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Moeran, Warlock and Song

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2016

Stephen Banfield
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Extract

Fifty years ago this December E J Moeran, Jack to his friends, died as he fell off a pier into the Kenmare River on the west coast of Ireland in a storm; he was only 55. Seventy years ago this December Philip Heseltine, Peter Warlock to his public, died in a gas-filled basement room in Chelsea; he was younger still, only 36. Suspicion of suicide has attached to them both, and while Moeran probably met his end through natural causes (a cerebral haemorrhage), Heseltine probably did not. Barry Smith's Warlock biography adduces evidence that makes death at the composer's own hand seem still more likely than was hitherto thought, even if another recent book, the memoir of Heseltine's son Nigel, counters this with a temptingly shocking though fairly untenable theory of murder by fellow-composer Bernard van Dieren.

Type
Research Article
Information
Tempo , Issue 215 , January 2001 , pp. 7 - 9
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2001

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References

1 Smith, Barry: Peter Warlock: the life of Philip Heseltine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994)Google Scholar.

2 Heseltine, Nigel: Capriol for Mother: a memoir of Peter Warlock and his family (London: Thames Publishing, 1992)Google Scholar.

3 See Gray, Cecil: Peter Warlock (London: Jonathan Cape, 1934)Google Scholar.

4 Copley, Ian: The Music of Peter Warlock (London: Dennis Dobson, 1979)Google Scholar.

5 Foreman, Lewis: ‘John Bishop’, The Independent, 29 09 2000, p.6 Google Scholar.

6 Payne, Anthony: Frank Bridge – Radical and Conservative (London: Thames Publishing, 1984)Google Scholar was expanded from his essays in Payne, Anthony, Foreman, Lewis and Bishop, John: The Music of Frank Bridge (London: Thames Publishing, 1976)Google Scholar, themselves expanded from his articles in Tempo 106 and 107 (1973).

7 The devotion in not Bishop's alone, however, for thanks especially to Barry Marsh and Andrew Rose, Moeran can now boast a quite splendid web page (www.moeran.com) that includes free and complete aural access to the unpublished 1946 recording of the Violin Concerto by Boult, Sammons and the BBCSO. All readers are urged to partake of this feast gratis while they may.

8 Hill, Lionel: Lonely Waters: the diary of a friendship with EJ Moeran (London: Thames Publishing, 1985)Google Scholar; Self, Geoffrey: The Music of EJ Moeran (n.p. Toccata Press, 1986)Google Scholar.

9 To be exact, Wever's ‘In youth is pleasure’, Shakespeare's ‘When daffodils begin to peer’, ‘When daisies pied’ and ‘It was a lover and his lass’, and Marlowe's ‘The passionate shepherd’.

10 It is reproduced in Copley, , op.cit., p.206 Google Scholar.