1883–1953 · United Kingdom
Arnold Bax (1883–1953) was a British composer, conductor and pianist. He trained at the Royal Academy of Music, taking composition from Frederick Corder and piano from Tobias Matthay; he wrote music for plays and films, and taught in Dublin and Cork. In 1942 he was appointed Master of the King's Music. For players, his piano pieces of varying difficulty — from miniatures to sonatas — are worth exploring.
Arnold Bax was born in Streatham, south London, on 8 November 1883, into a traditional Victorian family. His father, Alfred Ridley Bax, and his mother, Charlotte Ellen, née Lea, raised their son in comfort: Alfred had a private income and did not practise as a barrister. Arnold's younger brother, Clifford Bax, became a writer.
Bax learned the piano as a small child — so early that he later said he could not remember a time when he was unable to play it, at least inaccurately. In the 1890s he attended the Hampstead Conservatoire as a boy, and later, between 1900 and 1905, he trained at the Royal Academy of Music, taking composition lessons from Frederick Corder and piano lessons from Tobias Matthay.
Corder, a devotee of Wagner, shaped Bax's earliest musical allegiances: by his own account, for years in his youth he was absorbed in Wagner's music until he discovered Richard Strauss. Alongside his studies, Bax privately explored the music of Debussy, which the academy's conservative faculty did not approve of. He won the Macfarren Scholarship for composition and became known for his skill at sight-reading intricate modern scores, though his contemporaries Benjamin Dale and York Bowen were better known at the time.
Once his studies ended, Bax travelled to Dresden and saw a production of Strauss's Salome there, first hearing the music of Mahler as well. Ireland also left a strong mark on him: inspired by the poetry of Yeats, to whom his brother Clifford had introduced him, he set off for the country's west in 1902 and felt the Celt revealed within him. The academy concert that same year gave Bax his first public performance: an Irish-style song called 'The Grand Match'.
In 1908 Bax began a cycle of tone poems on Irish themes; his biographer Lewis Foreman considered this the start of the composer's truly mature style.
In 1910 Bax travelled through the Russian Empire, where he fell in love with a young Ukrainian woman, Natalia Skarginska. The romance came to nothing, but the trip proved musically rewarding: in Saint Petersburg he fell in love with ballet and came home full of Russian impressions, traces of which surface in the First Piano Sonata, in the piano piece 'Gopak', in 'May Night in the Ukraine', and in the First Violin Sonata, which he dedicated to her.
Giving up on winning Skarginska's affection, Bax went back to England, and in January 1911 he wed the pianist Elsita Luisa Sobrino. The couple settled in London and then moved to Ireland, to the Dublin suburb of Rathgar; they had two children. In Dublin literary circles Bax was known under the pseudonym Dermot O'Byrne, publishing stories, verse and a play under that name; some of these writings were banned by the censor for their sympathy with the Irish republican cause.
At the outbreak of the First World War Bax returned to England; a heart ailment that dogged him for life left him unfit for military service, so he served instead as a special constable. In these years, while many fellow composers served at the front, Bax produced a great deal of music, including two orchestral tone poems that remain among his best-known works from the period, 'November Woods' (1916) and 'Tintagel' (1917–1919). The Easter Rising in Dublin in April 1916 and the execution of its leaders affected Bax deeply; he expressed his feelings about these events in the orchestral piece 'In Memoriam' and in a trio for flute, viola and harp titled 'Elegiac Trio'.
During the war Bax fell in love with the pianist Harriet Cohen and left his family for her; she remained his muse for years to come and the regular performer of his works. From the early 1920s Bax embarked on a cycle of seven symphonies that formed the core of his orchestral output: the First Symphony (1921–1922) was an immediate success and held the stage in London promenade-concert programmes for several years, while the Third, completed in 1929, long remained one of his most popular works.
In the 1930s Bax composed less; works from that decade include the Violin Concerto (1937–1938), written with the violinist Jascha Heifetz in mind, although Heifetz never performed it. In 1937, at the time of the Coronation honours, Bax was knighted — an honour he had neither expected nor sought. Besides composing, he taught in Dublin and Cork.
In 1942, after the death of the previous Master of the King's Music, Walford Davies, Bax took on the honorary post; the choice surprised many, since Bax did not see himself as a man of the court. In this role he wrote only a handful of pieces for royal occasions, including a march for the 1953 Coronation.
When the Second World War began, Bax relocated to Sussex and took a room at the White Horse Hotel in Storrington, remaining there for the rest of his life and largely giving up composition. In these years he finished a memoir of his youth, Farewell, My Youth, and contributed music to a short propaganda film titled Malta, G.C.; later he composed the score for David Lean's Oliver Twist (1948) and for another short film, Journey into History (1952).
In October 1953, while in Cork, Bax died suddenly of heart failure at the age of 69. He was buried in St Finbarr's Cemetery in the same city.
After Bax's death his music fell into the shadows for two decades: audiences and critics considered it old-fashioned, and only in the 1960s did interest begin to revive — largely thanks to recordings by Lyrita and performances by the conductor Vernon Handley. Scholarly studies of Bax's life and work were published by Colin Scott-Sutherland in 1973 and by Lewis Foreman in 1983; that same year, 1983, marked the composer's centenary, which BBC Radio 3 marked with twenty programmes about his music.
In 1992 the British director Ken Russell made a television series, The Secret Life of Arnold Bax, in which he himself played the composer.
Bax wrote prolifically across many genres — songs, choral music, chamber works, piano pieces — but is best known for his orchestral music: seven symphonies and a series of symphonic poems. His early works bear the mark of Celtic culture and Yeats's poetry; later, Nordic themes and Icelandic sagas took their place. Critics noted that Bax's music combines robustness and wistfulness. The composer York Bowen observed that his orchestral scores often call for large forces — triple or quadruple woodwind, six horns and extra percussion.
Among Bax's larger works with soloist are the Symphonic Variations for piano and orchestra (1919), written for Harriet Cohen, the Cello Concerto (1932) and the Violin Concerto (1937–1938); his chamber output includes three string quartets, a Viola Sonata (1922) and a Piano Quintet.
Bax was himself an accomplished pianist; his works include four piano sonatas (1910–1932), and for piano duet he wrote the tone poems 'Moy Mell' and 'Red Autumn'. On the site, a good place to start is the 'Intermediate+' pieces: the 'Sonata No. 3', the arrangement 'Bach-Bax - Fantasia', the miniatures 'In a Vodka Shop' (1915) and 'Country Tune', and the piece 'Two Russian Tone Pictures'.
Songs occupied an important place at the start of Bax's career: some, mostly the early ones — such as 'The Fairies' (1905) — have piano parts so virtuosic that they tend to overshadow the voice. Against that backdrop stands a simpler and more popular song, 'The White Peace' (1907). Bax also set to music poems by Hardy, Chaucer, Burns, Synge, Joyce, Housman and Tennyson, besides verses by his brother Clifford. Among his choral works is his largest piece for unaccompanied choir, 'Mater ora Filium' (1921), set to the text of a medieval carol and inspired by Byrd's Mass.
In early chamber music the critic Edwin Evans praised several pieces for their inventiveness — among them a Phantasy for viola, a piano-violin-viola Trio, and a String Quintet so demanding that performances of it were rare — and he judged the Piano Quintet the finest achievement of that period, admiring its richness of invention.