Roger Quilter
Roger Cuthbert Quilter was born at No 4 Brunswick Square in Hove, Brighton, on 1st of November 1877. He was the fifth child and third son of Sir William Cuthbert Quilter, 1st Baronet and Lady Mary Ann Quilter, née Bevington. Queen Victoria had bestowed the baronetcy to William, in her Diamond Jubilee year 1897.
Roger’s father was a wealthy stockbroker, a businessman, the founder and director of the National Telephone Company, a politician elected as Liberal MP and afterwards Unionist MP for Sudbury, and the landowner of the Bawdsey Manor estate in Suffolk. With his brother Harry, he had invested in an extensive art collection, which became quite famous. William’s appreciation of the arts lay only in the financial gains to be made and the sale of his collection increased the family’s wealth considerably. The family returned to Suffolk in 1882.
Despite his enthusiasm for collecting art, Sir William had little interest in the artistic talents of his son. Music as a diversion or hobby was acceptable to him, but a musical career was not reasonable. Roger’s mother was more encouraging of his gifts. Her sensitivity and cultured intelligence nurtured his prodigious musical talent and provided for his artistic needs. They would remain close all her life and Roger was devoted to her. He found further sympathy and nurture at Pinewood, a preparatory school in Farnborough, Hampshire. In this most happy environment, the Reverend Fabian Brackenbury and his wife Edith provided Roger’s first music lessons.
Sir William however wished to provide a more ‘masculine’ education and upbringing for his son, and in January 1892, Roger was sent to Eton College. The contrast could not have been greater. Achievements in sport, not music were the focus of an Eton education. Roger hated every moment and managed to endure his misery only because his sickly constitution excused him from sports, and the college allowed him to take music lessons and play the piano and violin instead. He played his violin for school concerts but his memories of Eton were only of the wretchedness and despair he experienced. His physical weaknesses and health problems would affect him all his life but perhaps his hatred of Eton set him on a path away from Oxbridge, and gave him the firm resolution to follow a musical career.
In 1896, Quilter decided to go to Germany, to develop his musical gifts. He enrolled at the Hoch’sche Konservatorium, in Frankfurt-am-Main, on the recommendation of a family friend, and remained there for the next four and a half years. Although the Royal College of Music was founded in 1882, at the end of the 19th Century, it was still customary for English composers to go to Germany for a period of study and to benefit from a Germanic musical education. Here the Conservatories were either pro-Wagner or pro-Brahms. Hoch’s Conservatorium was indisputably pro-Brahms, as Clara Schumann had been one of their most illustrious tutors.
At the conservatory, he studied the piano with Ernst Engesser, yet he also studied privately for four years with the renowned Russian professor Iwan Knorr. A thorough and rigorous teacher, Knorr was also a devoted admirer of Tchaikovsky and French song. His liberated musical opinions deeply influenced his young British students, encouraging them to follow an individual path of development. Quilter shared the professor’s preference for French song, and particularly admired Fauré's individual use of harmony.
Fellow student, Cyril Scott, dispensed with bar lines and key signatures, composing atonal accompaniments to well-known tunes, which were considered extremely avant-garde in 1900. Percy Grainger looked towards folk-song for inspiration. Quilter, Scott and Grainger with Balfour Gardiner and Norman O’Neill formed the ‘Frankfurt Group’. As a group, they had a shared aversion to Beethoven and developed a close bond of friendship, yet their greatest influence on their contemporaries was as individual artists. Quilter’s technical precision and neatness was a result of his studies at Frankfurt. He also composed one of his most famous songs ‘Now sleeps the crimson petal’ during this period.
Returning to England in 1899, he set up home in London. He had already realised that his future as a composer lay in the art of song-writing and his London debut took place in 1901, with a performance by Denham Price of his ‘Song of the Sea’ at Crystal Palace. The text was a setting of Quilter’s own verse. This did much to raise his profile in London music circles. yet it was the endorsement and support of the tenor Gervase Elwes, which would establish Quilter’s reputation as the greatest English songwriter of his generation. Quilter spent two years trying to get publishers interested in his settings of Shakespeare, but it was Elwes’ admiration of ‘Now sleeps the crimson petal’ that led to the singer persuading Boosey’s to publish it. He also persuaded them of the public interest in Shakespeare and Quilter’s music.
Elwes became the greatest interpreter of Quilter’s songs, giving many premieres of new pieces and taking them across the world to new audiences. The song cycle ‘To Julia’ premiered in 1905, is dedicated to him and his endorsement of the ‘Seven Elizabethan Lyrics’ and the ‘Three Shakespeare Songs’ brought Quilter’s work to the attention of other famous singers, which included Harry Plunket Greene and Ada Crossley. Quilter would often accompany singers in recitals of his songs and his performances with Elwes were most memorable for audiences of the time.
During World War One, being unable to enrol in military service on health grounds, Quilter organised concerts in hospitals and initiated a chamber concert series, which continued after the Armistice. The American millionaire Robert Allerton was a close, intimate friend during this period, and no doubt supported Quilter’s philanthropic activities. Allerton had invited him to holiday in the United States but this was not to be. Elwes’ promotion of Quilter’s music had established the composer’s reputation as a great song-writer. Engagements and interest in his music kept him very busy in London.
The debt he owed to Elwes was deeply appreciated: ‘He inspired me so much that I could never have written in quite the same way if I had not known Gervase.’ The news of the singer’s tragic death grieved the composer deeply: ‘I feel suddenly as if my life and my work had lost their significance.’ Elwes died in a tragic accident, when he was crushed by a train at Boston railway station in Massachusetts, in 1921. Quilter was one of the founders and a life-long committee member of The Musicians’ Benevolent Fund set up in his memory.
All was not lost however, when in 1923, Mark Raphael gave a recital at the Wigmore Hall, Quilter befriended the young baritone and found a new champion of his songs. Raphael was also a founder member of the Musicians’ Benevolent Fund. In Quilter he found a life-long friend and together they made many recordings and gave recitals of Quilter’s songs. Columbia issued a six-record set of their performances in 1934. Another loyal friendship which lasted all his life from this time was with Leslie Woodgate, who became Quilter’s private secretary.
During long period of convalescence from an operation, probably for a duodenal ulcer, which made him very ill indeed and seriously disrupted his musical career, Quilter had set some poems by Dowson. He had already set ‘Passing Dreams’ by the same poet in 1904 but ‘The Songs of Sorrow’ have the deeply expressive qualities of German lieder. This sparked his composition of some of the most melodic, pianistic and individual songs of the 20th Century.
His exquisite taste in poetry and word setting had a great influence on his contemporary song composers. Peter Warlock sent him a song on which he had written: ‘If it were not for the songs of Roger Quilter, there would have been no Peter Warlock.’ Warlock’s book on ‘The English Ayre’ was also inscribed ‘To Roger Quilter, who has maintained so well the true tradition of the English Ayre’. Quilter’s success in the Edwardian parlour-song market, was immediate yet this was perhaps unfortunate, because his style developed little over the next 40 years. Although the 20th century's tonal revolution had no impact on his work, he did begin to write using more percussive accompaniments, and richer harmonic textures. Over 100 of his songs were published in his lifetime.
The song compositions of Schubert and Schumann were among his favourites, but he also enjoyed playing Strauss waltzes and Neapolitan folk songs. Perhaps this enjoyment of lighter music was channelled into his light opera compositions, set in the ‘jolly good ale and old' atmosphere of a fictional traditional English village. His first light opera ‘Julia’ is about a love affair between a countess and a composer. This was one of his collaborations with Rodney Bennett. Originally in one act and entitled ‘The Blue Boar’, it was broadcast by the BBC in 1933. He later re-arranged it as 'Love at the Inn'.
It was produced by the British Music Drama Opera Company and premiered at Covent Garden in December 1936. It was only given a short run of eight performances, and has been neglected ever since. The Abdication of Edward VII had made theatre companies anxious about investing in new compositions and many exciting works were not given much more than a few performances.
Quilter’s songs are generally very evocative of his time and are too often relegated to the rank of ‘period pieces’. Now his work is being performed to ‘fresh ears’ and valued for its true worth. His wonderfully delicate setting of a 15th century text ‘An Old Carol’ (1924) from a set of six songs, is particularly evocative of its medieval atmosphere, revealing the composer’s ability to disguise his extreme sensitivity within a simplicity of style.
There were a few orchestral pieces, which were performed at Proms concerts, but symphonies would have been too taxing on his health and he focused his energies on one-off songs, which he later combined to make interesting groups. Composing gradually became more arduous than usual, as he suffered with depression in the 1930’s. He moved to St John’s Wood in 1938 but he became semi-invalid, and mental illness troubled his old age, making him nervous and anxious. Mixing with others of his social class was only bearable if he felt they shared his love of the arts.
He often travelled and spent the winter months abroad, but the advent of a Second World War limited his trips. Having trained in Germany and made friends there, it must have been deeply upsetting for him to see hostilities growing in Europe again. The rise of the Nazism horrified him. His mother had been a Quaker and human rights issues were very important to him. Mark Raphael had been forced to cancel German tours, as a direct result of the increase in anti-semitism and may have told Quilter about the plight of the Jews. Perhaps Quilter’s enhanced sensitivity and having lived through World War One, meant that he saw another holocaust coming. He used his wealth to help Jews escape from Germany and Austria and his music was put on the Nazi ‘blacklist’.
Quilter never took any commissions but his setting of Kipling's ‘Non Nobis Domine’, originally written for the Pageant of Parliament at the Royal Albert Hall in 1934, was successfully revived as the Olympic Hymn for the opening of the Games in 1948. This was dedicated to another intimate friend Walter Creighton. He also undertook a collection of arrangements for ‘The Arnold Book of Old Songs’, published in 1947. It is dedicated to his nephew Arnold Guy Vivian, who was killed in World War Two. Five of the songs had been published in 1921 in his collection of ‘Old English Popular Songs.’ His setting of ‘Over the mountains’ from this collection would become very popular with the post-war generation of singers, including Kathleen Ferrier.
The BBC often broadcast performances of his songs and for his 75th birthday the BBC gave a celebration concert, conducted by his close friend Leslie Woodgate. Woodgate became Chorus Master of the BBC in 1934 and had supervised much of the publication of Quilter’s later music.
Quilter’s last years were overshadowed by the tragic circumstances of his nephew’s death. Arnold Vivian had been captured and made a prisoner of war. In 1943, while being transferred by train in North Africa, he and a friend took the opportunity to escape. They were re-captured and executed. News of this tragedy and the after effects of an ‘operation’ in 1945, triggered Quilter’s dramatic mental decline. There were also rumours of blackmail concerning his homosexuality, which would have added to the pressures and strains on his health. He was admitted to the private St Andrew’s Hospital, in Northampton on two occasions, 1946 and 1951.
In his last fifteen years, he had been cared for by Harry and Ada Heaton. Although very unpopular with the composer’s friends and family, they took holidays with him and were given full advocacy of his estate and affairs. It was often a struggle to manage the ailing composer, but they were well compensated for their trouble in his will; they allegedly compensated themselves with property, in addition to that bequeathed to them.
Roger Quilter died of heart failure and pneumonia. He had been confined to bed for a few weeks, yet his death was peaceful and at his home 23 Acacia Road, St John’s Wood, on 21st September 1953. He was buried in the family vault at St Mary's Church, Bawdsey, Suffolk. A memorial concert and service organised by his friends was held at the Church of St. Sepulchre, Holborn Viaduct, in London on October 14th 1953. It was well attended by people who had known him and people who only knew and loved his music. His colleagues and friends remember him best for his kindness and generosity. They included many artists, musicians, poets and writers and the National Portrait Gallery accepted Wilfrid de Glehn’s portrait of Quilter, after Sir Arthur Bliss, Sir Malcolm Sargent, and Dr Ralph Vaughan Williams signed a valedictory letter in 1954. There are two early portraits held by the Grainger Museum, at the University of Melbourne, Australia
As a young man Quilter had been quite lively and exuberant. His love of mimicry and entertaining endeared him to many people. As he aged, he became more shy and withdrawn. His health and worries about his health were a constant problem, yet his great sense of humour, gentle nature, charm and appreciation for the finer things in life made him great company. He was tall and distinguished in his dress; he especially loved wearing silk bow ties. His private income and inheritance had allowed him a comfortable lifestyle and the freedom to enjoy his music-making, yet he was always uncomfortable about his good fortune. He privately helped many young artists and less fortunate friends, including Roland Hayes, a young black singer. At this time, the great American contralto, Marian Anderson, also a friend of Quilter’s, had been turned away at stores in the West End, because of the colour of her skin.
Although he did not take pupils, or hold any musical appointment, he would often give his time generously to young singers who were interested in his songs. He never let his disabilities affect the kindness, charm and generosity he displayed in his life, as well as his music. Quilter is known to have said that he loved poetry more than music and wrote poetry himself under the pseudonym ‘Romney Marsh’. The elegantly decadent imagery of Herrick was his greatest inspiration. ‘April Love’ is a rather weak miniature of Herrick's imposing ‘Corinna's gone a-maying’ yet ‘Spring Voices’ skilfully imitates Herrick's favoured style of mixing of very long with very short lines.
His best known songs include settings of Tennyson's ‘Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal’, Shelley's ‘Love's Philosophy’ and Blake's ‘Dream Valley’. The quality of the poetry influenced the accents and phrasing of the music and the ‘tessitura’ of his vocal melodies and his precision in writing for the voice and piano makes his songs attractive to both professional and amateur singers. The songs require the skilled combination of legato singing with eloquent articulation. Here Quilter’s instinctive understanding of the voice has raised the parlour song style to art song status. The opening bars of any of his songs immediately identify Quilter as the composer. His unique sensitivity and craftsmanship are always at the core of his accompaniments. They are lyrical and rhythmically interesting, and his melodic and harmonic progressions rarely depart into unusual realms. When they do, it is always to create the perfect change of mood and poetic expression.
Quilter had the unerring ability to set fine poetry to music that is the perfect 'extension' to the poem. His choice was limited, yet his talent lay in his strong identification with the poet, especially Shakespeare and Herrick. Herrick had wished for music that would give him the illusion of living and dying 'mongst Roses’. Quilter cherished this poetic ideal and would seem to have been a Romantic somehow stranded in the wrong century. His music is so quintessentially English with a hint of nostalgia and wonderfully evocative of his own time.
Some of his music was specially composed for children. His incidental music for the children's play ‘Where the Rainbow Ends’ was first performed at Christmas, at the Savoy Theatre, London, in 1911. He orchestrated a brilliant and witty medley of nursery rhymes for the play, which was produced by Italia Conti. This fantasia of well-known nursery tunes became the much-loved ‘Children's Overture’, which has provided an invaluable aid to the study of the orchestra for many generations of young musicians. It was premiere in 1919 at the ‘Proms’ concerts and first broadcast by the BBC for Christmas 1922 (23rd December).
His settings of over 20 Shakespeare songs are among his finest music. Shakespeare’s lyrics inspired him the most. Three of his ‘Four Shakespeare Songs’ (Opus 30 No 2, composed 1933) are included in this recital. ‘How should I your true love know?’ Ophelia’s song from ‘Hamlet’, has poignancy and tenderness; setting the words to a simple melody and delicate accompaniment that sounds old and new at the same time. It is dedicated to Eva Raphael.
Some critics have accused him of occasionally sanitizing or emasculating some of the Bard’s raunchier texts, either by accident or purposefully; notably in Autolycus’ song ‘When daffodils begin to peer’ and Balthasar’s ‘Sigh no more, ladies’ from the same opus. However I feel that he has left the performer room to interpret and to gauge the appropriate level of ‘sauciness’ for a wider range of occasions and audiences. These songs he dedicated to Mark Raphael and Arnold Vivian respectively. Such dedications would suggest that he wrote the songs with deliberate intention of them being interpreted freely. A skilled performer can bring them to life, without recourse to vulgarity in the vocal line. A sparkle in the eye, a raised eyebrow at the right moment and a sense of understatement is all that is needed; traditional English humour and irony.
Of his later songs his best include two Shakespeare settings. ‘Hark, hark the lark’ from ‘Cymbeline’ (published 1946) and ‘Tell me, where is fancy bred?’ from ‘The Merchant of Venice’ (published 1951). They do resemble some of his earlier songs but have given such a natural feel to the lyrics that they could easily be performed in the theatre. His other Shakespeare settings include music for As you like it, Cymbeline, Hamlet, King Henry VIII, Love’s Labours Lost, Measure for Measure, The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing, The Tempest, Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Winter’s Tale. A complete anthology of his Shakespeare songs would make a truly wonderful publication and a fitting tribute to one of the greatest English song composers of the 20th Century.
© H Kean
My recordings on YouTube - click to lisiten
Bibliography
‘Quilter’ Composers A-Z
Richard Morrison
Classical Music Weekly April 1977
‘Roger Quilter’
British Composers of our Time
The Schoolmaster October 24 1952
‘Roger Quilter – the man and his songs’
Mark Raphael
Boosey & Hawkes
‘Roger Quilter Songs’ Volume 1
Trevor Hold
Website 2002
‘Roger Quilter Songs’ Volume 2
Philip Roddon Website © 1995
‘The Walled-In Garden’
Trevor Hold
Triad Press 1978
‘Roger Quilter - 1877 – 1953’
Valerie Langfield
Website 2002
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