music of Lord Berners (1883-1950): 'The Versatile Peer', The

Musical Times, Autumn 2003 by Thomson, Andrew

Peer review ANDREW THOMSON The music of Lord Berners (1883-1950): The Versatile Peer' Bryony Jones Ashgate (Aldershot, 2002); vii, 155pp; L35. ISBN 0 7546 0852 2.

Succinct, focused and not at all dry, this admirable study of the music of Lord Berners by the young scholar Bryony Jones provides an entirely appropriate and justly proportioned treatment of its subject. It's all the more praise-worthy as having evolved from her original master's thesis, by no means always a promising beginning for a good book. And much needed, too, after the rather flaccid, gossipy and musically weak biography by Mark Amory (reviewed in MT, Summer 1998). It opens with a good summary of Berners's unusual character and career, drawing on his autobiographical writings. Though Ms Jones stresses his strong adherence to the Franco-Russian school, the Austro-German tradition is to an extent given its due place in his artistic formation, above all his adolescent fascination with Wagner and continuing enjoyment of Richard Strauss - indeed, there's an allusion to Der Rosenkavalier in Valses bourgeoises - not to mention his brief but undoubtedly beneficial periods of academic study with Kretschmer and Tovey.

The most interesting musical discussion is, as one might expect, to be found in the chapters on the early piano music, songs and orchestral music written during and immediately after his crucial period of exposure to Stravinsky and the Diaghilev entourage in exile encountered during his lucky break in Rome as a diplomat during the Great War. It's unfortunate, however, that the iconoclastic modernism of the Futurist movement, with which Berners was also associated at that time, is barely mentioned, apart from a passing reference to the performance of Berners's puppet ballet L'uomo dai baffi under the auspices of the futurist group Fortunato Depero. The fact that this young Eton-educated, aristocratic Englishman could so rapidly come to terms with these truly overwhelming experiences is rather taken for granted, but the episode surely indicates his inner resources and intellectual toughness.

Debussy, Ravel and Stravinsky are shown to be the principal influences with which Berners actively engaged. In her perceptive discussion of Le poisson d'or, Jones makes a telling comparison with Debussy's similarly entitled piano piece:

In Debussy's work the fishes flick their

tails against a background wash of

semiquavers [...] In contrast, Berners's

music is much more direct: he focuses

attention on these tail flicks and there

is no aquatic background to draw

attention away from the action. [...]

Indeed, Berners's approach to the

subject has more of the directness of

expression of Stravinsky. [...] The only

suggestions of 'impressionism' come in

the the occasional pentatonic glissandi.

Jones herself clearly responds to the composer's melancholy compassion for the animal kingdom in 'Pour un canari' from Trois petites marches funebres, and wonders whether in fact he preferred animals to people - a possible mental defence, I would suggest, against the human carnage in the fields of Flanders. At the same time, the primitive force of Stravinsky's Le sacre du printemps had left its imprint on both 'Kasatchok' from Trois morceaux and on the final bars of the orchestral Fantaisie espagnole, whose premiere was given together with the first British performance of Stravinsky's chef d'oeuvre at the Queen's Hall in 1921. Jones is also alive to the darker, Jungian 'shadow' dimension of Berners's complex personality, manifest both in the extraordinarily bleak 'La haine' from Fragments psychologiques, characterised by extreme chromatic and fragmented textures, and in the song The lady visitor in the pauper ward' (Three English songs), whose representation of torment is achieved by atonal harmonies and disjunct vocal lines. The influence here is patently that of Schoenberg's pre-1914 'free atonal' music, a fact which Jones, for reasons best known to herself, seems utterly unwilling to acknowledge. This is my only serious worry about her otherwise fine scholarship; subsequently she cites only the negative latter part of a statement by Berners himself, reproduced in full by Amory as follows:

The violent interest I took, for a time in Schoenberg was I fancy the interest of an explorer. He had opened up for me the new territory of atonal music, but this territory, that at one time seemed almost a promised land, has proved itself infertile, an enclosed, dry, rocky, academic valley with no issue.

Moreover, her apparent antipathy to the Second Viennese school doesn't excuse a reference to 'the more egalitarian methods of atonality or twelve-note serialism' with its crude quasi-political overtones, or the mistaken ascription of serial methods to Berg's Wozzeck. I'm most surprised that this 'howler' got past her meticulous mentors at Liverpool...

Enough of that. The following chapters deal most informatively with the opera Le carrosse du Saint-sacrement - which contains 'some typically perverse, though subtle touches' - and the five ballets, highly accessible in idiom, of which The triumph of Neptune, Luna Park and A wedding bouquet were the most successful. Jones sums it up in a nutshell: