On Music

...Wedding Bouquet was successfully revived, and the Berners novels fared rather well...

...The Mad Boy, as he was known, moved in with him at Faringdon and stayed for the next 20 years...

...When he mentioned to his mother, who had met Wilde, that the opera's text was by him, Julia exclaimed, "Oh, hush, dear...

...With it came the country estate of Faringdon House, and enough money to maintain residences in London, Paris and Rome...

...The boy was an oddball and prankster from a tender age...

...On the other hand, when Stravinsky declared that Berners' best ballets were as good as the French ones produced by Diaghilev, Amory comments, "whether or not this could be construed as a compliment I cannot say...

...Amory perceives this as the possible cause of the "emotional timidity that was to turn to a crippling shyness and spread across his whole life...

...It was also in 1918 that Gerald Tyrwhitt, aged35, inherited hisbaronial title, becoming the 14th Lord Berners...

...He seldom was bored...

...Gerald's eccentricity grew apace...

...He later wrote a couple of film scores—the one for Nicholas Nickleby is on EMI 47668—and minor but graceful orchestral works are on the same CD...

...I don't know about the crippling shyness, but it may well be that Gerald Tyrwhitt's homosexuality owes something to the parental chill...

...What he composed, painted or wrote, however, frequently was...

...Osbert Sitwell famously observed, "In the years between the Wars Berners did more to civilize the wealthy than anyone in England...

...No longer composing, he was reading a lot—mostly Henry James—and kept some 70 notebooks about it...

...Julia was horrified at her son's thinking of becoming an artist...

...Finally, Strauss...

...He died quietly, with no great pain, of "bad heart and blood pressure" at age 66, a nonbeliever to the end...

...It is worth noting that the doctor who treated him during his last years refused payment, declaring the pleasure of Berners' company remuneration enough...

...The complete ballet is on Marco Polo 223711, the suite from it on EMI 47668...

...The creation of this ballet-harlequinade was fraught and comical, and involved meetings with George Balanchine in various picturesque locations...

...I prefer Stravinsky's "droll and delightful...

...The song texts are French and English, with "Red Roses and Red Noses" and "Come on, Algernon" especially amusing...

...The complicated plot, including some of the sung text, is summarized by Amory: "The curtain rises on the garden of a farmhouse, the maid Webster (? name that is spoken') is organizing the preparations and soon the guests arrive, including the poor dotty Julia ('Julia is known as forlorn'), the owner of Pepe ('Little dogs resemble little girls'), which is fortunate since Pepe is, naturally, danced by one...

...Apropos of them, Amory writes, "Gerald's music was immediately interesting, original, witty, with an obvious jokiness often signaled by the titles...

...As Gerald wrote, Tovey's orthodoxy drove him to obtain an unpaid post as honorary attaché in Constantinople...

...Gerald liked much about France: croissants, omelets, Normandy butter, and the scenery...

...Stravinsky, for example, sent powder for blue mayonnaise from Paris...

...He arrived, like Athene, fully formed, and at intervals produced new examples of what was essentially the same talent adapted to the circumstance...

...The first portentously parodies Beethoven's Fifth Symphony...

...ajournalist, the other, Tom Tug, a sailor...

...At its inaugural party, guests had a long tromp to it on a cold night, but were allowed six effigies to burn on the celebratory bonfire...

...The text was adapted from the beginning pages of Gertrude Stein's play, They must...

...Next the bride ('Charming, charming, charming') and the groom ('They all talk as if it was alarming, also as if they expected him not to be charming') appear and there is a group photograph...

...beyond that there is a melancholy...

...Then there is an evil grotto with giants, through which the travelers battle, only for the journalist to be seized and sawn in half at the ogres' castle...

...Josephine ('Josephine may not attend the wedding'), who is completely devoted to Julia ('not in any language would this be written differently'), gets drunk...

...Hugh, away on naval duty, was physically as well as emotionally distant, but Gerald got his sartorial refinement and his wit from him...

...Joseph Epstein's description of him in the New Criterion (November 1998) as a Renaissance man in "rather a small renaissance: one in Andorra, perhaps," is uncharitable...

...what he did, even more so...

...It premiered in April 1937 with scenario, sets and costumes by Berners, and choreography by Frederick Ashton...

...That he practiced composing, painting and writing with considerable skill was unusual, but hardly eccentric...

...Yet she played the piano for Gerald showed him her not incompetent watercolors, took him to art exhibitions, and permitted him to read Trilby after a teacher had confiscated it...

...He claimed to have read in a (surely imaginary) Heine biography that it was written not to a fair maiden but to a white pig Heine had met on a country ramble, and afterward was "haunted by the thought of the melancholy fate in store for it...

...and unleashes a minihell in the Russian peasant dance Kasatchok...

...Other such are to be found on three Marco Polo releases (223711, 223716,223780) that concentrate on the ballet music, for which Berners is best known...

...He sees Fairyland through a magic telescope and decides to explore it with his friend...

...Strauss et Straus, a takeoff, respectively, on Johann Strauss, Richard Strauss, and Oscar Straus (of Chocolate Soldier fame...

...To get away from the War news reaching Rome, Gerald went to Sorrento to compose Fragments psychologiques (1916), titled "Hate," "Laughter" and "A Sigh " This is piddling stuff, of the kind Erik Satie, who may have inspired it, managed better...

...And there were musicales at the house...

...Although the piece lasts only one minute, he introduced pauses into it...

...He took up painting with enthusiasm and got to be reasonably proficient at it...

...He threw a dog out the window to see if it could fly, and came to love even the hated crows after he read somewhere that they had difficulties counting beyond six, identifying them with his own dislike of arithmetic...

...Berners would send out trick dinner invitations, luring one lady to come meet the ? of W, which turned out to be not the Prince of Wales but the provost of Worcester College...

...His great love of learning May earn him a burning...

...The Valses bourgeoises (1918) represent our man at his most charming, opening with Valse brillante, a cheeky piece that contains what Stravinsky called "one of the most impudent passages in modern music...

...uneven as parody, this is nevertheless appealing music...

...Berners returned from lunch with one that had to be rehearsed with Balanchine in half an hour—sans piano, merely hummed—in the basement...

...It is better again for another Ashton-choreographed ballet...

...World War II heraided the passing of Berners' world, and propelled him into a nervous breakdown he never folly recovered from...

...Through London's darkest drawing rooms as well as the lightest he moved...

...Whether out of laziness, chronic fear of boredom, total immersion in the social whirl, or simply no need to earn money is difficult to determine...

...Everyone and everything got rave reviews, only the 18-year-old Margot Fonteyn was thought to overdo Julia's madness, a flaw she subsequently corrected...

...Julia, who has been 'ruined' by the groom, now throws herself at him...

...but rescued by a god...

...Despite an extensive social life, Gerald found time to continue the composing he had begun in Germany, his earliest mature work being Three Songs in the German Manner (1913) to poems by Heinrich Heine...

...In Germany, besides studying music with Edmund Kretschmer, he frequented the opera and pored over the score of Strauss' Don Juan...

...It could be argued that the fascination of the man bleeds into interest in his work, and that this accounts for the modest but undeniable stature he enjoy's in the world of literature too...

...then an utterly irresistible waltz topped by a brazenly seductive tango, and the dying fall of the melancholy conclusion...

...an amateur, but in the best—literal—sense...

...Two months later, seeing Salome performed in Dresden, he gushed: "It is a wonderful opera, quite the most wonderful I have ever seen—a perfectly immense orchestra but not at all noisy...

...The orchestral version (EMI 47668) is rousingly played along with other Berners works by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic under Barry Wordsworth...

...The first in this Lieder Album, as Gerald liked to call it, is a setting of one of the finest German love lyrics, "You are like a flower," previously set by Robert Schumann and Anton Rubinstein among others...

...Strauss] gets the most marvelous effects...

...Be Wedded...

...When the bride returns, she faints and, as night falls, the guests leave ('Thank you, thank you'), and Julia is alone with her dog...

...his complete songs and piano solo works are available on the aforementioned Troy and Symposium discs...

...At Faringdon, the guest book was to contain the names of Bernard Shaw, H.G...

...Robert, though mostly homosexual, was married twice...

...He sold all his dwellings, except Faringdon, and moved to lodgings in Oxford...

...The finest Berners ballet, however, is Wedding Bouquet, still in the Royal Ballet's repertory...

...Back on London Bridge, a drunken Negro [Snowball, the last role Balanchine danced for Diaghilev] upsets and breaks the magic telescope, but, in the end...

...He rigged up an outdoor toilet with a booby trap, so that when a detested governess went to sit on it a terrific blow was administered to her descending bottom...

...The hilarious anecdotes proliferate...

...Can medical history produce another such case...

...You can hear them sung artfully by Felicity Lott (Troy 290) or more humorously by Meriel Dickinson (Symposium 1278...

...More entertaining are the same year's Trois petites Marches funèbres, funeral marches for, respectively, a statesman, a canary and a rich aunt...

...Not very pretty music, yet it does capture both the flickering piscine movements and the basic loneliness in the fishbowl...

...The 12 tableaus devised by Sitwell have, to quote Amory, "two heroes, one...

...After various other subjects were discussed, Sacheverell Sitwell and Berners (whom Diaghilev had known in Rome and finally settled on as composer) suggested British painting...

...It was originally sung by a 10-piece chorus, later replaced, for reasons of wartime economy, by a single narrator, a role Lambert filled splendidly, his "imperturbable delivery [giving] the nonsense an extra nonsensicality by making it sound like sense...

...and asked him never to mention that name again...

...The groom partners his bride in a waltz, but then does a tango with his former mistresses...

...It did not develop or deepen, or become more complex...

...Harold Acton describes his friend's Rome apartment: "I remember tin goldfish that used to stir in big-bellied bowls, some of which were filled with blue and green water like those in chemists' windows, and transparent Javanese puppets like those on strings...

...Perhaps the most imposing work of this period and persuasion was that arranged by Casella for a small chamber orchestra to accompany a Futurist marionette show, L'Uomo dei baffi (The Man with Whiskers...

...About his piano playing he remarked "My performance had more temperament than accuracy," thus echoing, consciously or not, Oscar Wilde's Algernon in The Importance of Being Earnest: "I don't play accurately—anyone can play accurately— but I play with wonderful expression...

...That led them to the two famous print stores specializing in the popular "penny plain and tuppence colored...

...Another lady was sent an invitation listing a few worldclass celebrities, but neither the signature nor the return address was legible...

...Cochran revues...

...Despite being parodie, these three short pieces are really affectionate—in the waltz, even sweetly melancholy— tributes, as the best parodies usually are...

...The swallowing of the crumb is rendered by the piano in a rapid downward glissando...

...in his fiction, written in the campy manner of his friend Firbank, he and his homosexual friends are transmuted, say, into pupils of a girls' school, with Berners the headmistress...

...Evelyn Waugh was a (not so friendly) friend, and much of Berners' later life reads like something out of Waugh's early novels, involving the same people, only without their being given fictional names...

...The epitaph he wrote for himself runs: Here lies Lord Berners, One of the learners...

...The second song, "König Wiswamitra," about a king who covets his neighbor's cow and carries on like an ox, is set to duly gay music...

...The music lodges in your ear, heart, and memory: a sparkling Allegro brilliant followed by a lyrical-comical Tranquillo...

...A wealthy peer, he lived, after an undistinguished career in diplomacy, as a rich dilettante, albeit a dilettante with much more talent than usual, especially in music...

...Pleasant stuff, nicely played on both abovementioned discs...

...Next, the Valse caprice, with its endearingly poignant, almost Ravelian quality...

...When a man complained that someone had kicked his wife, "And in public too...

...Berners had someone build a so-called "folly" on his property—a nonfunctional tower in the middle of nowhere—with a sign reading that persons wishing to commit suicide jumping from it will do so at their own risk...

...The entire composition is available onASdisc 5003...

...As about Strauss, he was to learn otherwise...

...Berners also did nicely by an earlier short ballet Luna Park (1930), heard on the same CD...

...the Bernerspart, slightly expanded, on Marco Polo 223711...

...Wells, Aldous Huxley, Max Beerbohm, Isaiah Berlin, the Sitwells, the Mitfords, Siegfried Sassoon, Peter Quennell, David Cecil, Cecil Beaton, and John and Penelope Betjeman, whose horse, Moti, was photographed having tea at the guests' table...

...His political savvy is reflected in his remark that a threatened war between the Turks and the Greeks "would do them both good...

...Though Gerald inherited an oversized beak from his mother, she also supported him financially...

...Gerald did not last the full course at Eton, not because it had, as he claimed, set him back several years, but because Julia did not approve of crushes he had formed on some dashing schoolmates...

...In the Grove Dictionary, Ronald Crichton calls Wedding Bouquet a minor masterpiece...

...Les Sirènes (1946)—about strange goings-on on a French beach—but in both cases Ashton's dances and Beaton's decor were thought to have lost touch with the times...

...He went to Europe instead, to learn languages and prepare himself for a diplomatic career...

...He especially fancied Wagner, whom he later outgrew, and Richard Strauss...

...Nonetheless, Marco Polo 223780, which also contains music from Berners' only opera, arranged by Lambert, makes for lighthearted listening...

...Suffice it to say that the eight CDs partly or wholly dedicated to his compositions pretty much cover his output...

...the second is a touching dirge of a child for his dead pet, heard tweeting in the background...

...Here were statues bedecked with funny masks Berners himself often wore ("I get very bored with my own face"), funny signs (e.g., "Trespassers will be prosecuted, dogs shot, cats whipped"), and a truffle-finding pig (though there were no truffles in England...

...To their wife...

...Then the story pauses for a scene in a newspaper office and another in The Frozen Wood...

...That, too, was the effect much of his music aimed at...

...It was choreographed by Balanchine for one of the popular C.B...

...He created the atmosphere of a toyshop where the toys might spring to life and dance tarantellas or something pop out of a cushion...

...The CD (Marco Polo 223716) does Wedding Bouquet justice, although the words are not sung clearly enough and there is no text...

...For the 1939 Cupidand Psyche, choreographed by Ashton and based on Apuleius' The Golden Ass, the music falls off slightly...

...Gerald makes it sound bouncy, almost saucy...

...They are shipwrecked...

...Though composite, it is nicely blended by Casella's orchestration...

...The first of these ballets, The Triumph of Neptune, was commissioned by Diaghilev for his 1928 London season...

...In France and Germany he lived in pensions, frequented museums, took music lessons, and, when he could afford them, bought scores...

...It was his Futurist period, when his music was more daring than later...

...In Act 2, Tom's wife does a polka with a dandy, but as they are about to embrace romantically, a giant hand with a knife appears—the sailor's spirit...

...Writing or painting would be bad enough, but music she especially deplored...

...Most deemed six an inadequate number...

...Berners' parents, Hugh and the five years older, rather plain Julia, were unhappily enough married for Gerald, their only child, to record the lack of affection between them: "I thought at first that it was the normal relationship betweenhusbands and wives...

...Tom becomes a fairy prince and marries Neptune's daughter...

...Gerald had to put up with having Robert's first wife and baby live at Faringdon...

...He named one of his many birds John Knox, and taught it to turn somersaults...

...Relief from boredom came through occasional visits from English theater companies: One production was billed in Turkish as Lady Windermere's Fly-Whisk...

...Famous, too, was the clavichord Berners kept at the back of his chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce, its interior stenciled with butterflies...

...Transferred to Rome, he had a much better time, serving under the enlightened ambassador Sir Renell Rodd, a former friend of Wilde's...

...Having bought the Salome score, he thought Strauss was really going mad, and preferred "some lovely things by Debussy...

...The composer-conductor Constant Lambert became acollaboratorand friend, as did the future Sir William Walton, whom Berners subsidized for a long time, and who dedicated Belshazzar's Feast to him...

...His self-portraits contain some of his best writing, but are factually unreliable...

...By 1909 he had managed to fail the diplomatic service exams twice, and was taking music lessons in London from the future Sir Donald Tovey...

...Thus the frolicsome Le Poisson d'or (1914), headed by Gerald with a verse pastiche of a Jules Renard animal poem set by Maurice Ravel: A lonely goldfish yearns for a shining mate, but gets only a breadcrumb tossed into his aquarium...

...Still, one doubts whether mere friendship with Igor Stravinsky would have been enough to prompt the Russian's saying "more than once," as Amory writes, "that Gerald was the most interesting British composer of the 20th century...

...About one of Berners' novels, Stravinsky wrote the author, "la lecture de votre 'The Camell me ravit' (the reading of The Camel enchants me...

...Nevertheless, the parents had their uses...

...It used pieces by himself, Berners, Gian Francesco Malipiero and Béla Bartók...

...Dogs at Faringdon wore necklaces, and Berners painted the pigeons exotic colors, sometimes to match the dyed items on the dinner menu...

...ThemainproblemwithBemers' music is that there is so little of it...

...The voice writing is accompanied by grunts from the piano, and the singer is instructed to sound schnauzend (snorting...

...Of his score Berners said, "You will find a little of everything in it from Tchaikovsky to Léo Delibes...

...In the novel Far from the Madding War, he portrayed himself as the bald Lord FitzCricket, who, when annoyed, "looked like a diabolical egg...

...He evolved an early love of birds, fancying himself to have been one in a previous incarnation...

...Overhearing someone play Chopin's "Fantaisie Impromptu" through a half-opened door left Gerald wholly entranced...

...EVENTUALLY, Berners started writing autobiographies and short novels...

...The Trois Morceaux (1918) is Gerald's first orchestral work, though it exists also in solo piano and piano duet versions...

...This reveals the composer in full control of the orchestral palette as he parodies Western versions of Chinese music in Chinoiserie, does a rather wistful, almost ghostly version of a Viennese waltz in Valse sentimentale (shades of Ravel...

...The Sleeping Beaut)· was the model, with Lambert and Walton advising Berners...

...The English have produced some of the world's best eccentrics, and none better than Lord Berners, whether or not the last...

...Gerald in turn, once assured a lady complaining that people were saying she wasn't fit to live with pigs, that he stuck up for her by insisting she was fit to live with pigs...

...He had two art exhibitions that promptly sold out, "which shows," commented Waugh, "what a good thing it is to be a baron...

...The third, "Weihnachtslied" (Christmas Song), deftly imitates a German Christmas carol and presages Gerald's lifelong skill as a pasticheur...

...Gerald fell in love with young Robert Heber Percy, a wild youth from a good family...

...The music is exquisite throughout: comical, touching, zestful, nostalgic, and exuberant in canny alternation...

...but he had little interest in either foreign politics or local customs...

...The two-piano version is stylishly performed by Peter Lawson and Alan MacLean on English Music for Piano Duet (Troy 142), which includes Fantasie espagnole and Valses bourgeoises, along with music by other composers...

...At the 11th hour, Lydia Sokolova, dancing the Goddess, complained to Diaghilev of not having a solo...

...In Rome, Gerald hobnobbed with celebrities: the composers Stravinsky and Alfredo Casella, the Futurist painter Giacomo Balla, Diaghilev, the novelist Ronald Firbank, and various aristocrats...

...It all lasts just eight minutes, but Eugene Goosens, the distinguished conductor-composer who introduced it in Manchester, was right to claim for it "an honored place in the repertoire of every important orchestral society in the Kingdom...

...After only one orchestral rehearsal, Sokolova dancedthe Hornpipe flawlessly...

...According to him, they slept together only when he came home drunk from one of his escapades (he was grudgingly allowed to have lovers) and accidentally flopped into the Lord's bed...

...the third gallops along joyously in the nephew's happy expectation of an inheritance...

...a sort of missionary of the arts...

...Futuristic, too, is the minuscule Dispute Between the Butterfly and the Toad (1914), whose cover Gerald aptly illustrated...

...It isn't cricket," Hugh allowed how "It sounds more like football...

...The curtain calls were a mess, but the audience loved the story, the toyshop décor, and the music: The Triumph of Neptune was a triumph for all concerned...

...Inexperienced, he wrote that he "imagined homosexuality was a form of vice that was confined to public schools and only very rarely practiced by adults and then only by foreigners...

...But Praise to the Lord...

...Berners went on composing...

...Reaching 60, he said sex was over for him, "and a good thing, nothing but a nuisance," but as Amory comments, "it is not clear that there was very much before...