Peter Warlock: Capriol Suite

Peter Warlock
Born	Philip Arnold Heseltine (1894-10-30)30 October 1894 London, England
Died	17 December 1930(1930-12-17) (aged 36) London, England
Occupation	Composer and music critic

 Capriol Suite

The Norwegian Chamber Orchestra
Henning Kraggerud, leader
From Risør Chamber Music Festival 2012

 

The Capriol Suite is a set of dances composed in October 1926 by Peter Warlock and is considered one of his most popular works. Originally written for piano duet, Warlock later scored it for both string and full orchestras. According to the composer, it was based on tunes in Thoinot Arbeau's Orchésographie, a manual of Renaissance dances. Nevertheless, Warlock's biographer, Cecil Gray, said that "if one compares these tunes with what the composer has made of them it will be seen that to all intents and purposes it can be regarded as an original work".

The work is dedicated to the Breton composer Paul Ladmirault.

The suite consists of six movements:

1. Basse-Danse, Allegro moderato, D minor
2. Pavane, Allegretto, ma un poco lento, G minor
3. Tordion, Con moto, G minor
4. Bransles, Presto, G minor
5. Pieds-en-l'air, Andante tranquillo, G major
6. Mattachins (Sword Dance), Allegro con brio, F major

The individual movements are very brief; a performance of the suite lasts about 10 minutes.

 

Played by the European Community Chamber Orchestra conducted by Eivind Aadland.

 

Philip Heseltine (Peter Warlock 1894-1930) was born in London and lost his father as a child. His mother remarried and returned to her native Wales, living at Cefn Bryntalch Hall, Abermule, near Newtown, Montgomeryshire, the family home of her second husband, Walter Buckley Jones. Philip's education was mainly classical, including studies at Eton College, at Christ Church, Oxford (for one year), and at University College London (one term). In music, he was mostly self-taught, studying composition on his own from the works of composers he admired, notably Frederick Delius, Roger Quilter and Bernard van Dieren. Nevertheless, one of the masters at Eton, Colin Taylor, had introduced him to some of the modern masters which made a marked impression on him. He was also strongly influenced by Elizabethan music and poetry as well as by Celtic culture (he studied the Cornish, Welsh, Irish, Manx, and Breton languages). It was the move to Wales, occasioned by his mother's remarriage, that was the spark for this; only the working classes spoke Welsh but Philip, never one to shy away from the unconventional, set about learning it with vigour.
Heseltine wrote his earliest mature compositions, published to critical acclaim under the newly adopted pseudonym Peter Warlock, following his sojourn in Ireland of 1917-1918. They were followed by a period of concentration on musical journalism; for a while, he was the editor of the musical magazine The Sackbut. His most prolific period, both as a composer and author, was in the early 1920s when he withdrew from the financial and social pressures of London to his mother's and stepfather's house, "Cefn Bryntalch", in Montgomeryshire, mid-Wales, where he wrote some of his finest songs, finally completing his song-cycle The Curlew to poems by W. B. Yeats. During this period he also met Bartók, who visited him while returning from a concert in Aberystwyth arranged by Professor Walford Davies, and whose influence can perhaps be seen in The Curlew.
Between 1925 and 1929, following a quiet period, Warlock and his colleague E. J. Moeran led a wild, boozy life in Eynsford, Kent, having to deal with the local police more than once. For Warlock, however, this was one of the most fruitful periods of his life, but by the end of the 1920s his creativity was waning and he had to support himself with music criticism again. He was suffering from severe depression, but whether his death from gas poisoning at the age of 36 was suicide or an accident is not known for certain. His cat had been put out of the room before he died, perhaps to spare it. There is a third possibility: Warlock had made Bernard van Dieren his heir in his will, inspiring claims by Warlock's son Nigel Heseltine that van Dieren had murdered his father. An intriguing figure, Warlock has served to inspire several characters in English-language literature, among them: Coleman in Aldous Huxley's Antic Hay (1923), Roy Hartle in Osbert Sitwell's Those Were the Days (1938), Giles Revelstoke in Robertson Davies' A Mixture of Frailties (1958) and Maclintick in Casanova's Chinese Restaurant (1960) by Anthony Powell. D. H. Lawrence's use of Warlock as the model for Julius Halliday in novel Women in Love (1920) led to a threat of a lawsuit, followed by an out of court settlement. He appears in person, with Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa, madrigalist and uxoricide, in the play Music to Murder By by David Pownall. His name is surrounded by rumours of involvement with the occult, an interest which he shared with others in the bohemian world of the early 20th century — for example the novelist Mary Butts asserted that it was Warlock who initially introduced her to these subjects. Other less conventional aspects of Peter Warlock's life include experimentation with cannabis tincture, a gift for the composition of obscene limericks and a marked interest in flagellation.