Song in Gold Pavilions Ronald Stevenson on Music

159 Pages·2009·4.03 MB·English

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SSoonngg iinn GGoolldd
PPaavviilliioonnss

Ronald Stevenson on Music

Editor
CHRIS WALTON
Song in Gold Pavilions – Ronald Stevenson on Music
(The title of this book is derived from a line in Stevenson’s song cycle Border Boyhood
to texts by Hugh MacDiarmid.)
Published by SUN MeDIA Stellenbosch
Copyright © 2009 Ronald Stevenson
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any
electronic, photographic or mechanical means, including photocopying and recording
on record, tape or laser disk, on microfilm, via the internet, by e-mail, or by any other
information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission by the
publisher.
First edition 2009
ISBN: 978-1-920109-68-4
e-ISBN: 978-1-920109-69-1
DOI: 10.18820/9781920109691

Cover artwork: Ronald Stevenson by Victoria Crowe, oil on paper. Reproduced with the
kind permission of the artist.
Cover design by Ilse Roelofse
Typesetting by SUN MeDIA Stellenbosch
Publisher: Liezel Meintjes
Set in 10/12 RotisSerif
SUN PReSS is an imprint of SUN MeDIA Stellenbosch. Academic, professional and
reference works are published under this imprint in print and electronic format. This
publication may be ordered directly from www.sun-e-shop.co.za.
Printed and bound by SUN MeDIA Stellenbosch, Ryneveld Street, Stellenbosch 7600.
www.africansunmedia.co.za
www.sun-e-shop.co.za
RRoonnaalldd SStteevveennssoonn
CCoonntteennttss
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ........................................................................................................ i
INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................................................... iii
STEVENSON ON STEVENSON
The Passacaglia on DSCH ..................................................................................................... 1
Stevenson’s Fugue on a Fragment of Chopin; Symphonic Elegy for Liszt ..................... 4
Purcell Washed Whiter?: Reflections on my Purcell transcriptions ............................... 6
One Pianist’s Credentials and Credo .................................................................................... 8
Composing a Song Cycle: Border Boyhood ........................................................................ 10
A Composer Loyal to his Principles: Stevenson in Interview
with Martin Anderson .................................................................................................... 14
Ronald Stevenson and Art: Stevenson in Interview with Philip Hutton ....................... 20
STEVENSON ON BRITISH COMPOSERS
Edward Elgar, Panjandrum and Poet .................................................................................. 27
Edward Elgar: Whimsy and Spleen ..................................................................................... 28
Frederick Delius and the Wisdom of Life ........................................................................... 31
Delius’s Sources ...................................................................................................................... 33
Francis George Scott (1880-1958) ....................................................................................... 37
Percy Grainger: Music’s Mowgli .......................................................................................... 39
Alan Bush: Committed Composer ........................................................................................ 42
Alan Bush in the 70s ............................................................................................................. 65
William Walton’s Extravaganza .......................................................................................... 69
Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem ......................................................................................... 70
Britten at Aldeburgh .............................................................................................................. 73
Bernard Stevens ..................................................................................................................... 74
STEVENSON ON SCOTS MUSIC
Heifetz in Tartan .................................................................................................................... 79
Gaelic Music ........................................................................................................................... 80
Harps of their Own Sort: The Clarsach ............................................................................... 82
STEVENSON ON THE CONTINENTAL TRADITIONS
Franz Schubert ....................................................................................................................... 89
Robert Schumann’s Romantic Selves .................................................................................. 91
Discovering Meyerbeer .......................................................................................................... 92
On the Nature of Music: Towards an Understanding of Music in Relation to
the Absolute .................................................................................................................... 94
Sergei Rachmaninov, Nightingale and Raven ................................................................... 99
Szymanowski at the Piano ................................................................................................... 100
Leopold Godowsky ................................................................................................................. 105
Maurice Emmanuel: a Belated Apology ............................................................................. 106
Igor Stravinsky, Hedonist and Ritualist .............................................................................. 116
Gian-Carlo Menotti’s Seasonal Verismo ............................................................................. 117
An Introduction to the Music of Roman Vlad ................................................................... 119
INDEX OF NAMES AND WORKS ........................................................................................ 133
AAcckknnoowwlleeddggeemmeennttss
FF irst and foremost, I wish to thank Marjorie and Ronald Stevenson for their
constant encouragement and support. Joel Flegler of Fanfare Magazine,
Malcolm MacDonald of Tempo, Antony Bye of the Musical Times, Harry
Winstanley of the Godowsky Society and Will Scott of the Newsletter of the
Stevenson Society have all generously allowed articles from their journals to be
reprinted here, while Philip Hutton and Martin Anderson displayed the same
generosity in allowing me to publish here their interviews with Ronald. Victoria
Crowe kindly let us use her beautiful portrait of Ronald as the cover of this book,
and I owe both her and Ken Gray much gratitude.
I believe that I have made all reasonable efforts to notify the publishers of the
original articles of our desire to republish here, though since some journals no
longer exist and the ownership of them has since changed hands several times, this
proved difficult in some cases. The examples of Bernard Stevens’s music are given
by kind permission of Lengnick Publications, Bertha Stevens and the Bernard
Stevens Trust. The copyright of Roman Vlad’s works lies with SUGARMUSIC S.P.A.
(Milan), and I am grateful to them and to Alessandro Savasta for permission to
quote from them here. The music examples from Alan Bush’s works are given by
kind permission of his heirs, represented by his elder daughter, Rachel O’Higgins.
My research assistant Annemie Stimie in Pretoria was responsible for typing the
greater part of the first draft, and also – together with Karien Labuschagne – for
typesetting the music examples; I owe them much gratitude. I further wish to
thank the following individuals whose assistance and encouragement have proven
vital to this project: Derek Watson, Isobel van der Walt of the University of
Pretoria Library; Chats Devroop and Gerhard Swart of the University of Pretoria;
Wikus van Zyl of SUN PReSS; Stephanus Muller; and – for their constant patience
and support – my wife Riëtte and our children Isa, Elza and Alvaro.
CHRIS WALTON

ii
IInnttrroodduuccttiioonn
TT here is an undeniable fascination in reading the words that composers
write. Whenever a composer puts finger to typewriter rather than pencil
to manuscript paper, we inevitably hope that he might proffer us some
insights into the workings of the creative musical mind – that source of much
mystery since the act of composition left the realm of low artisanship for that of
High Art some two or three centuries ago. Composers who deal with words as
naturally as they write notes are, however, a breed of exceeding rarity. Ronald
Stevenson belongs amongst them: and the proof of it is to be found amply in the
present book.
Stevenson was born in 1928 into a working-class Lancashire family of mixed Scots
and Welsh descent. He studied with Iso Elinson in Manchester at what is now the
Royal Northern College of Music, he was imprisoned on account of his pacifism
and his concomitant refusal to do military service, he worked in a colliery school
in County Durham, then subsequently reaffirmed his Celtic roots by moving to a
tiny cottage in West Linton in the Scottish borders. With the exception of two
years spent lecturing in Cape Town in the early 1960s, he has remained in
Scotland, faithfully ‘local’ in that oddly cosmopolitan, internationalist manner that
the best Scots creative artists have somehow always managed to attain. He and his
wife, Marjorie, still live in that same cottage, half an hour’s bus ride from
Edinburgh – though for the visitor, its smallness somehow evaporates once inside,
revealing instead the far greater scope of the minds and hearts that reside in it.
Ronald Stevenson is a man possessed of multifarious gifts, though he has been
most prominent as a pianist and composer in whom virtuosity and musicality are
paired in equal measure. He has performed and lectured in many of the most
prestigious venues that the musical and academic worlds have to offer, from the
Royal Albert Hall to the Juilliard School of Music, but nevertheless eschewed the
customary travelling concert career that was the lot of his performing friends
(John Ogdon foremost amongst them). He also (with that Capetonian exception)
avoided the route into academia that has been the bread-and-butter choice of
many of his fellow composers. Stevenson’s compositional oeuvre is vast,
encompassing almost every genre from instrumental miniatures to large-scale
concertos and choral pieces, and his works have been commissioned and
performed by artists of renown, ranging from Peter Pears to Yehudi Menuhin. He is
probably best known for the work that is the topic of the first essay in this book:
his remarkable Passacaglia on DSCH for piano, which is cited just about
everywhere as being the longest single-movement work in the piano literature. At
about eighty minutes in length, it might well be. But it is in fact only the tip of the
iceberg – albeit a very large, impressive, craggy one. The catalogue of his works in
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SSoonngg iinn GGoolldd PPaavviilliioonnss
a recent volume on his life and music is in fact almost eighty pages in length.1
And besides his original compositions, Stevenson is a master of the art of
transcription, one worthy to be ranked alongside Busoni and Grainger.
Stevenson has been hardly less prolific in writing words than in writing notes. For
composers to write about music has in fact been something of a sine qua non for
well over a century now. As in so much else, we can put the blame squarely on
Richard Wagner. While other composers before him had achieved prominence as
critics – Robert Schumann is the obvious example – it was Wagner above all who
awakened the public’s expectations that a composer should express his opinions on
life, the world and his art in prose. This was for a long while – predominantly,
though not exclusively – a German phenomenon, where even those composers
with the least to say would insist on doing so at length; furthermore, German
academia has long distinguished between that which is ‘musical journalism’ and
that which is ‘proper’ musicology – with the implication, of course, that the former
is comprehensible but flimsy and throwaway, while the latter, being for longer-
term consumption, need not be so immediately intelligible. If there is a single
major difference between the Germanic and the Anglo-Saxon musicological
traditions, then it is surely that this distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ has ever
been blurred in the latter. In his own implicit disdain for such attitudes of altitude
and affectation in his approach to prose, Ronald Stevenson has remained decidedly
‘British’; and that he has much of import to say will be clear enough to the reader
of this book. To be sure, there are ample products of his pen from the past half
century that even the most Teutonic of commentators would happily stamp as
‘scholarly’ – his Western Music: An Introduction,2 his contributions to the study of
Ignaz Paderewski, Bernhard Ziehn or Alan Bush, or his articles on poets such as
Hugh MacDiarmid and Sorley Maclean. But he has also penned many shorter
pieces that were intended for more immediate consumption. Here, his regular
column on ‘last week’s broadcast music’ for The Listener in the 1960s and ’70s
comes to mind, which allowed him to comment directly on matters of the day,
musical and otherwise. But regardless of whether he is writing for the scholar, the
student or the homely listener in his comfy chair by the wireless, Stevenson never
looks down on his reader, nor dumbs down to him, but looks him straight in the
eye, inviting him, too, to do the same back. And, just as Stevenson the composer is
seemingly incapable of writing a brief canon or an Albumblatt without displaying
his mastery of form, structure, art and artifice, and just as his recordings of the
technically straightforward repertoire exude the same musicality as do his virtuosic
pyrotechnics, so too do his many occasional prose pieces show en miniature the

1 See Colin Scott-Sutherland, ed.: Ronald Stevenson: The Man and his Music. London:
Toccata Press, 2005, pp. 381-459.
2 Ronald Stevenson: Western Music: An Introduction. London: Kahn & Averill, 1971. New
edition currently in preparation.
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