1879–1941 · United Kingdom · 20th century
Frank Bridge (1879–1941) was a violist, conductor and composer from England. He was a native of Brighton and went through the Royal College of Music in London; Benjamin Britten counted among his pupils. The site carries his songs for voice and piano, from Intermediate+ to Advanced level.
Frank Bridge came into the world in Brighton on 26 February 1879. His father, William Henry Bridge, taught the violin and also led a variety theatre band; Elizabeth was the father's second wife, and Frank was their ninth child. The father insisted that his son practise the violin for long hours on a regular basis.
As soon as Frank's playing was good enough, he took a place in the theatre bands led by his father. If the father was absent, the boy conducted instead. He also made arrangements and covered for other players who were missing.
In London, Bridge was a student at the Royal College of Music, where Charles Villiers Stanford and other teachers taught him, until 1903. His chamber works from this time are among the oldest that have come down to us. Shortly after the course ended, he finished a first big orchestral piece, a symphonic poem.
Bridge was a member of several string quartets: he took the second violin in the Grimson Quartet and the viola in the English String Quartet, alongside Marjorie Hayward. He conducted too, occasionally replacing Henry Wood. Later he devoted himself to composition, supported by Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge as patron.
Brahms, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Franck and Fauré left their mark on the early music. In the years that followed, Bridge looked for a more mature and more expressive voice, which led to the stormy First String Quartet and a run of Phantasies for small ensembles.
His orchestral writing matured at a slower pace. He reached a new maturity in The Sea of 1911. It turned out to be his most popular and successful orchestral piece, and the Henry Wood Promenade Concerts programmed it frequently during his life.
In 1913 Bridge wrote Dance Poem, where Stravinsky and Debussy seem to leave a mark. It shows his interest in newer tendencies on the eve of the First World War.
Britten said that Bridge held strong pacifist convictions and that the First World War troubled him deeply; later, in the 2010s, doubts were raised about how far that pacifism went. During the conflict and just after it, Bridge composed pastoral and elegiac music that seems to seek spiritual solace. The main examples are a group of pastoral works for piano, Summer for orchestra, Lament for strings and A Prayer, which sets chorus with orchestra.
Bridge composed Lament for string orchestra to mark the sinking of the liner Lusitania. It was first played in September 1915 by the New Queen's Hall Orchestra under the composer's baton. His style during the war years stayed fairly restrained. Even so, the Two Poems for orchestra and a few piano works show a clear change in harmony: it grows coloristic and moves away from functional logic, favouring symmetrical scales, the whole-tone and the octatonic.
The same period saw Bridge finish two of his most successful chamber pieces: the Second String Quartet and the Cello Sonata.
Bridge gave Benjamin Britten private lessons. Britten went on to champion his teacher's music, and in 1937 he paid tribute by writing a set of variations on a theme taken from the middle number of Bridge's 1906 Three Idylls, a quartet work. Bridge did not teach composition much, and his methods were out of the ordinary: apparently the emphasis fell on aesthetics, on writing that suits the instruments, and on clarity, not on thorough technical drilling.
In 1939 Britten went to the United States together with Peter Pears, and Bridge handed over his Giussani viola as a parting present. The two never met again; Bridge died in 1941.
Through the 1920s Bridge worked toward heavier, more ambitious pieces. He dedicated his Piano Sonata (1921–24) to a friend, Ernest Farrar, who had died in 1918. The sonata was the earliest big piece in which his mature post-tonal idiom appeared at length. That idiom was put to better use in the Third String Quartet, which triggered a string of important orchestral and chamber works.
A last cluster of pieces came in the 1930s and the final period of his life. Among them are the Fourth String Quartet, the Rebus Overture, Oration with cello and orchestra, Phantasm with piano and orchestra, and the opening movement of a symphony for strings that was meant to be larger. It frustrated Bridge that these late pieces got little notice, while the earlier Edwardian ones kept being played.
Bridge died in Eastbourne on 10 January 1941. His grave is in the churchyard at Friston, East Sussex.
Bridge's earliest surviving works are chamber pieces from his student years. His language then moved on, from the influence of Brahms and Fauré to fantasies for chamber groups, orchestral music and, after the war, a more complex harmony. Among the orchestral scores The Sea (1911) became the most popular. His most successful chamber works include the Second String Quartet and the Cello Sonata.
Among his piano music, the war years produced a series of pastoral pieces; several piano pieces from that time show his harmony developing and a taste for colourful, non-functional sonorities. A major piano work is the Sonata (1921–24). His short organ pieces are also among his most performed works, even though Bridge was not an organist himself.
After the war Bridge's language moved on considerably. His letters show that he set himself harder and bigger tasks, with richer harmony and more developed motivic work. Several works from this time have an expressive link with the First World War: apparently the Piano Sonata and certainly Oration (1929–30). The Third and Fourth String Quartets, Phantasm for piano and orchestra and the Rebus Overture also appeared.
The site has 15 editions of Bridge's works for voice and piano. A good way in is «So Perverse, H.61», «The Violets Blue, H.69», «Adoration, H.57» and «Day After Day», all at the Intermediate+ level. More demanding, at the Advanced level, are «Fair Daffodils, H.51», «Come to Me in my Dreams, H.71» and «Love went a-riding, H.114».