Acquainted with Stravinsky, friend of Ravel and Poulenc, prolific composer and well-loved man, Lennox Berkeley (1903-1989) remains an enigma to most of us even if we know little of his enormous output of songs, symphonies, ballets and spiritually inclined choral music. His close friendship and early collaboration with Britten, a decade his junior, will ensure that his name stays in the frame of 20th-century British musical life forever. Yet this self-effacing figure, quick to praise others above himself, has rarely enjoyed the spotlight. He deserves his own twirl.
A new collection of writings, letters and interviews, edited by his one-time pupil Peter Dickinson, offers an easily digested introduction to the composer and his milieu. Berkeley’s own concert reviews, published mainly in the Musical Times and the Listener between 1943 and 1982, give perspective to the musical landscape of that period, from Stravinsky or Poulenc to whom he related, to Cage or Stockhausen who bemused him. That said, while admitting the limits of his taste, he remained open-minded: ‘I’ve never been able to make anything of electronic music but I listened today to a piece by Stockhausen for basset horn and electronic tape which to my surprise I found had a certain beauty of sound.’ Good for him.
There is no shortage of glamour. He was born in Oxford into an irregular but aristocratic Anglo-French family. Had there not been a blip of illegitimacy he would have inherited an earldom and Berkeley Castle. ‘Went to Berkeley Castle,’ he wrote in 1968, in a typically succinct diary entry. ‘I came away feeling no regrets and thankful that I didn’t have to live there. It is a gloomy place and its chief claim to fame is that it was the scene of one of the most horrible murders in history’ — allegedly that of Edward II.
Instead Berkeley’s early home, marginally less august and probably warmer, was in north Oxford. He attended the Dragon School and Gresham’s, Holt, where two who followed after him and later became friends were W.H. Auden and Britten. Much of Berkeley’s youth was spent in Paris as a student of the musicians’ guru, Nadia Boulanger. Summers were passed on the French Riviera, playing tennis and golf and attending the same parties as Somerset Maugham, a neighbour and friend at Cap Ferrat.
Berkeley achieved the rare distinction of a fourth-class degree in Modern Languages at Merton College, Oxford, converted to Catholicism and considered becoming a priest. Lightly veiled though the references are here, he was evidently homosexual in his youth, later marrying Freda Bernstein, a secretary at the BBC of Jewish-Lithuanian extraction.
Laced through this high life was music, though Berkeley appears never to have been one to shout or show off. He learned the piano from a young age and soon absorbed himself in composition. Without question, one of the greatest influences on Berkeley’s musical life was Britten. For a time in the 1930s the pair shared a mill in Aldeburgh, before Britten went off to America with Peter Pears. Always admiring of Britten’s fertile gifts, Berkeley often played down his own skills. On his Windsor Variations conducted byYehudi Menuhin he commented: ‘There were one or two places where the balance was not quite right — perhaps my fault.’ On completing his Four Piano Studies: ‘I don’t feel very pleased with them musically — they are too derivative’ (1972) On his Antiphon at Cheltenham: ‘I wish I’d been able to make the piece a bit longer — I felt it lacked weight. though I liked a good deal of it.’
Yet to take these comments at face value is to misunderstand Berkeley, who seemed to recognise that, however dazzling his contemporaries, he also had a distinct, poetic ability of his own. His son Michael, the eldest of three and also a composer, makes perhaps the most perceptive and moving remark of all in an interview with Dickinson:
My father was always at peace with his own gifts. We live in an age where the quiet personality is unfashionable — a big splash is much more important. I used to get slightly frustrated with his music as a student because I wanted it to do something more sensational. But now, with the benefit of age and a small amount of wisdom, I have come to see that he was very much his own man.
Listen to the Missa Brevis, or the Six Preludes for Piano, or any of the songs. You might well agree.
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