Arnold Bax (1883-1953): Piano Works • 3
Arnold Bax wrote nearly thirty short piano pieces during
and immediately after the First World War. These were
largely written for his friends and contemporaries,
mainly female, at the Royal Academy of Music, not
least the pianist Harriet Cohen, thirteen years his junior,
with whom he was involved in a passionate affair. When
he emerged as the leading British composer of the day in
the early 1920s, the availability of these pieces as sheet
music meant that his new admirers had music that they
could attempt at home, though Bax never wrote down to
his audience and none of the pieces were easy.
It was through the keyboard that Arnold Bax came
to music, and when he enrolled at the Royal Academy of
Music in the autumn of 1900, the surviving manuscripts
of his earliest compositions suggest he was soon a
capable pianist. His technique grew quickly, and in the
headlong, complex piano parts he wrote for the songs he
produced during this time we can document a rapidly
growing capability, perhaps keenest to play Wagner
operas at the keyboard, but abreast of the latest
developments, and he soon developed a penchant for the
piano music of Scriabin and Debussy.
Bax’s early music arose from improvisation at the
piano, and from playing the latest orchestral scores at
the keyboard, and he became celebrated for his ability to
read orchestral full scores at sight. He heard a great deal
of new music and it was his habit, too, to play duets with
his friends, notably the pianist Arthur Alexander, with
whom he played through Glazunov’s symphonies in this
way. Although not a regular concert pianist, Bax was
occasionally called on to play modern music when more
established figures cried off. As a consequence of this
we find him, in February 1909, accompanying Debussy
songs in the composer’s presence, and in January 1914
he did the same for Schoenberg’s songs when the
booked pianist withdrew at the last minute. From the
late 1920s onwards he played in public increasingly
rarely, although he did make two recordings – of
Delius’s First Violin Sonata and his own Viola Sonata,
in May and June 1929. Bax was a natural pianist, a
composer who thought at the keyboard, and the fire in
his romantic pianism is evident in both of those
performances.
While the four large-scale piano sonatas are the
backbone of Bax’s piano music (Naxos 8.557439 and
8.557592), there is also a varied repertoire of shorter
pieces. These include highly characteristic atmospheric
miniatures (some not quite so miniature), many of them
technically in the shadow of Debussy or Scriabin, also
alternative versions of scores most familiar to us as
orchestral works, as well as short late piano pieces
unpublished in his lifetime.
We also need to remember that Bax was obsessed
with the landscape, music and literature of Ireland, and
in his twenties was able to spend much time there,
absorbing the atmosphere, and, under the pseudonym
Dermot O’Byrne, publishing poetry, short stories and
plays. Bax thus encountered Irish nationalist politics,
though his friendship with the leading names has
something of unreality about it, and the Easter Rising in
Dublin in 1916 came as a personal blow reflected in
various scores of the time. Bax’s shorter pieces were not
all sunlit idylls, and in such darker scores as the piano
pieces Winter Waters and What the Minstrel Told Us it
seems probable that there may be untold programmatic
elements from this time.
Bax’s well-known liaison with the pianist Harriet
Cohen started late in 1914 and many of his short piano
pieces were dedicated to her. Indeed this resulted in
rivalry between Harriet (‘Tania’ to her circle) and Myra
Hess in the playing of Bax’s piano music. Yet Harriet
Cohen had small hands and this later caused her to avoid
the heavier demands of concertos by, say, Brahms and
Rachmaninov. Curiously, in Bax’s writing, particularly
in his works for piano and orchestra, he is seemingly
oblivious of her problems, not limiting his expression by
his pianist’s difficulties.
It must have been apparent to Bax that restricting
his champions at the piano to just Harriet Cohen and
occasionally Myra Hess was not a good idea, and yet
Harriet insisted on being the first to play all his piano
music, resulting in others tending to avoid it, perhaps the
reason it did not become more widely established in the
concert repertoire in its day.
The earliest pieces in our programme, dating from
1912, are the Two Russian Tone-Pictures given the
evocative titles Nocturne: May Night in the Ukraine and
Gopak. The Nocturne was dedicated to ‘Olga and
Natasha’. In the spring and summer of 1910 Bax went to
Russia and the Ukraine in pursuit of a Ukrainian girl,
Natalia Skarginska, whom he had met in Hampstead, the
two of them accompanied by a mutual friend, Olga
Antonietti. In his autobiography Bax tells the story and
gives them the pseudonyms ‘Loubya Korolenko’ and
‘Fiammetta’. May Night in the Ukraine is a graphic
musical image derived from Nikolay Gogol’s celebrated
evocation in Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka,
towards the end complete with trilling nightingales.
Gopak is subtitled National Dance and when it was first
played by Myra Hess at the Bechstein Hall in April 1913
it was actually called ‘Barbarian Dance’, which perhaps
hints at the composer’s intention. Nevertheless it was
‘affectionately dedicated’ to his piano teacher Tobias
Matthay. These pieces were played by Myra Hess (the
Nocturne was first played in November 1912) and it was
she who launched Bax’s reputation as a composer of
evocative piano miniatures.
For the next two or three years, Bax wrote various
piano works, most of which were later orchestrated or
withheld. Early in 1915, however, he was stimulated
into writing a succession of such pieces for the eighteenyear-
old Harriet Cohen. The dedications of the four
pieces written in 1915 speak volumes. The Princess’s
Rose Garden, The Maiden with the Daffodil and A
Mountain Mood (the first two written in January 1915)
are inscribed to ‘Tania’, she being both the princess and
the maiden with the daffodil (when Bax encountered her
at a party in January that year).
Bax gave Harriet Cohen The Maiden with the
Daffodil with a verse dedication: ‘This for the maiden
with the daffodil/Whose fingers’ intricate enchantments
fill/Our ears with far strayed echoes of Romance.’ Bax
marks the music as ‘fresh and innocent’ and one has to
say that few more escapist pieces can have been written
during the First World War. Not dissimilar, the nocturne
The Princess’s Rose-Garden is marked ‘Drowsily
rhythmical and moderately slow’, in 9/8, its gentle pulse
making us unsure whether Bax intends a lullaby or is
merely intoxicated by the scented atmosphere.
Doubtless Harriet Cohen played them in private in
Bax’s Academy circle, but in fact it was again Myra
Hess who appeared with The Maiden with the Daffodil
at the Aeolian Hall on 24th March 1915 and The
Princess’s Rose Garden at the Grafton Galleries on 29th
April 1915. They immediately found a publisher.
Bax’s marriage was soon to end, but the miniature
Sleepy-Head, dated 24th May 1915, is dedicated to his
wife, Elsita. Sleepy-Head is surely a musical vignette of
Bax’s sleeping children, Dermot and Maeve, then three
and two respectively. A Mountain Mood: melody and
variations, dated 2nd Sept 1915, was again dedicated to
Harriet Cohen, Bax adding ‘who plays it perfectly’.
The remaining pieces included here appeared after
the First World war, largely written in 1919 or 1920.
Many of them evoke happy and exotic scenes, but What
the Minstrel Told Us, dating from 1919 and dedicated
again to Harriet Cohen, confronts more serious issues.
This is another of those memorial scores that Bax wrote
in the wake of the Dublin Easter Rising of 1916 in
which he had lost many of his pre-war Irish friends. That
he subtitles this piece with the word ‘ballad’ and
effectively writes variations on a manufactured Irish
tune, suggests that he is here musing on the tragedy of
Ireland. The bardic outer sections frame a middle
section in two distinct moods, first a typical passage of
restless dreaming soon superseded by relentless and
aggressive writing, Bax almost shaking a fist at heaven,
before we return to the opening in a mood of resignation
and regret, the final statement of the tune now with the
suggestion of quiet keening. Published in 1920 it was
played by Harriet Cohen in her Wigmore Hall début
concert on 15th June 1920.
Lullaby, subtitled Berceuse, (27th April 1920) is
dedicated to the ballerina Tamara Karsavina, though
unlike the other piece Bax wrote for her, Slave Dance,
we do not know of an occasion when she danced to it. It
again featured in Harriet Cohen’s Wigmore concert in
June 1920. A Hill Tune also dates from 1920 and was
published the same year. Here another hidden Irish
influence is perceptible in the shape of the main tune
which Bax quotes from the first movement of his early
String Quintet in G of 1908. It is difficult to ascribe first
performance dates to some of these short pieces.
Mediterranean, written in 1920, is a classic musical
picture postcard, probably evoking a holiday which Bax
and musical friends, including his brother Clifford and
the composers Gustav Holst and Balfour Gardiner, took
in Majorca in 1913. It was first performed by Harriet
Cohen at the Steinway Hall in May 1921, and orchestrated
the following year when it was dedicated to Holst.
Probably it was much later that Bax wrote the short
Pæan (1928), dedicated to one of Bax’s most longstanding
champions, the pianist Frank Merrick. This
insistent passacaglia was later orchestrated as a noisy
occasional piece for a Royal Command Performance in
May 1938. Frank Merrick played it in Manchester on
25th June 1929, the earliest performance traced, though
when it was first recorded the pianist was Harriet Cohen.
Lewis Foreman © 2005