If you stroll into the Art Gallery of New
South Wales and turn into the second gallery on the right, you will see on the
wall what appears to be a painting of a gaggle of gypsies accompanying a horse
on which sits a small boy. The boy grew up to become the ‘Australian’ composer and conductor Constant Lambert.
I perhaps rather rudely put the word
Australian in inverted commas: his father, George Lambert, was born in St
Petersburg and had American forbears, though he was certainly naturalized and is
always referred to as ‘the Australian painter’. Constant, though born in England
in 1905, never came to Australia, but always thought of himself as Australian,
and worked with many Australian artists, including Robert Helpmann and Arthur
Benjamin.
His musical education took place in London;
while he was thirteen, and still at Christ’s Hospital, he wrote his first
orchestral works, and later at the Royal College he learned composition from
Ralph Vaughan Williams and conducting from Malcolm Sargent. Astonishingly, at
twenty the great impresario Serge Diaghilev commissioned him to write a score
for a ballet by Bronislava Nijinska about a rehearsal of Romeo and Juliet (the principal dancers who are rehearsing the play
make love rather than rehearsing their parts). It was not altogether a happy
collaboration – Lambert disagreed with every idea Diaghilev had about the
piece, and the impresario lost his temper and took to avoiding him. Then
Diaghilev cut an important scene and both Nijinska and Lambert were
incandescent with rage. Lambert tried to remove his orchestral score from the
orchestra pit, but was forestalled – at rehearsals he had a man on each side of
him to make sure he didn’t tear up the music. He told his mother he became so
distraught that Diaghilev had him watched by two detectives!
The ballet was not a success, but the
audience at the first night called for Lambert until he took a bow, ‘blushing
like a schoolboy,’ the Daily Express
reported. It was a pretty upsetting experience - but it gave Lambert experience
both for writing for the ballet and conducting performances. For the next few
years he concentrated on composition, turning out among other pieces his most
popular work, The Rio Grande, for
piano, alto soloists, chorus and orchestra, to a libretto by Sacheverall
Sitwell. It was written for a ballet, A
Day in a Southern Port, about low life in a tropical sea-port, with
prostitutes in skimpy costumes and an orgy of sailors, and shows Lambert’s
interest in African-American music and jazz (he was a great admirer of Duke
Ellington, Django Reinhardt and Stéfane Grappeli) . His masterpiece however may
be Summer's Last Will and Testament, a choral setting of Thomas
Nashe's poem about 16th-century London in the plague years. It is scarcely ever
performed.
As a conductor he was very active, highly
effective in the romantic Russian
composers, many of whose works he introduced to British audiences. The most
important and influential part of his life began in the 1930s, when he began
conducting for the Vic-Wells Ballet (later the Royal Ballet). With Ninette de
Valois, the company’s director, and
Frederick Ashton, its chief choreographer,
he was one of a trio who really built the company’s reputation, not only
musically but with his keen interest in stage design. His enthusiasm, it was
said, ‘flowed like a torrent, drenched like a fountain.’ Helpmann thought
he was the greatest of all conductors for the ballet: he could, he said, make
the Sadler’s Wells orchestra sound doubt its size.
But one must not give the impression that
his was a sad and unfulfilled life. It had one great romance: A Day in a Southern Port provided a
first starring role for Margot Fonteyn. She fell desperately in love with him,
and despite his being married and twice her age, their liaison lasted for many
years. Certainly he gave up composition in favour of his work for the Vic-Wells
– which among other things meant frenetic work during the war years, when the company
toured incessantly – but he also had a
real talent for friendship, with among others Ashton, the Sitwells, Michael
Tippett (who he called Arseover Tippett) the artist Michael Ayrton and the
writer Anthony Powell – in whose A Dance
to the M music of Time he appears as the character Hugh Moreland.
He himself was no mean writer, and his book
Music Ho!, sub-titled ‘A study of
music in decline’ is acute, opinionated, idiosyncratic and often very funny. Of
one composer’s work he writes, ‘The gear-change between the first and second
subjects would have made a dead French taxi-driver turn in his grave’, and he
claimed that while many composers work at the piano, Brahms must have worked at
the double-bass. He composed scabrous limericks, and loved practical jokes: he
once published a fake catalogue of a Royal Academy exhibition which included
paintings by the highly conventional painter Frank Brangwyn, with the titles
‘Blowing Up the Rubber Roman and ‘The Annual Dinner of the Rectal Dining
Society.’ He could also turn out a witty verse at the drop of a hat – for
instance a ‘Ballad of LMS Hotels’, inspired by the discomfort of wartime train
journeys. Faced with having to rehearse a rival composer’s work, he invented a
rhyme to suit the main rhythm: ‘Oh dearie me / I do want to pee / And
I don't much care if the audience see.’
Lambert was said to be the most fervent
drunk of his generation (he would not have scorned the title). He died, in
1951, of undiagnosed diabetes complicated by alcohol poisoning. He may have
been only a demi-semi Australian, but who would not want to claim him s a
fellow citizen?
