Symphony, Wagner’s Tristan and the early tone poems of Richard Strauss. It is
then easy to sense the zeal and excitement from a shared ideal which gripped many from Bowen’s
generation. Disillusioning obscurity had not yet confronted them with Debussy’s prophetic rejection of the
Wagnerian ideal as ‘the twilight mistaken for the dawn’. Formal portraits for publicity purposes reflected
these things, tending often towards either a ‘soft-focus’ or a studiedly farouche romanticism. Imageconsciousness shows too in the names: Bowen dropped ‘Edwin’ and the ‘e’ of ‘Yorke’; Holbrooke
Teutonised himself to ‘Josef’. An early photographic study of Bowen depicts a distantly high-minded gaze
and a strong-featured young man, in profile not unlike that doyen of later Bloomsbury, Osbert Sitwell. At
this point he was on the crest of a wave. Bax, one year his senior, was known at the RAM at this stage
mainly as a pianistic and orchestral sight reader of incomprehensible brilliance, but not yet as a composer.
Bowen was esteemed ‘the most remarkable of the young British composers’ by Saint-Saëns. The stage was
his, and, lest it be thought that he squandered opportunity by confining himself to the piano solo output of
which Stephen Hough’s recording provides a timely view, he responded with three piano concerti between
1904 and 1908, performing nos. 1 and 3 under Hans Richter in the Promenade Concerts at Queen’s Hall. By
1912 two symphonies had received favourable public notices.
Bowen’s pianistic distinction, which embraced the formidable demands of Liapunov’s Transcendental
Etudes and of Liszt and Chopin in patrician style, remained a focus for adulation in many quarters -but not
quite all: ‘Immortal Beethoven...’, wrote the tragically short-lived pianist and composer William Baines
(1899-1922) in his diary after attending a Promenade concert on 16th September 1921: ‘York Bowen played
his [Beethoven’s] C major Concerto as if it was [sic] the most difficult thing in the world...’. In the
intervening years since 1912 Bowen’s position as a composer had changed drastically. The European
musical establishment had been rocked by the scandalous 1913 première of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du
Printemps in Paris and by the advent of Schönberg’s then notorious Pierrot Lunaire the year before.
Britain’s insularity might have put off the evil hour for latterday romantics such as Bowen but for the
apocalyptic shadow of the Great War, which effectively silenced even so great a voice as Elgar’s. Those
who could not or would not swim sank, while, perversely, a man with the moral courage and creative
toughness of Frank Bridge must find himself ultimately marginalised for his newly uncompromising
utterance by a society still unable to bear very much reality.
The Great War had seen Bowen (as horn player) in the regimental band of the Scots Guards, with which he
served in France before being invalided home with pneumonia in 1916. He had probably confronted already
the fact that his creative impulse turned upon abstract poetic romanticism rather than unflinching human and
social commentary. His remaining decades (lived out in an almost wholly uneventful domesticity in the
impersonal environs of Finchley Road) are portrayed in Monica Watson’s ‘York Bowen -a Centenary
Tribute’ (Thames, 1984). Here one may discover a faintly bleak ménage dominated by spiritualism and faith
healing, as well as an apparent conflict (denied by the author) between avowed Anglo-Catholicism and what
seem to be aspects of Buddhist faith. Later years were to be clouded by financial anxieties not unconnected
with Bowen’s son Philip, whose supposed healing gifts are ominously reported by Watson as having been
‘controlled’ by an Indian doctor. Philip subsequently lost these gifts and drifted through a variety of
professions until his death in 1970. York Bowen himself continued to serve the Royal Academy faithfully as
a Professor until 1959.
The sense of virtual exile which this melancholy summary conveys must invite passing comparison with the
fate of the composer Nikolai Medtner (1880-1951), himself a refugee from Revolutionary Russia and
domiciled in North London for the last sixteen years of his life. Like Bowen, Medtner was a pianist of the
highest distinction. The piano is central to the output of both (especially to Medtner, who wrote for it almost
as exclusively as Chopin). Moreover, both composers still espoused the same idiom and aesthetic in the
middle of this century as they had at its outset, and neither was afraid to air in print some serenely
unrepentant views on the relative modernists of his time. Bowen’s music evinces a variable but still
significant debt to the Russian Romantic piano tradition of Balakirev, Liapunov, Rakhmaninov and Medtner
(whose G minor Sonata, opus 22, was in his repertoire), and it is possible to advance the Medtner
comparison further on purely technical grounds. ‘...Too generous with his substance. He never seems to
appreciate the value of’ repose’, reported the critic for The Spectator upon hearing Bowen’s Third Concerto
in 1907. His colleague with the Sunday Times had already complained mildly of themes being ‘overdeveloped’ in the First Concerto (1903). Such criticisms have been levelled too at Medtner’s tendency to
pursue every contrapuntal consequence of a theme to its ultimate conclusion, notably in such works as his
Sonata in E minor, opus 25 (The Night Wind). While Medtner is a composer of greater structural resource,
these similarities may go some way to explain the continuing obscurity of Bowen’s large scale works and
the virtual disappearance of Medtner’s from his adoptive (and his native) country until quite recently. Both
composers were stridently championed by Kaikhosru Sorabji, himself the iconoclastic composer of some of
the most fearsome piano music ever written, to whom Bowen dedicated his Twenty-four Preludes in 1950.
In view of all this it would be easy to read into the blunt northern honesty of William Baines an unwitting
observation of shallow or meretricious artistry waxing histrionic in the face of worldly disappointments, as
if in some misguided bid for attention; but this would be unfair. From Monica Watson’s observation of
Bowen we gain insight into a stoically humorous personality who bore the undoubted bathos of his later
years without bitterness and retained the affection and gratitude of many up to and beyond his death. As a
pianist he belonged to the twilight of a romantic tradition which prized tonal beauty and patrician elegance
in the face of all challenges and which had been able to embrace the theatrical instincts of a Liszt at the
same time as the sober obsession of a Tausig with concealment of all physical effort. The duality of such an
inheritance can be documented: Bowen recorded a selection of his own piano music for Lyrita in 1960, and
despite some understandably strenuous moments (he was then in his mid-seventies) his playing reveals an
honest clarity and strength which must have been all the more vivid in his younger days. Such virtues are
the antithesis of mere posturing, -and yet an anecdote told by the distinguished British pianist Hamish Mime
hints at underlying eccentricities: ‘I remember being taken as a fourteen-year-old to a soirée at his house
where his pupils performed and he himself played Glazunov’s Theme and Variations in F sharp minor. He
enunciated the theme (in single notes) with the second and third fingers of both hands on each note. Even at
fourteen 1 thought this rather odd, although I sensed that it added a certain grandeur. His reply to my shy
question was “Four horns in unison, dear boy, -how else could one score it?”’ Such a piece of baroque
eccentricity rooted in genuine musical percipience sounds like a possible legacy from student days with
Matthay.
Bowen died suddenly in November 1961, active as a musician to the very last. The ensuing generation was,
if anything, unkinder to his reputation than his later decades had been. It is only recently that a more liberal
and curious musical establishment has begun to rehabilitate him and many of his contemporaries.
Twenty-four Preludes in all major and minor keys, opus 102:-
The Preludes, bearing the dedication ‘To Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji, 1950’, adopt the ascending key
scheme used twice over by Bach in Das Wohltemperierte Klavier. Nonetheless, Bowen’s line of descent is
from Chopin’s Preludes and Etudes, comparable cycles under the latter title by Henselt and, most directly,
the Preludes and Etudes-Tableaux of Rakhmaninov (who esteemed Henselt’s and Chopin’s Etudes almost
equally). Rakhmaninov is the most detectable and recurrent model: Bowen’s opening Prelude may enjoy a
perceptibly different harmonic vocabulary, but its rhythmic and pianistic resources spring clearly from the
piece in the same key which opens Rakhmaninov’s Thirteen Preludes, opus 32. Coincidence of key and of a
particular blend of pianistic and emotional resonance is yet more obvious in the case of Bowen’s Prelude in
E flat major and its counterpart, Rakhmaninov’s opus 23 no. 6. Significantly, perhaps, the E flat Prelude is
one of Bowen’s happiest inspirations. Elsewhere, as in the C minor and G minor pieces, there is an
intermittent modality much more in line with certain piano miniatures by Moeran, Ireland or, a touch
ironically, some of Baines. These movements exhibit a welcome restraint and economy, thereby lending
balance to a highly eclectic and atavistic - but still imposing - overall conception. Overt moments of
virtuosity noticeably call forth a heightened terseness and astringency, typified by the Prelude in B flat
minor and by the startling ferocity of the technically demanding octave study in G sharp minor which
provides a fitting conclusion to the group of Preludes presented by Stephen Hough.
Sonata in F minor, opus 72:Bowen composed no fewer than six solo piano sonatas, of which three remain unpublished. The Sonata in F
minor, his fifth, was published in 1923 by Swan & Company and has some claim to be the most successful
of the group. Its arresting triadic opening generates material not only for the first movement, a spaciously
dramatic conception with an angular melodic principal subject, but also (in altered guise) for the driving
rhythms of the finale. Between these turbulent utterances comes a fragile idyll whose irregular five quavers
to the bar cannot wholly dispel reminders of Edward Mac Dowell’s lyrical simplicity in similar contexts.
(Indeed, the four sonatas of Mac Dowell bear comparison on other grounds, though relatively innocent of
Bowen’s pianistic and harmonic sophistication.) The design of the Sonata as a whole might suggest an
attempt to mirror the dramatic progress of Beethoven’s Appassionata in entirely personal terms (the two
works are in the same key and both feature slow movements deliberately cowed into submission by what
surrounds them). Bowen yields little to Beethoven in the sheer fury of his finale’s climactic coda (heard
after a valedictory reappearance of the work’s opening triadic material), and the ending of this work is no
less stirring than that of the G sharp minor Prelude. Presumably by coincidence, this peroration bears a
strikingly close resemblance to the final pages of the Sonata, opus 25 of 1954 by Bernard Stevens, a
similarly neglected British composer of the generation after Bowen.
Toccata in A minor, opus 155:Bowen composed a toccata in 1901 while still a student. Another constitutes the finale of his Suite no 3,
opus 38 of 1920, while the Toccata in A minor is his third and last (if one excepts the alla toccata final
movement of the Sixth Sonata), and dates from 1957. The work shows its creator’s accumulated wisdom in
a highly successful fusion of unaccustomed textural economy and an undiminished taste for exciting
pyrotechnics. The effect is of notable cumulative force enhanced by a relentless rhythmic drive. The final
assault on the piano’s lowest note by the player’s right hand may perhaps be an enthusiastic nod in the
direction of Debussy’s L’Isle Joyeuse and its identical closing device.
Having initially hesitated as to the inclusion of this piece within his Hyperion programme, Stephen Hough
later told the present author (who had enthusiastically recommended it on the basis of owning a photocopy
of the manuscript) that on a teaching visit to the Juilliard School in New York he had been astonished to
learn of no fewer than six students all learning the Toccata simultaneously from what was by then the
published Weinberger edition.
Berceuse in D major, opus 83:The choice of title here and the lilting character of the triple rhythm, combined with intermittent quasiimprovisatory arabesque, suggest initially an intended homage to Chopin’s solitary essay in the genre.
However, the earlier part of the piece contains transient hints of Ravelian harmony, as does the gently
mesmeric insistence on various pedal points heard as repeated offbeat monotones (perhaps an anodyne
transformation of that device as heard in Le Gibet from Ravel’s Gaspard de ía Nuit?). At times the
ambience resembles also that of the mature Arnold Bax, Bowen’s student friend and contemporary at the
RAM, whose Fourth Sonata (written some six years later) embodies a similar conception in its slow
movement. The dynamic level remains restrained throughout.
Moto perpetuo (Suite Mignonne,- flnale), opus 39:The Suite Mignonne is the fourth of Bowen’s five (many other sets of miniatures would qualify equally for
the title). The Moto perpetuo follows a Prelude and a Valse and preserves their attractive lightness of
compositional touch. Again a passing resemblance may be pertinent: among the composers said by Watson
to have been admired by Bowen is Frank Bridge (presumably through knowledge only of the latter’s more
accessible works before the late nineteen twenties). Bridge’s brief mood piece Fireflies, written in April
1917, postdates the Suite Mignonne by two years and is directly comparable in figuration and harmonic
resource. It seems entirely possible that the sheer pianistic elegance and ‘inside knowledge’ of Bowen’s
writing may regularly have placed more significant composers of lesser keyboard performing
accomplishment in his unacknowledged debt, though the formidable pianism of Bax here excepts him. In
wider terms the Moto perpetuo extends the nineteenth century ‘encore’ tradition typified by the humoresque
style of Moszkowski and others.
Ballade no 2 in A minor, opus 87:-
The second Ballade was published by the Anglo French house in 1931. It would be surprising if the mere
title did not remind one of Chopin, whose imaginative response to its narrative connotations remains
unique; and in the event, Bowen seems intent upon evoking specifically the rhythmic momentum with
which the second of Chopin’s four Ballades opens. Harmonically Bowen’s richly opulent inspiration may
recall variously Delius, Ireland, or the Delius-inflected accents of Moeran in his solo piano idyll Summer
Valley. A notable fondness for non-cadential dominant ninth formations reveals also the composer’s
awareness of Debussy, this being confirmed by subsequent filigree writing arising from the whole tone
scale. An early climax proves to have been merely the shape of things to come. A prolonged central passage
of considerable force encompasses figurations recognizably and deliberately arising from stormier moments
in Chopin’s second and third Ballades, these being persuasively recreated on Bowen’s own terms. After a
temporary lull this material regenerates itself in music of formidable momentum and pianistic virtuosity,
subsiding only as the work’s opening theme reappears beneath gradually dwindling right hand arpeggiation.
A full (though varied) recapitulation of the first section brings this imposing utterance to an enigmatic end
not unlike that with which Bowen was later to crown the last of his Twenty-four Preludes.
Romances nos 1 in G flat, opus 35, & 2 in F, opus 45.The two Romances were published in 1913 and 1917 respectively by Joseph Williams. Both are dedicated to
the composer’s wife. Despite its dense printed appearance the first is an affectingly simple utterance, in
which harmonic ingenuity serves primarily to vary continual reiteration of the gentle opening phrase. It is
not hard to imagine this taking on verbal form; indeed, the idea might have been conceived as a wordless
cipher for some privately familiar phrase of endearment. The second Romance, initially more hymn-like or
processional in character, rises eventually to an unexpectedly elevated climax enhanced by halved note
values from a dotted rhythm in the opening melody. After a recapitulation the piece ends peacefully in a
tenderly unhurried coda.
Composers of Bowen’s consistent but conservative virtues may always have been doomed to drift into
initial obscurity, depending posthumously upon the dawn of a more liberal and spontaneous - not to say also
inquisitive - age for their rehabilitation. In the cases of Bowen and his circle the rapid strides of recording
technology have combined with a new catholicity of interest to offer ‘time for amendment’. It is now to be
hoped that Bowen will soon be assessed on the strength of his more substantial works. While these may
arguably lack the unmistakable individuality of a Medtner or a Rakhmaninov, they belong in such company
and evince a comparable distinction in their witness to a red-blooded imagination illumined by performing
virtuosity and insight of the highest order. Probably no other British musician of Bowen’s generation
similarly embodied the phenomenon of composer-pianist in the mould of Saint-Saëns or the Russians
mentioned above. For this alone Bowen merits historical scrutiny; meanwhile his music, much of it long out
of print or else never in it, awaits the determinedly curious.
© Francis Pott, 1996 / amended text 2007.
www.francispott.com