Hinterland

It is never too late to discover the composer who did for the ears what Dalí would do for the eyes

Ihave written before about John Foulds, the barely known genius of a composer who was a near-contemporary of Vaughan Williams and Holst. Foulds has been an obsession of mine since the late Michael Kennedy, for many years The Telegraph’s revered music and opera critic, raved to me about the stunning recording of his piano concerto Dynamic Triptych, by the soloist Howard Shelley and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra under Vernon Handley – a revelation to him as it became to me.

Radio 3 has kindly let me make a documentary about Foulds, broadcast tomorrow at 6.45pm and then available on BBC Sounds. It follows Foulds, born in 1880, from his Manchester boyhood to the development of his precocious talent as a composer. Like Holst, Foulds was fascinated by oriental music, notably from India. He used quarter-tones, doing for the ears rather what Salvador Dalí would do for the eyes. He also used a multiplicity of modes, drawn from India’s musical language, as the structure for his composition, rather as Vaughan Williams (in a less ambitious fashion) had done with those from English music of Tudor times.

Foulds also made a living – quite a decent one – writing music for the stage. However remunerative, it was a source of great irritation, because impresarios would programme it at the expense of his more serious pieces – of which he wrote more as he matured. But Foulds also had problems of temperament that led to fallings out – with people who could have helped his career – and made decisions in his personal life out of step with the times. One, in 1915, was to leave his wife and children and move in with Maud MacCarthy, a bohemian figure to put it mildly. MacCarthy shared his interest in India and eastern culture, and eventually they married, but not before having two children, which scandalised a British musical establishment that, although radical in politics, was outwardly very conventional in its moral standards.

Foulds enjoyed considerable fame in the early 1920s, thanks to his World Requiem, written in memory of the dead of the Great War. This massive work was performed at the Festival of Remembrance in the Albert Hall annually from 1923 and 1926, but then inexplicably dropped; it was not performed again until 2007, in the same venue, on the initiative of the then-controller of Radio 3, Roger Wright, in the presence of Foulds’s 91 year-old son Patrick, who as a boy had sung in the choir at the 1926 performance.

It was the start of a bad turn in Foulds’s fortunes, that had him going to Paris to play the piano in cinemas during silent films. When the talkies put an end to that, he came back to England, writing his finest music – Dynamic Triptych and his Indian-inspired Three Mantras – but soon he ran out of road again, his music commanding first, but not always second, performances. When we hear it today it is overwhelming in its boldness, invention, the subtlety of its orchestration and, indeed, tunefulness: back then it sounded shocking and too much, rather as Ravel had seemed to the French establishment 30 years earlier.

Foulds’s livelihood was saved by a move, with his family, to Delhi in 1935, to run the music service of All India Radio. He was so successful that in 1939 he was asked to open a new service in Calcutta, but within a few days was

Foulds’s music once sounded shocking, as Ravel had seemed 30 years earlier

dead from cholera. That was tragic enough: the second tragedy was that, of trunks of unperformed manuscripts, some survived while others did not.

The musicologist Malcolm MacDonald, in the 1970s and 1980s, set about resurrecting Foulds, and the recordings of his works by Lyrita and then Dutton were partly down to him. The Three Mantras was performed at the Proms in 1998 to an ovation; Sakari Oramo, who conducted it, championed Foulds during his time with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, making the first public in 72 years of Dynamic Triptych for 72 years. Kathryn

Stott made an outstanding CD of Foulds’s piano music; Ronald Corp and the BBC Concert Orchestra made four CDs of his “light” music for Dutton. There is no difficulty now in getting to know this superb composer, and I hope my documentary might entice you to discover him yourselves.