Madeleine Dring
Madeleine Winefride Isabelle Dring was born at 66 Raleigh Road in Hornsey, London on the 7th Sept 1923. This wonderfully gifted and multi-talented English composer, singer, pianist, lyricist, cartoonist and actress was born into a family of talents amateur musicians, who supported and encouraged her precocious musical talent from an early age. Her father Cecil John Dring (1883-1949) was an architect and surveyor and her mother Winefride Isabel née Smith (1891-1968) came from a Scottish family.
Madeleine had an elder brother Cecil, who was born 1918. The children had a fairly strict Roman Catholic upbringing, a happy family life, with holidays and plenty of music-making. Their mother was a trained singer, a mezzo, who gave a concert at Wood Green in 1926 with stars from the London Coliseum. Their father played the cello and the piano, also entertained them with his ventriloquism act, which he had learnt working in a World War One Concert Party; he had also been a stretcher-bearer. Cecil junior was a gifted percussionist and Madeleine played the violin and the piano. This was an excellent environment for her developing musical gifts and although her parents never pushed her into her studies, they provided plenty of opportunities for her to perform.
As a family they shared their love of music-making with friends, holding an ‘open house’ after mass on Sundays. Their friends and relatives were part of a wide and cosmopolitan social circle, who enjoyed their ‘entertainments’ at the Dring home. Their piano was a good quality 7-foot Steinway, originally the property of Baron F de Rothschild, which had been bought at auction during the war. Madeleine loved the piano and it is still owned today by her husband.
Her headmistress at St Andrew’s Catholic School, Streatham also encouraged her talents and, after seeing a notice in an educational paper for a Junior Exhibition to the Royal College of Music (RCM), Madeleine applied and was successful on her 10th birthday in 1933. Here she also studied piano and singing and developed a love of the theatre.
Early photos of Madeleine show a child’s body and face but with a curiously ‘old’ expression. Her intense, soulful eyes, white blonde hair, small stature and pale complexion, which she kept all her life, gave her a striking appearance; her profile was compared to the movie actress Elizabeth Bergner. She was quite sickly as a child, suffering anaemia, bouts of influenza, rheumatism, liver attacks, deaf ear, scarlet fever and a ‘breakdown’. This made her life and studies quite difficult at times. Her young adult life was also marred by dental problems and she had to endure much pain and discomfort. To others she always appeared calm but inwardly she was hurting and very sensitive. All her life she would feel isolated and would hide her feelings from everyone, including friends and family.
At the RCM her singing teacher, Topliss Green, and piano teacher, Lilian Gaskell, worried that her physical conditions might hold back her studies. She also had exceptionally long fingers made her hands ‘difficult to manage’ but Madeleine fought against her limitations. She developed a fine soprano voice and an enviable piano technique, which is evident in her adult song compositions. As a mature composer she focussed on the piano, her long fingers helping her to perform her favourite Rachmaninov pieces, before other students could even stretch an octave. Her acute sensitivity helped her to analyse the music she heard and played, finding inspiration in the music of Chopin, Bruch, Prokofiev, Bax and particularly Rachmaninov, whose music inspired her ‘Fantasy Sonata’ for piano of 1937-8.
She also loved jazz and swing. Stuffiness and conformity were never her style. She found the pretentious airs and graces of some students and musicians ridiculous, and preferred the more practical elements of her studies to academic study. Written almost twenty years later, her satirical song ‘Don’t play your sonata tonight, Mr Humphries’, expressed her continued aversion and rebellion against the ‘norm’. Her first compositions were miniatures for piano or violin, experimenting with rhythm and harmony and challenging her tutors. She was often reprimanded for wandering off ‘into too many keys’ yet this is also a great distinction of her adult work. She accepted the advice to produce work of interest to publishers but always challenged them and tried to break the conventions.
At first she attended the RCM on Saturday’s only, continuing her education at the French convent ‘La Retraite’ at Clapham Park during the week. Here she felt very uncomfortable because of her talents and the music-mistress took delight in engineering situations where Madeleine would be humiliated or embarrass herself. Her strong sense of isolation from the other girls and the unsupportive attitude of the teachers did little to help. When Madeleine was chosen to play her own violin piece ‘Romance’ for a BBC broadcast from the RCM in March 1939, it was well received. The other girls were generally accepting of Madeleine’s unusual gifts and abilities, but the antagonism and isolation got worse.
It was a great relief for her when she won scholarships, which allowed her to attend the RCM on a full time basis. At the college she felt accepted, appreciated and supported. Her tutors encouraged her to learn the best technique possible, but to follow her own path. She would retain close links with the RCM for the rest of her life, feeling that she had received a stimulating and rewarding all-round musical education. Her tutors included: Freda Dinn and W H Reed for violin, Margaret Rubel for mime, Dorothea Aspinall and Betty Barne for piano and Sir Percy Buck, Joan Trimble, Herbert Howells and occasionally Ralph Vaughan Williams or Gordon Jacob for composition. She loved her time at the RCM and tried to never miss a day of it. Her diaries and notebooks were full of events and experiences at the college and cartoon-style drawings from her observations.
Her interest in make-up and hair styling for the stage is shown in sketches and self-portraits, the facial expressions also revealing another side to her shy persona. She observed people’s expressions and mannerisms and enjoyed mimicking accents, creating great amusement for her friends with impersonations of authority figures and characters she met. These characters were later incorporated into her mini plays and short stories, and inspired lyrics for her witty parody songs. This lead to her involvement with the RCM Christmas plays, which were organised by E Angela Bull, Head of the Junior Department. Miss Bull provided scripts, coaching for the cast, made costumes and produced the plays. She asked Madeleine to write the music and an adaptation for ‘The Emperor and the Nightingale’.
Miss Bull taught Madeleine dramatisation and theatrical techniques and how to tailor the music to suit the ability of the young musicians. Madeleine was also given her first opportunity to act. The finished work was well received and commissions for incidental music for stage, TV, film and radio and ballet soon followed. This experience was later most useful in her composition of educational pieces for children, which show shrewd judgement of the developing technique and abilities of small hands.
These lessons in drama and mime engendered a lifelong love of the theatre: inspiring incidental music and songs, and her performances as singer, actress and pianist. She often delighted RCM audiences with witty performances, which parodied the college ‘At homes’, and her modesty combined with a lively sense of wit and mimicry endeared her to everyone.
During the war years she became quite depressed and confused by the events. Her brother Cecil had joined the Territorials and was killed before Dunkirk and her continuing painful dental treatment became a part of the whole nightmare experience. She remained in London at her family home at Orleans Lodge, Woodfield Avenue, Streatham. Comfort and encouragement came from being able to complete her studies, as the RCM remained open. Her spirits were also kept up by her romantic relationship with RAF Flying Officer Roger Frewen Lord, a fellow musician and outstandingly gifted oboeist. Roger was the Gilbert Cooper Scholar at the RCM and originally came from Northallerton in Yorkshire.
On the 2nd of October 1945 the Daily Telegraph announced their engagement and two years later, on the 12th of August 1947 they were married at the Church of the English Martyrs, in Streatham. That same year, Roger was appointed Principal Oboe with the BBC Midlands Light Orchestra and they moved to Birmingham for two years. In 1949 Roger was given a post with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and they returned to London, living initially at the Dring family home. They were to remain in London for the next thirty years.
Their son Jeremy was born on the 26th of August 1950 and although she was now a wife and a mother, Madeleine managed to continue composing. Her work began to gain a wider reputation, as she was commissioned to write scores for TV, stage and the home service. Her compositions also began to appear in recitals for London concert programmes and Lengnick published some of her piano pieces in 1948. She wrote pieces for her husband and, in their early married days, they appeared in concert together, often playing her pieces. As Roger’s orchestral commitments grew they had less opportunity to play together.
After the death of WH Reed, her violin tutor at RCM, she gave up playing the violin, but continued writing music for the instrument with piano accompaniment. Most of her instrumental pieces are for solo instruments with piano and include compositions for viola, flute, clarinet and the oboe. Her orchestral experience in writing for plays at the RCM helped her compose pieces for instrumental ensemble and in 1948, she wrote a piece for a cello, stings, woodwind, percussion and piano ensemble. The piano became her preferred instrument and main means of musical expression. She composed a solo piano sonata and a solo piano piece ‘Festival Scherzo’, accompanied by string orchestra for ‘Nights in the Gardens of Battersea’, written to celebrate the Festival of Britain in 1951. Its technical proficiency was admired by scholars and compared to the music of Alan Rawsthorne, and its popular appeal was hailed as accessible music for all listeners.
Madeleine was never to produce symphonies, string quartets or overtures but many shorter pieces, lots of dances and miniatures of all kinds. Her style became influenced by her exploration of dance music and jazz. In the early 1950’s she composed a variety of piano pieces with Caribbean flavours and jazz syncopations, or expressing the nostalgia of Paris and French café music or the excitement of the tarantella and Renaissance and Tudor dance music. Yet every piece is infused with her own unique ingredients.
Her style has an affinity with Francis Poulenc, whom she admired, combining an overt enjoyment of popular styles with a total mastery of harmony and the piano. She had a particular gift in her ability to assimilate the qualities she admired in other composers and yet produce a totally original style and compositions. In a BBC broadcast about her in 1984, James Harding said her talent was revealed in her 'producing something utterly original, something entirely the work of Madeleine Dring and none other'. Madeleine believed that music ‘opened the doors of the sky’ and effused all her work with this sense of light and air. Her positivism and subtle wit is always present in her music, which never fails to raise a smile at some point. She was also as accomplished in writing music for the darkest emotions. These pieces often reveal the more hidden side of her nature.
In the 1950’s, two-piano music and intimate revues had become very popular and Madeleine began composing pieces for Laurier Lister's ‘Intimate Revues'. Lister was a true artistic eccentric and brilliant impresario. His popular satirical revues provided a platform for many young authors and composers. This was ideal for Madeleine, whose collaborations with lyricist Charlotte Mitchell were well received. Using a mixture of styles and pastiche, their side-splitting satirical songs and parodies of social pretensions were very daring and also successful at musical gatherings, particularly at the RCM ‘at home’ concerts.
As a member of the ‘Kensington Gores’ a Victorian style song and piano trio, established by Margaret Rubel, a drama teacher at the RCM, she enjoyed the creation and performance of a variety of pieces for stage, radio and TV using Rubel’s huge collection of period costumes. She also enjoyed acting and composing with the Players’ Theatre and appeared in a play with Prunella Scales. With librettist D. P. Aitken and the dancer Felicity Andreae, Madeleine acted in television drama and ran a light entertainment group.
Although she composed many ‘serious’ pieces, she never felt confident enough to attempt any large orchestral works. Her dance drama/opera ‘The Fair Queen of Wu’ (1951) and ballet ‘The Real Princess’ (1971) were achieved by composing in small manageable sections. She also composed over sixty songs with a wide range of emotional content. Surprisingly only three were published in her lifetime, the ‘Three Shakespeare Songs’ in 1949. Several of her songs were included in concert performances but the majority have only recently become known from original manuscripts kept by family and friends.
The social whirl of London and city life held fewer attractions as family commitments increased and Madeleine began to feel that it was getting harder to find the time and space to compose. Family life was rewarding and she had plenty of friends but she felt more isolated and yearned for the company of like-minded people, who could also respect the time she needed to be alone to work. Her life was also made stressful by the long periods of separation from her husband, during his absences for orchestra tours. Finances rarely allowed her to travel with him but, in the 1960’s, they were able to visit the USA together. Her ‘Trio for flute, oboe and piano’ was featured at Florida International Music Festival, performed by Roger with Peter Lloyd and André Previn.
They made many friends in the US and American audiences particularly enjoyed Madeleine’s music. Her music was also influenced by her experiences of America and her friendships with fellow artists, who shared her hopes and fears and understood how the practicalities of normal life inhibited creativity. By this time the British music scene had moved towards what she felt was morbidity in composition and opera driven in performance. Madeleine totally rejected the influence of ‘aurally incoherent’ music and began to feel rejected. Her music was considered ‘unfashionable’; she felt that her talents had been wasted and that her creativity had come to an end.
A new journey of self discovery began as she tried to find a way to deal with her life and emotions. She began a quest for ‘the truth in music’; her truth and finding a wide view of life and its meaning. In the 1970’s, having always been aware of her own psychic abilities, she studied parapsychology and gave talks about her interest and experiences in this field. This extra sensory awareness gave her a broad view on life, influencing and enhancing her wide-ranging creativity.
In 1975 she was invited to give a lecture for the Centre for Spiritual and Psychological Studies in London for a conference about the role of the Arts both in life and in spirit. This new talent ‘opened up a sort of landslide inside me and became a way of life.’ It helped her to see life in a different way and she began collecting books on philosophy, theology and parapsychology. She also read Jung and studied dream interpretation, befriended several mediums and psychics and began to speak openly and convincingly about her own psychic abilities and its influence on her music and insights.
She came to believe that ‘Music, the universal language, can express a pure and most potent form of truth, for it disarms the worldly personality by speaking directly to the soul’, and recognised that although acute sensitivity is usually part of an artist’s life and inspiration, that she was extra sensory in her awareness of other times, places and realities: ‘I wrote music … long before I went to school. And it’s nothing to do with being clever. I can only assume I must have lived before and brought through the memory.’
She felt that her music came to her in an altered state of consciousness; a channel opened and rather than directing thought or concentrating she let go, as in a meditative state. In 1976 she gave a talk about ‘How to listen’, which encouraged a meditative approach to receiving music and sound, absorbing the music rather than 'listening hard’. This state of mind also made her feel vulnerable and exhausted yet sleeping was difficult and her health suffered. This suffering was however an essential part of her creativity: ‘Our sufferings help us to reach towards the truth’
Madeleine felt very different to the people who surrounded her and this sense of isolation made her always uncomfortable and sometimes very sad. Her composition, performing and humour were the outlet for her inner struggle. She longed for companions yet isolated herself, feeling unable to socialise on a superficial level of ‘women’s chat’ and ‘coffee mornings’. Her witty humour was a cover for this awkwardness and a form of disguise or self-protection, but it was not always appreciated and she would then become withdrawn. The impish delight she took in a variety of humorous antics, is a trait for which she is most fondly remembered. Her humour and irreverent attitude hid her deep fears, yet this unique quality of merriment and ‘mischief’ touched the lives of so many people. It permeates her music and touches the hearts of audiences even now, 25 years after her death.
Her work was ‘food for the spirit’ and she also enjoyed dancing, particularly finding ballet a ‘limitless expression’ of spiritual connection. Although she did not have the physique to be a dancer, she loved performing in many other ways singing, playing, acting and speaking. However she never totally conquered her nerves and found performing very taxing and sometimes terrifying with a large audience. This is not unusual as most singers and actors experience this fear, but the surmounting of that fear through performance, brings great joy.
Poor or incompetent performances of her work by others would often upset her. Her perfectionism made attending performances of her work very uncomfortable. Even small mistakes would annoy her and made her feel very exposed. Overly self-conscious and careful performances irritated her most, as she preferred emotional commitment and free expression of the spirit. With other musicians she was rarely at ease and she felt the musical developments in pop and classical of the 60’s and 70’s were ’a time of irresponsible chaos’. For her a composer was a channel for the forces of light and darkness: ‘those who are able to bring ‘through’ music should be aware of the damage that can be done to others when they launch their private nightmares and despair into the world.’
She often felt the need to protect herself from these’ dark forces’ and from ‘psychic attack’ from certain people. Using instructions and prayers to help herself and the support of her husband, she found a way to deal with the ‘energy’ she built up about these experiences. Acutely aware if her own eccentricity, she began to ‘specialize in the unexpected’. Perhaps in our ‘New Age’ we are more open to her ideas and she would not be considered so eccentric. Her humour again provided her with a defence against people who found her ideas and beliefs outrageous.
Although a deeply spiritual person and a Roman Catholic, Madeleine did not compose any religious or church music, but I believe the attuned performer and listener can feel the spirituality in her music. Her spiritual journey took her beyond the limitations of organised religion and into the ‘free expression of divine love in all forms’. She hoped we would all ‘pass through into the company of the Gods’. She was also fascinated by numerology. In one of her notebooks she explores the personal significance of the number 7. She was born on the 7th of September; she lived at 7 Woodfield Avenue and in numerology, 'Dring’ adds up to 7. Her address became 52 (5+2) Becmead Avenue in SW 16 (1+6) and so on. She also died in 1977, suddenly on the 26th of March, from a brain haemorrhage, leaving her last song ‘Separation’, unfinished.
Songs were the focus of most of her creative energy; in addition to cabaret and theatre material, she wrote more than sixty ‘serious’ songs. The pressures of being a wife and mother never provided the necessary time and space to work on larger compositions. Unfortunately most of her ‘revue’ material has been lost. ‘Don’t play your sonata tonight, Mister Humphries’ is one of the few pieces that have been kept by friends and family. It reveals her talent for writing witty lyrics and a particular skill in parody of the 1950’s musical styles. In the 1950’s her work was often regarded as ‘enjoyable’ and ‘novel’ but this was perhaps more a reflection of her status as a ‘woman composer’.
Today her music is even more popular and her subtle humour is more widely appreciated. A first glance at her music gives the impression of great complexity but closer examination reveals her mastery of writing music, with wonderful musical effects with minimum technical effort for the performer. Her unique piano style is the essence of all her compositions. The manuscripts look hard to play and challenging but the performer quickly tunes into her idiom and the pieces are much easier than expected. They are always very rewarding for the performer and the audience.
By using a great variety of musical styles and dance rhythms from the 16th to the 20th Century, she created wonderful atmospheres, reflecting a diversity of time and place, and making her music instantly accessible. Her compositions are somehow new and yet strangely familiar, with snippets from Byrd and Dowland to Barber and Poulenc. Medieval elements and ornamentation from other eras are also present and her fascination with the rhythm of her own name. Her enduring love of Rachmaninov, whose music she could play with ease, due to her exceptionally long fingers, is always evident in the emotional content of her work, yet she was also influenced by the music of Poulenc and Ravel and the ‘non-conformist’ elements of Percy Grainger. She shared Grainger’s particular use of the element of surprise; the music often takes an unexpected and unusual turning, which always works so completely and appropriately. This incredible amalgam of styles creates a ringing resonance in all her compositions and a sense of timelessness.
Her ‘Seven Shakespeare Songs’ are perfect examples of her consummate skill in evoking an era, mood and atmosphere. The compositional style of the songs covers over 400 years of musical development and the evolution of the English art song. The piano accompaniments are more complicated than vocal lines and provide the broad emotional range and expressiveness to highlight the words. Only three of the ‘Seven Shakespeare Songs’ were published before her death, by Lengnick in 1949. All the seven songs are now published as a collection for medium voice. An extensive vocal range is required to sing all of them, which is a great and rewarding challenge for a solo performance.
Madeleine had an innate understanding of the voice and continued taking regular singing lessons even in her fifties. She wrote most of her soprano songs for her own voice and often expertly self-accompanied her singing at informal concerts. For public concerts she performed with accompanists and occasionally accompanied other singers for her songs. She also had perfect pitch and linked certain pitches to certain colours. Her ‘Colour Suite’ links each note of the scale with a colour. C major is red, D major yellow, F major brown, G minor blue and A minor is pink. Her use of ‘blue’ for a ‘bluesy’ style is evident in her ‘Song of the Nightclub Proprietress’ from the ‘Five Betjeman Songs.’
The texts for more than 40 of her songs are about ‘Love’ in various aspects: the pleasures and pains of love, reluctant lovers, false love, fading love and the false hopes of unrequited love. Most of them are in a light-hearted vein and mocking tone, yet deeply felt and expressed. As Madeleine often felt lonely and isolated, her songs provided an outlet for her anguish yet always managed to convert the suffering into beauty. She did not approve of ‘parading one’s neuroses in public.’
‘It is most heartening to hear that one’s music has made “contact” … to know that what you have expressed is “realised” and shared by another person is the only real reward … (any artist) can have’
The words of Shakespeare and Herrick were among her favourite texts, but she also set Marlowe, Lear, Rossetti, Blake and Betjeman. Her ‘Five Betjeman Poems’ are her most well known songs. The sympathetic vocal lines, with subtle harmonies in the piano part, are charming and unpretentious, yet, as with all her songs, the performer needs to use a certain amount of dramatisation and a directness of communication to put them across. Madeleine loved the theatre and acting and she admired emotional commitment in performance: ‘It is a terrible thing to be tepid’.
The ‘Seven Shakespeare Songs’ particularly reveal her innate gift for creating the mood and atmosphere of a bygone time in a totally modern settings:
In ‘Take, O take those lips away ‘ the pain of love forsaken, wrapped in the evocation of an Elizabethan courtly dance, is as real today as when Shakespeare expressed the suffering of his character ‘Mariana’ in ‘Measure for Measure’ nearly 400 years ago.
‘It is an Elizabethan poem couched in the musical language of today, exquisitely beautiful and passionate, as good a setting of the famous words as any I know, better I think even than the Warlock and as touching as the Quilter ... Dring has the same respect as Warlock for ... poems and the same insight into their heart.’ John Amis
The sunny playfulness of ‘Under the greenwood tree’ is complemented by a tumbling accompaniment and a pleasantly spiky vocal line, which contrasts beautifully with the sultry weariness and languid atmosphere of ‘Come away, death’. This beautiful and dreamy setting of unrequited love is one of her most expressive and eloquent compositions.
The vibrant energy of ‘Blow, blow thou winter wind’ reveals the darker emotions of betrayal and evokes the harshness of winter weather. The harmonies at first glance appear somewhat unpredictable yet they are always exactly what is needed and convey the content of the text perfectly. This also happens in her setting of ‘Crabbed Age and Youth’, where the accompaniment underlines the contrast of youthful energy with doddery old age, especially the musical imagery of lame hobbling in bars 19 and 20.
‘The Cuckoo’ reveals Madeleine’s mastery of elegant counterpoint and ornamentation. The interplay between the vocal and piano lines creates a delightfully mocking attitude, redolent of the ‘pleasure garden’ style of the early 19th Century, yet energetically modern and quite a test of the singer’s technique. This exploration of vocal agility is continued in her setting of ‘It was a lover’. The seemingly effortless coloratura displays are perfectly evocations of a carefree rustic life sought by the courtly sophisticates of Shakespeare’s ‘As you like it’.
The tenor Robert Tear, considered Madeline Dring to be 'one of the best, unknown, unrecognised English song-writers'. In 1982 he recorded ‘The Far Away Princess’ with piano accompaniment by Philip Ledger. It features 19 of her songs and brought her music to greater public attention. In 1992, it was reissued as a cassette (Meridian KD 89018).
In the 1990’s Thames Publishing, bringing her music back to the concert platform, published six volumes of her songs. The decline of the professional recital platform has seriously diminished the appreciation of our song heritage, but Madeleine’s songs are increasingly appearing on competitive festival programmes, usually performed by young singers. It is hoped that these budding professionals will take their love of her music on to future generations. More recently her work has been published in the USA, taking her fabulous songs and instrumental music to new audiences.
The sensitivity of her word setting in all the Seven Shakespeare Songs give them an immediacy that audiences will appreciate. Her direct honesty gives them a familiarity to modern ears, yet would not have seemed out of place to Shakespeare’s audiences. This recital may be the first professional platform to include all these songs performed by one singer.
© H Kean
With my thanks to Roger Lord, Ro Hancock-Child & Betty Roe at Thames Publishing for providing me with so much information and support and allowing me to make a deep and personal connection to the wonderful music and legacy of Madeleine. My only regret on retiring is that I will no longer sing her beautiful music, but i will always hear it in my head. Thank you for your friendship and sharing!
‘Madeleine Dring – Her life, her music’ by Ro Hancock-Child Micropress 2000
7 Shakespeare Songs
- The Cuckoo
- It was a lover
- Take O take those lips away
- Under the greenwood tree
- Come away, death
- Blow, blow thou winter wind
- Crabbed age and youth
Listen on Youtube -
for my recital I performed them in this order. It is unusual for one singer to perform all seven songs as a full and strong two octave range is required. This sequence allows for the tessitura to work best with my mmezzo-soprano voice. I recorded them in one take in this sequence with my accompanist in the same room to give the sense of a live performance.
Click on the song to listen
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