The Pagan Ecstatic: Arnold Bax

I notice a curious error in your issue of December 16. In discussing a concert of compositions by Arnold Bax and various continental composers [Szymanowski, Schoenberg, Conrad Beck, Norbert von Hannenheim, Hindemith, Poulenc and Stravinsky] you state that: ‘Arnold Bax is clearly in place in this distinguished company.’ I take it that the sentence was meant to express that the other composers were not unworthy of a place beside Arnold Bax. Personally I do not consider that most of the names on that programme are worthy to stand beside Bax, but this of course is a matter of opinion.

Ralph Vaughan Williams, letter to the editor of the Radio Times, January 6, 1933

Readers may recall that the inaugural pages of Quadrant Music, which enjoyed their publication exactly twelve months ago, made reference to an “impulsive young composer”. The fellow in question would later become a Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order and the Master of the King’s (then Queen’s) Music—though these were appointments that he found to be more of a discomfort than anything else. To some, he was known as Dermot O’Byrne, a contributor to the Irish Review and, through his poetry, a proponent of Irish republicanism. He was a man of both limitless passion and subtlety, bathed in Celtic twilight. In appearance, he presented as a dashing English gentleman; in character, he was ticklishly reticent. Eric Coates described him as “a kindly, lovable companion person, tolerant of others and loyal to his friends”. Of himself, in his own words, Bax said:

I can’t help being (fundamentally) a very primitive being. I believe in conditions of ecstasy—physical or spiritual—and I get nothing from anything else. I think all the composers who appeal to me—Beethoven, Wagner, Delius, Sibelius—were primitive in that they believed that the secret of the universe was to be solved by ecstatic intuition rather than by thought.

But this philosophical musing, ever-present in his music, poetry and writing, is far from primitive. It betrays a sensitive disposition and a curiosity for life. He counted among his friends the loneliest corners of the British Isles, drawing inspiration from outposts like Glencolmcille, Morar and the Old Head of Kinsale. Through the dark beech woods of Chiltern and above the cliffs of Tintagel Castle he conceived pagan visions, and these he translated into tone poems and verse. Rejecting Hegel and Marx but curiously drawn to Nietzsche, he was motivated—or even tortured—by the pursuit of beauty. He dreamt, loved, and as an older man pined for his youth. In 1931, the Sackbut dubbed him “the noblest English musician of the young century”.

And yet the name Arnold Bax (1883–1953) is, today, barely recognised. In this article, we seek to draw attention to just some qualities of Bax’s life, music and poetry, hopeful that our efforts shall revive at least some interest in his art, especially in our native Australia.

When one begins to understand Arnold the man—not biographically, mind, but philosophically—one is better placed to navigate the music of Bax the composer.

Arnold Edward Trevor Bax was born—“uninterestingly”, by his own admission—at about 8.30 a.m. on November 8, 1883, in Streatham, Surrey. The situation he came into was not an unfortunate one: his father, Alfred Ridley Bax (b. 1844), a barrister and Fellow of the Royal Society of Antiquaries, was the son of Daniel Bax (b. 1812), whose business dealt predominantly in the pioneering of the mackintosh waterproof. His factory in London, its showroom in Orchard Street and several other properties in Oxford Street generated wealth for the Baxes, a portion of which Arnold’s father invariably inherited. The family’s prosperous conditions favoured his mother’s interest in the arts. Born to a reverend whose flock grazed as far as Amoy (Xiamen), China, Charlotte Ellen Lea, whom Arnold remarked “would have made a very good queen”, was immediately encouraging of her son’s creativity. By the age of nine, Arnold was drawing and painting. Good literature, read to him by his mother, cemented in him a love for Dickens, Keats and Shelley. He was also familiar with Turgenev, Tolstoy and Ibsen, as well as Celtic and Scandinavian mythology. His brother, Clifford (b. 1886)—who would become prominent as a writer among England’s literary circles—also benefited from this maternal education. Of Mrs Bax’s influence on her children (additionally, Arnold and Clifford had a brother, Aubrey (b. 1884), and a younger sister, Evelyn (b. 1887)), Colin Scott-Sutherland astutely observes:

In the creative work of Arnold and Clifford this maternal influence was deep and lasting, and was soon to provoke that violence of emotion that is so often the result, in those endowed with unusual intellectual power, of the conflict between a precious, markedly feminine intuition underlying a heightened perception of beauty, and the more aggressive emotions of the male.

Alfred Bax’s role in his children’s upbringings was less impactful. Arnold described his father as “somewhat remote” with whom he “never became really intimate”. When a young Clifford turned to the writing of verse, Alfred declared that poetry was “rich pastry”—“You can’t live on it, my boy!” But Arnold’s father was much more sympathetic to music, especially choral music, and so he was “greatly pleased” when Sir Fredrick Bridge judged that a fourteen-year-old Arnold possessed the makings of a great composer.

When brother Aubrey died of meningitis in 1895, aged eleven, the Baxes relocated to Haverstock Hill, Hampstead, into a house named Ivybank. Built by Sir John Horton during the reign of Charles I, Ivybank, in Arnold’s mind, “seemed to belong to the country rather than to a London suburb”; the window of his “small and distractingly untidy study looked out upon a density of trees and shrubs through which not a sign of a house could be seen”. There can be no doubt that this isolation shaped his philosophies and even seeped into them. Ivybank’s garden, too, proved to be an environment of profound influence:

Below the terrace steps at the back of the house was a large lawn screened from westerly winds by a noble row of chestnut-trees, ponderous with lamplike blossoms in spring, and beyond these a second green … There was a third little-visited lawn near the Belsize Lanefence, and we even boasted a small apple orchard—a lovely riot of pink and white in the early days of May. Roses, hollyhocks, sunflowers, and sweet peas luxuriated in that heavy clay soil, and for me the whole place was an island pleasance peopled with all the phantoms of adolescent dream, and I recognise now that my long-vanished garden played a more important part in the world of my youth than I knew at the time.

Mrs Bax was, as Sir Melford Stevenson put it, “unbelievably generous” and her hospitality, especially demonstrated through her tasty suppers, began to attract many guests to Ivybank. Games of cricket became regular fixtures. Arnold’s talents as “a stubborn bat and a deceptively accurate left-handed bowler” achieved repute among Clifford and their friends. He was equally drawn to the solving of puzzles, particularly crosswords. Unquestionably, his was a happy childhood and an inquisitive adolescence. But this innocence would not last. By 1911, Ivybank’s structure had begun to decay, and Alfred Bax elected to sell the property. Immediately, the house was demolished, replaced by, in Arnold’s estimation, “a mesh of new roads and a pox of, no doubt, desirable villa residences”. This destruction, we suggest, conjured within the young composer a poignant realisation. At Ivybank, he had befriended solitude, nature, bliss and freedom, and then watched as the only physical synthesis of these other than himself was swept into nothingness. From this episode, it seems to us, grew the nostalgia that would weight much of his art and, indeed, his character. And, here, it may or may not be relevant to mention that he never purchased a house of his own.

Bax was ill-suited to married life. His was an adventurous soul; his wandering travels to Dresden, Ireland and Russia provided a kind of nourishment which domesticity impeded.

This is an appropriate juncture to praise Bax for his lean autobiography, Farewell, My Youth (1943). Published by Longmans, it is so very rich with insight; the composer’s childhood reflections that we cite above all stem from it. It is infused with wit and intellect and is scathingly honest. For instance, in one extended passage, Bax recalls the daunting premiere of his Christmas Eve on the Mountains (the score to which was completed in January 1912). Sitting shyly within the stalls of Queen’s Hall, he is distracted by “a small dryad face beneath a cloud of jet black hair, and a pair of bright eyes, brimmed with mischief”. But this “elfin child” becomes more a source of anxiety than refuge as the “low deep throbbing on ’cellos, basses, and harps” begins. Farewell, My Youth reveals, somewhat melodramatically, that it was not so much that Bax sought to impress his audiences; rather:

When I had finished this work I had reflected bitterly that the measure of my success in capturing this mood (unknown out of Ireland) must be commensurate with the misunderstanding of the music by a London audience … A sidelong glance shows me that my neighbour is anxiously turning over the pages of the programme for the tenth time … Everywhere I see for the most part a dull perplexity, a forbearing indulgence. Over there a stout red-faced man is yawning. I notice the girl in the precarious pale blue dress whisper something to her friend who shakes his head as though expressing a humorous hopelessness. On the other side of the circle two matrons are murmuring together industriously, and an old gentleman of military appearance uncrosses his legs and crosses them again, swiftly throwing himself back in his seat and stroking his white moustache hurriedly with impatience. And of course there is coughing everywhere … I feel utterly dejected. The music has lost all meaning for me. Heavens! Will it never end?

Small dryad faces and clouds of jet-black hair were something of a fascination for Bax. He was not a lewd man, but he was forcefully sensual, a self-styled “brazen romantic”. Farewell, My Youth goes as far as to pine for the “lovely, bewitching entanglement of sex!” This must have been, for its time, a radical expression; by comparison, the autobiography’s publication long preceded the erotic scandals that would disgrace Sir Eugene Goossens. (In 1956, Goossens, who was at the time both the chief conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and the director of the New South Wales State Conservatorium of Music, became intensely involved with the so-called “Witch of King’s Cross”, Rosaleen Norton. He was detained at Sydney Airport and, when his bags were searched, was found to be in possession of material that was considered to be pornographic. In 1922, Goossens had been closely involved in bringing off the important Queen’s Hall showcase of Bax’s talents, which had included, among other works, The Garden of Fand, the Phantasy for Viola and Orchestra, and the Mater ora Filium.)

Driven by beauty and sensuousness, it is little wonder that Bax, in 1909, embarked upon an ill-fated attraction to one Loubya Nicolyevna Korolenko—not her real name but, rather, the pseudonym he assigns her in Farewell, My Youth. She was a young, well-travelled Ukrainian, the daughter of a landed yet destitute Cossack. Bax was easily seduced by this “golden Roussalka with ice-blue eyes”; he decided, almost immediately, that he “loved her bewilderingly”. Equipped with “spun-gold hair” and the “graceful body of a water-nymph”, she enslaved his every desire, to the point that when she announced her sudden return to St Petersburg in the early months of 1910, Bax requested, breathlessly, to accompany her. She accepted with, even then, a detectable trace of disinterest.

By January 28, 1911, after a most turbulent and ultimately unsuccessful pursuit, Bax had not only returned to England but had married. His wife was Elsa Luisa Sobrino, the daughter of the pianist Carlos Sobrino, whom Bax had met before his Russian flight. Preferring the name Elsita, she was a kind-natured woman and soon the mother of two children by her husband: Dermot and Maeve Astrid. They lived at first overlooking Regents Park, then in Dublin’s Rathgar, where their children were born. Returning to England in 1913, they set up in Station Road, Marlowe, then moved to Riversleigh, and then again to Beaconsfield. Their endless relocations were but symptoms of the fact that Bax was ill-suited to married life. His was an adventurous soul; his wandering travels to Dresden, Ireland and Russia had provided a kind of nourishment which domesticity now impeded. More, we submit that Alfred Bax had not necessarily cemented within his sons—for, similarly, Clifford’s marriages were disruptive—a keen appreciation for the responsibilities of fatherhood. In 1918, Arnold and Elsa agreed to separate. Their decision appears to have been amicable enough, though Graham Parlett has noted that she refused him a divorce.

Just as he rebounded from Loubya into matrimony, Bax turned permanently to Harriet Cohen following his separation. She was “Britain’s most beguiling pianist” and, so named by Einstein, “the piano witch”. More affectionately, Bax called her “Tania”. She was just over twelve years his younger—but this must have seemed of little consequence to him, for his own mother was her husband’s junior by more than sixteen years. Cohen made her Prom debut in 1920 performing, as the dedicatee, Bax’s monumental Symphonic Variations. Their affair-cum-friendship would last until his death; had she not taken ill in Dublin after a performance of his Left-Hand Concertante, she would have been by him, at the house of Aloys Fleishmann in County Cork’s Ballyvolane, for his final breaths. And this she no doubt would have done even though, in 1948, Bax revealed to her the identity of a second mistress: a Mary Gleaves, who had, among other things, gone with him to the Scottish Highlands and been his companion throughout the orchestration of several works, including the Fourth Symphony. Gleaves recalled their sojourn in a 1983 radio documentary:

He usually worked in the morning for several hours—two or three hours. And then we would have lunch and we would go for these long walks and come back in the evening. It was lovely coming in to the little sitting room with a huge fire burning up the chimney. We would have supper in our little sitting room and then he would get back to working on his music. And it was then that he would ask me to read aloud.

Throughout many an interview, the conductor Vernon Handley, a true champion of Bax and his British contemporaries, frequently reiterates that one need not have a deep knowledge of the composer’s life—or, perhaps more precisely, his inner thoughts—to successfully interpret his music. This is, of course, true; more often than not, the music is of a sufficient quality (and, even then, there are works of particular superiority) that it can stand upon its merits. But when one begins to understand Arnold the man—not biographically, mind, but philosophically—one is better placed to navigate the music of Bax the composer. We contend that the relatively idyllic nature of his childhood brewed tumultuous passions within him and that these spilt over, uncontrollably, into his art and his relationships. Certainly, the complexity of his character only served to enhance his creative brilliance.

The music

Vaughan Williams accepts mysticism as an escape from the responsibility of thought—Bax does not. He must escape also, for the pressure of that thought is more than mortal can bear for long. But he escapes by gates of sensuous beauty, as a student lifts his head to a window, refreshing himself with the serenity of sun on sward. Again and again in his music we meet this sudden turning away from tragedy, this lift from unremitting discord to major harmonies of extraordinary sweetness and simplicity. But we know it for an escape, not a resolution…

L. Henderson Williams, “Bax—The Philosopher’s Musician”, Sackbut, March 1930

Bax’s “first conscious apprehension of beauty” occurred around 1889, whilst he was, as a six-year-old, visiting Worthing with his parents. Watching the sunset “speechlessly” from Arundel Park, he compared the “unimaginable glory of flame” before him, in its “sheer all-conquering splendour and majesty”, to Ragnarök in Norse mythology. The incident may well have become the foundational model upon which he judged just which “conditions of ecstasy” most appealed to him and, thus, which of these he translated into music.

Characterising Bax’s music is something of a linguistic challenge.

It is impossible, within the scope of this article, to comprehensively survey Bax’s entire catalogue, itself numbering hundreds of compositions, including: orchestral tone poems; concertos; sonatas for piano violin, viola, ’cello and clarinet; numerous other piano works; trios, quartets, quintets and other chamber music; songs and choral works; film music; and, essentially, seven numbered symphonies. Nor would it be appropriate simply to dissect a select number of works. In a way, formal musical analysis would seem too clinical an approach towards the output of this unique and enigmatic voice. The middle ground, then, is to loosely investigate Bax’s compositional qualities and align them with, as we have discussed, the philosophies he held. But before we may do any of that, we must first address his musical education and, specifically, his compositional influences.

Almost seventeen and after time served at Hampstead Conservatoire, Bax was accepted into the Royal Academy of Music in 1900, where he studied for five years. At the time, the Academy presented as something of a second-class institution. Britain’s dominant school of composition hailed from the Royal College of Music, where Stanford and Parry reigned over a vast pastoral empire. Their students included Vaughan Williams, Holst, Coleridge-Taylor and John Ireland. Conversely, the Academy, under the direction of the frenetic Sir Alexander Campbell Mackenzie, was the domain of Frederick Corder. Among Corder’s pupils and Bax’s fellow students of composition were Eric Coates and York Bowen. Bax also took piano lessons from Tobias Matthay, alongside Myra Hess and Irene Scharrer; as a fellow composer-pianist, he was “much beloved and appreciated” by the professor. Whereas Stanford favoured the teaching of well-established European tongues—chiefly, Brahms—Corder’s heart lay with the Gesamtkunstwerk of Wagner, Dvořák and, though otherwise “allergic” to French music, Gounod. He had, according to Alan Bush, “very little interest in Bach or Beethoven”, and he “was not interested in Palestrina at all”. Mackenzie, too, was equally pioneering in his affection for Liszt. Bax regarded both gentlemen as “enthusiastic progressives”. Indeed, it was eventually at Corder’s home that he began to take (in her opinion, at least) “real notice” of Harriet Cohen. And, in turn, Cohen would introduce Bax, much to his gratitude, to the music of William Byrd.

If his travels to Ireland, which we shall come to in earnest when considering his poetry, and Russia served to mould his aesthetic and personality, the time Bax spent in Dresden honed his craft and expanded his compositional vocabulary. In 1906 and 1907, he made two trips to the city; he encountered at the Dresden Opera House productions of Siegfried, Tristan, Elektra and Salome, and was pleasantly surprised by Anton Rubinstein’s The Demon. But for all his Wagnerian schooling and operatic exposure, he never properly attempted the form himself.

Dresden furthered offered the opportunity to absorb continental symphonic repertoire. From 1905 to 1907, Bax slaved over two now-disinherited leviathans: the Symphony in F, Op. 8 and the Symphony in F minor. Although these works are of little musical consequence, they served to offer their composer a tangible idiom which he considered, then rejected. He was present at the German premiere of Debussy’s L’après-midi d’un faune and found it “a very curious experience”. On the other hand, he was unimpressed by a Bruckner symphony, remembering “nothing of it except its conclusion”. The work of Gustav Mahler conjured a more nuanced reaction that, in the fullness of time, has proved somewhat prophetic:

One programme included the second and third movements of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony, and on this occasion I was introduced for the first time to the work of this eccentric, long-winded, muddle-headed, and yet always interesting composer. This restless perversity of the very individual orchestration excited me tremendously. I marvelled at the strange juxtaposition of the driest Kapellmeisterlich [sic] formulas and heart-wrung melodies and harmonies which might have been the outpouring of a Promethean grief. And those gawky scherzos, interminable ländlers, with knobs on (and indeed, spikes!). These works of the oddly laboriously minded Jew are still a matter for squabbling amongst amateurs of the art, and I doubt if they will ever be fully understood, or even whether the composer himself had any vision in continuity of what he was driving at.

Mahler was not the only Austrian to which Bax applied his razor-sharp wit. Wilhelm Kienzl’s Der Evangelimann was possessed of “amiable dullness”. Bax was also highly critical of atonalism and its proponents, unconvinced that “healthy and natural things” could “ever be associated with such a turgid medium”. He dubbed Pierrot Lunaire, Wozzeck and Lulu “manifestations of neurosis” and the stimulants of “sexual inhibitions”. Yet again, a ravenous hunger for nature, beauty and sensuality can be seen as the primary informant of his perspectives.

He was far more sympathetic towards the music and person of Sibelius. The two composers grew to become friends, with Bax dedicating his Fifth Symphony to “the capricious old Colossus”. Sibelius himself, in 1959, wrote that Bax was possessed of “a fine musical mind” and an “original personal style”. A year later, he christened Bax his “son in music”. For in the oeuvre of this “massive, bald-headed titan” lay musical inventions upon the Scandinavian mythologies that had ensnared Bax since childhood. And yet, as Scott-Sutherland notes, Bax’s attraction to a work like Tapiola was wholly due to its atmosphere, not its construction; in other words, his music could hardly be slandered as being mere reproductions of Sibelian material.

The temptation to pause upon or even wallow within Bax’s intoxicating harmonic landscapes is powerful. But he insisted—rightly—that he was a contrapuntal composer.

Indeed, characterising Bax’s music is something of a linguistic challenge. This is music that is conveyed through feelings, long before any commentator can elucidate, exactly, what those feelings are. The word melancholy is often quickly employed but, as Handley notes, even this more-suitable-than-not descriptor is far from sufficient. We favour nostalgia as an alternative, insofar as we explored the word earlier. In some terms, much of Bax’s work is defined by, on the one hand, complex moods of strange textures and violent rhythms, and, on the other, expressive melodies, the effects of which are heightened by chromatic harmonies. His best compositions—and, admittedly, the segregation is necessary—are tightly structured, deriving their form, in reality, through the development of interesting material and not any stated or implied program. (The Garden of Fand is a perfect example.) His orchestral works, especially his tone poems and symphonies, benefit from an innovative approach to scoring. The sound worlds of the Second, Third and Sixth symphonies, for instance, are not easily explained or related. Certainly, the orchestra was the principal canvas upon which he sketched his ideas; the most serious of his piano music is symphonic or colossale in scope, such as the Second Sonata (dedicated to Cohen). In this sense, Wagner’s legacy is remembered.

Yet even these descriptive attempts feel inadequate. It may be better, then, to approach the dilemma laterally by unravelling the difficulties that often manifest when performing Bax. Chiefly, and now obviously, his music is of great complexity, both in mood (style) and in construction (craft). At the very least, its interpreters are required to appreciate the composer’s cosmic ambitions, as well as identify, differentiate between, realise and, ultimately, unite his many ecstatic states. None of this, we stress, is easily or quickly achieved. Vast swathes of time must be invested into Bax to successfully bring his scores to life—by all parties. Even the most herculean of conductors cannot triumph alone. Orchestras must, as collegial units, properly come to comprehend Bax’s syntax, which they are wont to mistake, at first glance, for something similar in sound to Strauss. The comparison is understandable enough and yet one of catastrophic proportions. Indeed, the prevailing rehearsal culture among modern orchestras, fleeting and unionised, is not at all conducive to supporting this music—or the music of Moeran and, to some extent, Delius and Finzi. The emancipated soloist or chamber ensemble is the better positioned to try—but then, of course, Bax’s greatest works are written for the orchestra.

The temptation to pause upon or even wallow within Bax’s intoxicating harmonic landscapes is powerful. But he insisted—rightly—that he was a contrapuntal composer. His music is better thought of as being horizontal, rather than vertical, determined more so by florid lines than pillars of sound, and felt ever so slightly forward of, rather than behind, the beat. Those tempos printed without metronome markings are best handled in this fashion. In a similar vein, it is the precise (and ever so slightly forward-leaning) metrical articulation of his rhythms, not the volume at which they are articulated, which best conveys their intent.

What, then, to write of specific works? For the first-time listener, Bax is best approached via his tone poems. In the Faery Hills, November Woods, The Garden of Fand and, of course, Tintagel provide a sturdy introduction to the composer’s adept understanding of symphonic writing, as well as his exquisite ability to suggest narratives within his music. His lyrical piano pieces like Nereid, A Hill Tune and In a Vodka Shop capture his propensity for melody, as does the First String Quartet. Works like the Phantasy for Viola and Orchestra and the early piano sonatas explore longer forms and more intimate moods. Next, after this preparation, should be the First Symphony. It can be enjoyed without a prior familiarity of Bax’s music; but the purpose of gradually easing oneself into it is to be shocked by just how markedly arresting and new-sounding it is. The same can be said of the Second following the First, the Third following the Second, and so on. The first three symphonies should be thought of as one cycle, brought to a remarkable close by the Third’s epilogue. Certainly, the epilogues of the Third, Fifth, Sixth and Seventh symphonies—with the epilogue itself a completely Baxian improvement upon the symphonic form—are all notable for their respective conceptions of beauty and ecstasy. The later symphonies portray Bax scaling the heights of his talents, especially the Sixth. This symphony is (perhaps) smothered in melancholy and nostalgia, recalling sensual, pagan scenes through primitive, dance-like motifs and stormy counterpoint. And there is a kind of domesticity to the work’s second movement, particularly characterised through Bax’s charming employ of the Scotch snap.

The final, sparkling chord of the Seventh Symphony betrays Bax’s fading passions. He was reaching the same, inevitable fate as that memorable sunset he witnessed as a boy in Arundel Park. Now, a Celtic twilight was truly set upon him, and is readily detectable in his late works, especially the Left Hand Concerto. His last composition, the choral anthem “What Is It Like to Be Young and Fair”, itself a setting of text by Clifford Bax and written to celebrate Elizabeth II’s coronation, is little more than a nostalgic shadow. And yet, if increasing pessimism and declining health did serve to rob his music of its former vigour, it is in his poetry that we encounter a more consistent ferocity, a “violence of emotion” ever searching for ecstatic conditions.

The poetry

In a famous passage the Breton, Renan, declared that “The Celt has ever worn himself out in mistaking dreams for reality”, but I believe that, on the contrary, the Celt knows more clearly than the men of most races the difference between the two, and deliberately chooses to follow the dream.

Bax, Farewell, My Youth

One of the oddest aspects of Irish history during the years of the Celtic Twilight, that spirited revival of interest in ancient Irish culture and traditions, and the related political agitation for Irish independence from Britain, in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was the enthusiasm for these movements by some notable non-Irish-born and English people. A well-known example is Maud Gonne—the abiding, although persistently un-reciprocating love-interest of the most famous of Irish poets, W.B. Yeats. A republican revolutionary, born in Tongham in Surrey in 1866, of an English mother and an Irish army officer father, she was one of the founders of Sinn Féin, and of the Daughters of Ireland. As an actress, Gonne became a leading player at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, which brought her to the attention of Yeats, who wrote his first play, Cathleen ni Houlihan (1892), for her. Yet Yeats, of the Protestant Anglo-Irish ascendancy, always had an ambiguous attitude (captured in several of his poems) towards the zeal of the republican revolutionaries. Not that this ambivalence tempered in any way his devotion to Maud.

Bax is an even stranger representative of this phenomenon. Unlike Gonne, there is no evidence of any Irish ancestry in his family, and he expressed his regret that he had not been born in Ireland. His passion for Irish history and culture was initiated during his few years’ study at the Royal Academy. On his reading, in 1902, of Yeats’s epic poem The Wanderings of Oisin (1899), Bax astonishingly declared that “the Celt within me stood revealed”.

No one has better captured the strange spell that Ireland could cast over an English visitor than Lytton Strachey.

In Farewell, My Youth, Bax recalls that distant adolescent enthusiasm, with a degree of middle-aged scepticism, which these hyperbolic phrases capture: “I went to Ireland as a boy of nineteen in great spiritual excitement … Even Dublin itself seemed peopled by gods and heroic shapes from the dim past … Oh! It was all, no doubt, very young and extravagant.” The west of the island particularly attracted him; the region was “bathed in supernatural light”. Lewis Foreman, Bax’s biographer and an editor of his poetry, compares his fascination with that part of Ireland to nothing less than “a religious conversion”. Journeying to the Aran Islands, where only Irish was spoken, was seen as a sure sign of authentic Irishness by fervent nationalists. The islands are the subject of one of Bax’s poems. In James Joyce’s great novella, “The Dead” (which became the final story in the Dubliners collection, published in 1914), Gabriel Conroy, the tale’s principal character, is denounced by the strident Miss Ivors of the Gaelic League as a “West Briton” for scorning such patriotic exercises. Gabriel prefers to take his holidays on the continent: “I’m sick of my country, sick of it,” he says. Joyce shared this emotion; his utter contempt for Miss Ivors is palpable, resonating with his ridicule of such parochial nationalist fervour elsewhere in Dubliners.

Amusingly, Bax indicates, too, what he would have made, for all his enthusiasm for Ireland, of such boorish militancy when he refers to “two conscientiously Celtic ladies, always draped sentimentally in silken robes of what they supposed to be ancient Irish model and design”. In spite of his own Englishman’s unfettered devotion to all things Celtic, he was nonetheless not averse to noting that one of the women, despite being of “unmixed English birth”, was also bringing up her children to speak nothing but Irish. Bax, like Joyce (and, to a lesser extent, Yeats), had no allusions about the absurd extremities to which the nationalist cause could be extended.

Yet so infatuated with Ireland was Bax that he imagined the country as his mistress, waxing poetic in his febrile prose:

I adored my beloved in all her symbolic presentments … In imagination I fought in all her wars of old and dreamt cloudily of new and less material conflicts … to be fought out perhaps in the fields of art and intellect—that final victorious conquest which should restore Ireland to her leadership of Western spirituality.

And he even liked to fancy that his “last vision in this life” would be a scene from his window “on the upper floor at Glencolmcille”, in County Donegal, of the “still, brooding, dove-grey mystery of the Atlantic twilight”.

No one has better captured the strange spell that Ireland could cast over an English visitor than Lytton Strachey’s account, detailed in Elizabeth and Essex, of Robert Devereux’s expedition there in 1599:

The strange air engulfed him. The strange land—charming, savage, mythical—lured him on with indulgent ease. He moved, triumphant, through a new peculiar universe of the unimagined and the unreal. Who or what were these people, with their mantles and their nakedness, their long locks of hair hanging over their faces, their wild battle-cries and gruesome wailings, their kerns and their gallowglas, their jesters and their bards? Who were their ancestors? Scythians? Or Spaniards? Or Gauls? What state of society was this, where chiefs jostled with gypsies, where ragged women lay all day long laughing in the hedgerows, where ragged men gambled away among each other their very rags, their very forelocks, the very … parts more precious still, where wizards flew on whirlwinds, and rats were rhymed into dissolution? All was vague, contradictory, and unaccountable; and the Lord Deputy, advancing further and further into the green wilderness, began—like so many others before and after him—to catch the surrounding infection, to lose the solid sense of things, and to grow confused over what was fancy and what was fact.

So far as Bax’s musical development, at this period, was concerned, this love affair (“I was in love with Ireland … I needed no mortal mistress”) had what he regarded as very beneficial effects: “In part at least I rid myself of the sway of Wagner and Strauss and began to write Irishly, using figures and melodies of a definitely Celtic curve.” The result was that “many works of mine had been called Irish or Celtic when I supposed them to be purely personal to the British composer, Arnold Bax”. Yet he largely avoided, unlike some of his English contemporaries, “actual folk-song”.

Nonetheless, when we think of the composer during his few formative years in Ireland, it is much less of Bax and music, and more of Dermot O’Byrne—“my own Irish alter ego”—the nom-de-plume he adopted around 1910, and the poetry written under that name, that comes to mind. This literary interest, including the writing of stories and plays, and which had petered out by the 1920s (by which time Bax had returned to England), he “owed in the first place to Yeats”, adding, extraordinarily (in Farewell, My Youth): “His poetry has always meant more to me than all the music of the centuries … All the days of my life I bless his name.” The inspiration came from what we know as the early Yeats, the leading bard of the Celtic revival, in poetry and in poetic drama.

Undoubtedly, the best of the poems by Dermot O’Byrne are those inspired by specifically Irish situations and circumstances—such as “Morning in Connemara”.

Another, but less significant influence, was his association in Dublin with George Russell (known under the pseudonym Æ), editor, critic, poet, painter and Irish nationalist, and also a writer on mysticism. Russell said to Bax, “You have a completely Gaelicized mind”. It was the “spiritual content” of Russell’s poetry which particularly appealed to the composer, but Bax had little regard for Russell’s technical skill in verse. He dubbed it “little better than that conspicuously lacking in his painting”; another observation was that Russell had “small rhythmical invention and weak lines were inclined to mar even his loveliest poems”. While Bax himself could have a mystical experience of the world of faerie—for example, in a poem of 1910, “Out of Faeryland”, he speaks of “momentary gleams from Faerie”—he deprecates Russell’s supernatural epiphanies, recounted in “incoherent rhapsodic monologues” which, “after many repetitions, [become] even more tiresome”, dismissing him as a “charlatan”. In other words, with regard to his own writing in verse, the young aspiring poet was learning from Russell what to avoid. More positively, Russell’s Dublin salon gave Bax the opportunity to meet “nearly all the writers and artists” with whom he was to become “intimate”. Yet he points out, “I spoke little of music to any Irish associates.” Russell was “totally unaware” that the Englishman was a musician.

Bax doubted that his verse “had any literary value”, whilst also observing that poetry-writing was much easier for him than musical composition. In fact, the anthology edited by Lewis Foreman, Dermot O’Byrne: Poems by Arnold Bax (1979), reveals a sure command of the traditional arts of lyrical verse, in rhythm and rhyme, with an admirable range of subjects and of stanza variation. There is a definite talent and accomplishment here, if of minor importance. And Yeats had told Bax that his “A Dublin Ballad, 1916” was “a masterpiece”. In response, Bax noted: “This has pleased me more than any praise my music has received.”

It is, indeed, an extraordinary poem, most notable for its sustained tone of outrage which could only come, one would normally have expected, from a native-born Irishman. The subject is the same as that famously treated by Yeats himself in “Easter, 1916”, commemorating the republican uprising in Dublin. The insurrection led to the execution of most of the Irish leaders involved. What is notable in comparing the two poems is that while Yeats’s verse speaks of his familiar ambiguity about the rebels and their cause (“a terrible beauty is born”), while commemorating their sacrifice (which resonates, inevitably, with the Easter sacrifice of Christ), none of this ingredient of restraint appears in Bax’s angry poem.

Speaking for “all true Irishmen”, Bax appropriates Irish slang, referring (in the second stanza) to “some boy-o” and “such a broth of love and hate”, as if to verify, at the outset, his linguistic kinship with Irish-ness, as with the cause itself. Exclamatory diction adds to the forcefulness of the verse: “Christ! For that liberty they took / There was the ancient deuce to pay!” The British are derided as they “swarmed in from the fatal sea / With pomp of huge artillery / And brass and copper haughtiness”. Onomatopoeia captures the violence of the scene: “guns / That roared loud psalms … / To smash our wounded underneath”. That “unarmed Irish gentlemen” are victims in this onslaught adds to the bitterness Bax vividly expresses.

Mid-poem, he turns his anger on himself, lamenting that he was not present, bravely to stand up against the British: where was “Seumas and my drowsy self”, he asks, referring, probably, to Seumas MacManus, the Irish dramatist and poet who played an important role in the rise of nationalist literature. They were, Bax declares, “fooling with trifles in the dark”. Meantime, the executed are already “rotting fast in lime”, as “we all can sneak back into town, / Stravague about as in old time”, with the old Irish verb, there, for wandering aimlessly. And the poem concludes in a chilling indictment of complacency:

And when the devil’s made us wise
Each in his own peculiar hell,
With desert hearts and drunken eyes
We’re free to sentimentalize
By corners where the martyrs fell.

Here, the arresting sharpness and vigour of the verse are qualities not always present in Bax’s poems. Indeed, his “Dedication” to Clifford, included in Foreman’s anthology, is more typical of Romantic characteristics of imagery and sentiment, with even a languid 1890s insipidity emerging: “We seek for the same mystical blue flower— / Whose seed is sown alike in soul and sense / Whose scent invades us with the breath of dreams / Whose light …” and so on.

The passion of love-making is sensuously conveyed in another poem, “A Summer Memory”:
O loving mouth, was it so hard to guess
The one rich hour had come for you to press
The cup of fire Love held for you to drain?
Can such a day and night return again?

And in “At the Last”, in the same vein, Bax, mixing regret with sensuality, cleverly transposes a romantic love for the natural world to the body of a mistress:

The moon’s white beams are lost between your bare
Cold breasts nor hear I longer any sound
Of sweet night winds since I have heard your sighs
And all the dews were gathered in your eyes.

Undoubtedly, the best of the poems by Dermot O’Byrne are those inspired by specifically Irish situations and circumstances—such as “Morning in Connemara”. With such focused writing, the temptation to evaporate into rhapsodic vagueness is reined in.

There is no cause for supposing that the achievement and reputation of Bax the composer will ever be overshadowed by O’Byrne the poet.

Rarely does Bax speak explicitly of music in his poems, so “A Girl’s Music” is worthy of note. Its subject is Harriet Cohen. “A Girl’s Music” comes from the beginning of their affair, when Cohen was just eighteen and commencing her career (her concert debut came in 1914). Bax presents her as a “tortured beauty”. “Among the piano’s fire-lit keys / Intoxicate her fingers creep”; he imagines further that she is under the spell of some hidden demon, a “vicious-hearted djinn”, that makes her “drunken with these wild / Sad dronings”. The sensuality of the poem tends to overpower its musical components, as “the gorged drowsy fiend … gloats / On her half-naked loveliness”. Whatever the fiend may be experiencing, there is no doubt that Bax is similarly enthralled. The penultimate stanza does give prominence to a specifically musical evocation, as the place of Cohen’s playing:

Vibrates with rhythmic hammerings,
With thunderous noise of pear-shaped drums,
And some hunched rocking goblin thrums
Outlandishly on golden strings.

The poem closes, appropriately and characteristically enough, with reference to the “ecstasy” of Cohen’s playing; this, obviously and ecstatically for Bax, equates with that of their love-making.

As O’Byrne, Bax is a poet representative of the verse of the Edwardian and Georgian periods of poetry in English. The vast revolution that Modernism brought into verse—and, indeed, all the arts—in the wake of the First World War and for a generation afterwards has made that poetry sound very dated to us, more than a century later, for all its occasional delights and accomplishment, and the insights it gives us into the lives and personalities of its authors. There is no cause for supposing that the achievement and reputation of Bax the composer will ever be overshadowed by O’Byrne the poet, but if a poem were to be singled out that has lasted pretty well, it would be “A Dublin Ballad, 1916”.

In Australia

On Friday evening, August 13, in the Liberal Hall, North terrace, a recital with the flavour of “something different” will be given by Miss Margaret Sutherland, of Melbourne University Conservatorium. The programme will consist of instrumental and vocal works of her own composition. Miss Sutherland, who, by-the-way, was born in Adelaide, has just returned from Europe, where she devoted her time to composition. While in London she met Arnold Bax, who suggested that she should submit to him for criticism each new work as she completed it, and the programme to be performed at this recital is the outcome of his valuable advice and encouragement.

“Miss Margaret Sutherland”, Register, August 5, 1926

That Bax could hardly be regarded as a touring performer or a gregarious pedagogue did not prevent his name from reaching the Antipodes. The composer’s music may first have been heard in Australia on June 16, 1919, at the Presbyterian Assembly Hall on the corner of Melbourne’s Collins and Russell Streets. In aid of the Young Women’s Christian Association, the enterprising pianist Lady Emily Scott, wife of the historian Sir Ernest Scott, performed a recital of works by Bax, Schubert, Tchaikovsky, Debussy, Cyril Scott, Christian Sinding, and Percy Grainger (and may we remark: what a recital!). Regrettably, the exact program has not, to the best of our knowledge, survived, but knowing that Lady Scott’s intention in the recital had been to explore humour in music, an educated guess might be that Bax’s offering was either In a Vodka Shop, the 1913 Toccata or, earlier still, the Gopak from his Two Russian Tone Pictures.

Bax’s orchestral music seemed at one point to be gathering traction in Australia. On October 21, 1931, the New South Wales Conservatorium orchestra, under W. Arundel Orchard, gave a performance of In the Faery Hills, more than two decades after the work’s completion. The orchestra followed with the Third Symphony in 1935. Sir Bernard Heinze and the Melbourne Symphony performed the same piece on September 5, 1936, and received a standing ovation. In the following decade, the Third would again return, this time with Edgar Bainton conducting, during the Sydney Symphony’s British Music Festival, which took place in February 1945. Tintagel, Overture to a Picaresque Comedy, and the Violin Concerto also featured in the festival. But although he was well placed to cement Bax’s position in Australia, Goossens’s short-lived tenure at the Sydney Symphony in the mid-1950s did no such thing, and Australians have largely been denied the pleasure of hearing the work of this great composer. And if the music of Arnold Bax is in scarce supply, both Dermot O’Byrne and his poetry must be, to the Australian concertgoer, completely beyond conception.

We argue that Arnold Bax’s creativity is of immense value for individuals and societies alike. His music, complete with its many conditions of ecstasy, deserves to be heard widely, in Australia and abroad.

More recently, the relatively obscure Australian Discovery Orchestra, conducted by Kevin Purcell, staged a Sir Arnold Bax Music Festival, which included performances of Mediterranean, From Dusk ’Til Dawn and Tintagel in 2019. The same festival saw a performance of the Elegiac Trio for flute, viola and harp, which the Australian Debussy Trio performed last year in Hobart. Does this trio, along with the Third Symphony, rank among Bax’s most performed works in Australia? Even beginning to catalogue what of his music has and has not been performed here has proven cantankerous. Indeed, we can find nothing to suggest that any of the masterworks that are the seven symphonies have in the last several decades graced our concert halls. (If readers are aware to the contrary, we should be very pleased to receive your correspondence.)

We do not at all endorse this state of affairs. We argue that Arnold Bax’s creativity is of immense value for individuals and societies alike. His music, complete with its many conditions of ecstasy, deserves to be heard widely, in Australia and abroad. British and American conductors, orchestras and musicians would seem best equipped to once more perform and tour this repertoire. Equally, O’Byrne’s poetry carries yet another informed perspective of Ireland in the first half of the twentieth century. With his scores and verse now in the public domain, his is art that offers intrepid creators, listeners and readers much stimulus and much beauty.

Alexander Voltz is a composer and the founding editor of Quadrant Music. Barry Spurr was Australia’s first Professor of Poetry and is Quadrant’s Literary Editor.

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