The Englishman seethes with romance and passion - his classical music proves it

I’ve never quite understood the popular view of educated Englishmen as passionless and unromantic. They're reserved, certainly, but that’s mainly because they have a horror of appearing insincere or pretentious – inside, they’re seething away like billy-oh: watching an Englishman whose soul has been stirred trying to restrain tears can be deeply moving, because you know just how hard he’s fighting not to give way to his emotions.

For proof, I’d just point to all the wildly, unashamedly romantic poetry and music Englishmen have produced over the years: surely those artists can’t all have been exceptions to the rule. Indeed, most well-known English classical composers strike me as being fairly typical representatives of their race.

One of the great aesthetic pleasures of my adult life has been discovering the wealth of truly wonderful classical music produced by Englishmen during the first half of the 20^th Century. I’ve banged on at length in this blog about Vaughan Williams and Delius, and I love Elgar, Tippett, Walton and Britten - but I want to honour some of the slightly less well known composers who’ve given me so much pleasure over the years, and whose work I’m still discovering.

When Sir Granville Bantock died in 1946, a Bantock Society was established, and, impressively, its first president was Jean Sibelius (the Society's website can be visited here). I’ve loved the Thomas Beecham recordings of his entrancing 1901 tone poem, Fifine at the Fair, for several decades. But I only heard Bantock’s lushly romantic Celtic Symphony for Strings and Six Harps (1940) for the first time last week. Despite being composed by an artist in his 70s, whose music was already deeply out of fashion, there's no hint of waning powers, and it is extraordinarily beautiful. Thank goodness he managed to avoid the career in the Indian Civil Service his doctor father had mapped out for him. 

Born into a wealthy family of Dutch descent in Streatham in 1883, Sir Arnold Bax fell under the spell of Yeats’s poetry, Wagner’s music and the writing of Norwegian author, Bjørnsterne Bjørnson early on, and, as a consequence, went all Celtic and Nordic on us, producing a series of powerful impressionistic tone poems, of which my favourites are probably The Garden of Fand (1916) which is flighty and magical and fey, and his homage to Cornwall, Tintagel (1917), which is full of granite cliffs, expansive sea-scapes and crashing Atlantic breakers.

Sir Arthur Bliss’s music for the 1936 science fiction film, Things to Come, is powerful and exhilarating, and one of the greatest film scores I’ve ever heard. After an impressive war, Bliss became a modernist composer but then - thnkfully - developed a more traditional, romantic  style, composing a lot of film and ballet music, as well as tone poems and symphonies and what have you. He eventually becoming Director of Music at the BBC in 1940, and Master of the Queen’s Music in 1953. His Colour Symphony is another richly emotional favourite of mine.

God alone knows what heights as a composer George Butterworth would have reached had he not been killed in the First World War at the age of 29. His folk-inflected The Banks of Green Willow is a heartfelt hymn of love to England, and one of the loveliest pieces of music I know, but his rhapsodic A Shropshire Lad is probably my favourite of his works:

Peter Warlock committed suicide at the age of 36, having led a spectacularly dissolute life involving lashings of booze and drugs. He was more interested in writing songs than orchestral music, but his very traditional Capriol Suite, composed in the early 1920s is an absolute delight, in particular the achingly plangent Pavane.

Passionless? Unromantic? Poppycock!