A Passion for Symphonies: Robert Simpson (1921-1997)

By Lionel Pike

This is the first full-length study of the symphonies of Robert Simpson to be offered to the general public. Simpson is perhaps best known for his BBC work, including the Promenade Concerts and such innovatory radio programmes as The Innocent Ear; but critics have hailed him as one of the finest writers of symphonies of the twentieth century—one who additionally spent a lifetime examining and talking about works of this kind, being particularly interested in the oeuvres of Bruckner, Nielsen and Sibelius. As a result, his compositions provide invaluable case studies for the understanding of this most demanding of compositional forms, as well as being a string of eleven masterpieces spanning the last half of the twentieth century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Jun 21, 2024
• ISBN: 9781528966276

Lionel Pike

Lionel Pike Professor of Music Emeritus at Royal Holloway (University of London) and was the organist of the college chapel there from 1969 to 2005. For four years, he served as the dean of the Faculty of Music at the University of London. He was a chorister and assistant organist of Bristol Cathedral, and at Oxford, was organ scholar of Pembroke College, his tutors being Sir David Lumsden and Dr H.K. Andrews. The research for his D. Phil was in Renaissance music, though he has since published books on symphonic form and edited church music for the Purcell Society. He is married and has two daughters.

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About the Author

Lionel Pike Professor of Music Emeritus at Royal Holloway (University of London) and was the organist of the college chapel there from 1969 to 2005. For four years, he served as the dean of the Faculty of Music at the University of London. He was a chorister and assistant organist of Bristol Cathedral, and at Oxford, was organ scholar of Pembroke College, his tutors being Sir David Lumsden and Dr H.K. Andrews. The research for his D. Phil was in Renaissance music, though he has since published books on symphonic form and edited church music for the Purcell Society. He is married and has two daughters.

Dedication

To the memory of Bob and Angela

Copyright Information ©

Lionel Pike 2024

The right of Lionel Pike to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Acknowledgements and Prefatory Note

This is a book about symphonies: that musical form is one of the most demanding that any composer can face. The book will not teach anyone how to write a symphony, but it will introduce the form, discuss the difficulties that face those who tackle its problems, show how one of the greatest thinkers about music approached it and elucidated it for the general public, and demonstrate how his knowledge (and his unbounded inspiration, enthusiasm and skill) resulted in a series of eleven splendid and varied symphonies that span the second half of the twentieth century.

Thanks are due to many people who have helped me in the writing of this book. My wife and children have again suffered the hours I spent listening to the music, researching for my commentary and writing it up, and have done so without complaint. I am grateful for the care and attention showed to me by the library staff of the British Library and the Bodleian Library in Oxford: in particular I would like to thank Martin Holmes, Alfred Brendel Curator of Music at the Bodleian, for his assistance, especially in the duplication of many of the manuscript sources and his invaluable comments on them.

For a time those manuscripts were entrusted to me, since Simpson was running out of space for them (and in the end did not want to take them with him when he moved to Ireland); I kept them in my study in the Music Faculty of Royal Holloway (University of London). It may be that Simpson hoped that I would do some scholarly work on them one day, though he was too self- effacing to suggest such an idea - and in fact he never did suggest it. Eventually I moved all the sources to the Music Faculty Library for safe keeping, though I still had daily access to them thanks to the Faculty librarians: I thank them, even after all these years. Simpson’s scrap-books and much other material were also kept in the Faculty Library (and for a time Simpson was Visiting Professor at the College), but when space became a problem they were moved to the keeping of the late Terry Hazell (who at the time was Chairman of the Robert Simpson Society). Eventually these holdings were divided between the British Library in London and the Bodleian Library in Oxford. The shelf- mark of the autographs of the symphonies at the British Library is MS Mus. 1738, though the manuscript of Symphony No. 6 remains with the dedicatee.

James Sargent gave me great help in originating the music examples, and Mrs Christine Edmundson not only provided invaluable editorial backup but was keen to share ideas. Dr Jürgen Schaarwächter was always very encouraging and ready to help me: I thank him for his interest in the study; and Florian Schuck made pertinent and useful comments when I sent him drafts of some of the chapters. Much material was sent to me by the late Dick Edwards and the late Revd Brian Duke, and I thank them both - alas posthumously. Mrs Angela Simpson, too, was always glad to help me with information. I thank them all, and I hope that the finished project is worthy of them.

Mark Doran supplied me with transcriptions of radio talks that I had missed, and for those I am most grateful. In addition he supplied me with a 64-page typed version of a set of discussions he had held with Simpson, some of them made by telephone: these were spread over a number of occasions, and are undated, but they were held in the early 1990s, just after Simpson had written his last Symphony, No. 11. These talks were not in the archive at Royal Holloway, and in the conversations Simpson unbuttoned himself in a way that he had not done in any of his previous interviews: for once he was drawn into discussing technical details of composition. The exchanges are thus particularly valuable, and were perhaps only possible because of the composer’s advanced years and his feeling that he had reached a point where he was willing to relax in talking about his writing. On many occasions these talks repeat what we know from other discussions, but there is much that is new, and much in which additional detail is provided. I have unashamedly made use of these discussions, which I have reproduced as they stand, without attempting to sanitise the language, or even remove the occasional swear word: the result, I hope, gives a picture of the man himself that a cleaned-up copy would not provide. I thank Mark Doran from the bottom of my heart for supplying me with these talks.

When I have considered it helpful I have indicated precise pitches by the Helmholtz method. In this system C is the bottom note of the cello, c is the bottom note of the viola, c' is the lowest C on the violin and c" is a minor third above the violin’s open A string. I have used italics for comments and amendments in the composer’s own hand in the manuscripts. Notes are given in the text as words rather than music type.

There are many references to ‘sonata form’ (otherwise known as ‘first-movement form’) in this book, and some may wish for an explanation of these terms. Whole books have been written on the subject: but to put the matter briefly, in the classical period it was customary to cast the opening movement in the following sections:

Exposition (repeated): Development and Recapitulation (sometimes also repeated)

In the Exposition there would be two contrasting tonal areas, tonic and dominant (for major-key works) or tonic and relative major (for those in a minor key). In the Development - Germans referred to it as ‘going through the keys’ - other tonalities were explored, but a ‘retransition’ (often over a dominant pedal) prepared for the Recapitulation. The Recapitulation brought back the Exposition’s material, but this time all in the tonic key.

Those wishing for a deeper analysis of these works than I am able to provide in the present book should consult the two excellent doctoral theses: Martin Ratcliffe’s Robert Simpson’s Third Symphony: sources and influences, Ph.D, Royal Holloway, University of London, 1998; and Simon Phillippo’s The Symphonies of Robert Simpson, Ph.D, University of Cambridge, 2000.

My greatest debt is to Robert Simpson himself (‘Bob’ to his friends). I first met him when he was my nominee for the triennial Boyle Lecture at Royal Holloway, at a time when I knew only the Third Symphony: in his talk he discussed his most recent work, the Fourth Symphony, of which he was clearly very proud. I was sitting next to him at dinner after the lecture, and he asked to see the typescript of a book I was writing on the symphonies of Beethoven and Sibelius. He later returned the draft with the comment that - reading it on the train on his way home from the BBC - he had been so fascinated that he missed his station. Nobody else has been as kind as that, so I owe him the most enormous debt: this present book is the result, but at a great and regrettable distance. That dinner was the start of a friendship of many years, and initiated countless discussions about symphonic form. He was nevertheless inclined to be wary of close analysis: in a letter written from Killelton on Christmas Day 1987, commenting on my proposed liner notes for Vernon Handley’s recording of a couple of his symphonies, he said

I suppose being a composer I find all that [analysis] a bit disconcerting, largely because most of these things are done instinctively - what’s uppermost in my mind when working is CHARACTER, and the spacing out of things with controlled energy.… At times this music is meant to raise the hair on the back of your neck. I occasionally even get a kick out of it myself, especially in those performances! Listen without the score, with your eyes shut!

As is very evident from that letter, he had much more to teach me (there was nothing I could teach him), and – like many of his other admirers – I deeply regret his untimely passing.

Lionel Pike

Englefield Green

Surrey

Introduction

This great and humane composer never shirked what seemed to him to be the truth, in thought or feeling. His profound human qualities were matched by a first-rate intellectual mastery of his ideas, and this means that there is, in his music, an altogether unusually wide and deep range. In his work, we can find almost everything, from humour to tragedy – sometimes a blend of both; he can exult, or he can search darkly, and he knows simple human delight as well as complex inner conflict. The expression, where necessary, is enormously intense, yet it’s always quite free from inflation, exaggeration, self-dramatisation; always true, pure, objective. Music can impersonate human feelings: it can deceive the listener, and even its composer, but only a genius of a very high order is able to make music that is human – naturally, maturely, actually human, so that the intensest of feelings is expressed as a matter – of what? Fact, not fiction. It’s in this that Nielsen’s greatness lies; he’s influenced me deeply as a composer; but what’s more, he’s taught me about life and living.

These remarks, made by Robert Simpson about Carl Nielsen,¹ apply in equal measure to himself, though he would be the first to deny it: he would be amused rather than flattered by the comparison (indeed, he once asked me to remember his natural modesty) – but nothing can hide the outstanding quality if his penmanship. And his symphonic writing is no less outstanding.

Robert Simpson (1921-1997) has been described as ‘a giant among symphonists and one of the major figures in British Contemporary Music’:² he is ‘Undoubtedly, one of the core figures of both symphonies and string quartets during [the late twentieth century]’.³ He was a great thinker about music, so it behoves us to discover what we can about his thinking IN music. He himself said, in one of those characteristically accurate comments, These programmes,⁴ we hope, will stimulate the thought of enjoyment and the enjoyment of thought. No apology is necessary, therefore, for producing a study of his symphonies: but this is not the first study of these eleven splendid works. There is a short symposium of articles (mostly programme notes) about them, edited by Robert Matthew-Walker, which includes an essay by Simpson himself,⁵ and a substantial doctoral thesis by Simon Phillippo.⁶ Both are valuable contributions to the topic: but this present book is the first large-sized (and single-authored) study to be offered to the public.

Symphonic thought was of intense interest and supreme importance to Simpson, and all his music – not only the symphonies – exhibits his knowledge of that form to a certain extent. This fascination began early: he studied the Beethoven symphonies in his youth, and related how hearing a broadcast of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony from a Promenade Concert when he was fourteen affected him so deeply that he walked about in a daze for hours.⁷ In 1941, he made analyses of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony, and of Bruckner’s 7th and Brahms’s 4th.⁸ He published full-length studies of the symphonies of Nielsen (1952: the second edition also contains an investigation of Sibelius’s symphonies) and Bruckner (1963), a shorter study Sibelius and Nielsen: A Centenary Essay (1965) and countless articles and programme notes on a host of composers. Simpson writes (and, indeed, talks and lectures) with an authority and an understanding gained from being a composer himself, with a vast knowledge of a great deal of music beyond that which he is currently discussing, and with insights into the music that make a lesser mortal despair.

This can be illustrated by a quotation from his discussions with Mark Doran:

…since it evolved out of tonality, the vital tensions in sonata form depend on a tonal feeling. Tonality is much more important than themes in Haydn, for example, and in Beethoven and Mozart – though less so in the case of Mozart, I think, because he is more interested in themes than in the kind of argument that Haydn was especially good at. But the whole evolution of sonata form arose from the nature of tonality, and the large-scale tensions in it cannot, I don’t think, be sustained by means of themes or by intervals – although later on in life, you see, I came to see that intervals themselves have tensions which one can use on a large scale. I felt I had to make my way – feel my way – into that, and learn it. But usually in the later works of mine, you’ll find that where they’re based on these interval tensions, they’re not in sonata form – they evolve their own sense.

It is evident that Simpson was a great thinker about music. Moreover, he was able to explain complex processes to those with only limited musical knowledge: I certainly cannot match his ‘You may not be able to tell a fifth from a rissole…’, and it would be foolish to try. The persuasiveness of his writing is not only the result of the clarity of thought that goes into it, the special insights that he has into the composer’s craft, and his knowledge of the difficulties faced by a creative artist: it is also the result of the precision of his language, and the unerring choice of the mot juste. Most commentators, for example, might be quite satisfied with the word ‘sinews’ (or perhaps ‘muscles’) rather than the more obscure ‘thews’ in the following passage. But consider how impoverished it would be without the additional poetic alliteration that results from the choice of the less familiar word:

Where the climaxes of the ebullient Strauss and the self-tormenting Mahler spread themselves almost rapaciously around the listener, Brian’s knot themselves tightly with taut thews tense as a coiled spring.⁹

He had strong views, and he expressed them strongly. As a result of the success of his treatment of the large-scale works of various composers, he became the editor of a two-volume study of The Symphony,¹⁰ writing introductions that caused a great stir among those who did not share his views. He began by saying, One often hears musicians praising some work as ‘genuinely symphonic’: if, however, they are asked what they mean by this, most are hard put to it to give a very precise reply. Simpson outlined a number of factors that make up the notion of symphonism, using the following headings:

The fusion of diverse elements into an organic whole.

The continuous control of pace.

The reserves of strength necessary to achieve (1) and (2) are such as to express size.

In the first place, it was the dynamic treatment of tonality that made all this possible: it was a reaction against the tonal passivity of earlier music.

Perhaps the basic observation one can make about true symphony is that it is active in all possible ways.

Each of these headings leads to a paragraph of discussion, and in the Introduction to the second volume, we find Simpson remarking.

Hans Keller’s definition of symphonic music is ‘the large scale integration of contrasts’… This is plausible enough, superficially, until one realises that the word ‘integration’ begs a great many questions. The contrasts of Le Sacre du Printemps or Iberia may reasonably be thought integrated on a large scale in that their distribution produces a satisfactory balance (at any rate in the Debussy work). But such music is balletic, it is episodic, sectional. Why? Because all its elements are not functioning equally. When rhythm and melody are dominant, tonality marks time; when tonality changes, rhythm and melody wait. In a symphony, the internal activity is fluid, organic; action is the dominant factor, through and through. At the end of a great symphony, there is the sense that the music has grown by the interpenetrative activity of all its constituent elements…

This led to Simpson leaving some ‘symphonists’ (Britten, Hindemith and Stravinsky, for instance) out of the two-volume study: but the list and the explanatory paragraph are useful as a guide to his own works as well as to the works of the great masters of the form.

During a series of BBC World Service discussions with the general title ‘The Composer Speaks’ broadcast in 1973, Julian Budden asked Simpson whether the traditional elements of motif and themes still applied in the symphony today. Simpson commented:

In a sense they do, because music consists of recognisable ideas (at least for me it does), which can then be developed or made to grow into other things: and the whole process of composing a symphony is – for me, as with Sibelius – to find a germ from which the whole thing can grow; like a plant, or an animal.

This leads to a realisation that one factor that escapes mention in the foregoing five-point list is the logical evolution of thematic material exposed at the opening of a work: but it was fugue rather than symphony that originally taught Simpson this lesson. Howells – while tutoring Simpson for the external Durham B. Mus – looked at a student exercise fugue of Simpson’s, said nothing, but took out a fountain pen and wrote a complete fugue there and then, in his beautifully fastidious hand, as fluently and easily as if he was writing a letter, exploring all the intervals and implications of my subject in a way that I had not thought possible.¹¹

That was a lesson that remained with Simpson throughout his life, and it has relevance to his symphonic writing as well as to fugues (many of which can be found in his symphonies in any case). Intimate knowledge of the possibilities of his material became fundamental to his way of thinking. He approved of Tovey’s comment that there are two types of composer: those who show that they know their theme and those who show that they do not.¹² Tovey was referring to variation sets, but we can apply the comment to Simpson’s music in general, for he is a composer who always shows that he knows every aspect of his themes. Despite his concentration on pace and tonality, thematic material remains vital, and has a fundamental importance: as Simpson put it, Themes are more easily noticed than tonalities…¹³ On the other hand, we must take notice of another of his views:

Present-day attempts to prove the unity of large works by ingenious tissues of thematic derivations are, in my view, grossly over-valued, and stem from an obsession with Schoenbergian note rows. The actual unity of a symphonic composition is the result of interaction between all its elements…a warning is perhaps not out of place – believe only what you can hear!¹⁴

One further question remains before progressing: in a radio interview mentioned above Julian Budden asked Simpson, Bob, quite a lot of people nowadays say the symphony is dead. What do you think of that proposition? The composer replied:

Well, for a start, I don’t really know of anybody who is able to write symphonies who says that the symphony is dead, which seems to me rather significant. I think that most of the people who say that it is dead are those who don’t want to write symphonies – either that or they can’t.¹⁵

The list above does not exhaust all that we need to know about Simpson’s approach to the symphony. His work on Nielsen led him to insist that music must have a current; this is summed up by quotations from Nielsen, If my music has any value at all, it is in one thing, that it has a certain current, a certain motion, and if that is broken, it’s no good anymore.¹⁶ Simpson also valued Nielsen’s view that Music is the sound of life; it is life, subject to laws of evolution and transformation, but invincible… Music is life and, like it, inextinguishable.¹⁷ From this, developed his interest in energy – in fact he gave the title Energy to one of his brass pieces – and to his saying about the force of life, We all know how a tree can split a rock. He commented that his writing of symphonies at least partially resulted from ‘a great love of the classics, especially Beethoven and Haydn’.¹⁸ He considered that composers later than the classics had lost the ability to compose music with energy, and said that he finds ‘more force of life’ in Beethoven than in any 20th-century composer;¹⁹ his own writing was ‘an attempt to recover classical energy rather than the mannerisms of classical styles, to attack the problem from the inside’.²⁰ His deep love of Bach taught him how useful counterpoint could be, but he also learned from later composers. His work on Bruckner taught him much about writing Adagios, and much else besides his love of Sibelius drew his attention to the importance of pace and rhythm on the large scale.

And yet, it was not always works with the title ‘symphony’ that inspired him. Beethoven’s sonata Op. 106 in Bb (the ‘Hammerklavier’) has been called ‘the greatest of all pianoforte sonatas’:²¹ in it the composer seems to ask the question ‘What can I do with the interval of the third?’, and he proceeds to answer it in a vast symphonic work. How extraordinary that there should be an enormous and magnificent symphony – for piano, not for orchestra – on such a basic proposition; clearly, it affected Simpson deeply, and it became the inspiration behind his Tenth Symphony. He had already expressed the idea that symphonies share certain traits with other forms of composition in a little article ‘On Composing Chamber Music’ which was written in 1980 for the programme book of the Chamber Music Competition for Schools held in February 1981:

There can be no greater challenge to a composer than a kind of music in which every detail must be heard with frightening clarity: in composing for a few instruments, he is really up against it. I forget who it was who said sharply, There is no mercy in art. But he might have been thinking of chamber music, string trios and quartets in particular. Indeed, there is no mercy in art: if you aim at perfection in anything, you are up against the nearly impossible. It is perhaps easier to create an effect if your resources give you a certain kind of scope. A not very good composer can sometimes get away with a blast from the brass or a few detonations from the percussion department if he doesn’t know what to do next in an orchestral piece but he can’t do that in a real symphony, and if he’s the sort of composer who can’t resist temptations like that, he’s not really capable of composing proper symphonies, which are the most serious and demanding kind of orchestral music. There’s no better training for writing symphonies than writing string quartets – and vice versa.

The editors of the programme book were unwise enough to change the text, and Simpson was so incensed that the original was eventually printed as he had intended it.

Simpson tried writing symphonies (one of them serial) quite early in his life: in fact, the Symphony No. 1 that we know, and that is treated in detail below, was not really his first attempt at the form. In 1940, he wrote the following:

I’m working at composition now. My symphony, probably No. 1 if it is completed before the one in G maj. which is also on the stocks, is progressing favourably although it is so harsh and uncompromising that I hardly know whether to like it or not. As Vaughan Williams said of his 4th, I don’t know whether I like it, but that’s what I meant.

Here’s the main theme on full brass [here he gives a quotation] it appears through a fiery curtain of fearful discord of tremolo strings. The second subject of the 1st [movement] is most weird and strange also on string tremolo but beginning on oboe pianissimo.

The whole of the movement is complete and fully scored and so is half the slow movement. The symphony shows the influence of the times, harsh and unrelenting. I hope it doesn’t sound too hideous but it expresses a side of me. We all have some savagery in our hearts. It is better to let people shudder at it than to inflict it on them in your behaviour. The other symphony in G, No. 1 [sic; presumably No. 2], has no key, is sweet and jolly. It reverts more or less to the classical [style] of Mozart and Schubert with, I hope, some small touches of individuality. The critics will condemn No. 1 with a sense of shock and disgust as an attempt to be too original, and the G major as being too conventional and not discordant enough. On the other hand, no critic may hear either of them.²²

No critic did hear either of them, and neither did anybody else, for Simpson destroyed both; but his remarks show that even at this early stage he had a concern for instrumentation, an interest in expressing his own feelings, an intention to mirror the current times in his music, and an antagonism to critics. A sentence from his study of Bruckner is a later example of this last trait: Anyone who knows how difficult it is to compose (as contrasted with the ease of writing plausible newspaper criticism).²³ Already there is a clear interest in the classical symphony, but also a tendency to write more dissonant and ‘up-to-date’ music. It is of interest that the ‘Symphony in G major’ had ‘no key’: one would certainly like to know what kind of writing resulted in a work being both ‘in G’ and yet having no key. The comment about string tremolo refers to a kind of exotic orchestral colour that plays little part in his later music: he later discussed the matter with Mark Doran: