1894–1930 · United Kingdom · 20th century
Peter Warlock was the pseudonym of British composer and music critic Philip Arnold Heseltine, who lived from 1894 to 1930. He signed his musical works with this name while keeping his own name for critical writing. Warlock wrote mainly songs for voice and piano; several of them, from upper intermediate to advanced level, are collected on the site.
Philip Arnold Heseltine's birth date was 30 October 1894, and the family was staying at the Savoy Hotel in London, used at the time as their town residence. His father, Arnold Heseltine, worked as a solicitor in the family firm, and his mother, Bessie Mary Edith, who came from the Welsh border town of Knighton, was his second wife. Soon after the boy's birth the family moved to the Chelsea district of London, where he attended a nearby kindergarten and had his first piano lessons. Arnold Heseltine died unexpectedly in March 1897, at forty-five years of age. Six years on, Bessie became the wife of a Welsh landowner and magistrate, Walter Buckley Jones, and moved with her son to his estate, Cefn Bryntalch, near the town of Montgomery in Wales, though the family kept its London house. Philip was proud of his Welsh background and kept a lifelong interest in Celtic culture, which later left a clear mark on his music.
Heseltine began at Stone House Preparatory School in Broadstairs in 1903, doing well in his studies there and winning several prizes. In January 1908, at a concert at London's Royal Albert Hall, he heard Delius's Lebenstanz; the piece made little impression on him until he learned that his uncle, the artist Arthur Joseph Heseltine, lived close to Delius's home in France — a connection he used to obtain the composer's autograph for his school music teacher. That autumn Heseltine entered Eton. He disliked the general atmosphere of the school, but found relief in music: through an Eton teacher and Delius enthusiast, the cellist Edward Mason, he came to know the score of Sea Drift and began asking his mother for money to buy more of the composer's works. In June 1911, with the school's permission, Heseltine attended a London concert conducted by Thomas Beecham made up entirely of Delius's music, and was introduced to the composer in person during the interval. The acquaintance grew into a friendship that lasted for the rest of Heseltine's life and became the first serious creative influence on him.
Heseltine never received a systematic musical education and remained largely self-taught. In October 1911 he went to Cologne to learn German and study piano at the conservatory there; his progress at the piano was modest, but it was there that he wrote his first songs, which closely followed Delius's manner. In autumn 1913 Heseltine entered Christ Church, Oxford, to read classics, and when his time at Oxford did not work out, he moved to University College London for courses in language, literature and philosophy, and again left before finishing a degree.
In February 1915, with the help of a society acquaintance, Emerald Cunard, Heseltine got a post as music critic for the Daily Mail and immediately gave up his university studies for the job; four months later he left the paper, unhappy that the editors often cut his sharper opinions. In time he began writing for other publications as well. In April 1920 the publisher Winthrop Rogers invited him to edit the music magazine The Sackbut, and Heseltine produced nine issues under his editorship. After five issues Rogers withdrew his funding, Heseltine ran the magazine alone for several more months, and in September 1921 a new owner replaced him as editor.
Heseltine's music was influenced, besides Delius, by the composer Roger Quilter and the Dutchman Bernard van Dieren — his friendship with van Dieren began in late 1916 and lasted for the rest of Heseltine's life, during which he promoted the older composer's music. Celtic culture was another constant source of inspiration: besides his regular visits to Wales, Heseltine spent about a year in Ireland studying the local language. He moved there in August 1917 together with Minnie Lucie Channing, known in his circle as Puma, prompted by the threat of conscription. In Ireland Heseltine combined the study of early music with an interest in Celtic languages, withdrawing for two months to an island where only Irish was spoken, and he met the poet W. B. Yeats. In his final two weeks in Ireland, amid a dispute with the publisher Winthrop Rogers over van Dieren's works, Heseltine wrote ten songs which later critics have counted among the finest in his output.
At the end of August 1918, back in London from Ireland, Heseltine sent the publisher Rogers seven new songs; because of the recent dispute over van Dieren's music, he signed them with the name "Peter Warlock" — and from then on published all his musical works under this pseudonym, keeping his own name for critical and analytical writing. The most productive period of his career as a composer was the early 1920s, most of which he spent at his mother's house in Wales. There he completed the song cycles Lilligay and The Curlew, numerous songs and choral works, and a string serenade written for Delius's sixtieth birthday in 1922. Recognition of Warlock's growing reputation came when The Curlew was chosen to represent contemporary British music at the 1924 Salzburg Festival. In these same years he wrote the first full-length biography of Delius, which long remained the standard study of the composer.
In June 1924 Heseltine left Wales and lived briefly in a Chelsea flat in London, then, after spending Christmas 1924 in Mallorca, rented a cottage in the Kent village of Eynsford, settling there in 1925. He shared the house with the composer Ernest John Moeran, and among the other permanent residents were his long-standing girlfriend Barbara Peache and Hal Collins, who came from New Zealand and was Māori, helped run the household. The atmosphere of the house was shaped by evenings in the pub across the road and boisterous gatherings that at least once brought in the police, but on weekdays Heseltine worked hard: it was there that he set poems by two writers, the Jacobean playwright John Webster and, from more recent times, Hilaire Belloc, and also composed the Capriol Suite, scoring it both for strings alone and for full orchestra.
By the autumn of 1928 Heseltine's income no longer covered his expenses, and he had no choice but to leave the Eynsford cottage and go back to Wales, to his mother's estate, but by that November he had tired of life there and moved to London. Reviewing concerts and cataloguing work were hard going for him, and his main occupation at this time was compiling, under the pseudonym "Rab Noolas", the drinking anthology "Merry-Go-Down", illustrated by Hal Collins. Early in 1929 the conductor Thomas Beecham, a long-standing acquaintance of Heseltine, made him two offers that restored his sense of purpose: to edit the journal of the Imperial League of Opera, which Beecham had founded, and to help prepare a festival honouring Delius, planned for October 1929. For the festival Heseltine travelled to France in search of forgotten works by Delius and prepared programme notes and a short biographical sketch of the composer for the concerts.
In August 1929, at one of the Promenade Concerts, Heseltine conducted the Capriol Suite — the only public engagement of his life as a conductor. In January 1930 Beecham closed the Imperial League of Opera's journal, and Heseltine was again out of work; his attempt to raise funds for a production of van Dieren's opera The Tailor also failed. The last summer of his life passed in low spirits and inactivity; a brief creative revival came from a two-week trip to Hampshire in July 1930, after which he wrote the songs "The Fox" and "The Fairest May" — his last compositions.
By September 1930 Heseltine and Barbara Peache had moved into a basement flat on Tite Street in Chelsea. On the evening of 16 December he invited van Dieren and his wife round for drinks; according to van Dieren, they left around midnight, and neighbours later recalled hearing footsteps and piano music in the flat during the night. Returning home on the morning of 17 December, Peache found the doors and windows tightly shut, smelled coal gas, and the police broke in and found Heseltine unconscious. Heseltine died on 17 December 1930, aged 36, of coal gas poisoning; an inquest held on 22 December could not determine whether it was an accident or suicide and returned an open verdict. He was buried beside his father at a cemetery in Godalming on 20 December 1930, and memorial concerts of his music were held at London's Wigmore Hall in late February and again in December 1931.
Warlock's surviving output includes around a hundred and fifty songs, mostly for voice and piano, along with choral works, part of them accompanied by instruments or orchestra, plus a handful of purely instrumental pieces for piano and for string orchestra. From an early age he developed an interest in folk song and Elizabethan music, and later spent much time transcribing and editing early English music — both interests are visible in the poetic texts he chose for many of his songs.
At the start of Warlock's career as a composer, the nineteenth-century tradition of song for voice and piano, largely modelled on German examples, was giving way to new approaches: some composers turned to English folk song, while others sought to enrich the accompaniment beyond the piano alone. Within this environment song-writing gave the young Warlock room to develop his own style, and over time he went on to make more than five hundred transcriptions of early music and became one of the pioneers of its systematic study. Among the results of this side of his work was the book "The English Ayre", a general survey of Elizabethan English music.
The site brings together 18 editions of Warlock's music, all for voice and piano. Eleven of them are at upper intermediate level and seven at advanced level, so a player can work through his songs gradually, without any beginner-level pieces. Many titles — "My gostly fader", "Roister Doister", "Rutterkin", "Lusty Juventus", "The bayly berith the bell away" — keep their old English spelling, reflecting the interest in older texts mentioned above. "My gostly fader", "Lullaby", "A Sad Song" and "Roister Doister" work well as first steps, followed by the more demanding "Chopcherry" — these make up the site's "where to start" list.