On a May evening in 1916, the young Cecil Gray—already Philip Heseltine's boon companion and to become his first biographer—attended a performance of Berlioz's Roméo et Juliette, Beecham conducting, at Queen's Hall. "On taking a seat in the gallery, I found myself sitting next to a person who attracted my attention in a way that I had never experienced before. Immaculately clad in a suit of unusual cut, with delicately moulded Latin features, dark hair and eyes, a complexion with the unearthly pallor of old ivory, and a sardonically twisted mouth, he seemed the very embodiment and reincarnation of some figure from the 1830's, of the period in which Berlioz lived... or you might say he was like an apparition from out the pages of E.T.A. Hoffmann—inhuman almost, giving forth effortlessly, unconsciously, an hypnotic dæmonic power." Sculptor Jacob Epstein introduced Gray and Heseltine to Bernard van Dieren (1887-1936) a few days on as the mysterious stranger of the Roméo et Juliette concert. The following day they visited van Dieren, who gave them a taste of his music. "The few fragments of his works which he was able to play—for they were exceedingly difficult, and he was the world's worst pianist—were enough to convince me that that I was confronted by one of the most significant musicians of the age." It was an opinion shared by Heseltine, who forthwith adopted van Dieren as his mentor and master. Though not published until 1925, Levana, for voice and string quartet to words by de Quincey ("These are the sorrows..."), is representative of van Dieren's work at that moment: a diffident, distracted manner in which a contrapuntally knotted accompaniment seems at odds with the vocal line, glossing it with hesitations and ruminations akin to the late prose of Henry James. What van Dieren taught, however, was straightforward and salutary—"When separate parts have melodic meaning, the individual player makes his strand vibrant with life, and the whole will glow with internal energy and, as the saying is, sound well"—though it required two years for the lessons of the master to "take." Predictably, Heseltine's initial efforts, the three Saudades composed over 1916-1917—Along the Stream (Li Po, translated by Cranmer-Byng); Take, oh take those lips away (Shakespeare); and Heracleitus (Callimachus, translated by Cory)—out-Herod Herod with their air of distraction, strangeness, and self-conscious Modernism. Saudades is Portuguese, expressing "the haunting sense of sadness and regret for days gone by...."

© Adrian Corleonis, Rovi

2.Take, O take those lips away

Warlock's first setting of Take, O Take Those Lips Away, composed in 1916, is, with The Water Lily from the following year, the clearest evidence of his thralldom to the music and personality of the charismatic Bernard van Dieren (1887-1936). His first biographer, Cecil Gray, simplifies matters when he writes, "Under the influence of van Dieren a sudden complete change took place. He learnt to purify and organize his harmonic texture by means of contrapuntal discipline, and the thick, muddy chords which characterized the early songs gave place to clear and vigorous part-writing." The change was far from sudden—the lessons of the master were assimilated over two years—and it is significant that through 1917 and part of 1918, Warlock's "Irish year," he was apart from his mentor. Gray is accurate when he remarks, "The music he had written up to this time consisted chiefly of songs in which the interest was almost exclusively blocks of chords for the piano through which a mournful and sluggish voice part drifted like the waning moon through a bank of clouds." That could be taken for a description of both Take, O Take and The Water Lily, in which dissonance, expanded tonality, elusive key centers, declamatory vocal parts, and a dissociation of vocal line from accompaniment parade a self-conscious Modernism. It might also describe the van Dieren songs that were the model for Warlock's—such things as Levana, for voice and string quartet, Diaphony, settings of three Shakespeare sonnets for tenor and orchestra—though for Warlock the recherché chords were still a harmonic adventurism where, for van Dieren, they were a form of distancing, what Brecht would call the Verfremdungseffekt, a concept that may be traced back to van Dieren's close friend, Busoni, who put the matter succinctly in the spoken Prologue to Doktor Faust where he refers to the stage, and by extension, art, as a "magic mirror" in which "...realism to ridicule is brought—What's only play compels your serious thought." With a second setting of Take, O Take in 1918 (a third setting is lost) we are hearing less a "purifying and organizing of harmonic texture" than the emergence of the sui generis Warlock genius in which sensuous immediacy—rather than the aristocratic distancing of van Dieren and Busoni—riotous high spirits, and, above all, the primacy of fetching melody are the order of the day. The two settings mark the distance from an apprentice's thralldom to self-aware mastery.

© Adrian Corleonis, Rovi