Benjamin Frankel (31 January 190612 February 1973) was a British composer. His best known pieces include a cycle of five string quartets, eight symphonies, and concertos for violin and viola. He was also notable for writing over 100 film scores and working as a big band arranger in the 1930s. During the last 15 years of his life, Frankel also developed his own style of
12-note composition which retained contact with
tonality
Tonality is the arrangement of pitches and/or chords of a musical work in a hierarchy of perceived relations, stabilities, attractions and directionality. In this hierarchy, the single pitch or triadic chord with the greatest stability is call ...
.
Biography
Frankel was born in London on 31 January 1906, the son of Polish
Jewish
Jews ( he, יְהוּדִים, , ) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites Israelite origins and kingdom: "The first act in the long drama of Jewish history is the age of the Israelites""The ...
parents. He began to learn the violin at an early age, showing remarkable talent; at age 14, his piano-playing gifts attracted the attention of the American pianist and teacher Victor Benham (1867-1936) who persuaded his parents to let him study music full-time.
He spent six months in Germany in 1922, then returned to London, where he won a scholarship from the
Worshipful Company of Musicians
The Worshipful Company of Musicians is one of the Livery Companies of the City of London. Its history dates back to at least 1350. Originally a specialist guild for musicians, its role became an anachronism in the 18th century, when the centre of ...
and attempted his first serious compositions while earning his income as a
jazz
Jazz is a music genre that originated in the African-American communities of New Orleans, Louisiana in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with its roots in blues and ragtime. Since the 1920s Jazz Age, it has been recognized as a major ...
violinist, pianist and arranger. Known then as Ben Frankel, his jazz work can be heard on recordings by
Fred Elizalde
Federico "Fred" Díaz Elizalde (December 12, 1907 – January 16, 1979) was a Spanish Filipino classical and jazz pianist, composer, conductor, and bandleader, influential in the British dance band era.
Biography
Elizalde was born in Manila, Ph ...
's band. He also played violin with
Carroll Gibbons
Carroll Richard Gibbons (January 4, 1903 – May 10, 1954) was an American-born pianist, bandleader and popular composer who made his career primarily in England during the British dance band era.
Image of Gibbons from the W.D. & H.O. Wills ...
and the
Savoy Hotel Orpheans.
By the early 1930s, Frankel was in demand as an arranger and musical director in London, working with several dance bands. He wrote several popular dance band arrangements for
Henry Hall's BBC Dance Orchestra, including "Learn To Croon", "Don't Blame Me", "Weep No More My Baby", "April in Paris" and "In Town Tonight". He wrote many arrangements and scores for theatre and film music but gave up theatre work in 1944.
He did, however, retain an interest in film composing until his death, writing over 100 scores. These included ''
The Seventh Veil
''The Seventh Veil'' is a 1945 British melodrama film directed by Compton Bennett and starring James Mason and Ann Todd. It was made by Ortus Films (a company established by producer Sydney Box) and released through General Film Distributors in ...
'' (1945), ''
The Man in the White Suit
''The Man in the White Suit'' is a 1951 British satirical science fiction comedy film made by Ealing Studios. It stars Alec Guinness, Joan Greenwood and Cecil Parker and was directed by Alexander Mackendrick. The film was nominated for an A ...
'' (1951),
''The Importance of being Earnest'' (1952), ''
Night of the Iguana
''The Night of the Iguana'' is a stage play written by American author Tennessee Williams. It is based on his 1948 short story. In 1959, Williams staged it as a one-act play, and over the next two years he developed it into a full-length play, pr ...
'' (1964), and
''Battle of the Bulge'' (1965),
[Kennaway, E.D]
''Benjamin Frankel''
in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004) as well as the first British (partly)
serial film score, to ''
The Curse of the Werewolf
''The Curse of the Werewolf'' is a 1961 British horror film based on the novel ''The Werewolf of Paris'' by Guy Endore. The film was made by the British company Hammer Film Productions and was shot at Bray Studios on sets that were constructed ...
'' (1961).
From 1941 until 1952 he was a member of the
Communist Party of Great Britain
The Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) was the largest communist organisation in Britain and was founded in 1920 through a merger of several smaller Marxist groups. Many miners joined the CPGB in the 1926 general strike. In 1930, the CPG ...
, but resigned his membership in protest against the
Slánský trial
The Slánský trial (officially English: "Trial of the Leadership of the Anti-State Conspiracy Centre Headed by Rudolf Slánský") was a 1952 antisemitic show trial against fourteen members of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ), incl ...
.
During and after the war Frankel started to become widely known as a serious composer. One of his first works to gain attention was the Sonata No 1 for solo violin of 1942, which was dedicated to the Austrian-born violinist and viola player
Max Rostal
Max Rostal (7 July 1905 – 6 August 1991) was a violinist and a viola player. He was Austrian-born, but later took British citizenship.
Biography
Max Rostal was born in Cieszyn to a Jewish merchant family. As a child prodigy, he started studyin ...
.
Rostal made the premiere recording in 1944.
He went on to perform Frankel's most famous work, the Violin Concerto "in memory of 'the six million
'" (a reference to the Jews murdered during
the Holocaust
The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe; a ...
), commissioned for the 1951
Festival of Britain
The Festival of Britain was a national exhibition and fair that reached millions of visitors throughout the United Kingdom in the summer of 1951. Historian Kenneth O. Morgan says the Festival was a "triumphant success" during which people:
...
, and was the soloist in the Viola Concerto for BBC radio broadcasts in 1970 and 1972. The core of Frankel's output are the eight symphonies (composed between 1958 and 1971) and the five string quartets (composed between 1945 and 1965). His friend
Hans Keller
Hans (Heinrich) Keller (11 March 19196 November 1985) was an Austrian-born British musician and writer, who made significant contributions to musicology and music criticism, as well as being a commentator on such disparate fields as psychoana ...
was a champion of his concert music and did much to promote its performance at home and abroad.
In 1955 Frankel succeeded
Edward Clark as Chairman of the
ISCM
The International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) is a music organization that promotes contemporary classical music.
The organization was established in Salzburg in 1922 as Internationale Gesellschaft für Neue Musik (IGNM) following the ...
. That year issues arose about certain expenses Clark had claimed while he was chairman. Clark alleged that Frankel had accused him of fraud. Frankel denied he had ever made such a claim, but nevertheless said that such a claim, had he made it, would have been true. This amounted to slander as far as Clark was concerned, and he sued Frankel in the High Court. While Frankel's alleged slander itself was unproven, the jury exonerated Clark of any wrongdoing and he felt this meant his integrity was intact.
[Jennifer Doctor, 'Clark, (Thomas) Edward (1888–1962)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004]
Retrieved 31 January 2013 Clark's wife
Elisabeth Lutyens
Agnes Elisabeth Lutyens, CBE (9 July 190614 April 1983) was an English composer.
Early life and education
Elisabeth Lutyens was born in London on 9 July 1906. She was one of the five children of Lady Emily Bulwer-Lytton (1874–1964), a me ...
ever after referred to Frankel as "composer and ex-colleague".
Born and raised in
Hammersmith
Hammersmith is a district of West London, England, southwest of Charing Cross. It is the administrative centre of the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham, and identified in the London Plan as one of 35 major centres in Greater London.
...
, Frankel lived in London for many years, most notably at 17
Soho Square
Soho Square is a garden square in Soho, London, hosting since 1954 a ''de facto'' public park let by the Soho Square Garden Committee to Westminster City Council. It was originally called King Square after Charles II, and a much weathered s ...
between 1953 and 1957, where he was the host of a circle of artists including the poet
Cecil Day Lewis
Cecil Day-Lewis (or Day Lewis; 27 April 1904 – 22 May 1972), often written as C. Day-Lewis, was an Irish-born British poet and Poet Laureate from 1968 until his death in 1972. He also wrote mystery stories under the pseudonym of Nicholas Bla ...
, film director
Anthony Asquith
Anthony William Landon Asquith (; 9 November 1902 – 20 February 1968) was an English film director. He collaborated successfully with playwright Terence Rattigan on ''The Winslow Boy'' (1948) and '' The Browning Version'' (1951), among oth ...
, and the writer
Leonard Woolf
Leonard Sidney Woolf (; – ) was a British political theorist, author, publisher, and civil servant. He was married to author Virginia Woolf. As a member of the Labour Party and the Fabian Society, Woolf was an avid publisher of his own wo ...
. In 1958 he re-located to
Locarno
, neighboring_municipalities= Ascona, Avegno, Cadenazzo, Cugnasco, Gerra (Verzasca), Gambarogno, Gordola, Lavertezzo, Losone, Minusio, Muralto, Orselina, Tegna, Tenero-Contra
, twintowns =* Gagra, Georgia
* Karlovy Vary, Czech Republic
...
in Switzerland.
[ He married three times: first in 1932 to Joyce Stanmore Rayner (divorced 1944), then to Phyllis Anna Leat (1944 until her death in 1967), and finally to Xenia Hamilton-Kennaway in 1972, not long before his death. There were two sons and one daughter by the first marriage.][
Frankel died in London on 12 February 1973 while working on the three-act opera ''Marching Song'' and a ninth symphony, which had been commissioned by the ]BBC #REDIRECT BBC #REDIRECT BBC
Here i going to introduce about the best teacher of my life b BALAJI sir. He is the precious gift that I got befor 2yrs . How has helped and thought all the concept and made my success in the 10th board exam. ...
...
. When he died, ''Marching Song'' had been completed in short score; it was orchestrated by
, a composer who had studied with Frankel and whose advocacy has been at least partly responsible for the revival of interest in his works.