Douglas Stevens on Berkeley’s piano music

My interest in the music of Lennox Berkeley first began some years ago when, whilst still at school, I accompanied a flautist playing Berkeley’s Sonatina. I developed an immediate fascination for the music, and the Sonatina remains one of my favourite pieces of the composer’s output. What struck me most was the beauty of the melodic writing combined with the ingenuity of the polyphonic structures and the interplay between the flute and piano. A particularly poignant section, I thought, was the way in which Berkeley sculpted the coda in the first movement, and the way the harmony finally reaches the tonic at the end. Subsequently I began listening to some of the composer’s choral music, pieces like the Missa brevis and the anthem The Lord is my Shepherd and later I would discover the symphonic works, his great chamber pieces such as the Horn Trio and Diversions, and of course the piano music.

Berkeley’s style and aesthetic are often difficult to define or categorize, and this is in itself one of the features that make him such a unique composer. Superficially there are passages that reflect the work of other composers, such as Poulenc or Britten. Both were important influences on his style but, on the whole, Berkeley’s music does not really sound like either of them. Throughout his compositional career, Berkeley composed within a decidedly tonal framework, and the lyrical quality of much of his experimentations with twelve-note music suggests a mind keen to assimilate current methods with more orthodox procedures. No wonder that Berkeley, like many of his contemporaries, suffered the transition from being criticised for being too modern to criticism for being not quite modern enough. It is this independence of musical thought that so characterizes Berkeley and it can be seen in much of his piano music.

Berkeley might have preferred some of his early compositions to have remained obsolete, yet some of these pieces, written when he was a student of Nadia Boulanger in Paris, contain some beautiful moments. Notable is the central section of his Toccata; the parallel seventh chords (in inversion) structurally recall Chabrier, Ravel and Debussy (a similar feature occurs in ‘Mouvement’ from Images, for example) and the mood is reminiscent of the dreamy isolation of Alain Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes or even the lonely despair of Mauriac’s Thérèse Desqueyroux. Any doubt of how much Berkeley loved France would surely be dispelled by his Toccata alone.

Berkeley’s lyricism is seen again in his ‘Berceuse’, the central work of his Three Pieces, although this set shows his harmonic language becoming increasingly experimental. It is arguably in the Three Impromptus of 1936 that a confident and mature style really becomes evident, and this set of pieces contains many features that are quintessentially Berkeley. The complex tonal rhetoric of the second piece works by taking a slight deviation from the key as the starting point for a different harmonic direction which eventually takes the music back to the original key. This technique is something Berkeley took from Fauré, and does not feature so much in the music of composers like Britten.

Berkeley’s idiosyncratic approach to sonata form – usually polythematic and involving some sort of structural truncation, often by shortening the reprise – was consolidated in the 1930s, and in the piano music it is evident in the formidable Sonata in A for Piano. This work, both technically and emotionally challenging for the performer, also shows Berkeley’s use of a type of tonal polyphony in which a bitonal passage moves towards a point of common resolution between the two juxtaposed harmonies; a very good example occurs in the sonata’s slow movement. Cycles of tension and resolution, so much a feature of pre-twentieth-century music, remain continuously present in his harmonic idiom.

Berkeley’s late music is in many ways no less lyrical than his music from the 1930s and 40s, as his great song cycle Autumn’s Legacy and the Five Herrick Poems show. The ‘Andante’ from the Prelude and Capriccio for Piano contains a great deal of warmth despite its sparse textures, and the ‘Capriccio’ shows Berkeley delighting in his French heritage in terms of the underlying atmosphere of frivolity. Typical of the more astringent forms of some of his late works, however, are the cellular derived structures of the later set of Four Concert Studies for Piano (Op. 82). The second of these, marked ‘Allegro’, is a particularly good example. Here, intervallic cells rather than melodic patterns form the basis of the thematic material, something that Berkeley experimented with in his chamber music throughout the 1960s and 70s. These studies might appear slightly less flamboyant than the Four Concert Studies (Op. 14 No 1) of 1940, but they are no less challenging and all four are superb exercises, not just in finger dexterity but also in pedalling and articulation.

This very brief summary of some of the salient points concerning the evolution of Berkeley’s music for solo piano shows, I hope, why he is such a fascinating composer and also why the music itself is so deserving of being both played and performed. It is also, in spite of being mostly very difficult, extremely pianistic and in this it differs from the work of many contemporary composers and follows much more the great legacy of nineteenth-century piano music. As more people discover Berkeley’s piano music interest will be kindled in the remainder of his output, leading to further awareness and understanding of his highly individual musical aesthetic.