True
to the Tune
George Lloyd was once told his music
had "no contemporary significance'.
But things are different now, says Richard Morrison.
GEORGE LLOYD? ISN'T HE THE modern composer who writes
tunes? And is ridiculed constantly for this strange occupation?
'A lot of people hate my guts and think I'm a complete
anachronism,' confirms the man. 'Only a few weeks ago
the composer Robin Holloway laid into me in The Spectator.
He attacked me viciously, as someone who really should
not exist.'
Lloyd is 80 at the end of this month, and well accustomed to dealing
with verbal abuse. Being attacked is, he reckons, probably better than
being cold-shouldered. Through most of the Fifties and Sixties,
Lloyd and his melodious, ripely Romantic symphonies (12 of them now)
were simply ignored by the musical establishment. Those responsible
for programming new music in that doctrinaire era tended to believe
that if it wasn't 1 2-tone, it wasn't worth the time of day. 'If I
sent the BBC a score in the Fifties,' claims Lloyd, 'they sent it
back unread. In fairness, they've made it up to me since.' Why did
Lloyd stick to writing in his gorgeously old fashioned style? 'I never
wrote 12-tone music, because I didn't like the theory. I did study the
blessed thing in the early Thirties. I thought it was a cock-eyed idea
that produced horrible sounds. It made composers forget how to
sing.'
Whatever else may be said about Lloyd, his symphonies
certainly sing. Nor has he ever forgotten about that other
small matter: the audience. 'So many people have no religion,
no spiritual outlet. So they go for music. You can see
it in their eyes when they listen: they are searching
desperately for something to feed their souls. Twelve-tone
music gave them nothing. Whereas I often get letters from
people who tell me that they have had trouble, even tragedy,
in their lives - and that when they play my music they
feel better.'
That, perhaps, is easily understood. Lloyd has had his
share of trouble, and it would be remarkable if his music
did not speak strongly to others in distress. He was,
however, successful astonishingly early on: three symphonies
before he was 20, not bad for a Cornish boy who had hardly
gone to school (rheumatic fever struck in his childhood).
Then in 1934, he wrote an opera called Iernin, with a
libretto by his father. It was staged in Penzance by a
mixture of good local amateurs and London professionals.
By chance. Frank Howes, music critic of The Times came
to hear it 'and wrote a fantastic report in The Times,'
remembers Lloyd. 'It was so flattering that people said:
"This opera must be put on in London."'
So it was, at the Lyceum. Another opera followed, called
The Serf. this time written for Covent Garden. It
was not a triumph. 'Albert Coates, who had been a great
conductor, was deteriorating rapidly and he made a frightful
mess of it,' says Lloyd. 'It drove me out of the theatre,
actually. Then the war came, and that was the end of everything
for me.'
Lloyd served in a cruiser, accompanying the bleak Arctic convoys to
Murmansk. In 1942, the cruiser was blown up. 'I was at the bottom of
the ship. Most of the people down there were drowned in oil. I got
out, but my whole nervous system seemed burnt out.'
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They called it Shellshock - Many never recover.
Lloyd was lucky; his Swiss wife nursed him slowly back to health.
'Even so, it took me 20 years to learn to hold my hand out straight
without shaking.' His Fourth Symphony, a strange, haunting work,
was written as he recuperated. The work ends with a series of
brittle little marches - all forced cheerfulness. 'When the funeral
is over the band plays quick cheerful tunes,' is how Lloyd
explains it.
Professionally, it must have seemed as if Lloyd was attending
his own funeral. He had been commissioned to write an
opera for the Festival of Britain 'I was very ill, but
I delivered the opera, John Socman, on time,
and the Carl Rosa Company performed it. But everybody
was fighting everybody else, and I hadn't got the strength
to sort it out. The conductor and producer wouldn't talk.
Edward Downes, in his first job in opera, had to act as
go-between. When I finally heard a performance, it was
a shambles. I said 'I'll never go in an opera house as
long as I live. In fact I didn't for 17 years.'
Lloyd's life fell apart.'My health went skew-whiff again. My
father died. And I realised that nobody wanted to hear my music.'
He stopped composing, and started growing produce: first carnations,
then mushrooms. Tucked away in obscurity in Dorset for 20 years,
he prospered as a market gardener. His health recovered, and he
picked up the threads of his composing career, getting up at dawn
to write before the horticulture called. Ebullient works, such as
the Ninth Symphony with its 'merry-go-round' finale, date from this
period.
Then, miraculously, people started to take notice of his music
once more. The pianist John Ogdon championed his piano concertos;
Edward Downes his symphonies; Lyrita and Conifer began to record
his music; an American orchestra, the Albany Symphony, commissioned
him to write several works. 'All of a sudden, buckets of dollars!
I couldn't believe it.' The wheel had turned full circle: tonality
was back, and Lloyd was in vogue again.
So is his anti-progressive stance vindicated? What of the perfectly
rational belief that new music should say something new? 'Well,
those who believe that have been proved wrong, haven't they?' says
Lloyd 'The new trend is a return to simpler things.'
In fact, Lloyd denies that his unquestionably English
sounding music merely reproduces the idiom of Vaughan
Williams, Elgar and Delius. 'I was never influenced by
all those English late Romantics. The only one I admired
at all was Elgar. I couldn't stand Vaughan Williams.
But quite honestly it doesn't worry me who I am compared
with. I just write what I have to write.
Try Lloyd's music. You may love it for its ardour. Or hate it for
its complacent retrospection. Either way, it will challenge your
assumptions about how 'modem music' should sound Fellow composers
will probably continue to laugh at him. But how many could say 'I
write what I have to write' with such conviction?
Reprinted from BBC Music Magazine
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