Percy Grainger plays Grainger

by David Dubal









Percy Grainger's reputation and musical stock has greatly risen in the past decade or so. His music definitely speaks louder and more joyously than it ever has. Its bracing good will and generally folk-like character gives it its multi-cultural flavour. Percy wanted to bring "all the world's music to all the world." He grew up in a colonial British Australia, in a young country that heralded democratic ideals which stayed with him forever.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Percy was young, handsome, energetic, and a pianistic wizard. He was also a part of the vigorous folk-song collecting taking place in many countries. The fear that industrialisation would forever destroy the great repository of folk song was a real concern with such men as Cecil Sharp, Vaughan Williams, Bartók, Kodály, Pedrell, and many others.

Grainger loved with an exuberant passion folk music of every context and was convinced that European civilisation had become artistically too rarefied, having lost its earthiness and animal vitality. He had come to dislike the intellectuality of the sonata form and often actively denounced the Viennese classical school, having a temperamental antipathy towards Beethoven himself.

However, he was, if ever there was one, an eclectic. His enthusiasms held him spellbound. He loved the world's music from Polynesia to Perotin. During one period of his life, he held that the three greatest composers were Bach, Delius and Duke Ellington. He loved Grieg and Grieg loved him, enjoying his piano playing and buoyancy. The Norwegian composer wrote, Grainger's playing is "like the sun breaking through the clouds. As a pianist, I do not know to which of the very greatest I should liken him. But all comparison is futile when greatness is the question. He is himself. Possibly I am partial to him because he has actually realised my ideals of piano playing. If I had his technique, my conception of the nature of piano playing would have been exactly the same. Like a god, his playing lifts us high above suffering and struggles. I had to reach the age of sixty four to hear Norwegian piano music interpreted with so much understanding and genius. His playing of Norwegian folk dances breaks new ground for me and Norway."

Throughout his career, he was associated with Grieg's music, especially the piano concerto. Grieg's death prevented a tour together where Grainger would have been soloist in the concerto. Grainger's interesting edition of the concerto with many fine points confirmed by the composer should be consulted by any pianist studying the composition.

Grainger's playing was decidedly unique. Even as an old man, it possessed a well-spring of youth. His robust playing could be described as "of the great outdoors," often shocking his auditors with percussive effects, where they were used to a satin, singing sound.

Grainger's most productive years as a virtuoso were from 1900 until the First World War. He played far and wide through the British isles, Norway, Denmark, South Africa, New Zealand and Australia. At his New York debut early in 1915, performing to a capacity house at Aeolian Hall with Caruso and other luminaries attending, he played the Bach-Busoni Organ Prelude and Fugue in D major, the Handel Variations of Brahms and a few of his own pieces, as well as Chopin, Ravel and Albeniz. The critics went wild and were charmed by the variety of his programme. The doyen of New York critics James Huneker called him "the Siegfried of the piano," and Henry T. Finck wrote that "in less than half an hour, he convinced his critical audience that he belongs in the same rank as Paderewski and Kreisler... The audience was stunned, bewildered, delighted."

His discography well shows the spontaneity of his art. He was the first pianist to record Chopin's Sonata No. 3 using the electrical process. John Bird states, "This performance has stood the test of time and is the recording to which connoisseurs always turn when Grainger's greatness as a pianist is being discussed. It is played with a ferocity and wild abandon that is at times frightening." Wilfrid Mellers says, "Percy makes a few cuts and allows himself a sprinkle of wrong notes, but plays with a furious intensity that proves as revelatory of Chopin's wild Polish heart as it is of Grainger's own heroic ferocity. Having heard this, one can have no doubt that Grainger was among the supreme pianists of any time, even without the charisma added, in live performances, by his extravagant good looks."

As this exciting Nimbus release in its Grand Piano Series attests, Grainger was inimitable and unapproachable in his own music. He absolutely shines. The keyboard sizzles and spurts, the punch of his playing, its rhythmic dynamism is delectable. "Pianists", he once wrote, "with their alarming lack of rhythmic neatness, their inability to follow a conductor's beat, their inability to listen while they play - are more in need of some kind of musical team work (to offset their all-too soloistic study activities) than almost any other class of musicians." As a teacher, Grainger imposed severe metronome practice on his students.

The critic Olin Downes once told Percy, "Your virtuosity utterly amazes me. I have only once before heard a performance of Balakirev's Islamey that I could place beside yours, and that was one by Busoni."

Yet, Grainger had a kind of love-hate for the piano. Its 'soloism' bothered his democratic communal ideas about music, and he proudly said that since he was fifteen, he never wrote a solo piano piece, yet there is hardly a work in his output that he did not eventually adapt to the piano, and with the care and skill of a jeweller. Eventually he needed to play with his own hands what he wrote.

As a pianist, he was extremely insecure and was overtly nervous if he found out a good pianist was in the audience. He claimed "Real piano players are egged on to do their best when their fellow craftsmen go to hear them, so we are told. But I (knowing myself to be a sham as a tone-show player) always play my worst if a piano player is in the hall; my heart sinks into my boots". As late as 1949, he writes, "I don't have the ability to get good performances of the music I believe in - whether it is my own music or that of other composers. In spite of my long career before the public, I have never learnt the art of showmanship, or the technique of pleasing. Curiously enough, I do have the gift of FAME: audiences want to go to hear or see me and all sorts of misguided conductors and musical societies are silly enough to let me try my hand on their forces. But always with the same result: mutual disappointment, ineffectuality, disgust."

Grainger, the man and artist, would have baffled a team of Freuds, Adlers and Jungs. He was a seething cauldron of conflicts , loves, hatreds, mad passions and contradictions on a grand scale. Indeed, the complexity of his life and the range of his mind is startling. One minute, he was blindingly lucid, the next he sounded actually insane. His intelligence was acute, and his ideas are mixed with profound depth and sheer silliness. In reading his letters, one may alternatively empathise, get excited about an idea, or think Percy, if he had no art, would have been a criminal.

His adoration of his own sexual proclivities and perversities are so honestly expressed that the reader can almost come to think of his whip-lashing sexuality as perfectly normal. All those interested in Grainger are referred to John Bird's splendid biography published by Faber & Faber, as well as two magnificently edited and annotated collections of letters: The Farthest North of Humanness (Letters 1901-14, edited by Kay Dreyfus and published by the MacMillan Company of Australia and in the United States by Magnamusic-Baton) and a collection titled The All-Round Man - Selected Letters of Percy Grainger 1914-1961 published by Oxford and edited by Malcolm Gillies and David Pear. For a masterly analysis of Grainger's music, the Oxford University Press has published a study by Wilfrid Mellers, one of the world's most fascinating writers on music. One reads with awe about Grainger as a son, lover, composer, pianist, polemicist and the agonies and ecstasies of his sexual being. It seems almost everything Grainger thought and felt was different from other people.

Grainger was born in Brighton, near Melbourne on 8th July 1882. His father John's drinking led to violent scenes with his mother Rose, who from the first completely dominated Percy's life. At five, Rose gave her son piano lessons, as well as encouraging him in his drawing and painting for which he had a fine gift. Rose also instilled in him a love for literature and introduced him to Nordic sagas, which would influence his outlook on life in many ways.

Rose kept the youngster at the piano for a minimum of two hours a day. She was the centre of his life and she disciplined him harshly as well as doting on him. She told the boy that he was her saviour. By 1890, John and Rose separated, leaving Rose in complete control of her pliable son.

By the age of ten, his piano playing progressed rapidly and he was brought to study with Melbourne's finest teacher, Louis Pabst, a German-born pianist who had once studied at the St. Petersburg Conservatory with Anton Rubinstein.

On 9th July 1894, the golden-haired boy made his official debut at the Masonic auditorium. A reviewer wrote, "...Australians may watch his future career with mingled pride and confidence." In May 1895, with very little money, mother and son left Australia, their destination being Frankfurt, Germany. At the Hoch Conservatory, his piano teacher was the Dutch-born James Kwast. In Frankfurt, Grainger developed life-long friendships with a band of English composition students, Roger Quilter, Balfour Gardiner and Cyril Scott, whose music he especially admired, and throughout his career promoted, especially Scott's fascinating 1911 piano sonata.

By now, Percy had acquired a fair-sized repertoire and was earning a small livelihood teaching and accompanying. Rose, who had contracted syphilis from her husband, was constantly ill, and though she made some money teaching English, she had her sights set on the lively musical world of London where they arrived in 1901, just after Percy's nineteenth birthday. For the next thirteen years, London was his headquarters, from where he went on his numerous tours. These years saw his immense growth as a composer, folksong collector and pianist. He was lionised in fashionable society and played at the homes of the wealthy where he was a sensation. Grainger had by now made friendships with Busoni, from whom he took a few piano lessons, and more importantly with Grieg and Delius, two artists for whom Grainger had the deepest affection. Delius once told the pianist Harold Bauer of his own admiration for Grainger and Bauer in return wrote to Grainger saying, "We were talking about a number of contemporary composers whose work was then attracting considerable attention - 'What is lacking in everyone of them,' burst out Fritz, 'is the one indispensable quality - originality... There are just a few who have this quality and one of them is Percy Grainger. I consider him a genius and one of the greatest composers.' "

It was early in the new century that Percy developed and refined his fanatical sexual deviation of flagellation and sado-masochistic love-making finding a consenting lover in a young Danish woman, Karen Holten.

Grainger had been aware that "by sixteen, I was already sex-crazy" and sexuality would become a life-long obsession. He wrote, "If only one could get the whole world to unite in making the earth a temple of sexual intensity." He admitted that whipping and being whipped were equally as important and fulfilling to him as piano-playing and composing. He said to his mother, "To empty oneself out, in art or sex, is the acme of all life. Constipation, of all kinds, is the root of all downheartedness."

Grainger was a man of almost frightening energy, who loved running, jumping, swimming, rowing and other sports. He dreaded out-of-shape bodies. "One must work," he told Karen Holten. "To make the body fitter, firmer, fresher, harder, nicer than it is. You know what slack fingers are in piano-playing. Most people's bodies are similar after a certain (and that a very early) age. And there is not the least excuse for it."

Although Grainger fortunately never had children, he once wrote, "I long to flog children. It must be wonderful to hurt this soft unspoiled skin... and when my girls begin to awaken sexually, I would gradually like to have carnal knowledge of them... I would love to explain things to them and open to their eyes in this area the whole way of the world without the shame or shyness or cowardice." He was constantly propagating sexual liberation, and hated all forms of puritanism. "If I knew", he said, "of a country where I could publish an unabridged account of my sex-life and sex-feelings I would be a happy man indeed... maybe my unbridled mental licentiousness foreshadows a future freedom and pleasurableness of the race."

It was also during these years that he began developing his many racial theories. A believer in the purity of races, he was an obsessive believer in the superiority of the Nordic and Anglo-Saxon races, and over the years began relieving English of any of its Latin and other derivatives into what he called "blue-eyed English." There was not a topic in which he could not find Nordic superiority. In the field of sports, he wrote, "The Scandinavian love of non-combative sport (skiing, skating, swimming, bodily culture) was gradually southernised into the combative, and bloody bull-baiting, boxing, fox-hunting, shooting, big-game hunting, cockfighting and football."

His letters become ever fuller of his blue-eyed English which he kept evolving. I give an example from a letter to Cyril Scott. "I would have joy-quabbed (enjoyed) the tonery (music) at the monk-pack-house (monastery) had the tone-tools (instruments), been more in tune with the singer-host (chorus) and the tone-smacks (accent) been in the right place. Besides, I pain-tholed (was jarred) because the middle-fiddle (viola) seemed all the time to be any othery (different) note from the wind-pipe-tone-box (organ). Nor was the tone-bill-of-fare (programme) kind, as one might fore-know (expect) when tonery is alter-slain (sacrificed) to Christ-belief (Christianity).

Grainger rejected the usual Italian terminology in his own music. For instance, for crescendo, he wrote "louder lots" and for diminuendo, "soften bit by bit." His scores are peppered with directions, such as "don't slow off, slacken and soften, easy goingly but very clingingly, breathe at will, don't drag at all, with healthy and somewhat fierce 'go' " and many others.

Grainger and Rose decided to stay in the United States after his New York debut in 1915. Later that year, he began making a large series of piano rolls for Duo-Art, becoming one of the best sellers in the Aeolian Company's impressive list of concert pianists. In 1916, he performed at the White House for President Wilson, and, soon after, enlisted in the United States Army where he played soprano saxophone in the marching band. Rose's health steadily declined and her behaviour was growing more unstable than ever. Although he had various relationships with women, Rose was his main woman, and her domination had become fanatical, yet Percy thought it "unbelievable that anyone should live for love (or passion) in defiance of a mother's wish... I have taken love action only when advised to do so by my mother. Any other thought is sickeningly repugnant to me!"

However, she frequently terrified him by telling him that if he did not love her enough, she would kill herself. There had been much gossip and rumour that mother and son practised incest, a rumour that has no truth, but the gossip totally unhinged her, and while Percy was on tour, she flung herself from the Aeolian building at 27 West 42nd Street in New York. It was in the spring of 1922, Percy had just wired her to "Rest easy, beloved mother - trust in God and my love-longing-clasp you in my arms. Concentrate on recovery." Naturally Percy was in a state of shock when he heard the news. In some ways, he never recovered from his mother's death.

In 1928, he married Ella Viola Ström at the Hollywood Bowl before 20,000 people. He adored her and she willingly yielded to his sexual desires. For the rest of his eventful life, he continued to perform and compose. His last years were wracked by poor health and cancer. On 20th February 1961, he died at his home in White Plains, New York and was buried at West Terrace Cemetery in Adelaide, Australia.

The Music

Shepherd's Hey (English Morris Dance Tune)

Grainger himself provided a note for the Duo-Art piano roll. "This is a genuine traditional tune and can still be heard on the fiddle or pipe and taber (a sort of fife and drum) as an accompaniment to the sturdy, vigorous dancing of teams of 'Morris Men', decked out with jingling bells and other finery, in certain out-of-the-way agricultural parts of England."

In 1906, Grainger heard three fiddlers in the Bedford Morris-Dance Team, and notated the good-natured tune which he ingeniously arranged for piano in 1908, which was first published in 1911 in chamber and solo-piano settings.

Country Gardens

Grainger's 'hit' Country Gardens was written at Governor's Island, New York in June 1918 when he was serving in the army. On the score, the composer gives credit to the eminent folk song collector Cecil Sharp who had first notated the tune and published it in a collection called Morris Dance Tunes. It is noteworthy that Percy wrote to Sharp on two occasions offering him a portion of the royalties. Grainger in his most respectful manner writes to Sharp in the spring of 1924, "At the risk of seeming impertinent, I take the liberty of again making a suggestion with regard to the royalty of Country Gardens. It has proven even more of a success than I had expected, and you will see from the enclosed photocopy that it has broken all Schirmer's sales records... I hope you will forgive me if I ask you once again if you will not consider sharing the royalty with me. I feel it is quite undeserved that I should enjoy the whole of it myself." At the first writing in 1920, Sharp refused any payment, but he finally suggested one-sixth of the royalties. Grainger generously paid one-half of the royalty to the Sharp estate until 1927.

Because of Country Garden's overwhelming popularity, Grainger, like Rakhmaninov in his Prelude and Paderewski in his Minuet, was compelled by his audiences to play it constantly. Percy, wary that his other compositions would be neglected, could be sarcastic about his ubiquitous piece, wrote, "The typical English country garden is not often used to grow flowers in, it is more likely to be a vegetable plot. So you can think of turnips as I play it."

Sussex Mummers (Christmas Carol)

Grainger wrote "this beautiful tune (that in some ways resembles a chorale more than a carol) was collected by Miss Lucy Broadwood, at Lyne, in Sussex, in the South of England, in 1800, from the singing of somewhat gypsy-like mummers-that is, countryside actors-called Tipleerers." They used this tune in their Christmas play entitled St. George, the Turk, and the Seven Champions of Christendom. Grainger notated the melody down in 1905, though he did not complete the composition until 1911. The piece is dedicated to the memory of his 'beloved' Edvard Grieg, who died in 1907, but who most likely heard some version played by Grainger on his visits to the Norwegian master. Wilfrid Mellers wrote, "This piano score merits close attention; if one meticulously follows the composer's instructions as to voice-leading, dynamic range and pedalling, one will learn much about the relationship between oral and literate traditions."

Jutish Medley

Grainger loved Denmark and was conversant in the country's language. The Jutish Medley is the last movement of the Danish Folkmusic Suite. Originating as an orchestral work, Grainger brilliantly transcribed it for piano. The original scoring is ingenious using what Grainger calls his "elastic scoring" along with piano and strings; he uses xylophone, harmonium, saxophone, marimba and many others which give the textures a definitely non-conventional orchestral sound. Indeed to know some of the best of Grainger is to hear his works in their various scoring manifestations.

Molly on the Shore (Irish Reel)

One of Grainger's best known works is based on two Cork reel tunes, Temple Hill and Molly on the Shore, taken from the Complete Petrie Collection of Ancient Irish Music. Grainger originally combined them in 1907 as a setting for band. The piano version was "dished up" as he liked to say in 1918. As late as 1949, he orchestrated it for a Stokowski recording with his own piano part included. The piano version is masterful in combining the two delightful tunes.

One More Day, My John (No. 1 of Sea Shanty Settings)

The words of this sea shanty are:

"One more day, my John, one more day; O, rock me and roll me over, one more day"

Grainger took the tune from the collection of Charles Rosher, an author, painter and collector of sea shanties. Grainger heard Rosher sing it in a London drawing room in 1906 and notated it, but didn't complete it until 1915. Grainger wrote, "I find it hard to make up my mind as to how far such shanties are of British, American or Negro origin. Maybe various influences are blended in them. It will be seen that the tail-piece is a free addition of my own, as well as several twiddles."

Spoon River

This is a Grainger favourite, the score was dedicated to "Edgar Lee Masters, Poet of Pioneers", author of Spoon River Anthology who was delighted with the piece. The tune was sent to Grainger by Masters himself, writing, "The fiddle tune below was sent me by Captain Charles H. Robinson in the summer of 1915, at my request, after he had written me in regard to The Spoon River Anthology that he had heard the old fiddlers play this tune when he lived in Stark County, Illinois in 1857."

The Warriors

This previously unpublished roll titled The Warriors should not be confused with his large scale orchestral work The Warriors, "music for an imaginary ballet." Instead we have mostly a lyrical slow movement partly based on ideas from the large work as well as Grainger's 1916-17 Bridal Lullaby.

Ramble on the last love-duet in Der Rosenkavalier

Grainger's feelings on Strauss varied. In 1933 writing to D.C. Parker, Grainger, says, "I think you exaggerate my worship of Strauss. I thought him very cheap when I first heard him in 1896, but after the war, when he was too much belittled, I tried (with my usual effort at balance) to emphasise my admiration, which is only partial."

Grainger's Ramble on Love is something of a throwback to the nineteenth-century pianist's paraphrases, and in it Grainger exhibits his shrewd use of piano textures. Mellers says, "it sounds like streamlined Liszt, refashioned in Ravellian lucidity, and is a marvellous instance of Grainger's irresistible way with a piano."

March-Jig (No. 1 from Stanford's Four Irish Dances)

Sir Charles Villiers Stanford's Four Irish Dances composed for orchestra are based on eighteenth century marching tunes. They constitute Stanford's Op. 79. Grainger's adaptations are free and spirited. No. 1 is subtitled Maguire's Kick.

Grainger can be seen playing a portion of this piece on this writer's video produced by Peter Rosen The Golden Age of the Piano Philips Classics VCR or laser disc. In it, one sees this marvellous virtuoso take flight: his relaxation and fearlessness are extraordinary.

The Leprechaun's Dance (No. 3 from Stanford's Four Irish Dances)

An adorable dance. Grainger wrote on the score, "In some parts of Ireland, the rural population still believes in the existence of leprechauns - tiny men - fairies who wear tall hats and knee-breeches. The man that can catch one of them becomes fabulously rich, it is asserted, but they are hard to catch. In fact, few Irishmen ever succeed in catching a leprechaun. Stanford's composition reflects the elusive quality of the leprechaun. Two tunes in 9-8 time, a 'Jig' and a 'Hop Jig' are employed in this dainty movement."

A Reel (No. 4 from Stanford's Four Irish Dances)

Magnificently danceable. Grainger's explosive energy is captivating as a composer and pianist. The reel calms to a slightly less frenetic pace, and whirls home in a longish coda. One wonders why these virtuoso transcriptions with their tang of Ireland have been absent from the repertoire of concert pianists.

Sheep and Goat Walkin' to the Pasture (traditional American tune arranged by Guion)

Grainger helped popularise the American "folk pieces" of David Guion (1895-1981), a Texas-born composer. Guion was basically self-taught though he studied piano with Godowsky for a short time at the Vienna Conservatory. His best known pieces are excellent adaptations of cowboy and black songs.

Guion appends to the score these words: "Sheep and Goat was written, whistled, sung or played, once upon a time, by someone somewhere in America. The first time I remember having heard it was while trottin' on my mother's knees... and I heard it again at the cowboys' and old fiddlers' dances and reunions in my old home in west Texas. In this arrangement for piano, I have used, aside from the original old melody of Sheep and Goat, a little snatch, here and there, of other old familiar cowboy breakdowns, and a few 'side-kicks' of my own."

Turkey in the Straw (traditional American tune arranged by Guion)

Guion wrote, "Turkey in the Straw every American, of course, knows; but not as I do, for I have danced to it thousands of times out here at the cowboy dances until I was almost ready to drop."

"I do not know why, where, when or by whom it was written, but the cowboys and old fiddlers rather look on it as their 'national hymn'. In this concert transcription, I have tried to write it just as I have so often heard it whistled and played by our funny old fiddlers, the cowpunchers and cowboys. It is not easy - it was not meant to be, but I certainly could have made it a great deal harder to play."

Gay but Wistful (No. 2 from In a Nutshell-Suite)

One of Grainger's original scores in four movements using only his own material The second piece, Gay but Wistful was composed in 1912 and as usual he gave it various permutations arranging it for two pianos, piano and theatre orchestra and in three solo versions. Grainger, wrote. "Gay but Wistful is an attempt to write an air with a music-hall flavour embodying that London blend of gaiety and wistfulness so familiar in the performances of George Grossmith jr., and other vaudeville artists. The Gay but Wistful tune consists of two strains, like the solo and chorus of music-hall ditties."

Gum-Suckers March (No. 4 from In a Nutshell)

The term gum-suckers is derived from the fact that when Grainger was growing up in Australia it was common to chew the leaves of the eucalyptus tree which refreshed in hot weather. The habit was called gum-sucking.

Zanzibar Boat Song

Rudyard Kipling was one of Grainger's idols when he was young. The verses that inspired Grainger to his boat song head the story In Error found in the collection Plain Tales from the Hills

"They burnt a corpse upon the sand - The light shone out afar; It guided home the plunging boats That beat from Zanzibar - Spirit of fire, whe'er thy altars rise, Thou art the Light of Guidance to our eyes!"

"The reading of these verses", wrote Grainger, "induced a musical mood (in which the wistful theme of the poem and the rhythmic suggestion of 'the plunging boats' played their part) out of which this composition emerged. But in no sense is it 'programme music'; in no sense does the music aim at portraying the events and thoughts set forth in the poem - nothing beyond the voicing of a musical mood evoked by the poem."

Colonial Song

Another of Grainger's original compositions. The composer said, "It gives expression to feelings aroused by the scenery of Australia." The Colonial Song exists in many versions and the work was held in Grainger's affections.

Mellers writes, "Each variation is more sumptuously harmonised until, after a no-holds-barred climax, the process is reversed, the dynamics being gradually subdued." It is Grainger's finest tribute to the land of his birth.

Walking Tune

A simple and haunting lyric melody predominates throughout. The theme is of original vintage, but the folk element is inescapable.

Children's March (Over the Hills and Far Away)

For two pianos performed by Percy Grainger and Lotta Mills Hough. This irresistible, joyous march was first composed in 1916. Mellers writes, "Following Pied Piper Percy, tramp over the hills and far away - from the nasty industrial world to Grainger's antipodal utopia. It is a joy to march with them... Most liberating of all, perhaps, is the two-piano version, which is obstreperously physical - the cross-glissando, explosion at the apex of the procession delivers a punch to the solar plexus - while being glintingly clear in its multiple polyphonics."

In this performance, he is joined by Lotta Mills Hough, who Malcolm Gillies in his volume of Grainger's letters tells was an American pianist with whom Grainger was romantically involved between 1917 and 1922. She was Grainger's assistant when he taught piano at the Chicago Musical College.


© 1996 David Dubal

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