Cover: Malcolm Arnold
Malcolm Arnold wrote an astonishing breadth of music, so why is he snubbed by concert halls both in the UK and abroad? Malcolm Hayes reassesses the work of one of Britain’s finest composing talents
On the English composer’s centenary, Malcolm Hayes suggests it’s time Arnold joined the pantheon of greats
An English master-composer ahead of his time? That might seem an unexpected assessment of a creative musician of phenomenal gifts, whose concert-hall works were consistently dismissed during his lifetime, in most critical circles at least, as conventional and old-fashioned. Perhaps even more suspect intellectually was Arnold’s ultra-fluent, lucrative and successful output as a film composer – over 100 scores over a 20-year period, including major achievements such as The Bridge on the River Kwai (which won its composer an Academy Award). The same phenomenal workrate, meanwhile, had Arnold producing a total of nearly 150 works with opus numbers, including nine symphonies.
Today’s is a happily less prescriptive age regarding whether this or that classical musical style is considered acceptable. Even so, and despite a very substantial recorded legacy, it’s striking how little of Arnold’s work has featured in the nation’s concert-going life for the previous half-century. Distressing extra-musical circumstances were a factor: in the late 1970s a build-up of longstanding psychological problems, made worse by decades of overwork and heavy drinking, led to a mental and physical breakdown from which the composer took several years even partly to recover. But there surely has been time enough since then for Arnold’s output to re-emerge from that particular shadow.
Perhaps the slow process of acceptance is best explained by the maverick creative temperament that lies just behind Arnold’s outwardly tonal and traditional style – a style that brings together extremes of musical resource and mood, ranging from winsome tunefulness to flaring emotionalism, often with disconcerting mood-swings to match. Two other composers whose idiom operates in a similar way, and who were both admired by Arnold, are Berlioz and Mahler – familiar presences in musical life today, but much less so in the immediate post-war decades