Sorabji's Songs: Alistair Hinton

Although scant information has yet emerged about Sorabji's mother (Madeleine Mathilde Sorabji, 1874?-1959), it seems she was a soprano of Spanish-Sicilian descent who apparently abandoned a singing career for family reasons. Sorabji's unpublished essay Concert Going Memories, devoted mainly to singers and their art, mentions her having sung the role of Marguerite in a French production of Berlioz's Damnation de Faust at a time when he was too young to recall specific details. He goes on to recount a later occasion when "confined to the house with a sore throat(,) (she) insisted that I go across to what was then the Bechstein Hall (later the Wigmore)...to hear my first Lieder recital, from that greatest of English singers the incomparable Louise Kirkby Lunn"; a fulsome and revealing page or so follows in which he recalls "the seat that was to be my favourite for fifty years or so, the back row balcony gangway", the "utterly unique beauty of (her) voice...like purple velvet...the incomparable technique and sheer singing mastery, the transcendent distinction and beauty of her performance (which) is as vivid in my memory as it was then" (at least half a century later) and that "no one has ever...sung the Sapphische Ode of Brahms as she did" (and this from a composer who was never a great fan of Brahms!). Sorabji said that his mother also played the piano and the organ and gave him his first piano lessons when he was aged about 6. There can be little doubt that she also instilled in her only child a love of fine singing which was to remain with him for the rest of his long life. This is reflected in many of his reviews and in essays such as The Voice in Contemporary Composition, The Singing and Playing of Bach, Animadversions on Singing in General, with Remarks on the Misuse of the term 'Coloratura', Opera in the Vernacular, The Operatic Situation, A Note on Ernest Chausson, Blanche Marchesi and The Songs of Francis George Scott.

Sorabji was the very opposite of a child prodigy in the conventional sense and, whilst it seems likely that he recognised early on that his future lay in some kind of career in music, the precise directions that this would take remained unclear to him until he reached his early twenties. As a boy, he absorbed large amounts of the baroque, classical and romantic repertoire but his obsessively enquiring mind also led him at a remarkably early stage to learn a great deal about the newest trends in music. Assimilating substantial quantities of contemporary European music was no mean feat in the inward looking and unadventurous environment of Edwardian England, a pre-gramophone age where such work was performed either very rarely or not at all. Already considered an outsider in racial terms (his father was a Parsi from Bombay), Sorabji must consequently have cut a particularly odd figure in those days, investigating with irrepressible vigour and excitement the most recent creations of composers such as Debussy, Rakhmaninov, Mahler, Ravel, Bartok, Strauss, Medtner, and Schonberg, conveying with almost unremitting enthusiasm to all and sundry the results of his many and varied discoveries and making sterling efforts to persuade various powers-that-were of the urgent need for such music to be heard by English audiences. There was even a story that, when barely 14, the intrepid Sorabji made a solo pilgrimage to Essen to hear the world premiere of Mahler's Sixth Symphony conducted by the composer; when I questioned him on this in the 1970s, he broke into a broad grin, obviously enjoyed the tantalising effect of his deliberate refusal to confirm or deny this rumour and gave away nothing beyond the remark "Good story, isn't it!".

A gifted pianist but pathologically reluctant performer, Sorabji was unsure quite what to do with this new found knowledge; for a time he contemplated a career as a critic and indeed managed to pursue one parallel to his life as a composer until his mid-fifties, contributing regular articles and reviews to The New Age and The New English Weekly from 1924 - 1945 and publishing two books of essays in 1932 and 1947 respectively. Around 1915, while planning a book on Ravel, he seemed almost to stumble accidentally on the idea of composing his own music, a fact all the more remarkable when one considers the sheer prolixity of his output over the following seven decades. As a composer, then, Sorabji was a very late starter; although his first music was composed when he was about the same age as Beethoven when he published his Op. 1 piano trios, whereas Beethoven had already completed many works before his first publication, it seems that Sorabji wrote nothing at all before reaching the age of 22.

Given his love of the voice, it might seem curious that he wrote so few songs and no stage works at all, preferring instead to direct the majority of his energies to keyboard writing, principally a vast quantity of piano music and three substantial symphonies for organ. Performance of his entire song oeuvre would, for example, occupy barely one quarter of that required to present just one of his large piano works, the famous Opus Clavicembalisticum. Apart from what is apparently his very first work, a 1914 piano transcription of Delius's In a Summer Garden (which he may not have completed and which has yet to come to light), Sorabji did, however, devote his first two years of composition entirely to songs for voice and piano and to piano concertos. Apart from Cinque Sonetti di Michalengelo Buonarroti (for baritone and chamber ensemble) and his final song Benedizione di San Francesco d'Assisi (for baritone and organ), all his songs are for voice and piano and most of these feature the soprano.

As a song composer, Sorabji seemed particularly drawn to the poetry of the French symbolists and their English contemporaries such as Ernest Dowson. His first ten songs were composed during World War I when his harmonic language had yet to develop into the Busoni- and Szymanowski-influenced yet highly individual one of his maturity. His principal examples at this stage seem to have been Cyril Scott, Skryabin, Ravel, Ornstein and even Roslavetz. Although it is uncertain whether his youthful contemporary music researches drew the last of these into his circle of acquaintance, his contemporary writings evidence his awareness of Ornstein's more experimental music, he certainly attended Skryabin's London appearances in 1913 and was later to meet Roussel (and possibly also Ravel) in Paris. (Ornstein was, incidentally, a close contemporary of Sorabji; he is now approaching the age of 108...)

One consequence of Sorabji's profound desire for personal privacy and his resultant growing reclusivity was a customary reluctance to speak or write about his own music; this also accounts for the dearth of recorded interview material. Furthermore, even in the early days, he seemed to devote little energy to securing performances of his music and none of the songs written during his 20s reached performance until 1921.

Of all Sorabji's articles on singing, singers and vocal repertoire, it is arguably The Great French Song Writers (Mi Contra Fa, 1947) which points most closely to many of the persuasions in his own songwriting and provides the greatest key to his thinking and ideals as a song composer.

Verlaine's brief l'Heure Exquise, blending as it does restraint with fantasy, is an untitled poem from his collection La Bonne Chanson (1870) and is rather better known in settings by other composers - Faure in his cycle La Bonne Chanson, Chausson, Hahn, Delius and even Stravinsky.

Apparition, Sorabji's only known Mallarmé setting, is one of Premiers Poemes from Poesies published in 1887. Sorabji knew Ravel's Trois Poèmes de Stephane Mallarmé (which does not include this poem) well before composing it; in a letter to Philip Heseltine just before he began composing in 1914, he wrote "They are exquisite - monstrously difficult as of course goes without saying - I do not think that there can possibly be more difficult piano parts to any songs hitherto written. It is quite wrong to call them "accompaniments". Some three decades later, Sorabji devoted a paragraph beginning "The final triumph and crown of Ravel's work as a song-writer..." to a consideration of these particular songs towards the end of The Great French Song Writers; not usually given to short sentences, he ends this potently with the words "It must be heard to be believed", and then adds the sour footnote "Unfortunately I have never heard these wonderful songs sung. I have only heard them 'interpreted'. It was very unpleasant". Composed just three weeks after Apparition, Hymne a Aphrodite is taken from Laurent Tailhade's collection Le Jardin des Reves (1880) and is on a rather larger scale than Sorabji's earlier songs. Surveying the poetry which first attracted Sorabji to songwriting in The Texts of Sorabji's Vocal Music1, Paul Rapoport writes "Mystery, the unattainable, decay(,) and darkness both literal and metaphorical are some of the themes found in these poems...Many of (them) attain their effect by indirectness, subtlety(,) and unusual interplay of images - well-known traits of French symbolism."

Sorabji's earliest published scores appeared in 1921 and include the piano works Fantaisie Espagnole and Sonata No. 1 (1919) and Trois Poèmes for voice and piano (1918). Sorabji had met Busoni in London in November 1919 and played to him his then recently completed Sonata No. 1, whereupon Busoni wrote his younger colleague an open letter of recommendation with a view to assisting him in having his work published. The publication of Trois Poèmes was reviewed in UK in The Musical Times and Musical Opinion as well as in La Revue Musicale in France. Sorabji's only known public appearance with another artist took place in June 1921 in Paris at the invitation of French composer Florent Schmitt to play the piano part for French soprano Marthe Martine in the world premiere of Trois Poèmes; Szymanowski's Tagore songs were also included in this programme, sung by another soprano, but there is no evidence that Sorabji, who adored much of Szymanowski's work, played the piano in these. At least three French journals published reviews of the concert, of which one was written by the composer Darius Milhaud who seemed to take some exception to what he saw as the complexity of Sorabji's piano parts! The publication bears a dedication to Marthe Martine.

The texts of Trois Poèmes date from a generation before those chosen by Sorabji for his earlier songs; Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal and Verlaine's Poemes Saturniens were published in 1857 and 1866 respectively. The opening song, Correspondances, is in Spleen et Ideal and the second, Crepuscule du Soir Mystique, is from the collection Paysages Tristes. The influence of the mature Debussy is notably evidenced for the first time in these songs (Sorabji considered Proses Lyriques a major achievement in French song) and the elaborate, ornate richness of the piano writing in the first two is suggestive of some of the directions which his solo piano music was about to take; the final song, Pantomime, from Verlaine's Fetes Galantes (1869) however, is a model of sprightliness and economy and it is this volume of poems which also provides the source for Sorabji's next collection of songs.

This performance of Trois Poèmes occurred just before their publication so was evidently given from the autograph manuscript, two-thirds of which seems subsequently to have disappeared. The same regrettable fate has befallen the entire manuscript of Sorabji's only other published songs to date, Trois Fêtes Galantes and their precise composition date has therefore yet to be established; they appear to have been written soon after Trois Poèmes, but no performance is known to have preceded that in 1979 when both these published cycles were given by Jane Manning and Yonty Solomon. Sorabji's source material was an illustrated limited edition of Verlaine's Fetes Galantes published by Ferroud of Paris in 1913 which is now in The Sorabji Archive. His Trois Fêtes Galantes were published in 1924; dedicated to the composer's mother, they comprise l'Allee, A la Promenade and Dans la Grotte from the collection.

Apart from one revision and one completion, Sorabji wrote no songs for 14 years following his 1927 setting of Baudelaire's l'Irremediable. The three 1941 songs were commissioned by Dutch soprano Joy McArden and her husband the pianist H James Cooper for them to perform and are accordingly dedicated to them. Sorabji returns here to the poetry of Verlaine and Baudelaire which had earlier prompted l'Heure Exquise, l'Irremediable and the two published sets. The first song, Le Faune, is yet another from Verlaine's Fetes Galantes. The second, Baudelaire's Les Chats (Sorabji adored and admired cats, incidentally), is another poem in Spleen et Ideal and Sorabji's treatment involves a characteristically languorous and sinuous piano part at times reminiscent of No. 3 of his One Hundred Transcendental Studies (1940-44). The final song, La Derniere Fete Galante, comes not from Verlaine's Fetes Galantes but from his Parallelement, whose original publication in 1889 comprises three four-line stanzas; Sorabji, however, set a later edition which includes a further four lines added by Verlaine in 1894. It opens wittily with a quasi-baroque introductory gesture which the composer - tongue firmly in cheek - marks quasi "Cooperin". A BBC broadcast of these songs seems to have been planned but appears not, after all, to have taken place. The immensely high regard in which Sorabji held Joy McArden shines through the warm tribute to her which he paid in his obituary notice published in Musical Opinion in 1952; a pupil and protege of Nina Grieg, the composer's widow, she later became a favourite pupil of the legendary Blanche Marchesi, whom Sorabji knew well (and who, incidentally, like tonight's (November 3 2000) soloist, began life as a violinist before settling on a singing career). She gave the world premiere of Ravel's Chansons Madecasses in Paris in 1926 with the composer playing the piano. In this article, which occupied an entire half page of the journal, Sorabji wrote "Not only did she read straight off at sight the voice parts of three extremely difficult tricky settings of Verlaine and Baudelaire I wrote for her, but to my almost speechless admiration and amazement, after doing this, she walked about her flat singing snatches thereof perfectly from memory."

These songs almost conclude Sorabji's career as songwriter, although he continued to compose for at least another forty years; the aphoristic Frammento Cantato for baritone and piano (1967) and the aforementioned Benedizione di San Francesco d'Assisi (1973) represent his only subsequent returns to solo vocal writing. On the strength of his finest contributions to the singer's repertoire, it seems a great pity that, for so much of Sorabji's creative life, songwriting appears almost to have assumed the role of what Robert Frost - one of tonight's other poets - calls "the path not taken".

© Alistair Hinton 2000

Notes

1 Sorabji: A Critical Celebration, ed. Prof. Paul Rapoport (Scolar Press, Aldershot, UK; 1992, repr. 1994)

top