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Welcome to WarComposers.co.uk, a site dedicated to retelling the stories of the generation of classical

composers who fought in World War I.

We quite rightly hear a lot about the war poets of World War I, but less well known are the war

composers. Almost a whole generation of young composers volunteered to fight in the Great War, many

whom did not survive or were permanently affected by that conflict.

The site launched in August 2013 and at first is concentrating on individual biographies of the composers

who fought in World War 1.

What's new?

As of December 2014 the latest biographies on the site are about the English poet and composer Ivor

Gurney, the pianist and composer William Baines and the Belgian composer Georges Antoine . Also new are

downloadable examples of lesser-known compositions by war composers including George Jerrard

Wilkinson ("Suzette"), George Butterworth ("On Christmas Night") and Francis Purcell Warren ("Ave

Verum").

Elsewhere on the site are a selection of links to other sites or WWI-related initiatives that readers may be

interested in. A War Composers blog which will feature discussions, digressions and questions is also being

trialled.

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Home

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ContactGeorges Antoine

(1890-1918)William Baines

(1899-1922)Arthur Bliss(1891-1975)

George Butterworth(1885-1916)

Cecil Coles

(1888-1918)

W Denis Browne

(18881915)

Ernest Farrar

(1885-1918)

Ivor Gurney

(1890-1937)

Fernand Halphen

(1872-1917)

Francis Maurice

Jephson(1886-1917)

Frederick Kelly

(1881-1916)

William B Manson

(1896-1916)

Composers

Click to view biographies, images and examples of their work.

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E.J. Moeran(1894-1950)

Rudi Stephan

(1887-1915)

Ralph Vaughan

Williams(1872-1958)

Francis Purcell

Warren(1895-1916)

George J. Wilkinson(1885-1916)

30/03/2015 War Composers - the music of World War I. A biography of Georges Antoine

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Georges Antoine

April 28, 1892 15 November 1918

Georges Antoine was a promising young Belgian composer and pianist, who lived

just long enough to see the Armistice, but then succumbed to an illness assumed to

have been caused by the damp conditions he had encountered fighting in the

Trenches in the first period of the conflict.

Born in Lige on April 28, 1892, he had a musical upbringing; his father Eugene was

choirmaster of Lige Cathedral and was in charge of the majority of local official

music-making. He died when Georges was fifteen and as the eldest child Georges

became the head of his family. By this age, George's talent had already been

recognised, with the composer having commenced his studies at the Royal

Conservatory of Lige aged 10.

His first opus, Sirens, of 1910 was for double chorus for mixed voices followed by Deux Melodies, a Violin

Sonata in A flat, a lost piano concerto plus a handful of songs "In an old style" in the following two years.

As a Belgian, he was involved in the conflict from the outbreak of hostilities in Summer 1914. At the time,

it was widely assumed that the conflict would be over after a few weeks and he wrote to a friend

"nothing in the world would hold me back: Id need a gun, a kitbag and, above all, some bullets...it could

not be said of me that someone who chooses to sing the praises of his country would be capable of not

defending it. This bravado played down the fact that he suffered from chronic asthma.

He was soon involved in many of the early battles on Belgian territory including the seige of Malines and

the defence of Antwerp.

After the Battle of Yser in October 1914, the freezing winter that followed led to Georges catching a

damp-related fever in the trenches, which in the early days of the war were largely improvised with poor

drainage. After this he was hospitalised and after multiple recurrences he was honourably discharged from

the Army.

He settled in Saint-Malo, France giving lessons and concerts throughout 1915-1916 and completed his

Sonata, and songs by poets such as Baudelaire, Corbiere, Klingsor, Samain and Verlaine, gaining maturity in

the period 1917-1918 with works for full orchestra.

In the summer of 1918 as the Allies pushed to win the war, George again rejoined the Belgian army, where

as a librarian to the campaign army he witnessed the liberation of Bruges. However, his return to the army

was ill-advised and he suffered a recurrence of the fever. Doctors diagnosed a serious pulmonary disease.

A telegram to his mother noted that "On November 13...George became aware of his situation but as he

had already suffered so much during the war he did not believe in the seriousness of his illness. In the

evening, about seven o'clock, he died quietly, without agony, speaking of his next return to Lige, his

mother and the Prix de Rome..."

The well-received premiere of his Trio took place a few days later in Amsterdam, with the performers

unaware of its composer's fate.

Bibliography

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This biography is largely derived from an article by Philippe Gilson Librarian of Lige Royal Conservatory of Music, and the CD

notes written by Christophe Pirenne (tr. Celia Skrine) for the only major release of his works; Georges Antoine, Quatuor et sonate

(Oxalys, 2014).

Public domain compositions by Georges Antoine can be viewed at the IMSLP website

30/03/2015 War Composers - the music of World War I. A biography of William Baines

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William Baines

26 March 1899 - 6 November 1922

William Baines is likely to be the youngest of the war composers featured on this

site, and for good reason. He had only just turned 18 in 1918 when he was called up

and was undergoing military training at Blandford Camp in Dorset.

Never a particularly strong child, he had already been assessed three times for his

suitability before it was decided he was fit enough to take on a role as a batman

(personal servant) for an officer in the RAF which he took up on 4 October. It was

the first time he had left his native Yorkshire.

Unfortunately, conditions at the camp were said to be the worst in the country and

the flu epidemic that was spreading across Europe had apparently already broken out at the camp. Within

two weeks he had succumbed to septic poisoning and was hospitalised. By the time he had recovered, the

war was over, and he was demobilized on 24 January 1919 having spent the previous months recuperating.

However, the illness had damaged his already weak health.

Born in Horbury near Wakefield, Yorkshire, he came from a musical family. His father was a cinema pianist

and organist at a Primitive Methodist Chapel. Encouraged by his parents, Baines began piano lessons at a

young age and later had formal lessons at the Yorkshire Training College of Music in Leeds, although his

later compositional style was largely self-taught.

In 1913 the family moved to Cleckheaton and whilst there Baines was able to attend the concerts of the

Bradford Permanent Orchestral Society and acquainted himself with the basic orchestral repertoire. The

family moved to York in 1917 where, aged 18, Baines became a professional musician and gave his first

public piano recital at which a number of his original compositions were heard.

Following his discharge from the military, aware of his precarious existence, Baines entered an

extraordinary period of composition, and by 1922 he had completed roughly 150 works, mostly piano solos,

a high number of which gained publication. He also completed a Symphony in C Minor (first performed in

1991), a Poem for piano and orchestra and a number of chamber works.

Many of his piano works are influenced by the landscape of his home county of Yorkshire. Several were

composed at Nun Appleton House (of Andrew Marvell fame) whose owner Mrs Milner became a patron to

the young composer.

His piano minatures often have descriptive titles; perhaps his best known works are are "Goodnight to

Flamboro'" and "The Lone Wreck" comprising the collection Tides, named after Flamborough Head, the

coastal promontory on the Yorkshire coast. His Seven Preludes from 1919 are amongst his finest

compositions, displaying a virtuosic approach to the instrument. He continued to compose and give

recitals, although his only major recital outside of Yorkshire was in Bournemouth at the invitation of the

conductor Sir Dan Godfrey in 1921.

Baines' health had been steadily deteriorating since his illness in 1918. He died of tuberculosis aged 23.

Robert Weedon, December 2014

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Bibliography

This biography incorporates material I posted in 2011 on Wikipedia under the GDFL licence. The current article can be viewed

here.

John French, "How Quiet and Calm it Will be at Flamboro' today." - A visit to Flamborough Head with William Baines, MusicWeb

International

William Baines Collection William Baines Collection at the British Library website.

William Baines Googlesite

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William Denis Browne

3 November 1888 4 June 1915

William Denis Browne's name will forever be associated with the Apollonian figure

of Rupert Brooke. It was Denis Browne who accompanied Brooke on the ill-fated

WWI expedition to the Dardanelles in February 1915 and it is his poetic description

of Brookes death and burial that has to a certain extent mythologised the poet.

Denis Browne's death in battle at Gallipoli six weeks later was somewhat less

picturesque. Having seen the public reaction to Brooke's death, Denis Brown's

musical executors were concerned that as the first composer to die in the war he

would be similarly sentimentalised. As a result of this, his legacy was hidden from

view until the war was over, and before then on the composer's own instructions

only a handful of works were retained.

Although because of their close friendship it is easy to only associate Browne with Rupert Brooke, this is a

disservice, for he was the composer of To Gratiana Dancing and Singing, a setting of a poem by Richard

Lovelace often considered the high point of English song of this period.

None of his surviving songs are alike, and all are attractive in their own ways, displaying a range of talents

in word setting and harmonic inventiveness - from the playful yet deceptive simplicity of 'Diaphenia' to

the ghostly, impressionistic 'Arabia', his last complete work dating from 1914. He also left some choral

works of varying quality and attractive lighter music for smaller orchestras, including a one act ballet, The

Comic Spirit, which was performed in 1914 but is now partially lost.

Having surveyed his surviving works (and there are few), one is inclined to say that he was perhaps the

most forward-looking of the War Composers, and whereas many of his fellow pre-war composers were

writing in the Edwardian, Germanic style taught at the RCM, Denis Browne's finest songs still feel fresh,

inventive, and above all different. They feature unexpected and pleasing harmonies, lyrical word setting

and interesting changes of meter that display influence more from the impressionist music of France,

Russian ballets and the dances of the English Renaissance than the German High Romantic music in vogue at

the time.

Resources

Read about William Denis Browne's life

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Arthur Bliss

2 August 1891 27 March 1975

Although the war had been over for more than ten years, I was still troubled by frequent nightmares; they

all took the same form. I was still there in the trenches with a few men; we knew the armistice had been

signed, but we had been forgotten; so had a section of the Germans opposite. It was as though we were

both doomed to fight on till extinction. I used to wake with horror.

So wrote Sir Arthur Bliss in his autobiography As I Remember (1970, p.96)

explaining the motivations behind composing his choral symphony Morning Heroes

of 1930, a work of great passion and solemnity, but also one which addresses the

impetus that he and his generation felt to fight in World War I.

Bliss served with distinction in that conflict; although physically he survived

relatively unscathed, his autobiography details some horrific experiences. He was

injured at the Somme in 1916 and gassed at Cambrai 1918. He also lost a brother,

Kennard, and many friends and fellow officers. Bliss's war as remembered in his

diaries and letters is not a glamorous one (as few true accounts are), but gives a

frank impression of a young man comprehending the unrelenting difficulties with a weary logic and

resillience.

In spite of, or perhaps because of the war, Bliss became an innovator in his post-war compositions, which

initially led to him apparently being considered as something of an enfant terrible to conservative

concert-goers. Straight after being demobbed in 1919, he started a-fresh, surpressing the majority of his

pre-war work (with the exception of his Pastoral for clarinet and piano of 1916, possibly due to its

connection with Kennard, who was a talented clarinetist).

As Hugh Ottaway notes, Arthur's development as a composer had been delayed by four years, and by the

time the war was over he was nearer 30, but perhaps as a result the 1920s were an extraordinary prolific

one for the composer. Andrew Burn notes:

His abhorrence of time-wasting was a further result of his war years. He knew how fortunate he was to

have survived, and was determined not to lose a moment's opportunityas witnessed by contemporary

descriptions of him immediately after the war which portray a forthright young man bursting with energy

and purpose. (ODNB)

Bliss established himself writing unusual works for chamber ensembles such as Madame Noy (1918), a comic

"witchery song" which he considered his opus 1, and Rout (1920), which features a female solo line made

up of nonsense syllables. Even his more traditionally-scored Colour Symphony for the Three Choirs Festival

in 1922 was considered "disconcertingly modern" by Elgar, despite Bliss's evident desire for the older

composer's approval; Bliss had carried a pocket score of the Cockaigne Overture with "good luck"

inscribed by Elgar with him to the Front.

Although Bliss was briefly schooled in composition at the RCM prior to the war, the style of music he

produced afterwards continued the ideals he learnt at Cambridge from Edward Dent, and he looked as

much to French and Russian composers (especially Stravinsky) as German Romantic music for inspiration.

Perhaps the closest in style pre-war was his fellow Rugby School and Cambridge attendee, William Denis

Browne, who was killed in action in 1915. Given Bliss's later penchant for staged dance music, perhaps the

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comparison is a pertinent one.

Arthur Bliss became widely respected, especially as a composer of orchestral works; after a substantial

revision of the Colour Symphony, his Morning Heroes (essentially a second symphony), with its mixture of

Classical texts and war poetry can be seen as a prototype of what Benjamin Britten achieved with his

much later War Requiem (1960).

Bliss's three ballet scores for Sadler's Wells Checkmate (1937), Miracle in the Gorbals (1944) and Adam

Zero (1946) are also particularly fine. Although his music became less fashionable and arguably more tonally

conservative after World War II, he took over the mantle of Ralph Vaughan Williams as a sort-of father

figure of British music, being knighted and becoming Master of the Queen's Music, a post he held with

distinction from 1953 to his death in 1975.

Amongst the war composers, Bliss is important, not only as a figure spanning 20th century British music, but

one that offers a yardstick for many of the composers who died in that conflict. Bliss freely admitted that

few of his pre-WW1 compositions were of any quality (indeed, he later withdrew almost all of them), and

his post-war success and standing gives hints as to what some of the other war composers may have

become.

Robert Weedon, March 2014

Bibliography

Sir Arthur Bliss can be heard in a 1972 edition of Desert Island Discs

Bliss, Sir Arthur, As I Remember (London: Thames Publishing, 1989).

Bliss, Sir Arthur, Bliss on Music, ed. Gregory Roscow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).

Burn, Andrew, Arthur Bliss: From Rebel to Romantic, Musical Times, Vol. 132, No. 1782, (August 1991), 383-386.

Burn, Andrew, Bliss, Sir Arthur Edward Drummond (18911975), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2004)

Burn, Andrew, "'Now, Trumpeter for Thy Close': The Symphony Morning Heroes: Bliss's Requiem for His Brother" Musical Times,

Vol. 126, No. 1713 (Nov., 1985), pp. 666-668

Craggs, Stewart R., Arthur Bliss: A Source Book (Aldershot: Scholar Press, 1996).

Evans, Edwin, Arthur Bliss (concluded), Musical Times, Vol. 64, No. 960, (Feb. 1, 1923), 95-99.

Ottaway, Hugh, CD notes for Morning Heroes, EMI5 05909 2 (1983)

Palmer, Christopher, Aspect of Bliss Musical Times, Vol. 112, No. 1542 (August 1971), 743-745.

Robertson, Alec, Arthur Bliss in British Music of Our Time, ed. A.L. Bacharach (London: Penguin Books, 1951).

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George Butterworth

12 July 1885 - 5 August 1916

George Butterworth is probably the best-known of the war composers, held up as emblematic of the lost

talent of his generation. A keen folk dancer and cricketer, Butterworth and his music seem the very model

of a particular type of Englishman.

Relentlessly self critical, Butterworth regrettably destroyed the majority of his

early compositions in 1915 before leaving for the Front, leaving four completed

orchestral works, plus a tantalising fragment of a longer orchestral fantasia, his

eleven song settings of A.E. Housman, a still unrecorded string quartet and a

handful of other songs and choral pieces, all dating from the period 1910-14.

Several of his works remain in the repertoire. The justly famous orchestral

pastorale The Banks of Green Willow of 1913 is a staple of the English music

canon. With genuine mass appeal, a century after its premiere the public voted

it 80th in the Classic FM Hall of Fame.

Gerald Finzi wrote in 1922 that Butterworths music 'sums up our countryside as very little else has ever

done'. Indeed the silver thread of the first English folksong revival is woven throughout his music, the

clarity of his melodies and folksong modality still sounding fresh to the ear; no composer since has made a

solo clarinet seem so redolent of an Arcadian English summer of oversaturated green and golden sunlight.

Later works such as his rhapsody A Shropshire Lad display a darker, more uncertain tone and the fragments

of an unfinished fantasy for orchestra give hints that this is the direction his music would have taken.

Resources

Read about George Butterworth's life

George Butterworth's carol arrangement 'On Christmas Night'

30/03/2015 War Composers - the music of World War I. A biography of Cecil Coles

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The first page of Cecil Coles' 'Cortege', circa 1918

Cecil Coles

7 October 1888 26 April 1918

At Christmas 1917, Gustav Holst received a manuscript

score splashed with bloodstains and muddy

watermarks. This was the third movement, Cortege, of an intended four movement suite Behind the

Lines written by a young Scottish composer whom Holst had taken under his wing while he was a tutor at

Morley College in London.

By the following April, its composer Cecil F G Coles was dead, wounded while attempting to rescue

casualties from a wood near the Somme on 26th April 1918.

Other than a prominent dedication on Holsts Ode to Death, Cecil Coles remained virtually unknown until

2002. His revival that year was due to the intervention of his daughter Catherine Coles whose research

into her father, about whom she knew very little until the last years of her life, brought to light 40 piano,

vocal and orchestral pieces stored in a cardboard box at George Watson school in Edinburgh.

Consequently, there is very little written about him, with the majority of biographies, as with this one,

derived from the research of Catherine Coles, his biographer John Purser, the conductor Martyn Brabbins

and the musicologist Professor Jeremy Dibble in their work to revive his orchestral works for release on a

CD on the Hyperion label in 2002. He has since gained some exposure after being featured at the BBC

Proms in 2003 and Cortege was used as the title theme to the Channel 4 documentary series The First

World War.

Like many of the composers featured on this site, Coles is very much a what if? whose talent was not

given the chance to mature, but listening to those works now, it seems surprising that his music languished

in obscurity for so long. Some pieces such as his Four Settings of Poems by Verlaine have an attractive

light operatic quality, evidence of his time working in the Stuttgart opera, others such as Fra Giacomo,

regarded as his masterpiece, are more serious in tone and heavily influenced by the Late Romantic music

of Germany. However, it is probably 'Cortege', a funeral elegy written in the midst of the war by a

composer who was to die in that conflict that is the most evocative of his works.

Resources

Read about Cecil Coles' life and legacy

30/03/2015 War Composers - the music of World War I. A biography of Frederick Kelly

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Frederick Septimus Kelly

29 May 1881 13 November 1916

Frederick Septimus Kelly is one of the most enigmatic of the War Composers. An

Australian by birth, he was probably more famous in his day as a rower than a

composer; he won gold with the men's 'Eight' in the 1908 London Olympics and was

said to have a grace and ability on the water that no other oarsman of his

generation could match.

A talented pianist, he was carving an unusual dual career as a musician and

sportsman. The two sometimes overlapped, as heard in his raucous early cricket

song Eton and Winchester. In terms of his compositions, he is largely agreed to

have been a late starter in terms of gaining a unique voice; reviews of his

published works usually state that they are competent but unremarkable, although recordings of his works

remain scarce and some works are still in manuscript in Australia.

In common with many of the War Composers his music was neglected during the 20th century, although a

large project by the National Library of Australia in 2004 led to a rediscovery of his work including a very

complete set of personal diaries from 1907-1915 which reveal his friendships and connections to the great

and good of the day.

Today he is best remembered as one of the participants in the ill-fated Hood Battalion which set sail on

the Grantully Castle with an extraordinary band of noteworthy young men including the poet Rupert

Brooke and the composer William Denis Browne amongst others. Unusually, like Cecil Coles, Kelly

continued to compose music even after enlisting, for example writing an Elegy for strings and harp to

commemorate Brookes burial on the Isle of Skyros early in the voyage. That battalion ended up at

Gallipoli where he won a DSC in January 1916 during the Gallipoli evacuation. He was promoted to

lieutenant-commander, but posted to the Somme where a bullet claimed his life in November of that year.

Resources

Read about Frederick Kelly's life

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Frank Maurice Jephson

1886 to 20 April 1917

Frank Maurice Jephson (1886 to 20 April 1917), referred to as F. Maurice Jephson on his compositions, was

an organist and composer, whose principal published output mainly consists of piano music, with some

music for organs and choirs.

Regrettably, there is little biographical detail available, but an obituary was published in the Musical Times

in 1917 which gives us a few snippets of his life.

Born in Derby to Mr T and Mrs E Jephson, he gained the Associate Diploma of the Royal College of

Organists (ARCO) and by age 16 he was assistant organist at Westbourne Park Church in Derby, later moving

to London to becoming organist of the Presbyterian Church, Richmond in 1904. It is unclear if he was

himself a Presbyterian. He was married and lived at an address near Kew Gardens, London.

He was also accompanist of the Arundel Male-Voice Choir, with various references to this role surviving in

the Musical Times of the 1910s. It was most likely for this ensemble that he composed a male voice setting

of John Donne "Send back my long stray'd eyes to me" (published 1930) and an arrangement for men's

voices and orchestra of "The Arethusa" (1916, credited on the score to William Shield, although now

considered to by an earlier anonymous composer) which is still available in the Novello back catalogue.

Probably the most interesting reference in his obituary is mention of his day job; "For some time he was

associated in business with Dr. Charles Vincent, and recently he held a responsible position in the

Orchestrelle Company."

The Orchestrelle Company (also known as the Aeolian Company) were a New York-based firm which sold

musical instruments, and were particularly famous for selling pianolas, self-playing pianos, which usually

took the form of an upright piano with an apparatus inside which played the keys from grid pattern on a

paper roll, here demonstrated on YouTube (not one of his compositions):

These were popular novelty items around the turn of the century, offering a "live" performance of piano

music inside the home of far superior quality to recordings then available on gramophones or phonograph

machines. In 1903 the Orchestrelle Company purchased the loss-making Grosvenor Gallery in New Bond

Street and renamed it the Aeolian Hall. This housed the firm's offices, showroom, and a concert hall, and

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one assumes that Frank worked at this place in some capacity, either as a salesman, demonstrator or

perhaps even as a transcriber/arranger of music for the piano rolls.

The company continued until well into the 1920s when pianolas went out of fashion, with the Hall

becoming a popular Central London venue. During the Second World War the hall (which still exists today)

was taken over by the BBC and used as a regular venue for broadcasting concerts and recitals up until 1975.

Frank's compositional output seems to date largely from the period 1911-1913, possibly as a result of his

acquaintance with Dr Vincent, who also published pieces for piano and organ, although his widow

evidently continued to submit his pieces for publication well into the 1920s and 1930s - his John Donne

setting for choir was only published in 1930.

A recording of his organ work "Gaudeamus" played by Dr James Garratt of Manchester University has

recently been made available on YouTube:

Midi files of two of his organ works are also available at the Bardic Music website, the sound of which

suggests his music for his own instrument was in a typically late Victorian/Edwardian idiom. Other than the

more sober-sounding organ works, the titles of his works suggest his piano music was in a ligher, popular

vein; perhaps even suitable for the instruments he sold.

Frank joined the 1st/5th Bn. London Regiment (London Rifle Brigade) and held the rank of Rifleman. He

died of wounds sustained in action, possibly at the Battle of Arras, in a base hospital at Etaples on 20th

April 1917 and was buried at Etaples Military Cemetery, Nord-Pas-de-Calais.

Bibliography

I regret that I have been unable to source a photograph of Frank Maurice Jephson for this article.

Obituary: Frank Maurice Jephson in The Musical Times, Vol. 58, No. 892 (Jun. 1, 1917), pp. 263-264

Review: "The Arethusa by W. Shield; Frank M. Jephson" in The Musical Times, Vol. 57, No. 877 (Mar. 1, 1916), p. 151

Rifleman F.M. Jephson, Find a Grave

Rifleman F.M. Jephson, Roll of Honour

List of catalogued works

Below is a list of works held by the British Library, which (except where noted) are for piano and were published by the London

firm Joseph Williams.

Arabesque (1913)

Autumn "romance for piano" (1912)

Brownies: two short pieces for the piano (1924)

A Country Dance/A Woodland Dance (1927)

Danse Humoresque (1913)

"Dear golden Days" a song with words by P. J. O'Reilly (London: Novello & Co, 1918)

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Five Pieces for Piano (1911)

Gaudeamus, for organ (London: The Organ Loft, 1911)

Hunting Song (1911)

Idyll (1912)

Impromptu (1911),

Marionettes "A Characteristic Sketch for the Piano" (1912)

Melody (1911)

"My Scotch Lassie" song with words by F. G. Bowles (J. Williams, 1914)

On the Hill-side (1917)

Postlude in C minor for Organ (reprinted by Bardic Music, 2002)

"Send back my long stray'd eyes to me" for male voice choir (TTBB) words by John Donne (Joseph Williams, c1930.)

Six Easy Pieces (On the Hillside, The Tin Soldier, Minuet, The Irish Piper, A Country Dance, Harlequin) (1914)

Two Little Waltzes (Joseph Williams, c1924)

Waltz in C (1911)

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Willie B Manson

1 July 1896 - 1 July 1916

William Braithwaite Manson (1 July 1886 to 1 July 1916), mostly referred to as

Willie B Manson, was a promising composition student at the Royal Academy of

Music. Born at Dunedin on the south island of New Zealand, he became a chorister

at the Chapel Royal at St James Palace, London from at least 1906; several

photographs of the young Willie in various outlandish ceremonial robes exist in the

RAM archive.

By 1912 he had joined the Royal Academy of Music where he studied composition

under Harry Farjeon. Manson was evidently a high achiever. His Musical Times

obituary notes:

After only four terms he was appointed sub-professor of year's work he gained three

silver medals, the Oliveria Prescott prize, and the Charles Lucas silver medal for composition, which is

looked upon as the 'blue riband' of the Academy, and later he won the Battison Haynes prize for

composition.

Regrettably, the available published obituaries of Manson tell us nothing of his character, but simply note

this long list of prizes, although Harry Farjeon's tribute to him was published in the RAM Club magazine in

1916.

He joined the London Scottish Regiment as a private in January 1916 and served on the Western Front

from May. He was killed on his birthday in July that year, the first day of the Battle of the Somme.

A Pianoforte Trio is mentioned as having been performed at an RAM concert in his memory in November

1916, but if at all he is known for his two published song collections Songs of Love and Youth which sets

the poems Love! What wilt thou with this heart of mine? and Hence, Away Begone by Henry

Wadsworth Longfellow and A Birthday by Christine Rossetti and Three Poems from A Shropshire Lad;

Think no more, lad, When I came last to Ludlow and Loveliest of Trees. Both were published

posthumously in 1919 and 1920 respectively.

His composition tutor Harry Farjeon dedicated his Piano Sonata to his memory. His parents gave money to

the RAM to create a new music ensemble, and the Manson Ensemble continues to this day. The Academy's

Manson music recording studio is also named in his honour.

Bibliography

Obituary: Willie B. Manson in The Musical Times, Vol. 57, No. 883 (Sep. 1, 1916), p. 410

Obituary: Willie Braithwaite Manson, The Musical Times, Vol. 58, No. 888 (Feb. 1, 1917), pp. 68-69

A collection of photographs and memorabilia related to the composer are viewable on the RAM museum website.

Discography

Two of his Songs of Love and Youth performed by Walter Widdop are available as very old 78 recording transfers on the

Symposium CD An Anthology of Song, Vol. 2: 1903-1935 (SYMP1357)

30/03/2015 War Composers - the music of World War I. Ernest John Moeran's war

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Ernest John Moeran

31 December 1894 1 December 1950

Ernest John "Jack" Moeran, composer and madrigalist, survived the First World

War, but having lived through the Second, it is often said that the first claimed

him in 1950. While standing on the pier at Kenmare, County Kerry in a storm in

December 1950, he was observed to collapse into the water, and was found to

have suffered a brain haemorrhage. This is sometimes attributed to a head wound

he suffered over thirty years earlier.

Moeran was one of the finest post-WW1 British composers, the depth and lyricism

of his output perhaps placing him at odds with later trends in music, leaving his

music sadly underappreciated and underheard until relatively recently when a

number of new recordings have brought his works to greater attention.

Moeran's music has a timeless quality. While obviously of the 20th century, he took the sound of the

English folk music revival to its apex with works such as his Symphony in G Minor of 1938 and miniatures

such as Lonely Waters, while also displaying a great influence from the composers of the English

Renaissance through his choral works (his "madrigals") and orchestral pieces such as Whythorne's Shadow

and the Serenade in G. Leading a life which was in many ways troubled and marked by self-doubt, he

found solace in the county of his childhood and his adopted spiritial home in the far South of Ireland.

Characteristically, while Moeran's experience of WWI was largely unspoken during his life, subsequent

biographers view the war as indelibly colouring his work; his biographer Geoffrey Self views the

Symphony as his "war requiem", and one cannot fail to hear a certain desolation in that unsettling yet

deeply beautiful work, the passages of great lyricism frequently interrupted by drums and dissonant brass.

Resources

E.J. Moeran's war

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Rudi Stephan

29 July 1887 29 September 1915

Rudi Stephan was perhaps the most famous German composer killed in World War

1. His death at the Eastern Front in 1915 deprived Germany of the leading member

of the informal Jungdeutsch movement of proto-Modernist composers influenced

both by the late-Romantic music of Richard Strauss and the Impressionism of

Debussy, but also the more Modernist music being premiered in the pre-war period

by composers such as Alban Berg and Igor Stravinsky.

Born in the city of Worms, Rhineland in 1887, his musical studies were encouraged

by his parents; he was taught music from an early age and his father, a respected

lawyer, sat on the boards of several arts festivals, meaning that the young Rudi was

exposed to a wide range of cultural experiences in his youth.

In 1905 Rudi persuaded his parents to allow him to study music at a conservatoire. He first attended the

Frankfurt Hochschule (1905), but left there in 1906 to study in Munich. Although taught by several

respected teachers, Juliane Brand suggests that he appeared to shun formal composition study and follow

his own instincts.

Early works tended to be song settings and works for chamber forces, but from 1908-9 onwards, his works

were conceived on a larger scale; there followed a one-act opera Vater und Sohn (Father and Son), a

ballad for tenor and orchestra called Liebeszauber (Lovespell) and the first of his pieces titled Musik fr

Orchester (1910). His father financed a public performance of his works in January 1911, hiring the Munich

Konzertverein orchestra. The performance was not said to have been a complete success, but brought his

name to a greater audience and focussed his mind.

Maturer works

Despite an apparent daliance in watercolour landscape painting in his youth, his later works for larger

ensembles especially were explicitly un-programmatic. His adherence to absolute music went as far as

writing a note on his Opus 1 explaining to his publisher that it should have "no poetic title, not the

designation tone poem, nothing".

His subsequent orchestral compositions have austere titles such as Music for Seven String Instruments and

Music for Orchestra. Somewhat confusingly, there are two surviving compositions called Musik fr

Orchester, usually distinguished by the date of performance; 1910 and 1912 respectively. Of these, the

second (below) is the better-known, and a piece that benefits from multiple listenings, which bring to the

fore the composer's skillful manipulation of the opening thematic material, for example.

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His greatest achievement is probably his two act opera Die ersten Menschen (The First Man), an

expressionist post-Wagnerian stage work based on an 'erotic mystery' by Otto Borngrber. Rudi had begun

work on the opera in 1911 and was preparing for a premiere performance in 1914 when the war prevented

the production. He apparently regarded the majority of his early works as training for it.

The work must have been considered decidedly controversial at the time; it casts the Biblical story of

Cain and Abel along Freudian lines; the role of Eve is apparently played as a "virtual nymphomaniac",

whose advances are shunned by Adam and the fratricide of Cain portrayed as oedipal jealousy. In its 1920

production, all four characters wore only simple bearskin costumes.

Rudi never saw his opera produced, however. In March 1915 he was called up for active service, and by

September of that year he had been posted to Tarnopol, Galicia on the Eastern Front (now part of

Ukraine). He was shot through the head by a Russian sniper two days after arriving at the front. He was 28.

Legacy

It is perhaps illustrative of the respect for the composer that a number of his compositions were

posthumously published, and his loss was said to be particularly felt in his home city; the Gymnasium

(grammar school) he attended in his youth was renamed in his honour.

His friend, the critic Karl Holl (1892-1972) edited and published the majority of Stephan's scores, also

writing a short monograph on the composer in 1920 which is the principal biographical source for many

details of Rudi's life. Stephan's opera Die ersten Menschen was given its premiere in Frankfurt in 1920.

Akin to several Allied composers killed in World War 1, there was a feeling that Germany had lost one of

its leading young composers. However, after the fall of the Weimar Republic and the political turmoil of

the 1920s and 30s, Stephan's works were neglected.

Regrettably, his legacy cannot be fully assessed. The majority of his manuscripts and fragments of works-

in-progress were destroyed in Allied bombing of Worms City Archive in 1945.

Bibliography

Robert Blackburn, "Rudi Stephan: An Unfulfilled Talent?" in The Musical Times, Vol. 128, No. 1733 (Jul., 1987), pp. 375-378

Juliane Brand. "Stephan, Rudi." Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press.

Christopher Hailey, Review of 'Musik fr...': Untersuchungen zum Werk Rudi Stephans by Hartwig Lehr, Music & Letters, Vol. 79,

No. 1 (Feb., 1998), pp. 135-137

Gordon Kerry, CD notes for Music for Orchestra, (Colchester: Chandos Records 2006), CHAN 5040.

The 1913 Schott publication of Music for Orchestra is available to view on the IMSLP website.

30/03/2015 War Composers - the music of World War I. A biography of George Jerrard Wilkinson

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George Jerrard Wilkinson

16 August 1885 - 1 July 1916

George Jerrard Wilkinson was a composer and folk dancer. A friend of George

Butterworth, Wilkinson was one of the main players in the foundation of the

English Folk Dance Society alongside Cecil Sharp and also a composer of art songs in

the English tradition.

He was born in Edgebaston, Birmingham in 1885. According to Georgina Boyes'

article about Wilkinson, his father was a member of the clergy at St. Johns

Church, Ladywood, Birmingham while his mother was the daughter of the Bishop

of Brisbane. He attended Uppingham School in Rutland and gained a scholarship to

Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge, where studies in music led him to form a

friendship with Cecil Sharp, and by age 19 he was already assisting Sharp in arranging country dance tunes.

It is likely some of the familiar published folk dance arrangements for piano or strings credited to Sharp

may have had input from Wilkinson. According to an article published in the English Folk Dance Society

News in 1924 by Mrs Helen Wilkinson (one of the dancers in the Kinora film on this site's Butterworth

article):

His arrangements of some of Mr. Sharps folk-songs with pianoforte and string accompaniments are probably

known to a good many readers. He was able to devote a good deal of his time to teaching folk-dancing, and

he inspired people in many places who still keep up the dancing to this day. His dancing was a lesson in

perfect finish and accuracy.

By the age of 25 in the April 1911 census he was boarding in Wandsworth, London, where his occupation

was listed as "teacher of music". This perhaps corresponds with his employment as a music teacher at the

Caius Mission House in Battersea, a educational college sponsored by the Cambridge College.

He became part of Sharp's folk dance demonstration side alongside fellow English folk dance enthusiasts

and was evidently instrumental in the founding of the English Folk Dance Society, serving on its first

executive committee. In this picture from 1911 we see left to right Douglas Kennedy, George Butterworth,

James Patterson, Perceval Lucas, A. Claud Wright and George Wilkinson.

As well as his work with the Caius Mission and English Folk Dance Society, he taught music at Northaw

Place School near Potters Bar, Hertfordshire between 1912-1914. Throught the dance team, he became

close to Helen Dorothy Kennedy, sister of Douglas Kennedy, one of the other dancers. Georgina Boyes

uncovered a story in her 2012 article about George (or "Wilkie" as his friends evidently knew him)

30/03/2015 War Composers - the music of World War I. A biography of George Jerrard Wilkinson

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purchasing a motorbike & sidecar and teaching Helen to ride it around Battersea Park, on one occasion

nearly ending in disaster when she had not been shown how to brake properly. The couple later toured

around the Midlands with the motorbike, but it is not thought they became engaged before the war broke

out.

George joined the Schools Battalion Artists Rifles in December 1914. He became a sergeant in the 16th

Middlesex Regiment which was a signalling battalion. There is a web posting of a unique scrapbook by a

member of the regiment which features a pencil sketch of the composer drawn while the battalion was

marching through France, presumably on its way to the Front.

Comparing it with the morris side photograph is undoubtedly the same man, and probably the last record

of him. Tasked with storming Hawthorn Redoubt on the 1st July 1916, the first day of the Battle of the

Somme, his battalion suffered heavy casualties. He was killed that day at Beaumont Hamel and is

commemorated on the Thiepval monument.

Works

In terms of original compositions, no works have been recorded but some were published, mostly in 1916,

which implies they were published posthumously.

Titles currently listed by the British Library are the Choric Song from Tennysons Lotos Eaters (1916) a

fairly substantial composition being scored for baritone solo, male chorus and orchestra, Four Songs about

Children for voice and piano (1916), Nine Songs and Duets (1913), which are settings of various Japanese

poems, and "Suzette" a song with words by Elizabeth B. Piercy (1916), the latter which Stephen Banfield

writes is 'worth reviving for its Edwardian charm' (Sensibility and English Song, 134).

A transcription of "Suzette" may be viewed here.

On the basis of the Choric Song he was evidently able to write for larger forces than just piano, although

the orchestral parts are presumably lost. Did he write any other music that was considered uncommercial

to publish and if so, where is it now?

Bibliography

Thank you to the staff of the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library and Anthony Whitaker of the Old Northavian Association Website

for their assistance with some details about George Wilkinson's life.

Banfield, Stephen, Sensibility and English Song (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985)

Breeze, Jo, "The Morris at War" in Roots, June 2014, No 372, pp. 40-41, 73.

Boyes, Georgina, Unsung Hero: George Jerrard Wilkinson A Beautiful Accurate Dancer in English Dance & Song Autumn 2012,

Vol. 74 Issue 3, p. 20

Karpeles, Maud, Cecil Sharp: his life and work (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967)

Wilkinson, Helen, "Early Days" in English Folk Dance Society News in May 1924, pp. 172-177 and May 1925, pp. 277-28.

30/03/2015 War Composers - the music of World War I. A biography of Francis Purcell Warren

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Francis Purcell Warren

29 May 1895 - circa 3 July 1916

Francis Purcell Warren died so young, aged 21, that any assessment of his abilities can only be made on the

basis of a very small number of early works and the esteem that his contemporaries held him in.

Life

F Purcell Warren (as his published works usually credit him) was born in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire on

May 29, 1895, the son of a local musician and conductor, Walter Warren. He was educated at Beech Lawn

School, Leamington, and West House School, Edgbaston. As a student, according to Thomas F. Dunhill he

had some works intended for use in Roman Catholic worship published while still at school; certainly his

Ave Verum and Benediction Service were in print by 1912.

In March, 1910, he obtained a scholarship to study violin at the Royal College of Music with a secondary

study of piano, although it appears that he later gravitated towards the viola, at which he showed a

particular talent.

While at the RCM, he became a firm friend of Herbert Howells and it is through Howells that his name is

mostly remembered. Warren was one of The Bs in Howells early orchestral work (Op.13) of

October/November 1914 which celebrated some of the composers close friends; Purcell Warren qualified

as a consequence of his inevitable nickname Bunny.

It appears that although Bunny was not officially a composition student, his friends managed to get a

piece he had completed, Five Short Pieces for Cello and Piano, performed in a college concert and

caught the ear of Sir Hubert Parry, who later reported favourably on his potential as a composer. The very

short pieces were subsequently published.

In September 1914, Bunny enlisted as a private in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, and went to France

in the following March. Shortly afterwards he returned to England and joined the 10th Battalion of the

South Lancashire Regiment. According to Hubert Parry, he endured bravely some very uncongenial

experiences in the earlier stages of training, which Parry does not expand on, but perhaps hints that he

was not ready for the trauma of fighting in the conflict.

In March 1916 Warren obtained a commission as a Second Lieutenant and was posted to France. He was

reported missing at Mons on July 3, 1916 during the Battle of the Somme. His body was not recovered, but

he is commemorated on the Thiepval Memorial.

Hubert Parry, in his Directors Address to the RCM of 24 September 1917 devoted a large section to

Warren's virtues:

I am afraid there is no longer any hope of young Purcell Warren being alive. He has not been heard of for

months. It is a peculiarly tragic case. He was one of the gentlest, and most refined and sensitive of boys,

and was of that type which attracted people's love. He was a very promising violinist, and had also began to

show characteristic qualities as a composer which were quite surprising, for there was a subtlety and a

dexterity about his compositions which made us look upon him as likely to make a personal mark. He

endured bravely some very uncongenial experiences in the earlier stages of training, and then he had to

face the barbarities, and one of humanity's tenderest possessions was ruthlessly destroyed.

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Works

With the exceptions of the early choral pieces Ave Verum and the Benediction Service of 1912, the

majority of Warren's musical output consists of chamber works for strings or piano.

These include the aforementioned Five Short Pieces for Violoncello first published in 1914, two

movements of which - Sunday Evening in Autumn and Cradle Song - have been recorded by Stephen

Hough and Steven Isserlis on the CD Childrens Cello published on the BIS label in 2006. The other

movements are titled 'An Absent One', 'Waltz' and 'So seems it in my deep regret'.

Works published before or soon after his death include a short Caprice Fantastique for solo piano and an

Adagio for violoncello and piano, the latter published in 1925. The Adagio was his last completed work

before leaving for the Front, and was planned as the slow movement of a Sonata, of which the first

movement also existed in manuscript as an incomplete sketch in the 1920s.

The only other significant work by Warren is a String Quartet in A minor of 1914, of which the final

movement, a pleasant set of Variations on an Original Theme for String Quartet has been published by the

Merton Music Project and is available on the IMSLP website.

Perhaps his greatest legacy was as a friend of Herbert Howells, who commemorated him in an achingly

mournful Elegy for Viola, String Quartet and Strings first performed in a Mons Memorial Concert in the

Royal Albert Hall in 1917. The composer Alan Ridout recounts in his memoirs that:

There is no doubt in my mind that he [Howells] loved Francis Purcell Warren. He had a snapshot of him on

his mantelpiece, standing together with Leon Goossens...Once he stood before the picture gradually

becoming inarticulate with grief. After a long silence he said, He was everything to me and sobbed, then

swiftly pulled himself together.

The Bs was also performed in tribute in 1917 and Howells was later to incorporate some of the melodic

and thematic material from the Bunny movement into Corydons Dance in his Music for a Prince (1949),

where again snippets of solo viola can be heard.

Bibliography

I regret that I have been unable to source a photograph of F Purcell Warren for this article, but will endeavour to find one.

W.R. Anderson, Forgotten Men of English Music in The Listener, Vol 25, No 631, 13 February 1941, p. 245

Thomas F. Dunhill, Francis Purcell Warren in Music & Letters, Vol. 7, No. 4 (October 1926), pp. 357-363

Paul Spicer, Herbert Howells (Bridgend: Poetry Wales Press Ltd, 1998), p. 63

Martin John Ward, Analysis of Five Works by Herbert Howells, (University of Birmingham thesis, 2005), Appendix 2b, p. 164

Francis Purcell Warren 'Ave Verum' (1912)

30/03/2015 War Composers - the music of World War I

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Ernest Bristow Farrar

7 July 1885 18 September 1918

Beneath the light-leaved sycamores,

In the blue dusk of spring,

Still I walk and think of one

Who went a-soldiering.

The opening of a song called "In Memoriam" by Percy Dixon and set to music by

Harry Gill published in 1941, probably the most explicit tribute amongst four

individual pieces dedicated to the memory of Ernest Bristow Farrar, who was

killed aged 33 at the Somme on the 18th of September 1918, after just two

days at the Front. While perhaps not the greatest poetry ever written, it sums

up something of the feeling amongst the colleagues and friends of the

composer, whose death also inspired significant works by Frank Bridge and

Gerald Finzi.

Farrar has been relatively neglected since 1918, and is now best known as the

first, and arguably most influential teacher of the young Gerald Finzi. Finzi

went on to be one of the most celebrated English composers of the mid-

century and the melancholic tone of his works is often attributed to the loss of his friend and teacher.

During Farrar's life, he was considered an up-and-coming composer who had written over 40 opus numbers,

the majority of which were published. Having trained at the Royal College of Music chiefly under Charles

Villiers Stanford (and arguably maintaining more of his teacher's style than some of his contemporaries),

Farrar was equally adept at writing miniatures (with several attractive songs, organ, choral and piano

pieces published) and longer forms; the majority of his orchestral works survive and have been recorded.

While some of his works, especially his choral works have dated badly, his English Pastoral Impressions is

still fresh to the ear and his much darker and atmospheric orchestral Heroic Elegy, performed just weeks

before he went to the Front, stands as a chilling lament for himself and his generation.

Resources

Read about Ernest Farrar's life and legacy

30/03/2015 War Composers - the music of World War I. Introduction to Ivor Gurney

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Ivor Gurney

28 August 1890 26 December 1937

Ivor Gurney was an artist equally and unusually competent as both a poet and

composer. A prolific composer of over 330 songs of varying quality, several are

considered masterpieces of the genre. He also wrote orchestral, instrumental and

choral music, much of which is only slowly emerging from years of obscurity.

Because of his status as a War Poet, it is through his widely-anthologised and

unusually direct poetry that he is probably best known today. However, he

considered himself to be a composer first and only turned to verse through the

difficulty of composing at the Front. Indeed, he is noteworthy as being one of a

handful of composers to write music while in the trenches, which gives pieces

such as "By a Bierside" a special extra-musical atmosphere.

Gurney was not killed in World War 1, but was invalided out following a gas attack in 1917. In 1922 he was

declared insane and committed to an asylum; he was to remain a patient at various institutions until his

death aged 47. For many years was considered a casualty of the war, but the reality is more complicated -

Gurney already had a history of mental illness, and it has even been argued that the war held his illness at

bay.

Gurney is not an easy figure to write about since the trajectory of his life, particularly post-WWI is

undoubtedly one which has at its heart a victim of a troubling mental condition which even now is not

fully understood.

Resources

Read an introduction to Ivor Gurney's life

30/03/2015 War Composers - the music of World War I. A biography of Fernand Halphen

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Fernand Gustave Halphen

February 18, 1872 - 16 May 1917

Fernand Gustave Halphen was a composer, violinist and patron of the arts. Born in

Paris in 1872, he was the youngest of six children from a wealthy Jewish family;

his father was a diamond merchant, his mother the daughter of a banker.

His mother in particular influenced her son's early interest in the arts; a painting of

Ferdnand was commissioned by no less a figure than Auguste Renoir, today part of

the collection of the Muse d'Orsay, Paris.

When age ten, through Fernand's sister (who was married to a noted patron of the

arts) he was introduced to Gabriel Faur, the pre-eminent French composer of the

late 19th century. It was this early meeting with which was to have the greatest influence on Halphen's

direction in life and the sound of his music. Faur coached the young composer until his entry into the

Conservatoire de Musique in Paris in 1885 where he was taught composition by Ernest Guiraud and later

Jules Massenet.

Although his main focus was on composition, he was also a talented violinist and pianist - on receipt of one

prize for composition in 1898, his father gave him a Stradivarius violin, and many of his chamber works

are for violin and piano.

He married Alice Koenigswarter (1873-1963) in 1899. A chateau, Castle of La Chapelle-en-Serval (Oise),

was built for him in 1909. He had a daughter, Henriette in 1911 and a son, Georges in 1913.

Although aged 42 when war broke out, he volunteered as a captain in the 13th territorial Infantry

Regiment. Owing to his age, he was not posted to the front but given charge of a territorial regiment.

There he founded a military band which he led for three years, writing and arranging music for the band;

military bands played a large role in the drill and rhythm of training and base camps in the war. However,

the conditions were not condusive to Fernand's health and he died of disease at a military hospital in Paris

in May 1917.

During his life, he was a founder member of several trusts to develop music and music education in France,

and following his death his wife created the Halphen Foundation to assist young composers to have their

works performed.

Works

Free of financial concerns, Ferdnand was able to compose without having to find other sources of income.

Thus, his catalogue of work is quite large, numbering over 150 compositions, few of which are performed

today. They include a Symphony in C Minor of 1897, the Sicilian suite for orchestra (1896), a Shakespeare-

influenced one-act opera Le Cor Fleuri ("the ornate horn", although usually translated as "Oberon's Horn"),

performed at the Opra-Comique theatre in May 1904, plus music for a pantomime, a ballet, many songs

and chamber works, as well as examples of choral music.

A detailed list of works can be seen on the Musica et Memoria (fr) website and the score of Le Cor Fleuri

and some of his chamber works are available at the International Music Score Library Project.

Several of his songs have been recorded on CD, and a CD of his piano and chamber music, Fernand

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Halphen: Melodies Pieces for Piano & Chamber Music was released on the Buda Musique label (860138) in

2006.

Bibliography

Denis Havard de la Montagne, Musica et Memoria: Fernand Gustave Halphen (Fr.)

"Halphen" in Encyclopaedia Judaica, Volume 9, ed Fred Skolnik & Michael Berenbaum (Granite Hill Publishers, 2007), 285.

Philipp D'Anchald (ed.) Les Musiciens et la Grande Guerre IV: Mlodies Prescience Conscience (Paris: Editions Hortus, 2014)

Anon. Fernand Gustave Halphen, Programme note for concert in June 2014

30/03/2015 War Composers - the music of World War I. A biography of Cecil Coles

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The first page of Cecil Coles' 'Cortege', circa 1918

Cecil Coles

7 October 1888 26 April 1918

At Christmas 1917, Gustav Holst received a manuscript

score splashed with bloodstains and muddy

watermarks. This was the third movement, Cortege, of an intended four movement suite Behind the

Lines written by a young Scottish composer whom Holst had taken under his wing while he was a tutor at

Morley College in London.

By the following April, its composer Cecil F G Coles was dead, wounded while attempting to rescue

casualties from a wood near the Somme on 26th April 1918.

Other than a prominent dedication on Holsts Ode to Death, Cecil Coles remained virtually unknown until

2002. His revival that year was due to the intervention of his daughter Catherine Coles whose research

into her father, about whom she knew very little until the last years of her life, brought to light 40 piano,

vocal and orchestral pieces stored in a cardboard box at George Watson school in Edinburgh.

Consequently, there is very little written about him, with the majority of biographies, as with this one,

derived from the research of Catherine Coles, his biographer John Purser, the conductor Martyn Brabbins

and the musicologist Professor Jeremy Dibble in their work to revive his orchestral works for release on a

CD on the Hyperion label in 2002. He has since gained some exposure after being featured at the BBC

Proms in 2003 and Cortege was used as the title theme to the Channel 4 documentary series The First

World War.

Like many of the composers featured on this site, Coles is very much a what if? whose talent was not

given the chance to mature, but listening to those works now, it seems surprising that his music languished

in obscurity for so long. Some pieces such as his Four Settings of Poems by Verlaine have an attractive

light operatic quality, evidence of his time working in the Stuttgart opera, others such as Fra Giacomo,

regarded as his masterpiece, are more serious in tone and heavily influenced by the Late Romantic music

of Germany. However, it is probably 'Cortege', a funeral elegy written in the midst of the war by a

composer who was to die in that conflict that is the most evocative of his works.

Resources

Read about Cecil Coles' life and legacy