Hinterland

Britten never forgot the debt he owed his teacher. It’s time the rest of us gave Frank Bridge his due

Frank Bridge deserves to be remembered for more than inspiring a great work by a greater composer. His name lives on in the title of Benjamin Britten’s sublime early piece Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, a tribute to his teacher. Bridge hardly taught anyone else: he was first and foremost a composer and conductor and, indeed, one of Britten’s most spectacular rages against the musical establishment was that better connected conductors, notably Adrian Boult, landed plum jobs he felt should have been Bridge’s. His inability to call a spade anything but a spade hindered his advancement.

Bridge was born in Brighton in 1879. Had his father not taken an unusual turn in his own career – from being a master lithographer to a violin teacher and a conductor of a theatre orchestra – Frank might never have been a musician. His father insisted he learn the violin, and was a martinet about his music lessons. The young Bridge was soon playing in his father’s orchestra and, like him, learnt to conduct. In 1896, he joined the Royal College of Music, which, although only having opened 13 years earlier, was already in something of a golden age. He studied under Stanford, whose influence can be heard in much of Bridge’s orchestral music in particular. His earliest compositions came quickly, and his work with Stanford – a notoriously difficult man – was a complete success: Bridge won the college’s Gold Medal when he left in 1903.

After graduation, perhaps because of his upbringing,

Bridge gravitated towards theatre orchestras to earn a living; but he also quickly established a reputation as a writer (and performer) of chamber works, starting with an early version of his Piano Quintet and his Phantasie in F Minor for string quartet. His name was really made, however, by his orchestral music. He was taken up by Henry Wood, father of the Proms, who gave the first performance of Bridge’s symphonic poem Isabella at a Prom in 1907, when the composer was just 28.

His orchestral masterpiece The Sea, which has embedded itself in the international orchestral repertoire, was also premiered by Wood in 1912. Critics talk of Bridge being influenced by Debussy and Ravel: both French composers have some input into The Sea – Debussy’s

La Mer was composed just seven years earlier – without detracting from its originality or, indeed, an Englishness typical of alumni of the RCM in Bridge’s generation and for a while afterwards.

Bridge was certainly typical of his generation in being deeply affected by the Great War, in which many of his friends were killed, notably the composer Ernest Farrar. Medically unfit to serve, Bridge composed prolifically during the war years, including some works directly influenced by the conflict. Perhaps the most moving is his Lament, for a nine-year-old girl lost on the Lusitania when the Germans sank it in 1915; but the most striking, and impressive, is his majestic setting of Rupert Brooke’s war sonnet “The Dead” (“Blow out, you bugles...”) : an interesting choice of text for a committed pacifist, given it unequivocally celebrates glorious death in battle.

In the 1920s and 1930s, Bridge wrote more exceptional music –

Bridge’s inability to call a spade anything other than a spade hindered his career

such as his Oration for cello and orchestra, Phantasm for piano and orchestra, and Enter Spring – as well as the work considered the pinnacle of his chamber music, his Second Piano Trio, an obvious influence on Britten. He was helped greatly by the patronage of an American millionairess, Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, which allowed him to focus on composition. In the late 1920s, Britten, as a schoolboy, began to visit Bridge for lessons in his Sussex cottage. The Bridges came to consider him an adopted son.

After Bridge’s sudden death in 1941, Britten repaid his teacher by championing his music, while everyone else preferred, inexplicably, to forget it. For those who wish to explore Bridge there are riches in the recorded canon: Richard Hickox, before his own untimely death in 2008, recorded six CDs of Bridge’s orchestral music for Chandos, all absolutely indispensable. Fine accounts of the chamber music are on

Naxos, and on Lyrita with some of the orchestral works. If you are unacquainted with Bridge’s genius, dive in.