Armistice concert to remember Edinburgh composer Cecil Coles
Nineteen years ago, I was introduced to a frail 82-year-old lady living in modest circumstances in Kirkintilloch who had a sad story to tell of the father she hardly knew. He was Cecil Coles: a Scots-born composer of immense promise, Penny Catherine Coles assured me. She had a single piece of pencil-written manuscript to prove it. Coles died on the battlefields of the Somme in 1918, aged 30, one of many young creative voices silenced by the indiscriminate tragedy of war. Catherine had been born less than a year before.
I’m reminded of this by In Memoriam, a concert taking place tonight in Edinburgh’s Signet Library on the eve of tomorrow’s Armistice Centenary, which – as well as music by Elgar, Holst, Ireland and Andrew Campling sung by the London Dockland Singers – features a performance by the Marcel Sinfonia of Coles’ Sorrowful Dance, the very work that was Catherine’s only material connection with her father.
The man organising the programme, Robert Marshall, has a particular interest in Coles’ music. “Like me he studied music at Edinburgh University and won the same scholarship,” says Marshall, who was among several enthusiasts who placed a wreath next to the composer’s name on the University war memorial at Old College last March to mark the centenary of Coles’ death.
The Coles family story is one of multiple tragedy. Born in 1888, Coles himself grew up in Edinburgh, attending Daniel Stewart’s College and George Watson’s College before matriculating at Edinburgh in 1905. A year later he won a Cherubini Scholarship, on the basis of his youthful orchestral work From the
Scottish Highlands, allowing him to study composition at the London College of Music.
In London he met the composer Gustav Holst, who wrote effusively of Coles’ “genuine love of and talent for music”. They became close friends. A further scholarship took him to Stuttgart, where he wrote fine song settings of Verlaine and Heine. He remained in Germany as assistant conductor at the Stuttgart Royal Opera, where he doubtless encountered Richard Strauss. Now married to an English wife, Coles returned to London in response to rising tensions in pre-war Germany. His greatest composing success was in 1914, when Henry Wood invited him to conduct the Queen’s Hall premiere of his own Fra Giacomo, a powerful dramatic monologue based on Robert Buchanan’s poem, favourably reviewed in the Times.
Coles signed up for active service in 1915, and in March 1918, as part of a stretcher party assigned to rescue wounded soldiers from a wood near Amiens, died under enemy fire. Among the scores he completed literally in the trenches is the poignant orchestral suite Behind
the Lines, the front cover of which – currently in the National Library of Scotland – is spattered with mud.
Years after his death, Catherine recalled a childhood home that never recovered from the trauma, her mother clearly suffering mentally from the death of her husband and other close male relatives. She was effectively brought up by her maternal grandmother, endured a miserable school life at St Paul’s Girls’ School (she was convinced that the director of music there, her father’s close friend Holst, was contributing to her upkeep) and at the first opportunity left home to pursue a solitary life in Scotland, severing ties with her mother and brother. She worked initially in service, but later wrote popular romantic novels. She never married.
The one thing that had haunted Catherine for all those years was the score she possessed of Sorrowful
Dance, with its dedication “to my dear wife” and an indication it was written at Southampton Rest Camp in 1917, revised when back in action in France. “It was [until her estranged brother, then dying of cancer, got in touch in the 1990s] among the only clues I had to my father’s personality,” she told me in 1999. But she had no idea what the music sounded like.
Thanks to conductor Martyn Brabbins and the BBC SSO, who pioneered a recording of Coles’ music, she did attend a concert in 2002 that featured Fra Giacomo and extant parts of Behind the Lines, though not Sorrowful Dance, which was eventually orchestrated by Brabbins at the behest of tonight’s conductor Robert Marshall and premiered in 2014, alas too late for Catherine to witness.
In our 1999 interview, I asked her how she came into possession of the pencil score in the first place. She was cautious, telling me that as a young girl she had surreptitiously removed it from a bookcase in the family home which she and her brother were forbidden access to and kept it. How poignant that tonight’s performance of Sorrowful Dance could only have been made possible by such a desperate act of remembrance.
Among the scores he completed literally in the trenches is the poignant suite Behind the Lines