Bax: Symphony No. 6 / Into The Twilight

Description

Arnold Bax (1883-1953)Symphony No. 6 • Into the Twilight • Summer MusicA commemorative plaque graces the house in Streatham where Arnold Bax was born in 1883, but it is unlikely that he would now recognise this busy London suburb as being what was then a quiet parish in the county of Surrey. Although there was no long-standing musical tradition in the family, his paternal uncle, Ernest Belfort Bax, a well-known socialist philosopher, had studied music in his youth and had even published a rousing song entitled ‘All for the Cause’ with words by his friend William Morris. According to his autobiography, Arnold’s own first composition was a piano sonata written at the age of twelve while he was recovering from sunstroke (‘very fittingly my enemies might snarl’, he quipped). Four years later he entered the Royal Academy of Music, where he soon gained a reputation as a phenomenal sight-reader at the piano but was overshadowed as a composer by several of his fellow students, though it is Bax’s work that has proved the most enduring. The turning-point in his life came in 1902, when he discovered the Celtic world through the poetry of W. B. Yeats. He soon visited Ireland, where he enthusiastically explored its culture, history and landscape; he even learned to read Irish Gaelic with ease but shied away from using it in the presence of native speakers. His music, which for some years had been under the sway of Wagner, now assumed an Irish identity, and he began to write what he called ‘figures of a definitely Celtic curve’. Having no need to earn a living, he was able to spend months at a time in a small coastal village in Donegal imbibing the local atmosphere and pouring forth a stream of emotionally charged poetry and music. It was here, in November 1907, that Bax completed a five-act play based on the story of the legendary Irish heroine Deirdre of the Sorrows. He had intended it as the libretto for an opera, and during the following months he made some sketches for the music before eventually abandoning the project. Reluctant to waste good ideas, however, he turned the opera’s prologue into an independent orchestral piece, which he called Into the Twilight after the poem of that title by Yeats. It was to be the first in a trilogy of ‘symphonic pictures’ collectively entitled Éire, the other two being In the Faery Hills (1909) and Rosc-catha (1910), the latter also based on the Deirdre sketches. The manuscript of Into the Twilight is prefaced by Yeats’s poem, and in a programme note for the work’s only performance during his lifetime (under Thomas Beecham in 1909) Bax wrote that it ‘seeks to give a musical impression of the brooding quiet of the Western Mountains at the end of twilight, and to express something of the sense of timelessness and hypnotic dream which veils Ireland at such an hour’. The opening theme was almost certainly intended to represent De