Talent spotting

An officially commissioned company history: recipe for yawns! Most such hardly amount to more than an exercise in corporate piety with surreptitious window-dressing. But let me ‘declare an interest’ (which I’ll hope to convey and share). Boosey & Hawkes have been my publisher for even longer than I’ve been writing Spectator columns — 32 and 19 years respectively. And this, by Helen Wallace (published for the firm this month), really is different — not merely for the absorbing saga of vision, audacity, happy accident, brilliant timing, an unlikely yet successful match of old-style wariness with slick newstyle entrepreneurial flair, yielding gradually via galvanising play of vibrant personalities to a downward spiral of self-destruction to arise phoenix-like into new life; but, far more important, for the abiding involvement of most of the 20th century’s major composers, revealed here human-all-too-human, often in compromising (or plain embarrassing) postures.

The unlikely match linked gentle, court- eous Leslie Boosey, latest proprieter of a well-established company known best for its drawing-room ballads and the concerts wherein they were first aired, and Ralph Hawkes, whose firm was based on purveying military marches (plus the appropriate instruments) to the Empire on which the sun never set. But Hawkes, a gambler with a flair for risks that paid, hankered after modern music, too, and had already put out Continental feelers in the 1920s, well before political circumstances began to offer rich pickings beyond his wildest imaginings.

The exodus from central Europe brought, first, music editors of the highest distinction and sophistication; when the catalogue of composers began to expand the ground was prepared. Hawkes’s earliest coup was to sign up in 1935 the conspicuously gifted Benjamin Britten, aged 22. Another attempted poach from the Oxford University Press — William Walton, the year after — didn’t succeed (lucky, too, with hindsight; who could have foretold that Walton had already peaked in the 1st Symphony, only just completed?).