We owe Constant Lambert (1905–1951) a huge amount, and the flashes of brilliance that survive from his short life only suggest the energy with which he established the possibilities for English culture. What we remember about this extraordinary man are some delightful pieces of music, especially The Rio Grande; the funniest and most cultivated book about contemporary music ever written, Music Ho!; and a few surviving recordings of his work as a conductor.
Before his death, aged 46, from chronic alcoholism and undiagnosed diabetes, he had established the Sadler’s Wells Ballet with Ninette de Valois and Frederick Ashton; in the trio, he was not only the conductor and musical expert, but someone who was acutely alive to the possibilities of stage design and drama. He survives as a sort of in-between figure, coming after the English visionary genius of Elgar and Vaughan Williams and before composers with the international stature of Britten and Tippett. From reading about this life of extraordinary professional energy, it became clear to me that Lambert almost single-handedly created openings for a later generation.
He was obviously a fascinating person. After his death, many of his friends tried to pin down the louche charm of his conversation, his broad interests and his wit. Best of all are two portraits by his friend Anthony Powell — the first as the character Hugh Moreland in A Dance to the Music of Time, the second under his own name in Powell’s memoirs. The bawdy, cultured, rueful world around Lambert is beautifully captured, as well as his bad luck. The sort of absurd joke he relished is nicely summed up thus:
Lambert especially enjoyed putting forward subjects for Royal Academy pictures in the sententiously forcible manner of Brangwyn, of which two proposed canvases were Blowing Up the Rubber Woman and ‘Hock or Claret, Sir?’: Annual Dinner of the Rectal Dining Society.
His wit happily survives in Music Ho! — a book which is often wrong, but very persuasive — as well as in a run of music reviews, as incisive, knowledgeable and funny as any of George Bernard Shaw’s: ‘The gear-change between the first and second subjects would have made a dead French taxi-driver turn in his grave’ is a typical example.
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