Percy Grainger

Percy Aldridge Grainger (born George Percy Grainger; 8 July 188220 February 1961) was an Australian-born composer, arranger and pianist who moved to the United States in 1914 and became an American citizen in 1918. In the course of a long and innovative career he played a prominent role in the revival of interest in British folk music in the early years of the 20th century. Although much of his work was experimental and unusual, the piece with which he is most generally associated is his piano arrangement of the folk-dance tune " Country Gardens".

Grainger left Australia at the age of 13 to attend the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt. Between 1901 and 1914 he was based in London, where he established himself first as a society pianist and later as a concert performer, composer, and collector of original folk melodies. As his reputation grew he met many of the significant figures in European music, forming important friendships with Frederick Delius and Edvard Grieg. He became a champion of Nordic music and culture, his enthusiasm for which he often expressed in private letters, sometimes in crudely racialist or anti-Semitic terms.

In 1914 Grainger moved to the United States, where he lived for the rest of his life, though he travelled widely in Europe and Australia. He served briefly as a bandsman in the United States Army during the First World War through 1917–18, and took American citizenship in 1918. After his mother's suicide in 1922, he became increasingly involved in educational work. He also experimented with music machines, which he hoped would supersede human interpretation. In the 1930s he set up the Grainger Museum in Melbourne, his birthplace, as a monument to his life and works, and as a future research archive. As he grew older, he continued to give concerts and to revise and rearrange his own compositions, while writing little new music. After the Second World War, ill health reduced his levels of activity. He considered his career a failure. He gave his last concert in 1960, less than a year before his death.

Early life

Family background

Grainger was born on 8 July 1882 in Brighton, south-east of Melbourne. His father, John Grainger, an English-born architect who had emigrated to Australia in 1877, won recognition for his design of the Princes Bridge across the Yarra River in Melbourne; His mother Rose Annie Aldridge was the daughter of Adelaide hotelier George Aldridge.Bird, pp. 2–6

John Grainger was an accomplished artist, with broad cultural interests and a wide circle of friends. These included David Mitchell, whose daughter Helen later gained worldwide fame as an operatic soprano under the name Nellie Melba. John's claims to have "discovered" her are unfounded, although he may have offered her encouragement. John was a heavy drinker and a womaniser who, Rose learned after the marriage, had fathered a child in England before coming to Australia. His promiscuity placed deep strains upon the relationship. Rose discovered shortly after Percy's birth that she had contracted a form of syphilis from her husband. Despite this, the Graingers stayed together until 1890, when John went to England for medical treatment. After his return to Australia, they lived apart. Rose took over the work of raising Percy, while John pursued his career as chief architect to the Western Australian Department of Public Works. He had some private work, designing Nellie Melba's home, Coombe Cottage, at Coldstream.

Childhood

Except for three months' formal schooling as a 12-year-old, during which he was bullied and ridiculed by his classmates, Percy was educated at home.Simon, pp. 2–3 Rose, an autodidact with a dominating presence, supervised his music and literature studies and engaged other tutors for languages, art and drama. From his earliest lessons, Percy developed a lifelong fascination with Nordic culture; writing late in life, he said that the Icelandic ''Saga of Grettir the Strong'' was "the strongest single artistic influence on my life". As well as showing precocious musical talents, he displayed considerable early gifts as an artist, to the extent that his tutors thought his future might lie in art rather than music. At the age of 10 he began studying piano under Louis Pabst, a German-born graduate of the Moscow Conservatory, Melbourne's leading piano teacher. Grainger's first known composition, "A Birthday Gift to Mother", is dated 1893. Pabst arranged Grainger's first public concert appearances, at Melbourne's Masonic Hall in July and September 1894. The boy played works by Bach, Beethoven, Schumann and Scarlatti, and was warmly complimented in the Melbourne press.Bird, pp. 20–22

After Pabst returned to Europe in the autumn of 1894, Grainger's new piano tutor, Adelaide Burkitt, arranged for his appearances at a series of concerts in October 1894 at Melbourne's Royal Exhibition Building. The size of this enormous venue horrified the young pianist; nevertheless, his performance delighted the Melbourne critics, who dubbed him "the flaxen-haired phenomenon who plays like a master". This public acclaim helped Rose to decide that her son should continue his studies at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt, Germany, an institution recommended by William Laver, head of piano studies at Melbourne's Conservatorium of music. Financial assistance was secured through a fund-raising benefit concert in Melbourne and a final recital in Adelaide, after which mother and son left Australia for Europe on 29 May 1895. Although Grainger never returned permanently to Australia, he maintained considerable patriotic feelings for his native land, and was proud of his Australian heritage.

Frankfurt

In Frankfurt, Rose established herself as a teacher of English; her earnings were supplemented by contributions from John Grainger, who had settled in Perth. The Hoch Conservatory's reputation for piano teaching had been enhanced by the tenure, until 1892, of Clara Schumann as head of piano studies. Grainger's piano tutor was James Kwast, who developed his young pupil's skills to the extent that, within a year, Grainger was being lauded as a prodigy.Bird, pp. 26–29 Grainger had difficult relations with his original composition teacher, Iwan Knorr; he withdrew from Knorr's classes to study composition privately with Karl Klimsch, an amateur composer and folk-music enthusiast, whom he would later honour as "my only composition teacher".

Together with a group of slightly older British students – Roger Quilter, Balfour Gardiner, Cyril Scott and Norman O'Neill, all of whom became his friends – Grainger helped form the Frankfurt Group. Their long-term objective was to rescue British and Scandinavian music from what they considered the negative influences of central European music. Encouraged by Klimsch, Grainger turned away from composing classical pastiches reminiscent of Handel, Haydn and Mozart, and developed a personal compositional style, the originality and maturity of which quickly impressed and astonished his friends. At this time Grainger discovered the poetry of Rudyard Kipling and began setting it to music; according to Scott, "No poet and composer have been so suitably wedded since Heine and Schumann."Scott, pp. 51–54

After accompanying her son on an extended European tour in the summer of 1900, Rose, whose health had been poor for some time, suffered a nervous collapse and could no longer work. To replace lost income, Grainger began giving piano lessons and public performances; his first solo recital was in Frankfurt on 6 December 1900. Meanwhile, he continued his studies with Kwast, and increased his repertoire until he was confident he could support himself and his mother as a concert pianist. Having chosen London as his future base, in May 1901 Grainger abandoned his studies. With Rose, he left Frankfurt for the UK.Bird, pp. 39–41

Before leaving Frankfurt, Grainger had fallen in love with Kwast's daughter Mimi. In an autobiographical essay dated 1947, he says that he was "already sex-crazy" at this time, when he was 19. John Bird, Grainger's biographer, records that during his Frankfurt years, Grainger began to develop sexual appetites that were "distinctly abnormal"; by the age of 16 he had started to experiment in flagellation and other sado-masochistic practices, which he continued to pursue through most of his adult life. Bird surmises that Grainger's fascination with themes of punishment and pain derived from the harsh discipline to which Rose had subjected him as a child.Bird, pp. 42–43

London years

Concert pianist

In London, Grainger's charm, good looks and talent (with some assistance from the local Australian community) ensured that he was quickly taken up as a pianist by wealthy patrons. He was soon performing in concerts in private homes. ''The Times'' critic reported after one such appearance that Grainger's playing "revealed rare intelligence and a good deal of artistic insight". In 1902 he was presented by the socialite Lillith Lowrey to Queen Alexandra, who thereafter frequently attended his London recitals. Lowrey, 20 years Grainger's senior, traded patronage and contacts for sexual favours – he termed the relationship a "love-serve job". She was the first woman with whom he had sex; he later wrote of this initial encounter that he had experienced "an overpowering landslide" of feeling, and that "I thought I was about to die. If I remember correctly, I only experienced fear of death. I don't think that any joy entered into it".

In February 1902 Grainger made his first appearance as a piano soloist with an orchestra, playing Tchaikovsky's first piano concerto with the Bath Pump Room Orchestra. In October of that year he toured Britain in a concert party with Adelina Patti, the Italian-born opera singer. Patti was greatly taken by the young pianist and prophesied a glorious career for him. The following year he met the German-Italian composer and pianist Ferruccio Busoni. Initially the two men were on cordial terms (Busoni offered to give Grainger lessons free of charge) and, as a result, Grainger spent part of the 1903 summer in Berlin as Busoni's pupil. However, the visit was not a success; as Bird notes, Busoni had expected "a willing slave and adoring disciple", a role Grainger was not willing to fulfil. Grainger returned to London in July 1903; almost immediately he departed with Rose on a 10-month tour of Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, as a member of a party organised by the Australian contralto Ada Crossley.

Emergent composer

Before going to London Grainger had composed numerous Kipling settings and his first mature orchestral pieces.Thwaites (ed.) p. xx In London, when he found time he continued to compose; a letter to Balfour Gardiner dated 21 July 1901 indicates that he was working on his ''Marching Song of Democracy'' (a Walt Whitman setting), and had made good progress with the experimental works ''Train Music'' and ''Charging Irishrey''. In his early London years he also composed ''Hill Song Number 1'' (1902), an instrumental piece much admired by Busoni.
In 1905, inspired by a lecture given by the pioneer folk-song historian Lucy Broadwood, Grainger began to collect original folk songs. Starting at Brigg in Lincolnshire, over the next five years he gathered and transcribed more than 300 songs from all over the country, including much material that had never been written down before. From 1906 Grainger used a phonograph, one of the first collectors to do so, and by this means he assembled more than 200 Edison cylinder recordings of native folk singers. These activities coincided with what Bird calls "the halcyon days of the 'First English Folksong Revival.

As his stature in the music world increased, Grainger became acquainted with many of its leading figures, including Vaughan Williams, Elgar, Richard Strauss and Debussy. In 1907 he met Frederick Delius, with whom he achieved an immediate rapport – the two musicians had similar ideas about composition and harmony, and shared a dislike for the classical German masters. Both were inspired by folk music; Grainger gave Delius his setting of the folk song ''Brigg Fair'', which the older composer developed into his well-known orchestral rhapsody, dedicated to Grainger.Carley, pp. 33–34 The two remained close friends until Delius's death in 1934.

Grainger first met Edvard Grieg at the home of the London financier Sir Edgar Speyer, in May 1906. As a student, Grainger had learned to appreciate the Norwegian's harmonic originality, and by 1906 had several Grieg pieces in his concert repertoire, including the piano concerto. Grieg was greatly impressed with Grainger's playing, and wrote: "I have written Norwegian Peasant Dances that no one in my country can play, and here comes this Australian who plays them as they ought to be played! He is a genius that we Scandinavians cannot do other than love." During 1906–07 the two maintained a mutually complimentary correspondence, which culminated in Grainger's ten-day visit in July 1907 to the composer's Norwegian home, "Troldhaugen" near Bergen. Here the two spent much time revising and rehearsing the piano concerto in preparation for that year's Leeds Festival. Plans for a long-term working relationship were ended by Grieg's sudden death in September 1907; nevertheless, this relatively brief acquaintance had a considerable impact on Grainger, and he championed Grieg's music for the rest of his life.

After fulfilling a hectic schedule of concert engagements in Britain and continental Europe, in August 1908 Grainger accompanied Ada Crossley on a second Australasian tour, during which he added several cylinders of Maori and Polynesian music to his collection of recordings.Simon, pp. 5–6 He had resolved to establish himself as a top-ranking pianist before promoting himself as a composer, though he continued to compose both original works and folk-song settings. Some of his most successful and most characteristic pieces, such as "Mock Morris", "Handel in the Strand", "Shepherd's Hey" and " Molly on the Shore" date from this period. In 1908 he obtained the tune of "Country Gardens" from the folk music specialist Cecil Sharp, though he did not fashion it into a performable piece for another ten years.

In 1911 Grainger finally felt confident enough of his standing as a pianist to begin large-scale publishing of his compositions. At the same time, he adopted the professional name of "Percy Aldridge Grainger" for his published compositions and concert appearances. In a series of concerts arranged by Balfour Gardiner at London's Queen's Hall in March 1912, five of Grainger's works were performed to great public acclaim; the band of thirty guitars and mandolins for the performance of "Fathers and Daughters" created a particular impression. On 21 May 1912 Grainger presented the first concert devoted entirely to his own compositions, at the Aeolian Hall, London; the concert was, he reported, "a sensational success". A similarly enthusiastic reception was given to Grainger's music at a second series of Gardiner concerts the following year.

In 1905 Grainger began a close friendship with Karen Holten, a Danish music student who had been recommended to him as a piano pupil. She became an important confidante; the relationship persisted for eight years, largely through correspondence. After her marriage in 1916, she and Grainger continued to correspond and occasionally met until her death in 1953. Grainger was briefly engaged in 1913 to another pupil, Margot Harrison, but the relationship foundered through a mixture of his mother Rose's over-possessiveness and Grainger's indecision.Bird, pp. 148–49

Career maturity

Departure for America

In April 1914 Grainger gave his first performance of Delius's piano concerto, at a music festival in Torquay. Thomas Beecham, who was one of the festival's guest conductors, reported to Delius that "Percy was good in the ''forte'' passages, but made far too much noise in the quieter bits".Bird, pp. 150–51 Grainger was receiving increasing recognition as a composer; leading musicians and orchestras were adding his works to their repertoires. His decision to leave England for America in early September 1914, after the outbreak of the First World War, damaged his reputation among his patriotically minded British friends. Grainger wrote that the reason for this abrupt departure was "to give mother a change" – she had been unwell for years. However, according to Bird, Grainger often explained that his reason for leaving London was that "he wanted to emerge as Australia's first composer of worth, and to have laid himself open to the possibility of being killed would have rendered his goal unattainable". ''The Daily Telegraph'' music critic Robin Legge

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