Interview, Martin Jones on the piano works of Elisabeth Lutyens

The works of the unorthodox, uncompromising British composer Elisabeth Lutyens have been making something of a comeback on record, though to date this has mostly been limited to her chamber and orchestral works. A new series on Resonus Classics aims to redress the balance with a complete set of her piano music, performed by Martin Jones – featuring numerous works never recorded before, and in many cases perhaps never performed at all.

I spoke to Martin about the unbendingly tough music of an unbendingly tough composer, and the challenges that face those seeking to become more familiar with her work.

Perhaps surprisingly, the majority of the works you’re performing here have never been recorded before. Is there an element here of rehabilitating a composer who has been unfairly sidelined?

She was such a rebel; if she could break the rules, she would! She didn’t make life easy for anyone – herself, the performer and certainly not the listener. But there’s an amazing bravery in doing that on your own.

There was a stage early on when a few of her pieces did attract attention – her film scores are the things that she’s mostly remembered for. Things like The Skull (1965) and things like that. Horror films of that kind suited her style, in many ways! But it’s such uncompromising music… I almost hesitate to even say this, but I don’t feel that it’s the kind of music that is going to make someone sit down and think “I’ll just listen to a piece of Lutyens”. You need to seek it out, and perhaps even have a score – it needs some input from the listener.

Much of Lutyens’s music seems to be characterised by ideas of austerity, economy and paring-back – doing more with less. Her music may bear little relation to the styles popularly dubbed “minimalism”, but do you think it’s reasonable to see her as a kind of minimalist too?

Yes, but not a repetitive minimalist. She did use silence more and more in her music; by the time you get to the later pieces there are whole five-second gaps in places, and isolated notes. So in the sense that it doesn’t progress like traditional music does, then she does have something in common with Philip Glass, John Adams and the rest of what we know as the “minimalists”. Though of course they loved traditional harmony, which Lutyens certainly was having none of.

It’s the other extreme – and that’s perhaps part of the problem. You can’t pin her down anywhere, except perhaps to Webern. But even then, Webern is often concerned with writing very short pieces, and Lutyens isn’t necessarily short. She was definitely on her own.

The evocative titles on this album – often referencing water, weather and the sea – suggest more of an affinity with the tone-painting of Debussy than with the extreme abstraction of the Second Viennese School. Is Lutyens maybe more of an impressionist than she might first seem?

Debussy was her great hero. The relationship is clear in the pieces that have a stormier title, but the watery ones I’m less sure about – they don’t sound terribly watery! Her very early pieces have titles like Berceuse, Barcarolle and so on; I don’t yet have the scores for those but it would be very interesting to see what they’re like, and how she developed in those really early works.

These works all come from the final decade of Lutyens’s life; how representative are they of her overall compositional style?

I don’t think she changed a lot during her mature career; I wonder if when we look at her earliest works we’ll find a big shock somewhere, where it’s initially traditional and then suddenly we’ll see the point at which she decided she wanted nothing more to do with that style. The problem is that there’s not much information about these very early works, so there are many questions to which I just don’t yet know the answer.

They’re all sitting in the British Library, which is very frustrating; I’m waiting to get them to see what they’re like. They’re mostly not just unrecorded, but unpublished and unperformed. She couldn’t play them herself; she was no pianist. And that’s the other big problem; this music is written for the piano but it doesn’t always suit the piano. When you listen to her orchestral works the colours work much better than on the piano.

She was a viola player – and I read somewhere in her biography that when she did play the piano it gave the impression of someone trying to play Debussy but very badly! It’s cruel but you can see, in some of these pieces, where it’s coming from. It’s disjointed but striving in that sort of French direction.

We have the ever-combative Lutyens to thank for the “cowpat music” accusation levelled at the English Romantics (Vaughan Williams, Holst, Finzi, Bax and others). Do you think she was right to essentially dismiss this approach to music?

No! I don’t think any of us can dismiss other music. We can say we don’t like it, but to say that it shouldn’t be there, I don’t think that’s right. I don’t know what Vaughan Williams thought of her – probably about the same, but too polite to say so! Composers do have to be very committed to what they’re doing in order to stay with it, especially if you’re as extreme as Lutyens was. But no, I think it was a silly comment, really. There have been a few comments like that – Boulez suggesting that we should blow up all the opera houses, for instance, or Stravinsky saying that there were no more tunes to be written in C major – but you have to take them with a big pinch of salt.

We need variety in music; you wouldn’t want a three-course meal consisting of three curries.

This album is being released as Volume 1 – but of how many? How much more of Lutyens’s piano music is still out there, waiting to be reintroduced to audiences?

I think there will be three in total. I’ve got one more album’s worth of albums either printed or that I’ve copied out from manuscripts. Some of them never even made it to the printer’s and are almost unreadable; it’s taken me all summer sitting out in the garden to rewrite them just to be able to play them!

I also remember reading in her biography that someone felt she was more interested in getting music down on the page than in ever actually hearing it. I honestly wonder whether she was concerned with ever having some of these works performed – once she’d written one down, the next one was hard on its heels. To write that amount of music (and that’s not counting the film scores), and having four children as well, would have been an immense amount of work. There is a curious kind of feeling that that’s what it was about – simply writing it, and often at considerable speed, and it’s up to us to work it out!

I’d almost say it was “half-composed”; the basics are there but the rest needs to be worked out. And even when you’ve done that, the work still isn’t done because the listener also needs to do some work interpreting the music, and getting rid of all their preconceptions of what music might be like. You just have to accept this noise that comes at you.

The other problem with it is: How would you ever programme it? Short of doing a whole programme of Lutyens, Webern and Schoenberg – which is already preaching to the converted. If you put one of these pieces in with a traditional programme, it’s going to stick out like a sore thumb. What I might try is to take two or three of her short bagatelles or impromptus, and play them twice – once in each half. It’s a hell of a thing to swallow just in one go. People have got to appreciate what you’re doing – not just slamming notes down at random.

It’s often hellish stuff to play, because it isn’t very pianistic and it’s written with all sorts of crazy accidentals. It’s full of seconds and ninths, so the accidentals become a real problem to write out and to read. It’s just not easy going at all.

Still, let’s hope this will encourage more people to try more of her music. There’s enough of it out there.

How did you first encounter Lutyens and her music yourself, and how did this project come about?

My agent John Owen was a student of hers at York, and another friend of his was Glyn Perrin, who runs the Trust that looks after the Lutyens scores. So the three of them, plus the man who runs the record company, all live in York, and John asked me if I was interested. And I thought, why not? It’s someone that we know so little about. How many people will buy the discs I’m not quite sure! But let’s hope it does generate some interest – in the chamber music, maybe, or some of the orchestral music. It would certainly grab your attention if you encountered it in, say, a piano-based streaming playlist.

But yes, in terms of how much more there is to come, I’d say probably three discs. I don’t know the exact length of them but there are six or seven pieces in the British Library, among them a piano sonata. Whether that’s on a Scarlatti-ish scale or a Beethovenian scale I have no idea! The second disc at least will be quite similar to this one, with groups of pieces – so for instance there’s a set of bagatelles that come to about thirty minutes in total. She didn’t pursue traditional forms at all, so there are no sets of variations or things that you could put one of those traditional names to. She does herself no favours here, either! To call a piece Plenum, for instance… is the man on the street going to think to himself “I’d love to listen to Plenum”? Probably not. It’s the opposite extreme from Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words, and Schumann and so on – in every sense. But she just wasn’t a person who cared about being easy on the ear, or being easy in life. If there was an argument to be had, she’d have had it – and not always because she was persuaded of what she was arguing! To an extent I think she just liked to fight. A very interesting character. Her biography is an amazing read – “A Pilgrim Soul”, by Meirion and Susie Harries. [Note: A Pilgrim Soul, ISBN 9780571161218, is unfortunately out of print at present, though second-hand copies can be obtained from various retailers.]

She was extreme in general life, as well as musically – to smoke sixty cigarettes a day and knock back a bottle of brandy a day! When I was a young man I went and played to her with a clarinettist, in her flat in Belsize, but annoyingly I can’t remember a thing about it. I wish I’d taken more notice – I can remember going into a darkened room filled with some kind of Indian perfume, connected with some project she was working on at the time. I think she must have been fairly polite, because if she’d given us full blast I’d have remembered about it.

We all know about Stravinsky having trouble with The Rite of Spring, but he did go on to write less extreme things later, whereas Lutyens just carried on relentlessly. Maybe that would have been the answer – if she’d written just one accessible piece that might have helped the listener, and indeed the performer, along the way. It might have helped her cause but it wasn’t her nature. It reminds me, too, of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, which I was listening to the other day. Written twenty years after Beethoven’s death – the difference, and the nerve he must have had to write that piece at that time, is just extraordinary. And he stuck with it, and you really have to take your hat off to Lutyens for sticking with it right to the end as well. It’s up to us to see what we can make of it. I wonder if these recordings might encourage people to play the music themselves, even if they don’t listen to the recordings themselves – simply by piquing people’s curiosity to look for themselves. Even if they just dip in and play two or three of the bagatelles.

The second disc should be recorded early next year, and when the British Library can get the scores to me then we’ll do the third.