The ‘geriatric prodigy’

Paul Cooke reviews the life and work of Havergal Brian

Recognised by Guinness World Records as ‘the world’s largest symphony’, the Gothic Symphony casts an enormous shadow over the life and works of its composer, Havergal Brian, the 50th anniversary of whose death we are marking this month. Not only is it longer than Mahler’s Third — the 2011 recording conducted by Martyn Brabbins comes in at 106 minutes — but it calls for more massive forces than Mahler’s Eighth: instrumentally, there are 82 strings, 32 winds, 24 brass, four timpani, 18 percussionists, four keyboards, four harps, four brass bands and organ; vocally, four soloists, two choirs and a children’s choir. Composed between 1919 and 1927, it received its first professional performance in 1966 and its first recording in 1991.

But there is much more to Brian than this comparatively early work. During a creative life of 80 years, he wrote another 31 symphonies, 20 of them after 1958, by which time he had reached the age of 82 and had moved into a council flat on England’s south coast. No wonder that he was affectionately referred to as a ‘geriatric prodigy’ by his friend and fellow composer Robert Simpson who, as a BBC producer, was able to have every symphony broadcast in the years between 1954 and 1979.

Brian (born William — he took on Havergal as a tribute to a family of hymn writers) was born into a working-class family in Dresden, Staffordshire. His parents sang in a choir and Brian sang and played the organ in local churches; as a composer, however, like Elgar, whose example he was inspired by, he was largely self-taught and was much influenced by brass bands.

Despite being regarded as displaying ‘courage and fortitude in the face of almost total neglect’, he was well-known as a composer in the years before World War I. Part-songs and choral works were performed at festivals, and orchestral works were performed at Prom concerts: both his overture For valour and his English suite no 1 featured in concerts in 1907 (the Staffordshire Sentinel wrote that ‘Mr Brian has the happy distinction of waking up this morning to find himself famous’), and another overture, Doctor Merryheart, was performed in 1913.

Such comparative fame was not to last, however. The collapse of his first marriage, the loss of his wealthy patron, and a move to London meant poverty and thoughts of suicide: he wrote to his close friend Granville Bantock in 1914 that ‘I am on the scrag end of R’s last £5 & don’t know where the next £1 is to come from…’. He gained employment as music copyist, writer, and editor, while labouring over the comic opera The tigers (written between 1916 and 1918, and orchestrated between 1918 and 1930) and the Gothic Symphony.

Before a brief period of silence between 1944 and 1948, he wrote four more symphonies, reminiscent for the critic Adrian Corleonis of William Blake’s prophetic books, ‘in which terrifying presences and cosmic portents — baleful and beautiful — are visited upon the Earth, but without resolution, as movements or entire works may not so much end as simply stop or disintegrate’. I suspect Brian, who set to music a number of Blake poems, would appreciate the image. After 1948, his many symphonies tended to be much shorter, with development and exposition increasingly telescoped; at the same time, he maintained large orchestral forces, allowing for a great variety of textures and sonorities: a man forever experimenting with the most traditional of forms.