Berkeley Manuscripts at the British Library

Tony Scotland considers some newly-acquired manuscripts at the British Library

The bulk of Lennox Berkeley’s music manuscripts are in the safe-keeping of the British Library, where they were deposited on loan by the family after his death, and are diligently cared for by Dr Nicolas Bell and his colleagues in the Music Department.

Over the years this collection has been examined, analysed and written up by a number of Berkeley scholars, especially Professors Peter Dickinson and Stewart Craggs, and Joan Redding. However readers of their works – respectively, The Music of Lennox Berkeley, second edition, Boydell Press, 2003; Lennox Berkeley – A Source Book, Ashgate, 2000; and A Descriptive List of the Musical Manuscripts of Sir Lennox Berkeley, MSc. thesis, University of North Carolina, 1988 – will be only too aware that there are conspicuous gaps in the BL’s holdings.

The problem is primarily that Lennox never paid much attention to his music once he had written it, preferring to move on to the next piece. Consequently scores disappeared. Some – particularly the early works – he disowned and conveniently lost. Others were lent to musicians for performance and never came back. And yet others he quite simply forgot about.

In 1972 while researching his Berkeley article for the New Grove Dictionary of Music, Peter Dickinson asked Lennox about the Cello Concerto which he wrote for Maurice Eisenberg in 1939. At the time of composition, Lennox thought it was ‘in some ways ... the best thing I have done’, but 33 years later he had not only forgotten he ever wrote a cello concerto, but even suggested it might be best not to include it in Grove. Another decade later, the autograph score suddenly turned up in a bottom drawer at No 8 Warwick Avenue, and the following year the Cello Concerto was given its long-delayed premiere at the Cheltenham Festival in a performance by Moray Welsh and the Hallé Orchestra conducted by James Loughran. The autograph score, in black ink with pencil notes and scratchings-out, is now safely in the British Library (LOAN 101.4).

But a musical archive is never a static thing, and always open for additions. A few years ago the heirs of the Canadian-born British violinist Frederick Grinke (1911-1987), for whom Lennox wrote a number of works between 1942 and 1961, gave the British Library his collection of music. Amongst it, with some Berkeley printed scores, were the following Berkeley autographs:

Another new acquisition at the BL is a piano reduction, in Berkeley’s own hand, of the fourth movement of the Partita for Chamber Orchestra (1964-5), together with orchestral parts in a copyist’s hand, and a dyeline copy of the first movement (‘Prelude and Fugue’) and the second and third movements (‘Aria I’ and ‘Aria II’). This work was first performed by the Frensham Heights School Orchestra conducted by Edward Rice, in Farnham Parish Church in 1965. The scores came to the BL in the Farnham Festival archive, which was bequeathed by the late Alan Fluck, who founded the festival in 1961.

A more recent acquisition is a collection of music manuscripts owned by the late Peter Wishart, and presented to the BL by the Jackdaws Educational Trust founded by his widow. Among these manuscripts Dr Bell was surprised to discover the autograph fair copy of Berkeley’s Five Chinese Songs (1970-1), with a draft, again in the composer’s own hand, of an additional song, ‘Releasing a Migrant Yen’. The set was commissioned by the Park Lane Group and dedicated to Meriel and Peter Dickinson, who gave the first performance in the Purcell Room in 1971. Peter Wishart (1921-84) was a private pupil of Berkeley (and later of Nadia Boulanger).

At present Dr Bell and his team are sifting through the archive of the Scottish conductor and composer Muir Mathieson (1911-75), which recently arrived at the British Library. Since Lennox worked extensively with Mathieson on a series of wartime film scores, for which Berkeley wrote the music and Mathieson conducted, let us hope that the following scores might turn up:

The British Library already has the holograph of the score of a third Berkeley score which Mathieson conducted, Out of Chaos (1944), a documentary about the work of British war artists.

Peter Dickinson lists no fewer than fourteen lost works in his Berkeley. They all date from before the war, and include a symphony for strings which Anthony Bernard and his London Chamber Orchestra played in London in 1931. The loss of autograph scores of works that exist in printed or copyist form is nothing by comparison with the total loss of these early works. But it’s nonetheless frustrating that autographs of some of the standard Berkeley works are missing, if only because of the clues they might yield for performers. And one of the puzzles for Berkeley archivists is the location of the autograph score of the Symphony No 3, commissioned by the Cheltenham Festival and given its world premiere there in 1969 by the French National Radio Orchestra conducted by Jean Martinon. But perhaps this too will arrive in a box of new acquisitions in Dr Bell’s office one of these days.