For all the glories of the English musical renaissance ushered in by Parry and Elgar a little more than a century ago, hardly any composer who emerged during that period deserved the title of genius. Benjamin Britten, writing the sort of innovative, mature music in his late teens and early twenties that most composers struggle for decades to produce – and still fail – is generally agreed to be the exception. Vaughan Williams had to work at it until he was almost 40 to achieve any proper recognition, and only began to write truly original work when he was well into middle age. Elgar was 42 when the Enigma Variations made him into what we now call a star. But what about John Foulds?
Who on earth, you will almost certainly ask, is John Foulds? Well, he is a British composer of the early 20th century who might also deserve to be called a genius. However, few have heard of him, fewer still have heard his music, and only a select few thousand now alive have ever attended a performance of it. The odd bits of writing about Foulds – articles, sleeve notes and one biography, short but immaculate – all make the same point: that no composer of his stature in England has ever been so completely forgotten.
To those who have discovered him, he is a revelation in his originality and talent. The emotive power of some of his writing is awesome. A Foulds revival is now under way, as conductors and performers of international stature discover the miraculous quality of some of his work. However, but for a very British dose of prejudice, it might all have happened for Foulds decades earlier.
Like Elgar, Foulds was from the wrong side of the musical tracks, a player rather than a gentleman, who had to work his way up from the shop floor. He was born in Manchester in 1880, the son of a bassoonist in the Halle Orchestra. Like Elgar, too, he was steeped in music from birth. He wrote his first pieces at the age of eight, and by his teens was a prolific composer, mostly of string quartets and other chamber works. Like so many of his musical elders and contemporaries, he was heavily influenced by German Romanticism, an affliction that, fortunately, he offloaded on reaching manhood.
His childhood was not especially happy. The Foulds family were Plymouth Brethren, which he found oppressive, and he ran away from home when he was 13 or 14. The biographical details, both at this stage and often later, are sketchy. This is partly because of the peripatetic nature of his later life, when many of his papers went missing, but also because of the dearth of papers in the first place. According to the author of the only biography, Malcolm MacDonald, a legend in the Foulds family has it that John’s education was completed by the kindness of a “woman of ill-fame” – what we would now, presumably, call a tart with a heart. This woman, of whom we know nothing else, looked after him until he was reunited with his family and found his first settled job, as a cellist with the Halle in 1900.
His teens were spent as a jobbing orchestral player in small seaside bands and theatres – though he appears to have visited Vienna and, possibly, one or two other centres of European music. This was not for any formal tuition: he was completely self-taught as a composer. Meanwhile, his career in composition continued – still mainly chamber works – and, at the age of 17, he had his first public performance, of the Rhapsodie nach Heine for piano and violin. In the late 1890s and early 1900s, he concentrated on a series of string quartets, most of which are now lost, and various “music-poems”. His first published piece was the Variazioni ed Improvvisati of 1900, which caught the eye of Elgar’s friend and publisher August Jaeger. He recommended Foulds to Havergal Brian, another composer now sorely neglected, as one of the great hopes of the future of British music. At the Halle, Foulds was soon taken up by its legendary conductor, Hans Richter, who sent him to Europe whenever the excuse presented itself, and encouraged his writing.
By this time, Foulds was becoming highly experimental: to the conventional musical language of tones and semitones, he added quarter-tones, further sharpening notes that were already sharp, and flattening already flat ones. This gave some of his music a radical, ultra-modern feel that placed him at a distance from most of his contemporaries. The only one who came near, and with whom Foulds would have other important similarities, was Gustav Holst.
Like Holst, Foulds explored oriental music, and music from India in particular. Somewhat self-delusively – for his music has that peculiarly “English” feel that comes from the modal influence to which Foulds was openly susceptible – he claimed there was no such thing as “national music”.
The grammar of Indian music and the mysticism of Indian culture attracted him powerfully: they collided with a man who was highly experimental and free-thinking by nature. This sort of music was not, however, going to pay the rent in late Edwardian Britain. Foulds had married in 1909, and had a child. In the manner of modern composers who write film or television scores to remain solvent, he turned to writing light music and, after meeting Lewis Casson and Sybil Thorndike, music for the theatre. This would bring him great success – ironically, in his lifetime, far greater success than his classical compositions. He wrote, for example, the music for the first production of Shaw’s St Joan in 1924. In the world of light music, his Keltic Lament of 1911 became a sensation, and was for years almost the only thing that earned him any significant royalties.
This success would, paradoxically, cause him great pain in later life. There exists a letter he wrote in August 1933 to Adrian Boult, who was then in charge of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, to complain that, while the BBC continually broadcast his light music, it would not touch his more serious works.
Foulds was not alone in suffering this neglect: a magic circle of composers with a background at Oxford, Cambridge and the Royal College of Music dominated the BBC when it came to the selection of music for broadcast, and Foulds’s face did not fit. The reasons were wider-ranging than his being from the wrong school – or, effectively, no school at all: they were to do with the unconventional turn that his life took in an age when conventionalism, especially in music, was de rigueur.
Foulds’s interest in the Orient soon extended beyond music. He became interested in spirituality, and it was a short step from there to the occult. In 1915, he met Maud MacCarthy, whose interests were even more developed in this direction. The pair, it seems, quickly agreed to marry, notwithstanding the minor complication that each was already married to someone else. They also had in common a radical socialism that was strong meat for many who might otherwise have sought to patronise Foulds, although that appears only to have seeped out slowly. Eventually, each divorced and they married.
Foulds appears to have been in thrall to his new wife, whose strength of character and scope of intellect seem to have exceeded his. She undeniably stimulated him to move in new creative directions but, equally, helped to alienate him from the very people who could have assisted him most.
Foulds did not fight in the 1914-18 war, despite being young enough for active service. He provided entertainment for the troops in London and, like Holst, did war service by promoting and performing music under the auspices of the YMCA. The war deeply affected him, however, and he set about writing a huge choral work to commemorate it: A World Requiem. It was, initially, a great success. From 1923 to 1926, it was performed at the Albert Hall on Armistice Night, at what has since become known as the Festival of Remembrance. It required a vast orchestra and a choir of 1,200, and relied for its effects on a mixture of eastern and modal music. By all accounts, its first performance, and the three subsequent ones, were received rapturously by an audience that was deeply moved by it. The critics, however, were hostile, and this seems to have initiated the period of Establishment opposition to Foulds. His biographer speaks of “an intrigue” against him that led to the annual performance being scrapped after 1926; there is no more precise information, except that one or two leading figures in the British musical Establishment decided to denounce Foulds as a fraud. This was either on account of his not having fought in the war that he was commemorating, or because, perversely, it was decided that his internationalist, left-wing opinions made him an inappropriate composer for this night of national remembrance. Either way, the effect on him was devastating.
Foulds went to Paris, where he worked as an arranger of music, a teacher and, most bizarrely, as an accompanist for silent films in the city cinemas. For all the personal misfortune he was enduring, this was the period of his greatest creativity. He finished a short orchestral work entitled Three Mantras, taken from an opera, on which he had been working for years, on the theme of yogic meditation. When first performed just three years ago, nearly 70 years after its composition, the work caused a sensation; another outing at the Proms in 1998 was received ecstatically, as was a recent performance in Birmingham. The three movements are the “Mantra of Activity”, the “Mantra of Bliss” and the “Mantra of Will”: they are exotically scored and fiendishly difficult to play. They alternate between bombast, celestial bliss and violence, and are like nothing being written contemporaneously in Britain. In Paris, Foulds was mixing with Les Six, Korngold, Stravinsky and Ravel: and it shows, although even they would have been stretched to write this masterpiece.
In 1929, he wrote his Dynamic Triptych, a Technicolor piano concerto in three movements that echoes all of the above-named composers, with Busoni, Holst, Rachmaninov and various others thrown in for good measure. Like the Mantras, it is stunningly original, with moments of intense beauty. Foulds came back to England with the work in the spring of 1930, and managed to secure a public performance of it the following year. Even the BBC could not ignore it, and it was broadcast in 1933. But it would not be performed again for 50 years, until Howard Shelley made a dazzling recording of it in 1983.
To all intents and purposes, Foulds then undertook his own disappearance. His wife, with a young man in tow who seems to have been a cross between toyboy and medium, wanted to go to India: he went with her. He found himself a job at All India Radio in Delhi, providing recitals and organising talks and concerts, but also, it is recorded, commentating on a cattle show. He was still writing prodigious amounts of music, much of it to fulfil his aim of bridging the gap between eastern and western culture. However, as far as the English musical world was concerned, he had gone off the map: and there he stayed until the mid-1970s, when suddenly a new generation of critics and performers remembered him, and rescued him.
His work in Delhi was highly regarded, and he was promoted to a job in Calcutta to spread the musical word there. Within days of Foulds’s arrival in April 1939, the woman living next door heard him crying out in agony in the middle of the night. He was taken to hospital but, by morning, he was dead of Asiatic cholera; he was 58.
Had Foulds wished to press home his success, to ensure he was taken seriously, as he merited, he should simply have stayed in England and fought his corner. Had he lived ten more years, he would have found a regime in charge of music at the BBC, and elsewhere in the musical establishment, that would have been instinctively sympathetic to him. Now, more than six decades after his death, his works are being recorded and performed by artists of international repute. Nobody cares that he was a socialist or an occultist or any other “ist”: the brilliance of his writing is plain to hear for all who buy his music and listen to it. The 20th century may have consigned John Foulds to oblivion, but the 21st will see him return in glory.
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