Acquainted with Stravinsky, friend of Ravel and Poulenc, prolific composer and well-loved man, Lennox Berkeley (1903-1989) remains an enigma to most of us even if we know little of his enormous output of songs, symphonies, ballets and spiritually inclined choral music. His close friendship and early collaboration with Britten, a decade his junior, will ensure that his name stays in the frame of 20th-century British musical life forever. Yet this self-effacing figure, quick to praise others above himself, has rarely enjoyed the spotlight. He deserves his own twirl.
A new collection of writings, letters and interviews, edited by his one-time pupil Peter Dickinson, offers an easily digested introduction to the composer and his milieu. Berkeley’s own concert reviews, published mainly in the Musical Times and the Listener between 1943 and 1982, give perspective to the musical landscape of that period, from Stravinsky or Poulenc to whom he related, to Cage or Stockhausen who bemused him. That said, while admitting the limits of his taste, he remained open-minded: ‘I’ve never been able to make anything of electronic music but I listened today to a piece by Stockhausen for basset horn and electronic tape which to my surprise I found had a certain beauty of sound.’ Good for him.
There is no shortage of glamour. He was born in Oxford into an irregular but aristocratic Anglo-French family. Had there not been a blip of illegitimacy he would have inherited an earldom and Berkeley Castle. ‘Went to Berkeley Castle,’ he wrote in 1968, in a typically succinct diary entry. ‘I came away feeling no regrets and thankful that I didn’t have to live there. It is a gloomy place and its chief claim to fame is that it was the scene of one of the most horrible murders in history’ — allegedly that of Edward II.
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