A tribute to Freda Berkeley

Freda, as everybody knows, was a wonderful person. She had a special quality of understanding people and their predicaments and was generous in her interest. She was a perfect support to Lennox throughout their time together.

I first met Freda almost sixty years ago. My supervisor at Cambridge, Philip Radcliffe, said it was time I showed some scores to a real composer. Since I had been playing Lennox’s piano music since I was at school, I leapt at the opportunity to meet him. Probably early in 1957, I walked up the path to 8 Warwick Avenue, having passed the decaying houses of Bishop’s Bridge Road, shortly to be demolished for the new Westway. Freda answered the door and seemed preoccupied, as well she might since their third son, Nicky, was still only a year old, as he recently reminded me. I met Lennox and we went into the drawing room – Michael’s red toy car was under the piano. I played my Four W. H. Auden Songs and, as I have told elsewhere, when Lennox set his Five Poems of W. H. Auden for the American soprano Alice Esty the following year, he chose three of the poems I had set. Then I played my Piano Variations, later renamed for the ballet by the Mexican choreographer Gloria Contreras as Vitalitas Variations. Lennox made a suggestion about a chord – he was right and I changed it. Both these works have survived and are recorded.

When we lived in London there were dinner parties with the Berkeleys – I especially remember one when I was alarmed to have to sight-read Schubert piano duets with Marion Harewood (formerly the concert pianist Marion Stein, and not yet Mrs Jeremy Thorpe).

In Freda’s memory, in the weeks following her death, I composed a new work, Freda’s Blues, based on her favourite song by Lennox – How Love Came In – to a sonnet by Herrick. It was published in 1936, but could have been written earlier. For my tribute, I imagined Lennox going to a night club with Ravel and hearing blues, then going back to his song the next day. Lennox’s melody is clear in the single notes which always lead into the blues. The piece also employs one of his favourite chords – a version of the dominant thirteenth. I gave the first performance at the Tabernacle Theatre, Notting Hill, within the tribute to Freda at her Memorial Concert on 11 October 2016.