It’s time we recognised the tortured genius of Malcolm Arnold
The British composer’s reputation has long been in decline – unfairly so, argues
‘His success as a popular composer – as a writer of film music – created a prejudice against him’
Sir Malcolm Arnold was born 100 years ago next Wednesday. He was a prolific composer whose reputation has sunk since he died and, indeed, began to decline long before his death in 2006. That it has done so is unfair, for he wrote much sublime music and showed intense talent from an early age. He is renowned for his film music, which adorned 1950s gems from the St Trinian’s films to The Bridge on the River Kwai: he continued to write it through the 1960s but then, after his life took a problematical turn, he stopped, and indeed for some time stopped writing anything at all.
In his prime he had a gift for invention and for melody, and wrote (to use a phrase I imagine he would have hated) accessible music that won him popularity from the 1950s to the 1970s. Whether instrumental (such as his memorable Brass Quintet) or orchestral (such as his sets of Dances – one of the English Dances was for decades the theme to What the Papers Say, and is perhaps his best-known piece) he wrote con brio: perhaps that is one reason why he has endured such critical neglect. That, and a personality that caused problems for his wives, his children and his collaborators made it hard for him to win the respect and cooperation his career needed to advance. By the 1970s, to put it bluntly, he had a reputation for being drunk, rude and unreliable.
Tonight at 6.45pm on Radio 3 I am presenting a documentary about Arnold, about his more serious, and darker, side – specifically, about his massively underrated nine symphonies. All have merit, some inevitably more than others – but then the same might be said of Beethoven, or Schubert, or Vaughan Williams, all of whom also wrote nine. From the interviews conducted for the programme it was clear Arnold used his symphonies to express the most intense strands of his creativity, but also his deepest despair in a life that was beset by psychological troubles and by his own self-inflicted wounds.
He was what we would now call bipolar. An eminent psychiatrist I interviewed said his condition would hardly have been recognised when Arnold was growing up: it was therefore not treated until his middle age, and by then it was all too late.
By the early 1970s he was effectively suffering from burnout, his addiction to alcohol and women rendering his life chaotic. His creativity subsided – having written six symphonies by 1967 there were only three more, in 1973, 1978 and 1986, the last being very definitely an acquired taste but a work whose unusual depth reveals itself after several hearings, and is more revelatory once one understands the context in which it was written. Arnold’s mental collapse was so profound that in 1978 he checked himself into a psychiatric hospital; and although that was not the end of his career, he wrote only with the greatest difficulty in the last 30 years of his life.
His success as a popular composer – as a writer of film music – almost certainly created a prejudice against him that persuaded critics not to take his symphonic works seriously. Reading some of the early reviews of his symphonies it is as if some critics were actively searching for faults; here was a man who seemed to find writing music so easy, and that appeared to offend many of them. Above all, in an era where “difficult”, atonal music was the vogue, someone who wrote tunes was fit only to be held in contempt.
Fortunately, there are two stunning cycles of Arnold’s symphonies available, and they provide abundant evidence of how ignorant and bigoted a judgment it was to belittle and disregard them: one is conducted by Vernon Handley with several orchestras; the other, which has the benefit of an equally insightful conductor but working with the same orchestra throughout, features the RTE Symphony Orchestra conducted by Andrew Penny (Arnold had an affinity for Ireland so it is appropriate he should be so well interpreted by the country’s national symphony orchestra). It is through listening to these nine major works that one realises Arnold was not merely a facile writer of tunes, but had a genuine genius for composition.
His greatest work is his 5th Symphony of 1961: there were elements of deep and unhappy introspection in his 4th, but its successor takes unease to a new level. Its second movement is a threnody in memory of musicians who were Arnold’s friends, including Dennis Brain and Gerard Hoffnung, and evokes great beauty and great sadness. When critics attacked the flippancy they thought they discerned in the work, Arnold angrily asked what was flippant about such grief, and its expression.
The scherzo that follows reflects Arnold’s fascination with jazz, but also radiates menace and uncertainty. The finale seems to be proceeding to a happy resolution, but ends darkly almost by surprise; it was as if any moment of serenity or joy in the composer’s life had by definition to be followed by pain. The critical reception depressed Arnold and it was six years before the next symphony appeared: it has an almost ferocious intensity from the start, and rarely shows any lightness; but then the light was starting to go out.
It was also in the 1960s that Arnold collaborated with Deep Purple and wrote a work for vacuum cleaner. If he wasn’t already done for critically, such things sealed his fate. Over half a century later the so-called experts who hounded Arnold are no longer relevant. It is up to a new generation to make up its mind about him as a composer, and they will do so not by recourse to his character, but by reference to the quality of his music alone, and his genius as a communicator and an entertainer.