Neglected master
Simon Heifer on the composer George Lloyd, who died five years ago
George Lloyd would have been 90 last week: and this week is the fifth anniversary of his death. He was England's last romantic composer, and he suffers in death for that label just as much as he did in life. Although his recordings have a large following, and the rare concerts of his music are packed out by devotees, his name is very little known just now. All composers seem to endure a period of unpopularity after their demise: Lloyd's admirers trust that his will not prove permanent.
He wrote 12 symphonies, three before his 20th birthday. There were three operas, two written in his early 20s: one had an extensive run at Covent Garden in 1935, the other at Sadler's Wells a little later. He also produced four piano concertos, two violin concertos, several substantial choral pieces and much piano music, as well as works for brass band. He was a patriot and a Tory, who despised composers who sought subsidy to allow them to write selfindulgent and unpleasant works, which is perhaps part of the reason why the musical establishment came to hate him. His own analysis of their distaste was that, in an age where atonalism was de rigueur, he had the temerity to write tunes.
His brilliant career came unstuck after 1942. He joined the Royal Marines when war broke out and his ship was holed by one of its own missiles on the Arctic convoys. Lloyd was trapped in the oil and water of the engine room and almost drowned. His shellshock was so bad that his wife was told he would need to be institutionalised for the rest of his life. She dis
agreed with the doctors. As soon as the war ended she took him to her native Switzerland and they set about his recovery. In late 1945 he began to write his Fourth Symphony, able at first to work for only a half-hour a day before the noises in his head became too much for him. He completed the work in September 1946, and it remains his masterpiece. That it took 35 years for it to have its first — and only — public performance is indicative of what happened to Lloyd after the war.
A man who clung to his fundamental inspirations of Verdi, Puccini, Berlioz and Brahms found little favour in the immediate post-war world. His third opera, commissioned for the Festival of Britain in 1951, was beset by production difficulties, and Lloyd was driven to a nervous collapse. For 22 years he went off the map, to grow mushrooms and carnations in Dorset. He still wrote music, and optimistically sent it to the BBC for consideration: it was sent back to him with what he called 'vicious' replies. Eventually, the pianist John Ogdon forced them to give Lloyd the respect he deserved. He enjoyed a renaissance in his 70s and 80s, with all his major works recorded, London performances of several of them, and recognition around the world. However, his death at the age of 85 seemed, sadly, to bring an end to any efforts to make Lloyd and his music familiar to the world.
There is no longer a blacklist of composers to whom Radio Three will not give airtime. hut in Lloyd's case there might as well be. I know from conversations over the last few years with some who do the Corporation's classical music programming that he is regarded with a mixture of hostility, ridicule and utter indifference. The loathing music critics had for him was reciprocated fully: when, as a young journalist nearly 20 years ago, I wrote to him asking for an interview, he eventually assented on the grounds that I wrote about politics and was not a professional critic. When I met him in his flat off Baker Street in the spring of 1986 I found a man who had modesty, charm and fierce determination in equal measure. Lloyd was in no doubt that what he wrote was worthy of regard. Within a few years his own opinion was endorsed by that of the public and impresarios on several continents. But here it was always a grudging respect: and when George died, despite the valiant efforts of his record company to keep his name alive, his reputation began to fade for want of the enormous energy he used to put in to preserving it.
When he was 80 the French national classical music station devoted a special programme to him, while his own country largely ignored the event. When he died Radio Three broadcast a tribute programme: but since then there has been silence. As well as Ogdon and the celebrated pianist Kathryn Stott, he was championed by two significant conductors, Charles Groves and Edward Downes. There is nothing cheap, tawdry or amateur about his music, as the endorsement of such distinguished musicians would seem to confirm. He simply does not fit in with the prejudices of the contemporary musical establishment, a body too much motivated by snobbery and cliquism; and so, until someone of standing in the musical world can take up the cause, is he likely to remain.
And yet when the critics come to Lloyd sight, as it were, unseen, they seem to admire him. 1 gave one of our most revered critics a CD of the Fourth Symphony some years ago: he returned a few days later, having always dismissed the very notion of George, to say it had been a revelation. It had been as if he had heard a missing symphony by Tchaikovsky, he said. Others, unfortunately, cannot be bothered to test their prejudices so.
Those of us who heard the first performance of the Fourth in 1981 will never forget it. Massive in scale (it lasts over an hour), it draws on every conceivable emotion — fear, anger, grief, serenity, love — before a finale of the ecstatic reaffirmation of the triumph of life over death. It shows all Lloyd's talents at their best: his gift for orchestration not least, but also his apparently bottomless well of inventiveness. He said the finale mimicked the Cornish tradition (he was born in St Ives) of the band striking up a jolly tune after the funeral. I have a tape of the premiere, so I know the prolonged, rapturous ovation the symphony and its composer received after; it is no trick of the memory. It would bring the house down at a Prom, but the normally open-minded Nicholas Kenyon remains steadfastly unconvinced of its merits, or of the merits of any other of Lloyd's works.
George Lloyd was a great man. His greatness consisted not merely in his merit as a composer, but in his adherence to himself, his view of his art, his principles, and in his determination that he had a gift that would prevail. In old age, it seemed to have done so. Now, the flame is nearly out. Perhaps by the time of his centenary it will have been rekindled, and those who lead musical opinion in this country will no longer condemn a man simply for writing music people want to hear.
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