Bax: String Quartet No. 3 / Lyrical Interlude

Description

Arnold Bax (1883-1953)String Quartet No. 3 • Lyrical Interlude • Adagio ma non troppoQuite how the Bax family came to be as well-off as they were is difficult to discover, for Bax’s father although a qualified barrister did not practise. Generally their good fortune has been ascribed to ownership of a plot of land in central London and an interest in the patent for Macintosh raincoats. In 1893 Alfred Ridley Bax purchased an imposing mansion, Ivybank, in Hampstead, for the then enormous sum of ?ú10,075. It was 1896 before the family moved in, when it became the focus of the development of Arnold Bax and his brother Clifford, who was to become a celebrated writer and playwright, and Bax lived there until his marriage in 1911. Bax’s early signs of musical talent were encouraged by his sympathetic and over-protective mother. She dominated life at Ivybank, which was to all intents and purposes a country house existence, Hampstead then still being semi-rural. Bax became a student at the Royal Academy of Music from 1900 to 1905 and then, having a private income (he never had to accept paid employment to survive) he was free to develop his musical career as the mood took him. Though living at home until 1911, he adopted a semi-Bohemian lifestyle, travelling widely, including the German city of Dresden and in 1910 going to Russia in pursuit of a Ukrainian girl he had met at a friend’s house in London. It was on the then remote west coast of Ireland that Bax discovered his spiritual home. There, as he put it ‘lorded by the Atlantic’ and under the influence of the early poetry of W. B. Yeats, he discovered the village of Glencolumbcille in Donegal, a place to which he constantly returned, though after the Easter Rising in 1916 Bax’s Irish escapist dream was faced with all too stark reality. Bax imbibed all things Irish. He wrote poetry, short stories and Synge-like plays, using the pseudonym of ‘Dermot O’Byrne’. In 1911 he was married and set up home in Dublin, and there until 1914 he moved in literary and nationalist circles; his friends included the poet and writer Padraic Colum, founder of the Irish Review, and Padraig Pearse, champion of the Irish language, who was executed after the Easter Rising. We have grown accustomed to think of Arnold Bax as a composer of romantic orchestral music, including tone-poems such as the popular Tintagel, written in 1917-19. Between the wars came seven symphonies, which gave him a substantial reputation at the time, but we need to remember that Bax wrote extensively in most forms except opera (and he started more than one of those). He produced a substantial output of chamber music for a wide variety of forces, including a piano quartet and quintet, three mature string quartets, a piano trio and one for flute, viola and harp, oboe and harp quintets and many works for larger ensemble including a nonet. The last of Bax’s string quartets, his la