The joy of Malcolm Arnold’s optimistic, hummable tunes

Never meet your heroes, they say. But if you grew up with classical music in the 1980s, there was fat chance of that. Stravinsky, Britten, Shostakovich, Walton: you’d just missed them. Which is why, in 2001, and finding myself duty-managing an 80th birthday concert for Sir Malcolm Arnold, I inched past his minders and delivered a few trite, polite but entirely sincere words of gratitude and admiration. No response: Sir Malcolm stared blankly ahead. Then he gripped my hand, and started shaking. And kept shaking, faster and faster, his grip tightening like a vice. Raising his head slightly, and pumping my hand with increasing force, he growled: ‘I’m not letting go until you call me Sir.’

In truth, it was reasonably widely known by then that Arnold was no longer ‘all there’. Orchestral players loved to embroider his drunken antics; this, after all, was the man who’d shouted ‘bollocks!’ at Sir Malcolm Sargent. Still, easier to excuse him as an eccentric — what a terrific old boy! — than admit that we were honouring the traumatised wreckage of the man who wrote such vital music. One read about Schumann or Hugo Wolf, reassured that tortured geniuses were a purely historic phenomenon. The story that emerged after Arnold’s death in 2006 — the depression, the suicide attempts, the repeated breakdowns and the brutal therapy that had scoured out and finally erased his glorious creative gift — is still barely fathomable.

Because, damn it all, his music is just so life-affirming! Arnold writes melodies that sound like you’ve been humming them since childhood (just mentioning his score for the 1961 film Whistle Down the Wind is enough to guarantee that its main theme will be lodged in the ear all week).