The Power of Robert Simpson: A Biography by Donald Macauley (review)

After the Hyperion recording of Robert Simpson’s Ninth Symphony (1986) was released in 1988, David Fanning wrote in Gramophone magazine that ‘Simpson had found what Sibelius in the end seemingly despaired of finding—a way of uniting the essentials of symphonic momentum with the essentials of modern consciousness’. Such high claims—Fanning also described Simpson’s music as ‘uniquely invigorating’—were by no means exceptional. According to Donald Macauley, ‘a poll of readers of the BBC Music Magazine [in 1999] asking them to nominate their favourite twentieth century work and composer, gave Simpson’s Ninth joint third place alongside Britten’s Peter Grimes and Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, while among composers he ranked fifth, after Bartók, Elgar, Prokofiev and Richard Strauss’ (p. 174). But just five years later, in 2004, Julian Anderson could describe the same work more ambivalently, as ‘an isolated case of Sibelius-influenced uninterrupted transformation extended to previously unheard-of lengths within a relatively traditional harmonic and orchestral idiom. As such it is an undervalued and underplayed masterpiece by a lone figure in British music’ (The Cambridge Companion to Sibelius, ed. Daniel Grimley (Cambridge, 2004), p. 211).

The paradox of the fifth ‘best’ twentieth-century composer as ‘isolated’, and ‘a lone figure’, is reinforced by Macauley’s observation that the Ninth has not been performed live since its London premiere in February 1992. Despite a constant stream of commissions—‘since coming to prominence as a composer in the mid-fifties he received more than he could actually accept’ (p. 192)—Simpson’s major works were often left unplayed after their premieres. For this reason alone, ‘paradox’ might have been a better noun for Macauley’s title than ‘power’.

Simpson lived from 1921 to 1997, and the unusual degree of social mobility possible in the middle of the twentieth century enabled this son of full-time Salvation Army workers to progress from school to medical studies only to abandon them in 1942 in favour of private composition lessons with Herbert Howells. As a conscientious objector called up in wartime he followed a very different path from Michael Tippett and Benjamin Britten, fulfilling (in an eerie parallel with Karlheinz Stockhausen in Germany) the harrowing obligations of working with an ARP mobile surgical unit. After a hand-to-mouth freelance existence after 1945, he joined the BBC in 1951, and stayed there for nearly thirty years, resigning in 1980—just before he was due to retire—after increasing irritation with the allegedly autocratic ways of the Head of Music, William Glock, and his successor Robert Ponsonby. This found expression in a booklet called The Proms and Natural Justice; the esteem in which Simpson was held as a composer helped to add plausibility to his broader musical arguments at a time when such support as the ‘avantgarde’ had been given during the Glock–Boulez years at the BBC was coming to seem distinctly passé.

Simpson’s own musical identity was well formed by 1949, a review in Music Survey of Tippett’s third string quartet homing in on matters of ‘tension’, and the risks of seeming ‘busy rather than energetic’ even when preserving a ‘sense of tonality’ that is ‘delicate and imaginative’. The completion of his Durham DMus exercise, the Symphony No. 1, in 1951—Macauley tells us that this had at least four predecessors—and the publication of his absorbingly partisan monograph Carl Nielsen Symphonist in 1952, written in a mere nine weeks, made clear that Simpson was working a very different musical seam from that of such well-established British symphonists of the time as Ralph Vaughan Williams, Arnold Bax, and Edmund Rubbra: and he was no less distinctive when considered alongside the younger postwar star, Benjamin Britten. Simpson would later comment that Britten ‘always seems to me to take the easy way out’ (p. 247) and he excluded the composer of Sinfonia da Requiem and the Cello Symphony from his two-volume survey of symphonic composition (Penguin Books, 1966–7...