Edmund Rubbra: Symphonist (review)

"Like yards and yards of brown linoleum." This unappealing image was applied to one of the British composer Edmund Rubbra's symphonies by his compatriot, Arthur Bliss. As cold as this judgment may seem, Bliss was hardly alone in his equivocal estimation of Rubbra's symphonic scores. Howard Ferguson wrote to Gerald Finzi, "I was very disappointed by [Rubbra's Third Symphony]—as a work, I mean—at first hearing." Finzi defended Rubbra's symphony privately by writing at the bottom of Ferguson's letter, "Well, he won't after a few more hearings." Finzi, who was often an astute critic of the work of his contemporaries, wrote to a friend that he admired Rubbra's individual profile as a composer, declaring that "from the word go everything he has ever written has been Rubbra" (Stephen Banfield, Gerald Finzi: An English Composer [London: Faber and Faber, 1997], 99).

Surveying the whole of Rubbra's symphonic achievement suggests, however, that Finzi's assessment of his colleague's work may have been overgenerous. In fact, Rubbra took a relatively long time to work through the varied influences that contributed to the formation of his idiom. That Rubbra is relatively little performed today, even in Britain, is hardly the result of a lack of industry, intelligence, or invention; Rubbra composed eleven symphonies, as well as a substantial body of chamber music and some of the loveliest choral music written during the last century. The currently low value of Rubbra's shares on the stock exchange of musical opinion is due in part to the unevenness of his output allied to the very models upon which he predicated his work. Few, if any, twentieth-century composers were as resolutely indifferent to fashion as was Edmund Rubbra.

Astonishingly, the main currents of twentieth-century modernism left Rubbra's music largely untouched; there is no discernable trace of the influence of Stravinsky or Schoenberg in his symphonies. Rubbra took as his principal models the symphonies of Sibelius and, to a lesser degree, Vaughan Williams; other potent influences were Hindemith and Holst. Un surprisingly, this lack of obeisance to the chief standard-bearers of musical modernism limited Rubbra's reputation largely to Britain during his lifetime, and his resolute lack of interest in post-war developments, such as chance, musique concrète, or serialism, meant that he was relegated to the dinosaur division of British music during the 1960s and 1970s along with his colleagues Finzi, Bliss, Ferguson, and many others. Perhaps the day will come, however, when a new generation of composers, musicologists, and even music critics, will finally rebel against the suffocating influence of Stravinsky and reevaluate upwards the music of composers such as Rubbra.

As for Rubbra's own opinions concerning stylistic development, Leo Black reports in his thoughtful book on the composer, Edmund Rubbra, Symphonist, that the composer once declared forthrightly that "it is not musical style that matters, but the thought behind the style; it is the stature of the thinking that gives music substance" (p. 23). Such a view neatly illustrates Rubbra's unremitting seriousness of purpose: there is no humor and little charm in his music. Rubbra's reverential attitude toward music was the direct result of the circumstances of his life. Born into humble circumstances, he read widely and voraciously; he wrote cogent and expressive prose; and he was a Catholic convert who was nevertheless fascinated with Buddhism, theosophy, and the mystical traditions of both West and East. Rubbra's mystical impulses were given their initial impetus through his study with the theosophist composer Cyril Scott; Rubbra's predilections in this direction were encouraged further by another of his teachers, Gustav Holst, who was himself profoundly interested in Eastern religions and the occult.

Black skillfully explicates this other-worldly aspect of Rubbra's aesthetics as well as providing other keys to the composer's quite contradictory personality. As Rubbra was one of Black's teachers at Oxford, a certain endearing overstatement pervades this book; few besides...