Peter Warlock was a pseudonym of Philip Arnold Heseltine (30 October 1894 – 17 December 1930), an Anglo-Welsh composer (mainly of songs) and music critic. He used the pseudonym (and various others) when composing, and is now better known by this name.
Contents |
Philip Heseltine was born in the Savoy Hotel in London.[1] His father died when he was only two, and his mother remarried in 1903;[2] she then returned to her native Wales, living at Cefn Bryntalch Hall, Abermule, near Newtown, Montgomeryshire, the family home of her second husband, Walter Buckley Jones. Philip's education was mainly classical including studies at Eton College, at Christ Church, Oxford (for one year), and at University College London (one term). In music, he was mostly self-taught, studying composition on his own from the works of composers he admired, notably Frederick Delius, Roger Quilter and Bernard van Dieren. Nevertheless, one of the masters at Eton, Colin Taylor, had introduced him to some of the modern masters which made a marked impression on him, most notably Delius himself.[2] He was also strongly influenced by Elizabethan music and poetry as well as by Celtic culture (he studied the Cornish, Welsh, Irish, Manx and Breton languages). It was the move to Wales, occasioned by his mother's remarriage, that was the spark for this; Welsh may at that time have enjoyed a relatively low status in the country but Philip, never one to shy away from the unconventional, set about learning it with vigour.
He married Minnie Lucy Channing ("Puma") on 22 December 1916;[1] they had one son born in wedlock. In 2011, the British art critic Brian Sewell revealed that he was Heseltine's illegitimate child, born seven months after the composer's death.[3][4]
Heseltine wrote his earliest mature compositions, published to critical acclaim under the newly adopted pseudonym Peter Warlock, following his sojourn in Ireland of 1917-1918. They were followed by a period of concentration on musical journalism; for a while, he was the editor of the musical magazine The Sackbut.
His most prolific period, both as a composer and author, was in the early 1920s, when he withdrew from the financial and social pressures of London to his mother's and stepfather's house in Mid-Wales. Here he wrote some of his finest songs, finally completing his song cycle The Curlew to poems by W. B. Yeats. During this period he also met Béla Bartók, who visited him while returning from a concert in Aberystwyth arranged by Professor Walford Davies, and whose influence can perhaps be seen in The Curlew.
Between 1925 and 1929, following a quiet period, Warlock and his colleague E. J. Moeran led a wild, boozy life in Eynsford, Kent, having to deal with the local police more than once - including for riding his motorbike naked. For Warlock, this was one of the most fruitful periods of his life, but by the end of the 1920s his creativity was waning and he had to support himself with music criticism again. He was suffering from severe depression, but whether his death from gas poisoning at the age of 36 was suicide or an accident is not known for certain.[5][6] His cat had been put out of the room before he died, perhaps to spare it. There is a third possibility: Warlock had made Bernard van Dieren his heir in his will, inspiring claims by Warlock's son Nigel Heseltine that van Dieren had murdered his father.
His name is surrounded by rumours of involvement with the occult, an interest which he shared with others in the Bohemian world of the early 20th century — for example the novelist Mary Butts asserted that it was Warlock who initially introduced her to these subjects. Aleister Crowley, in his book Magick Without Tears, affirms that Warlock's death was the result of an Abramelin magical operation aimed at winning his wife back. Other less conventional aspects of Peter Warlock's life include experimentation with cannabis tincture, a gift for the composition of obscene limericks and a marked interest in flagellation.
Warlock inspired several characters in English language literature, among them:
Warlock's compositions are nearly all songs and most of these are for solo voice and piano. There is a smaller, but still significant, number of pieces for voices — choral songs — although a few of these are arrangements of his solo songs.
He wrote little instrumental music, although the suite Capriol (October 1926) is probably his best-known work and exists in versions for string orchestra, full orchestra and piano duet. (There are arrangements for other combinations, but these are not by Warlock.) His only composition for solo piano is a set of arrangements of Celtic melodies, the "Folk-song preludes". He had a deep affinity for poetry, especially that of Yeats and his friends Robert Nichols and Bruce Blunt (1899–1957). He always chose texts of high artistic value, many of them from the Middle Ages, as basis for his songs.
Many people consider his greatest work to be the song-cycle The Curlew, for tenor and chamber ensemble, in which he sets four linked poems by Yeats. It is certainly his most substantial piece and was written over a long period of time — some seven years — taking in many stylistic changes along the way from the neo-Delianism of "The lover mourns for the loss of love" to sections within the longest song, "The withering of the boughs" that suggest Bartók and Schoenberg as influences before achieving a more idiosyncratic, modal, and genuinely Warlockian vocabulary.
Warlock is also known for his many carols, such as Adam lay ybounden, Tyrley Tyrlow, I Saw a Maiden and Bethlehem Down, the last a setting of words by Bruce Blunt.
Warlock's musical tastes were wide, from Renaissance music to Bartók. In his own works, we hear a development from emulation of the Victorian and Edwardian drawing-room style to a more contrapuntal, strongly personal idiom characterised by the relationship between modal lines and a distinctive palette of chords. He was unusual amongst composers of his generation in being largely unaffected by the folksong movement, either as an arranger (the above-named piano pieces being an exception) or a composer. He wrote only one folksong-oriented work, the cycle "Lilligay".
Apart from original works, Warlock edited and transcribed many lute songs by Elizabethan and Jacobean composers in addition to music by Purcell and other Baroque composers. He also did much to promote the music of Delius, especially by organising the successful Delius Festival of 1929 with Thomas Beecham. He wrote the first biography of Delius, as well as, with Cecil Gray, a book about Carlo Gesualdo. His book on The English Ayre was a ground breaking study, but he also wrote about contemporary music. His article on Arnold Schoenberg was probably the first substantial study in English of his music. In 1925, Warlock rediscovered the music of 16th century composer Thomas Whythorne, and published a book of his compositions and poetry.
Warlock also edited, under the pseudonym Rab Noolas (to be read backwards, i.e Saloon Bar), an anthology on drinking "for the delectation of serious topers", entitled Merry-Go-Down (Mandrake Press, c. 1930).