The odd couple

Some years ago now I bought from the artist Robert Buhler a pastel portrait of the composer Lennox Berkeley (reproduced above). Since I knew neither of the two men well (although in the case of each I admired the work without having an irresistible enthusiasm for it), even today people often ask me why I made the purchase. The answer is that in that one work Buhler shows so much more than his usual blithe accomplishment; he is perfect not merely in his portrayal of his sitter’s outward features but also in conveying an inner character of brooding spirituality.

Tony Scotland’s book performs the same feat. He miraculously catches a face as narrow and delicate as one the composer’s beautiful songs, and at the same time vividly projects a character haunted by the shadows of the illegitimacy that deprived him of an earldom, and by the the quest for a sexual satisfaction in constant conflict with the insistent demands of the Roman Catholic Church.

Until his mid-forties, when he finally married, Berkeley devoted so much time to the pursuit of the ideal male partner that it is astonishing that his final musical legacy was one of 226 works. Scotland divides this period of feverish musical and sexual activity into three parts. Firstly, in the mid-twenties, there is Oxford, then full of elegantly effeminate girl-boys, many later to marry, like Evelyn Waugh, and produce large broods of all too often neglected and demanding children. There follows Paris, centred on the Place de la Madeleine — described, with some exaggeration, by the painter Jean Hugo as ‘the crossroad of destiny, the cradle of loves, the matrix of disputes, the navel of Paris’.

When not making friends with the ‘wild hornets’ of the city’s modernistic composers, taking classes with Nadia Boulanger, her grave, cerebral muse perhaps of less value to him than some classes with another friend, Aaron Copeland, might have been, or drinking cocoa from Guadeloupe in some seedy boîte, he slaved away at his compositions.