8 Imo

Imogen Holst conducting

After my duties for Stephen Reiss had been transferred to Miss Flo Powell, Imogen Holst took me over. And never was there a more sensible arrangement. Imogen had a long experience of assistants. Her treatment of them was a kind of authoritarian love. In 1955 she was forty-six but had taught so much, travelled so far, been Ben’s saviour for three amazing years, that she possessed a greater authority than she realised, and had little idea of the effect she had on me. Everything she said or required was like a gift. The plainness of her face was itself so total that it had become beautiful. Her voice was modulated, her laugh raucous. She liked men and was used to them. She had no notion of work time and leisure time, and she made me have no notion of these opposites either. We worked at her father’s desk, a big Arts and Crafts piece of furniture. We seemed to be huddled together at times. At some vague hour she would cry, ‘Food!’ and make scrambled eggs. Her dining table was a board laid over her bath. She would fling a check tablecloth over it and laugh when I couldn’t get my feet under it.

I was frequently at Little Easton Rectory at this time, and so could gossip about Thaxted. Canon John Barnett was himself a considerable musician and Imogen was amused by the fragmentary things I had learned from him. Or had especially liked. Reynaldo Hahn’s songs for instance. Hahn was a pupil of Massenet and Proust’s first lover, and the part-origin of the composer Vinteuil whose ‘little phrase’ haunts Remembrance of Things Past. The other was Henri Duparc.

But John Barnett’s enormous library of 78s also introduced me to Gustav Holst’s music and that of his contemporaries Vaughan Williams, Herbert Howells, Arnold Bax, Frank Bridge and John Ireland, as well as Bach and Mozart. Each record would be denuded of its sleeve, lightly dusted with a velvet pad and placed on the turntable. Or the Canon would play for hours at the Steinway piano, cigarette ash – Balkan Sobranie – tumbling down his cassock. A huge, untidy, somewhat unwashed figure with stained teeth and a beautiful speaking voice, a widower with a love now of young men, he did little new in the parish. Once after a walk to Little Easton village itself he asked, ‘What is it like down there?’ He trundled about the Essex landscape giving inspired music talks to the Workers’ Educational Association. Now and then we went to Thaxted where Conrad Noel’s banners floated above the arches in what I always thought of as Gustav Holst’s church.

In 1912 the Countess of Warwick, née Frances Maynard and heir to vast Essex acres, became a socialist, eventually filling her farmhouses and cottages with musicians, actors and writers. Each of these buildings had a handprint with a coronet over it in the plaster – manus-Maynard. Solomon the pianist, Philip Guedalla the biographer and H. G. Wells, amongst the distinguished tenants, had cycled the lanes. John Barnett’s services were a kind of slovenly holiness, himself frequently in his pyjamas under his robes … But on Good Friday his Steinway would be hauled across the road by the farm labourers and placed on the chancel step where, during the Three Hours, people would come from near and far to listen to Bach. I took the poet James Turner there and he wrote:

Gustav Holst, who had died in 1934, was still a potent force in this Essex countryside. Walking and cycling I could ‘hear’ him. He too had discovered it whilst tramping through a five days’ holiday during the winter of 1913. Most of all Thaxted, where he had put up for the night at the Enterprise in Town Street. In 1914 he rented a cottage from the Essex dialect writer S. L. Bensusan, whose nephew John Bensusan-Butt was a friend of mine. Imogen tells what happened next:

The Holsts lived in this house, Monk Street Cottage, until 1917, then they rented The Steps in the centre of Thaxted for the next eight years. One evening, working with Imogen, I happened to mention my weekend at Little Easton Rectory and she said, ‘That was our part of the country!’

In her 1952 diary, after she had taken neat copies of her work on Gloriana round to Ben, who had been in bed all day with a cold, the two of them settled for a drink – Drambuie, a favourite, for her and rum for him – during the course of which they discussed the future:

My closest relationship with Imogen was when Ben and Peter were far away in Bali and she more or less took charge of the 1956 Festival. I wasn’t aware of this at the time but I do remember an exultancy about her which was catching. Trailing up the stairs to her flat she called out, ‘The Festival is everything – everything – dear, isn’t it?’ And I felt a warning. But she set me to work on the Programme Book and, given a free hand with it, I was also aware of a rise in my status, or rather the realisation that she had, mercifully for him, stolen me from Stephen Reiss. Could Kurt Hutton take the pictures? Could John Nash do the line drawings? Might I discuss the printing with Benham’s of Colchester? Imogen’s own freedom was catching. It was when the cats are away the mice do play but also that change of the world thing which I now and then saw in her face, and which I later thought of as the breakthrough joy of early socialism – the expression of it which William Morris and the nineteenth-century Fabians possessed. There must be a portrait of Schubert but not that lozenge-shaped pair of spectacles. Imogen always knew where things were. She knew where he wasn’t wearing them. ‘He was beautiful.’ So we wrote to Munich for a drawing which entirely revised one’s concept of the young composer. I have kept the print to this day.

Imogen’s triumph at this moment was to reinstate her father’s one-act chamber opera Sāvitri. A previous attempt to stage it had been postponed and Albert Herring substituted in its place. The decision to make this change came after Imogen had to leave halfway through an Executive Committee meeting because of a rehearsal in Ipswich. The reason was its cost. It was to have been part of a double-bill which included The Soldier’s Tale. Now it would share the evening with her new presentation of John Blow’s Venus and Adonis. There was a fairly Wagnerian Gustav Holst in Sāvitri, and a thrilling Imogen in Venus and Adonis. Her genius was to work through old texts like the Aldeburgh wind, refreshingly if mercilessly. In this instance from a 1682 manuscript in the British Museum. She ended the Children’s Concert in the church with her father’s hymn ‘Turn back O man, forswear thy foolish ways’ which he had composed for Whitsun at Thaxted in the midst of the First World War’s appalling losses on the Western Front. Imo conducted 230 Suffolk children singing it on a summer’s afternoon at Aldeburgh. Both she and Ben had a kind of direct line to children. They would arrive with a mixture of resentfulness and bravado, and would leave quite changed.

Sāvitri – the 1956 performance – revealed both Imogen’s and her father’s India. Gustav had been obsessed by Indian culture and Imo had spent two months studying Indian music at Tagore’s university in 1950–51 just before leaving Dartington and arriving in Aldeburgh. She wanted to collect Indian folk songs and she set about it much as her father’s generation had done before 1914. The brilliant singing teacher Pandit Onkaamda Thakar gave her a compacted study of an endless subject. Only an Imo could grasp what she did in so short a time. It was a two-way teaching. She learned; the Indians learned. They sang Britten and Bach, she found that their style of singing took a bit of getting used to – their habit of what we would call ‘scooping sounds’ distressing to Western ears until one has learned to accept it as ‘inevitable’.

And now she and I, and E. M. Forster, were walking from Ben’s house to the Jubilee Hall to hear Sāvitri. At last. Aldeburgh itself was like a great song. Or was this because I had stopped being so anxious and was just looking and listening? Imogen sat between us at the front. The opera marked a high point in the performance of Gustav’s work. Her dutifulness towards him came second to her knowing its importance. She was still and absorbed.

Holst had written his own libretto from a Sanskrit story in the Mahabharata. Satyavan, a woodman, comes home one evening to his wife Sāvitri, and hears a stranger moving in the forest. He raises his axe but the strength goes from his arms; the stranger is Death. Instead of cursing the intruder Sāvitri welcomes him. Death is so impressed by Sāvitri that he promises her anything she desires for herself¸ but she must ask nothing for her husband. She then makes a passionate appeal for life in all its fullness. But what is life without him? Death sees that he has been defeated and vanishes. For even Death is an illusion. Satyavan wakes with his wife’s arms around him. She tells him that a Holy One has visited them both – and blessed them.

Arda Mandikian sang Sāvitri and Peter Pears Satyavan. Thomas Hemsley sang Death.

One of those ridiculous but ineradicable things occurred as the three of us were leaving. Forster’s cap had fallen to the floor. When I rescued it I saw that it was covered with dust so I banged it on my knee. Instead of thanking me he was cross. Cross – or worse – too when on returning to Ben’s house in Crabbe Street he saw a big police notice fixed to the wall – to stop parking. These trifles seemed to have obliterated all that we had seen and heard. He was upset. I held his hand for a moment before he disappeared. But when we met for dinner at the Wentworth Hotel a little later he was happy again. Imogen was pushing the boat out, to use a suitable banality, and had ordered one of those snowy tables in the restaurant which I had only seen through the window, and the manager Lyn Pritt himself had seated us. I can’t recall what we talked about, only the moment, the noise of the sea, the privilege of it all. Imo loved a drink, or three drinks, so I expect there was wine. Maybe that which I had helped Lyn to cork and label in the Wentworth’s cellar.

A year or two before, Forster had published The Hill of Devi, a collection of letters, including those from India where he was tutor to a Raja:

Forster’s clothes were a miracle of drabness, I used to wonder where one could buy them. They were so careful in having nothing to say. But his talk! Imo’s talk. How can I recall her sentences but not his? The lopsided ness of life.

Imogen’s flat looked out on the High Street and towards the sea. The floor was covered with fresh coconut matting and a design for Honegger’s King David by Kokoschka hung on the wall. Seagulls would skirmish on the windowsills. Neat copy fluttered all over everything. Once when I went to Dartington they let me have her room which was uncannily similar to the Aldeburgh flat. There they spoke of her with love-struck awe, and with still a kind of mourning at her going. And I too was made aware of the wealth and comfort which she abandoned in 1951 for what at first was a virtual homelessness and a suitcase. Also a desert from a throne – not that this would have occurred to her. When we met in 1955 these losses had been sensibly replaced by her knowing the total dependency which Britten, the greatest English composer of the twentieth century, had on her. There was no one else. They were about the same age. They shared a similar music culture and a similar drive, and in some ways they were equals.

As the Festival spread through the town, engulfing the Jubilee Hall, the Parish Church, the Baptist Chapel, the Moot Hall, the hotels and boarding houses, the beach, the very air, there were rumbles. But Imogen had only to walk down the High Street, her eyes fixed on no one or anything, than a kind of armistice ensued. She would ‘look straight past you’ but people understood. Should someone, not knowing the drill, bring her to a halt she might give them a full minute of her time. But no one for a minute thought that she was stuck up. Miss Holst had better things to do than gossip. She had no idea that she walked blindly through something approaching adoration, nor would it have pleased her to know it.

I would tell her about the circle at the far end of the town, the artists Juliet Laden and Peggy Somerville, and the writers who were often with me, and Imogen would say, ‘But don’t they like our Festival? – some do not.’ And I would say, ‘They don’t know it is ours.’ Which was true if strange. There was another Aldeburgh, another Suffolk. Some thought that the Festival was wearing me out and some that the shoemaker should stick to his lathe and just write. Their concern made me feel pleasantly hard done by. But the contrasting venues of Crag House and Brudenell House created a drama in my life, whilst the ancient basic Aldeburgh of the fishermen enthralled me, it being so remote. I remember attempting to emulate Imogen’s indifference to accommodation, but this was impossible. And to both her and Christine Nash’s incomprehension I spent a lot of time making ‘a nest’. Their word.

Sometimes Ben would drop me off after a Festival meeting in his Rolls, and all at once I would feel troubled and lonely. Unsure of myself and ‘far from home’. Although the question was, ‘Where was home?’ And where should I be going? And, maybe, who with? When Imogen knocked on my door with a Cragg Sisters’ cake, it would be ‘Very nice, dear.’ But not looking around. All anyone needed was a chair, a table and a bed. Unless one was Benjamin Britten when a Miss Hudson was essential. I don’t think anyone ‘did’ for Imogen. She adored food and drink but was no cook. I was openly hungry half the time like a dog.

Imogen said in her diary:

But it was. On this occasion, ‘Miss Hudson had cooked a superb meal and we both felt better.’

Rehearsing on the Crag Path in the evening I would fetch fish and chips and we would sit on the wall in a line to eat them. But the real feed was in Juliet’s limitless kitchen at Brudenell House. Or a similar meal at Peggy Somerville’s limited table.

Imogen died early on a March morning in 1984. Might she have a sip of water – like a bird? After which ‘her head drooped gently sideways … and she slipped away’. I watched her funeral procession to where Ben lay in Aldeburgh churchyard on local tele vision. A handful of friends sang the five-part Sanctus by Clemens non Papa, a canon she had taught them, at her open grave. The last time I saw it, pointed sycamore leaves had covered it.

On 29 September 1952, her first day as an Aldeburgh inhabitant, she wrote in her diary:

THE SAYINGS OF IMOGEN

On Bach

He was spared the nineteenth-century craving for originality at any price.

It would be fairly safe to guess that the first tune he ever heard was a hymn tune.

In the prolonged hush before the expected ‘resurrection of the dead’ the harmonies move through remote regions that had never before been explored. And in the final ‘grant us thy peace’, the piercing notes of the trumpets mount higher and higher to their climax of gratitude.

On Editing Other People’s Music

This talk is concerned with the editor’s need for second thoughts; with the sight-reader’s struggles to disregard most of what is on the printed page; with the composer’s exasperation at having to fight against the publisher’s house rules, with the learner’s lack of definite instruction, the listener’s damaging preference for what he is used to, and with the danger of still believing everything that one has ever been taught.

On Folk Music

Looking through the early volumes of the Journal of the Folk-Song Society we can almost hear the ‘twiddles and bleating ornaments’ of Mr Joseph Taylor, carpenter; and the broad, even notes of Mr George Gouldthorpe, lime-burner, who ‘gave his tunes in all possible gauntness and barenness’; and the ‘pattering, bubbling, jerky, restless and briskly energetic effects’ of Mr George Wray, brickyard-worker and ship’s cook, who had a grand memory at the age of eighty and sang his innumerable verses with a jaunty contentment.

Those who live in the North are used to keeping out the cold by singing with half-closed vowel sounds to prevent the gale-force wind from giving them toothache, and by dancing quick rhythms with all their energy.

On Her Father

Over tea in front of a blazing fire, he [Britten] suddenly said, ‘Did your father get terribly depressed?’ And then before I knew where I was I told him how I’d neglected G [Gustav] during the last 2 years of his life, being ambitious about jobs instead of ruling bar-lines for him, and how it was one more reason why it was lovely to be doing bar-lines in Gloriana. Ben said he’d been quite sure that he’d been responsible for his mother’s death & it had taken ages to realise that he hadn’t been.

On Leaving Dartington for Aldeburgh

Ben will realise that when one is always teaching amateurs and future professionals who are still immature, one needs constantly to be criticised on one’s own music by someone who one knows is a better musician than oneself. Now in South Devon, we had so many blessings but we hadn’t many musicians better than me at that time … I thought I mustn’t get into the habit of this. I remember walking round the garden in early spring and thinking, ‘Now, you could live here for the rest of your life.’ It seemed a kind of heaven on earth, and then thinking, ‘No, because you are a musician, and you have got to go on teaching and got to go on having really strict criticism.’