1887–1936 · Netherlands
Bernard van Dieren (1887–1936) was a Dutch composer, music critic and essayist who spent much of his working life in England. He wrote the opera The Tailor, two symphonies, six string quartets, songs and piano pieces. The site offers his piano works at the Intermediate+ level. He was born in Rotterdam and died in London.
Bernard van Dieren was born in Rotterdam on 27 December 1887. He was the youngest of five children, and his mother, the second wife of his father, was French. Little is known about his schooling, but it appears that he first trained for scientific work and spent time as a research assistant in a laboratory.
He had a gift for the sciences, a remarkable intellect and a phenomenal memory, knew literature well, played the violin and enjoyed drawing. He taught himself both the violin and composition. His path as a composer began at about the age of twenty, when a few of his early pieces were printed in the Netherlands.
In 1909 van Dieren left for London as a correspondent of the newspaper Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant. He travelled with Frida Kindler (1879–1964), a pianist and former pupil of Busoni. They married at the start of 1910, and their son was born that same year. It was also then that the composer took British nationality. Frida was the sister of the cellist Hans Kindler.
In the 1920s the family lived in West Hampstead and later moved to St John's Wood. In 1925 van Dieren worked for the electrical firm Philips, but because of his illness he had to leave it the following year.
In the early 1910s van Dieren travelled in Europe and met the composers Schoenberg and Busoni; with Busoni he became friends. He wrote as a music correspondent for a number of European newspapers and magazines, and this is how his first links with the musical world were formed.
During the First World War he worked briefly in Dutch intelligence as a specialist in ciphers.
Van Dieren was unwell for most of his life: because of a kidney complaint he underwent many operations, and during bouts of severe pain he took morphine. Since the attacks came so often, his wife kept the family, giving piano lessons and performing in recitals.
Friends and admirers helped with money: the sculptor Jacob Epstein, the writers Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell, the painter Augustus John, Kaikhosru Sorabji, the composer Peter Warlock (whose real name was Philip Heseltine) and Cecil Gray. Warlock and Gray were especially drawn to van Dieren's strong personality and worked tirelessly to secure performances and publication of his music.
Epstein portrayed van Dieren in sculpture on several occasions, and van Dieren in turn left a deep mark on Kaikhosru Sorabji.
Such warm backing sometimes provoked the opposite reaction. Eric Coates played viola at the poorly rehearsed premiere of Diaphony (1916) and saw how scornfully representatives of the musical establishment, among them Parry and Stanford, treated van Dieren. Within his close circle in London, however, his personality, his music and his critical opinions were held in high regard.
His book on Epstein appeared in 1920. During the 1920s some of his works were published, and in 1927 his Fourth String Quartet was played at a festival in Frankfurt. In 1930 he finished the comic opera The Tailor, which he had begun in 1916 at the request of Heseltine and Gray.
In 1935 a collection of his provocative essays, Down Among the Dead Men, was published. In his articles van Dieren spoke up for such composers as Alkan, Bellini, Busoni, Liszt and Meyerbeer.
In 1934 the BBC broadcast his Diaphony, and in 1935 his Chinese Symphony. The first public performance of the symphony was conducted by Constant Lambert on 15 March 1935 from Broadcasting House in London. Bernard van Dieren died in London on 24 April 1936.
Van Dieren's harmonies lean on chromaticism, his rhythms stay supple and his lines move with polyphonic freedom. The music is not anchored to a key, yet it is not atonal, and the pages often carry no bar lines. Melody matters most, above all the singing line, and this stands out in the songs that Goss, a baritone, and Foster, a soprano, promoted. He chose poems by Goethe, Heine, Hugo, Byron, Keats, Beddoes, Verlaine and Joyce.
Schoenberg's influence is audible in the chamber works. All six string quartets quickly won the interest of leading players. Paul Hindemith took the viola part when the Amar Quartet gave the Second at Donaueschingen in 1922. The Third carries a dedication to Delius, and the Fourth calls for an unusual ensemble of two violins, viola and double bass. In 1925 van Dieren composed the Fifth for violin, viola, cello and double bass, then in 1931 he recast it for the standard string quartet. Ronald Stevenson later made a version of it for solo piano.
The Chinese Symphony (1912–1914) calls for five soloists, a chorus and an orchestra. Its words are Hans Bethge's German versions of Chinese poems, which Mahler had also chosen. Alongside Schoenberg and Busoni, the rhapsodic, lyrical manner of Delius is often audible in it. Van Dieren also composed the opera The Tailor, two symphonies and a great many songs.
His piano pieces trace a change of manner: the brief, atonal Six Sketches (1910–1911) give way to a friendlier, lyrical, tonally anchored style, heard in the Three Studies of the early 1920s and in Tema con Variazione (1927). Many of these works were first played by the composer's wife, Frida.
On the site you can find four of his pieces for solo piano, all marked at the Intermediate+ level: Piccolo Pralinudettino Fridato, Netherlands Melodies, 6 Skizzen and Theme & Variations.
From 1925 Oxford University Press issued some of the scores, yet much of his output stayed in manuscript and long remained difficult to obtain, well after his death. Lost scores and parts were rebuilt in the 1970s by Denis ApIvor and Alastair Chisholm. Latterly, Bardic Edition's Barry Ould has put previously unpublished works back into circulation.