Interview, Adrian Bradbury on The Pre-Raphaelite Cello

A rich treasure-chest of premiere recordings for piano and cello, newly released on Somm - inspired by the British cellist Beatrice Harrison, and by the 'Frankfurt Gang' of composers with whom she was closely linked. Commemorating the centenary of a landmark outside broadcast by the BBC, which saw Harrison duet live with a nightingale in the garden of her family home, it features repertoire from Quilter, Scott, Grainger, Iwan Knorr and Hugo Becker.

The works on the album represent an artistic effort by this school of composers to distance themselves from the British mainstream - composers such as Stanford and Parry - and to focus on emotional communication over structural considerations. 

I spoke to cellist Adrian Bradbury about the gorgeous works recorded on the album, and about the impact that the 'Frankfurt Gang' and their self-described Pre-Raphaelite approach to composition had on musical history...

For many people, the first thing that springs to mind when they hear the word ‘Pre-Raphaelite’ will be the visual arts - Burne-Jones, Millais, Rossetti and others. Why did the ‘Frankfurt Gang’ of composers, several decades after the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood had fizzled out, start seeing themselves as musical Pre-Raphaelites?

“The one thing we were all united on was: we all hated Beethoven!” is how Percy Grainger summed it up. Just as Pre-Raphaelite painters were rejecting the Classical and Mannerist schools, especially as represented by Joshua Reynolds (whom they called ‘Sloshua’) so the Frankfurt Gang were rejecting the conservatism of the South Kensington school of composers (Parry and Stanford) - Balfour Gardiner, another Gang member, once even turned down a perfectly friendly invitation to tea from Parry, something he of course grew to be ashamed of.

It seems that Grainger and Scott in particular identified with the complexity and intensity of Pre-Raphaelite canvases, with vivid colours that mirrored their beloved ‘chords’, major triads on the flattened mediant and submediant. Cyril Scott’s house was adorned with Pre-Raphaelite artwork. Interestingly, music eras in general always lag behind art eras of the same name, a whole other fascinating topic, so the Frankfurt Gang’s coinage of the term ‘Pre-Raphaelite’ maybe wasn’t so anachronistic in the grand scheme of things. But yes, Debussy could be said to have been influenced by the Pre-Raphaelite movement well before the Frankfurt Gang, so by the time English composers had caught up they were relatively out of date, with even Elgar by then sounding more modern in comparison.

The lynchpin of this album is the cellist Beatrice Harrison - would it be going too far to describe her as something of a muse to the likes of Quilter, Scott and Grainger?

Cyril Scott certainly - he proposed to her several times and referred to her as a Botticelli angel! But attraction apart, they were all Frankfurt students in their day, and though Beatrice was there a good ten years later than the Gang they did have this common Anglo-German provenance which, I would argue, meant her playing especially ‘spoke’ to them and likewise their compositions to her. The composers of course had other cellists in their lives - Quilter also played with Herbert Withers, and Grainger worshipped Herman Sandby - but they all adored Beatrice; Quilter especially was a frequent visitor to the Harrison house in Cornwall Gardens, playing and chatting into the small hours.

The album is in part a commemoration of the 1924 broadcast where Harrison played in the garden of her house, with the songs of nightingales also audible on the broadcast. What was the significance of this early broadcast?

With radio in its absolute infancy the cello and nightingale programme on 19th May 1924 was hugely significant in broadcasting history, almost certainly being the very first outside broadcast by the BBC (or rather 2LO, the London station of the British Broadcasting Company as it then was). John Reith took some persuading to send a van full of engineers down to Harrison’s home, Foyle Riding, on the Kent/Surrey border, place a cat’s whisker microphone in the bushes with cables heading via to the telephone line to London, and wait for the bird to react to the cello’s cantabile. But react he did, at quarter to eleven in the evening, and so the announcer interrupted the Savoy Orpheans broadcast to go live to the garden.

And for the audience of over a million, throughout the British Empire, so soon after the Great War, the emotional significance cannot be overstated. Quite apart from the sound of the most beautiful birdsong and the sound of the most beautiful cello playing, it was surely the interaction between those two voices that meant so much to listeners who had known such loss and devastation. And, by the way, it WAS a nightingale, not a whistler or siffleur as recently claimed in the press - listen back to the ‘cello and the nightingales’ documentary from 19.15 on 19 May - the exact centenary - on BBC Radio 3 for a debunking of that particular myth!

Iwan Knorr, one of the few non-British members of the Frankfurt Gang, spent some years teaching at the ‘Imperial Institute for Noble Ladies’, in Kharkiv. This sounds like an upmarket version of a finishing school - what sort of things would have been taught there?

Knorr was not actually in the Gang, he was their teacher, but we included him on the disc because he is such an important part of the narrative. Polish-born, he taught at the Kharkiv Institute for some years before becoming director of the Kharkiv division of the Russian Imperial Music Society and then professor of composition, and later Director, at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt. Secondary education for girls was very limited in Tsarist Russia, so the Institutes for Noble Maidens - private boarding schools for primary and secondary students which now sound so quaint and classist - were actually progressive in their day. Just like Gustav Holst (Head of Music at St Paul’s Girls School) and Borodin (founder of the School of Medicine for Women in Saint Petersburg) it seems that Knorr was a living advocate for women’s education.

Having said that, you ask what sort of things were taught there, and a memoir of her time in another of these Institutes by Vera Figner paints a picture of their limited education: "...never showed us a skeleton, nor even a stuffed animal, and not a single plant. Never once did we look into a microscope, and we had not the remotest idea what a cell was... On the other hand, for four years they tormented us over penmanship. For seven years we had to study drawing, notwithstanding the fact that during all that time not one of us displayed the smallest sign of talent."

Hugo Becker’s Liebesleben, of which two movements are heard here, is a fascinating work, almost a Lieder cycle for the cello - like Mendelssohn’s earlier Lieder ohne Worte, but conceived as a set with a narrative. Were other people exploring this approach at the same time?

Hugo Becker, born into a richly musical family, was steeped in the German Romantic school of Mendelssohn and Schumann, becoming a student of Grützmacher in Dresden before taking up the professorship in Frankfurt and then, on Robert Hausmann’s death, in Berlin (Frankfurt and Berlin being where he taught Beatrice). His beautiful Op. 7 Liebesleben, dedicated to his other teacher Alfredo Piatti, shows a strong Schumann influence, but maybe more musically reminiscent of that composer’s piano cycles (like Kinderszenen or Waldszenen) than his song cycles. We are though indeed taken on a journey by Becker: 1. Begegnung (First Sight), 2. Zweifel (Doubt), 3. In Träumen (Dreaming), 4. Tändelei (Flirting), 5. Frage (Question), 6. Antwort (Answer); with 5 and 6 (the numbers we selected for the CD) surely representing the popping of the question… and the yes!

The Frankfurt Gang seem not to have left any obvious musical ‘descendants’, and arguably seem to have pretty much lost their artistic war against the likes of Stanford and Parry. What would you say was their main influence on later generations of composers?

Thomas Armstrong, a friend of the Gang and author of a fascinating article on them (Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, 1958-1959, pp. 1-16), argues that any influence of the Gang died with the First World War. However in their heyday Grainger and Scott, along with their hero Grieg, had a strong influence on Delius; and Grainger claimed that his experimental ‘irregular’ rhythms were copied ten years later by Stravinsky in the Rite of Spring: “I think it is a shame that credit should go to the conceited continent for innovations that were created within the British empire”. Armstrong also claims Quilter made an impression on Finzi’s song writing, and Elgar, on being told by Bernard Shaw that the harmonies in his second symphony were becoming very daring, replied ‘maybe so, but don’t forget Cyril Scott started it’. In fact we should acknowledge that their harmonic experiments influenced all the composers of their generation, and some later ones, notably Bax, Ireland, Moeran, and Warlock, and - according to Armstrong - passed into the permanent system of English music.

He also points out that their very independence was an influence in itself. But by 1907, with Schoenberg’s Op. 11 already in print, they were seen as old-fashioned. The ‘artistic war’ with the South Kensington school was surely, at least, a learning experience for all involved. I’d like to think that Gardiner would now accept that invitation to tea from Parry, and how fascinating it would be to hear their chat.