Peter Warlock (composer)

Peter Warlock , a pseudonym for Philip Arnold Heseltine (born October 30, 1894 in London , † December 17, 1930 ibid), was an English composer and music critic . He used the pseudonym Peter Warlock as a composer and his birth name as a critic, but is now better known than Peter Warlock.

Life

Philip Heseltine lost his father as a child. His upbringing was largely traditional and included studies at Eton College , Eton , Christ Church , Oxford, and University College London . Musically, he was mainly self-taught and learned composition by studying the works of composers he admired, particularly Frederick Delius , Roger Quilter and Bernard van Dieren . He was also heavily influenced by the music and poetry of the Elizabethan era , as well as Celtic culture (and studied the corresponding languages: Cornish , Welsh , Irish , Manx and Breton ).

Heseltine wrote his first mature works, which also received approving reviews, under the newly adopted pseudonym Peter Warlock between 1917 and 1918 in Ireland. A period of concentration on music journalism followed ; For a while he was editor of the music magazine The Sackbut . His most creative time as a composer was in the early 1920s when he moved to his mother's house in Cefn-Bryntalch , Wales, where he wrote some of his best songs, such as the song cycle The Curlew based on poems by WB Yeats .

A troubled period of binge drinking followed between 1925 and 1929, during which Warlock and his colleague EJ Moeran , with whom he lived in Eynsford , Kent , ran into multiple conflicts with the local police. For Warlock, however, this was the most productive phase of life, because towards the end of the 1920s his creativity waned and he had to make a living from music reviews again. He suffered from severe depression; however, whether his death from gas poisoning at the age of 36 was a suicide or an accident is not clear.

Works

Warlock's compositions are almost exclusively songs, although the Capriol Suite for Chamber Orchestra is one of his best-known works. He had a deep affection for poetry, especially that of Yeats and his friends Robert Nichols and Bruce Blunt (1899–1957), and always chose texts of high artistic value, often from the Middle Ages , as the basis of his songs.

Warlock's musical preferences were broad, ranging from medieval music to Bartók . In his own music one recognizes a development starting from the imitation of the Victorian and Edwardian salon style towards a more contrapuntal , distinctly personal writing style.

Aside from his own works, Warlock edited or transcribed around 300 folk songs and a similar number of lute songs from the pens of Elizabethan and Jacobean composers. In addition, he campaigned strongly for the music of Delius and organized a successful Delius Festival together with Thomas Beecham in 1929. He wrote the first biography of Delius and next to it, together with Cecil Gray , a book about Carlo Gesualdo .

Warlock himself appears, only slightly altered, as a character in the novel Women in Love by DH Lawrence or, as Coleman, in the novel Antic Hay of Aldous Huxley . Anthony Powell incorporated some biographical details into the character of the composer and music critic Maclintick in his novel Casanova´s Chinese Restauraunt (1960), the fifth volume of the 12-part novel A Dance to the Music of Time .

Web links

• The Peter Warlock Society website, with a detailed biography and complete catalog raisonné
• Sheet music and audio files by Peter Warlock in the International Music Score Library Project