Wilfred Mellers - not a
fan...
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W H Mellers
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I am grateful to
Pete Lopeman for not only digging out and typing up these two articles,
but also providing linking commentary. W H Mellers was not a great
lover of Moeran, and these are certainly the most hostile criticisms
I've seen yet. Yet with almost sixty years gone since the later
article was written, are his arguments still relevant? You decide.
Pete Lopeman comments: They are both written by W.
H. Mellers, a music critic for Scrutiny. It is worth noting that
Scrutiny was founded and edited by the great English literary critic
and Fellow of Downing College, Cambridge University, F.R.Leavis
- one of the great supporters of traditional culture and high art
and fervent opponent of popular ephemeral arts. Scrutiny ran from
1932 until 1953, and was very much in the editorial grip of Leavis
(a right-of-centre Liberal) who was following in the cultural tradition
of Wordsworth, Matthew Arnold, and T.S.Eliot who all opposed the
erosion of fine culture by mass culture in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries.
There are two articles by Mellers whose extracts are
below; the first is a general criticism of the Moeran/Warlock/Delius
influences.
'Delius and Peter Warlock' Scrutiny, Vol V, No
4, Cambridge, March 1937.
'Delius has nothing whatever to offer to the composer
of the future those composers who, like E.J. Moeran, try to follow
him succeed only in writing pretty pretty pastiche - and the last
thing one would say about Delius's best and most typical music would
be that it was pretty pretty. The only composer who is supposed
to have derived from Delius and who has composed music of any lasting
significance is Peter Warlock.' (p.390)
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Pete Lopeman:
" I think in hindsight, as it were, that maybe Mellers
was swept along by the tide of Modernism and expected Moeran's
music to either take up the blatantly Modernist cause or keep
itself firmly in the Finzi/
Rubbra/RVW camp, which obviously it did neither, much to Mellers'
annoyance."
Dr Bruce Polay:
"Mellers' writings ARE dated and certainly not amongst
the most authoritative -- at least that was my view from the
historical research I did in prep for my analytical research."
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So now we know what Mellers thinks about Moeran's
general abilities as a serious composer; what is his opinion of
the then newly-released Halle/Leslie Hewerd/HMV recording of the
G minor Symphony? This extract comes from:
`New English Music' Scrutiny Vol. XI, No 3, Cambridge,
Spring 1943. p. 174.
`How impossible it is to merge so restricted a dialect
[Mellers' dialect refers to Finzi's use of folk-song which he acclaims]
either into a vitally contemporary speech or into the main European
traditions is revealed clearly in the chaos of E. J.Moeran's Symphony
- the lack of adequate formalization and the intermittency of its
textural interest - for while this work no doubt contains material
for three or four rural elegies of about four minutes each it is
as a "modern" symphony an anachronism. The kind of success that
is possible for a contemporary composer in this vein is indicated
by the yearning anguish which is given to the first movement's modal,
folksong first subject by a sinuous twist of rhythm and tonal centre
at the end of the phrase; but it is not the kind of virtue that
can be developed to symphonic proportions. This first movement has
climaxes in plenty, it stops and starts with no doubt all kinds
of thematic inter-relations, but it has no emotional growth because
there is a fundamental cleavage between the folksong and Delian
elements and the attempt at modernity - a cleavage still more patent
in the ostensibly "tragic" finale with its melodramatic metrical
ferocities out of Walton's Symphony, its canon on the brass from
Vaughan Williams's Fourth. Potentially the most interesting movement
is the lento, which begins well in the Baxian manner, a wild "celtic"
lament with surging strings and chromatically gurgling woodwind;
but here again it lacks direction, and it takes Delius at his best
to doodle around and get away with it. Nothing could be further
from either the concentrated evolution of a lyrical idea in Rubbra's
symphonies, or the sharp lucidity of the articulation of the sound
pattern in Copland's sonata, than this verbose, opulent, wailing,
provincial music.'
One wonders what Peter Warlock would have made of
his friend's music being described as `opulent, wailing, provincial
music'!
Who was Wilfred H Mellers? Find
out more here.
(Sample quote: "Rarely has such erudition been joined with
such a degree wisdom and insight." Hmmm...)
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