Havergal Brian

Havergal Brian (born William Brian; 29 January 187628 November 1972) was an English composer. He is best known for having composed 32 symphonies (an unusually high total for a 20th-century composer), most of them late in his life. His best-known work is his Symphony No. 1, ''The Gothic'', which calls for some of the largest orchestral forces demanded by a conventionally structured concert work. He also composed five operas and a number of other orchestral works, as well as songs, choral music and a small amount of chamber music. Brian enjoyed a period of popularity earlier in his career and rediscovery in the 1950s, but public performances of his music have remained rare and he has been described as a cult composer. He continued to be extremely productive late into his career, composing large works even into his nineties, most of which remained unperformed during his lifetime.

Life

Early life

William Brian (he adopted the name "Havergal" from a family of hymn-writers, of whom Frances Ridley Havergal was most prominent) was from the Potteries district of Staffordshire. He was born in Dresden, a suburb of Longton, one of the towns which make up what is now the city of Stoke-on-Trent. He was one of a very small number of composers to originate from the English working class.

Brian's earliest musical education appears to have been as a choirboy; he sang in the choir at St James' church in Longton. In 1887 he and other choristers from his home town participated in a concert in Lichfield Cathedral marking the Jubilee of Queen Victoria. This experience gave the boy an interest in large-scale musical effects. At the age of 12, after leaving the elementary school attached to the church, he started work (he tried a variety of trades). In his spare time, he continued to study music including the organ for which he showed talent at a young age; as a composer he was virtually self-taught.
From 1896 he was organist of All Saints', a Gothic Revival church in Odd Rode, just across the county border in Cheshire. The post involved playing at Sunday services; his main job at this time was with a timber company.

Around the time he started at All Saints', he was influenced by hearing '' King Olaf'', a composition for soloists, choir and orchestra by Edward Elgar. Now one of the composer's lesser-known works, ''King Olaf'' was commissioned for the North Staffordshire Music Festival of 1896, where it was well received. Brian sent a sample composition to Elgar who gave him encouragement. Brian became a fervent enthusiast of the new music being produced by Richard Strauss and the British composers of the day. Through attending music festivals he began a lifelong friendship with composer Granville Bantock (1868–1946).

In 1898, Brian married Isabel Priestley, by whom he had five children. One of his sons was named Sterndale after the English composer Sir William Sterndale Bennett.

Full-time composer

In 1907 Brian was offered a yearly income of £500 (then a respectable lower-middle-class salary) by a local wealthy businessman, Herbert Minton Robinson, to enable him to devote all his time to composition. It seems Robinson expected Brian soon to become successful and financially independent on the strength of his compositions, and initially Brian indeed found success: his first ''English Suite'' attracted the attention of Henry J. Wood, who performed it at the London Proms in 1907. The work proved popular and Brian obtained a publisher and performances for his next few orchestral works, although this initial success was not maintained. For a while Brian worked on a number of ambitious large-scale choral and orchestral works, but felt no urgency to finish them, and began to indulge in pleasures such as expensive foods and a trip to Italy.

Arguments over the money and an affair with a young servant, Hilda Mary Hayward (1894-1980), led to the collapse of his first marriage in 1913. Brian fled to London and, although Robinson (who disapproved of the incident) continued to provide him with money until his own death, most of the allowance went to Brian's estranged wife after 1913. The affair with Hilda turned into a lifelong relationship: Brian and she began living together as man and wife, and after Isabel's death in 1933 they were married, by which point Hilda had already borne him another five children. No longer able to rely on Robinson's support, in London Brian began composing copiously whilst living in poverty. On the outbreak of World War I he volunteered for the Honourable Artillery Company but saw no service before he was invalided out with a hand injury. He subsequently worked at the Audit Office of the Canadian Expeditionary Force until December 1915. The family then moved to Erdington, near Birmingham, Warwickshire, until May 1919 and then spent several years in various locations in Sussex. His brief war service gave him the material for his first opera ''The Tigers''. In the 1920s he turned to composing symphonies, though he had written more than ten before one of them was first performed in the early 1950s. Brian eventually obtained work of a musical kind, copying and arranging, and writing for the journal ''The British Bandsman''. In 1927, he became assistant editor of the journal ''Musical Opinion'' and moved back to London.

In 1940 he retired, living firstly in London, and then in Shoreham-by-Sea, Sussex. Freed from the requirement to work to make a living, he was able to devote all of his time to composition, and the bulk of his compositional output belongs to the last three decades of his life, including four of the five operas (composed between 1951 and 1957) and twenty-seven of the thirty-two symphonies (composed from 1948 onwards). Through most of the 1960s, Brian composed two or three symphonies each year.

This late flurry of activity coincided with something of a rediscovery, in part due to the efforts of Robert Simpson, himself a significant composer and BBC
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