Composers
George Dyson
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Born: 1883
Died: 1964
George Dyson came from a working class background in Halifax, West Yorkshire , the son of a blacksmith. Although from a poor family in the industrial north, Dyson’s parents were musical and encouraged him as an organist in the local church. The young Dyson became an FRCO at the age of sixteen, and he won an open scholarship to the Royal College of Music in 1900. Despite his background, Dyson was to become the voice of public school music and later Director of the RCM, the first College-trained musician to do so (a fact of which he was very proud). At the RCM, Dyson became a pupil of Sir Charles Villiers Stanford then at the height of his influence as a composition teacher.
Little of Dyson’s early music had been thought to have survived, but in
2001 the discovery of an engaging and romantic Cello Sonata dating from
1903, now recorded by the cellist Joseph Spooner, has reminded us that
he was an avid composer from the outset. In 1904, he won the Mendelssohn
Scholarship, the award intended to help promising young composers
travel abroad, and at the instigation of Stanford he went to Italy,
later journeying on to Vienna and Berlin where he met many of the
leading musicians of the day, including Strauss and Nikisch, and the
latter produced Dyson’s early tone-poem Siena, though after four
performances Dyson withdrew it.
It was thanks to the influence of Sir Hubert Parry, Director of the RCM,
that on returning to England, and needing to find a job, Dyson became
Director of Music at the Royal Naval College , Osborne. Dyson soon used
this experience to move on to Marlborough College, but on the outbreak
of war in 1914 he enlisted, his war experiences being an interlude
rather than a major turning point in his musical development. During the
war he became celebrated for his training pamphlet on grenade warfare,
which he produced as brigade grenadier officer of the 99th Infantry
Brigade, and which was widely disseminated.
Dyson saw action in the trenches. In a letter dated 5 December 1915 he
vividly describes the life he was living at this time. ‘We are
continually under shellfire . . . and at this moment he has
unfortunately caught a squad of men in the open outside with appalling
results. Our own guns are blazing away like mad, so that you can’t hear
yourself think . . . The trenches are simply vile in this weather.
Between knee-deep and thigh-deep in mud, in addition to the havoc
wrought by the Bosch.’ Inevitably, in due course he was invalided out,
and in his diary Parry writes in shocked terms when he saw Dyson back in
College, a shadow of his former self. Later, Dyson worked in the
newly-founded Air Ministry where he realised the march RAF March Past
that Henry Walford Davies had sketched in short score. Dyson’s wartime
experiences surely meant that when over 20 years later he started work
on his major choral work Quo Vadis, he wrote from a powerful inner
vision: he had seen hell first hand.
In 1920 Dyson became more widely known as a composer when his Three
Rhapsodies for string quartet, revised from earlier works written before
the War soon after his return from the continent, were chosen for
publication under the Carnegie UK Trust’s publication scheme. He took up
the threads of his earlier working life when he was appointed to
Wellington College , and he also became a professor at the Royal College
of Music. It was at this time that he produced his celebrated book The
New Music, widely admired in its day for its learning and apparently
commonsense view.
Around the end of the war Dyson wrote many short choral pieces and in
1920 he completed a children’s suite for small orchestra after poems by
Walter de la Mare called Won’t You Look Our of Your Window (later
renamed Suite after Walter de la Mare) which had a notable success at
the 1925 season of Queen’s Hall Promenade Concerts when Dyson himself
conducted.
In 1924 Dyson moved to Winchester College where he enjoyed possibly the
most productive part of his life as a composer. At Winchester , as
Director of Music he was organist and had a choir and an orchestra and
also an adult choral society. It was for these forces that he started
writing music, and for them he developed choral music of a tuneful
vigorous cast. This started in 1928 with In Honour of the City which was
so successful he soon produced a more ambitious piece, The Canterbury
Pilgrims, a succession of evocative and colourful Chaucerian portraits
written for Winchester in 1931 and, in the 1930s, certainly his most
famous score.
Soon he was commissioned by the Three Choirs Festivals to write further
works, and for Hereford in 1933 he produced St Paul ’s Voyage to Melita
(repeated in 1934, 1937 and 1952). Other Festivals soon followed, and
The Blacksmiths was written for Leeds in 1934, and then Nebuchadnezzar
for Worcester in 1935.
Dyson was not only a choral composer - there were also orchestral works.
These included the Prelude, Fantasy and Chaconne for cello and
orchestra in 1936 and a symphony in 1938, a symphony full of glorious
pageantry and now twice recorded. During the Second World War Dyson’s
Violin Concerto was played by no less a figure than Albert Sammons, now
recorded by Chandos.
For the 1939 Three Choirs Dyson had been commissioned to write what we
know as the first part of Quo Vadis, though the festival was cancelled
on the outbreak of war in September 1939. In the event it would not be
heard until near the end of the war, and was first performed in London
’s Royal Albert Hall and then at Hereford in September 1946, and as part
of the complete work in 1949. This is by a long way Dyson’s most
ambitious score. In nine substantial parts, for it he assembled a
remarkable anthology of extracts from English Literature as his text.
Notable is the fourth movement, the Nocturne “Night hath no wings”,
sometime heard separately. Here Dyson sets poems by Robert Herrick
(1591-1674) and one by the much less well known Victorian poet Isaac
Williams (1802-65), who was influenced by Keble and involved in the
Oxford movement. The singer waits for the leaden minutes to creep past.
He cannot sleep and, sick at heart his entreaty is underlined by the
plangent questioning of the intertwining viola. Eventually, as the
supplicant pleads for comfort, in a simple but almost transcendental
moment, the chorus enter with a hushed vision of the dawn. At the end
the soloist and his shadow, the interceding viola, plead for comfort,
but now in a mood of serenity. It is also worth drawing attention to the
remarkable final movement “To find the western path”. At over 18½
minutes this has the stature of a separate work. Indeed the text that
Dyson has assembled is striking it its own right. Here Dyson takes his
text from Blake, Shelley and ends with a most affecting setting of the
Salisbury Diurnal (“Holy is the true light”) which Howells also featured
in Hymnus Paradisi, first heard in 1950. It is a typical Dyson choral
movement, the headlong succession of memorable ideas breathtaking in its
cumulative impact. The second section is taken from “Adonais”, Percy
Bysshe Shelley’s well-known poem on the death of Keats, and here we may
see Dyson’s typical method in taking just what he wanted from a poem –
in fact making it his own.
During the war Dyson, as Director of the Royal College of Music, kept
the college open and functioning, even sleeping at the office, and he
remained there until 1952. After his retirement he enjoyed a remarkable
Indian summer of composition, though by this time his music was
beginning to sound ‘old hat’ to some and although it all achieved
publication and performance at the time, it did not have quite the
immediate following of his earlier scores. We now know better that this
is delightful and evocative music.
These late works include Sweet Thames Run Softly (1954), a mellifluous
setting for baritone, chorus and orchestra of words from Edmund
Spenser’s Prothalamion. In 1955 there followed Agincourt , a brilliant
return to the scale and style of that first choral work, In Honour of
the City, now setting well-known Shakespearean words. Hierusalem, a
beautiful setting of a 15-verse hymn adapted from St Augustine for
soprano solo, chorus, strings, harp and organ, was written for Harold
Darke in 1956. Finally came a 20-minute nativity sequence, A Christmas
Garland, in 1959. Dyson died in Winchester in 1964.
© Lewis Foreman
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