Lennox Berkeley

Biography

He was born in Oxford, England, and educated at the Dragon School, Gresham's School and Merton College, Oxford. His father was Hastings George Fitzhardinge Berkeley, a captain in the Royal Navy and illegitimate son of George Lennox Rawdon Berkeley, 7th Earl of Berkeley (1827–1888).

In 1927, he went to Paris to study music with Nadia Boulanger, and there he became acquainted with Francis Poulenc, Igor Stravinsky, Darius Milhaud, Arthur Honegger and Albert Roussel. Berkeley also studied with Maurice Ravel, often cited as a key influence in Berkeley's technical development as a composer.

In 1936 he met Benjamin Britten, another old boy of Gresham's School, at the ISCM Festival in Barcelona. Berkeley fell in love with Britten, who appears to have been wary of entering a relationship, writing in his diary, "we have come to an agreement on that subject." Nevertheless, the two composers shared a house for a year, living in the Old Mill at Snape, Suffolk, which Britten had acquired in July 1937. They subsequently enjoyed a long friendship and artistic association, collaborating on a number of works; these included the suite of Catalan dances titled Mont Juic, and Variations on an Elizabethan Theme (the latter also with four other composers).

He worked for the BBC during the Second World War, where he met his future wife, Freda Bernstein, whom he married in 1946. Lady Berkeley died in 2016.

He wrote several piano works for the pianist Colin Horsley, who commissioned the Horn Trio and some piano pieces, and gave the first performances and/or made the premier recordings of a number of his works, including his third Piano Concerto (1958).

He was Professor of Composition in the Royal Academy of Music from 1946 to 1968 and his pupils included Richard Rodney Bennett, David Bedford, Clive Strutt and John Tavener. 1954 saw the premiere of his first opera, Nelson, at Sadler's Wells. He was knighted in 1974 and from 1977–83 was President of the Cheltenham Festival.

His eldest son, Michael Berkeley, Baron Berkeley of Knighton, is also a composer. His youngest son is the photographer Nick Berkeley.

He resided at 8 Warwick Avenue, London, from 1947 until his death in 1989.

Honours

Musical style

Berkeley's earlier music is broadly tonal, influenced by the neoclassical music of Stravinsky. Berkeley's contact and friendship with composers such as Ravel and Poulenc and his studies in Paris with Boulanger lend his music a 'French' quality, demonstrated by its "emphasis on melody, the lucid textures and a conciseness of expression". He maintained a negative view of atonal music at least up until 1948, when he wrote:

I have never been able to derive much satisfaction from atonal music. The absence of key makes modulation an impossibility, and this, to my mind, causes monotony [...] I am not, of course, in favour of rigidly adhering to the old key-system, but some sort of tonal centre seems to me a necessity.

However, from the mid-1950s, Berkeley apparently felt a need to revise his style of composition, later telling the Canadian composer, R. Murray Schafer that "it's natural for a composer to feel a need to enlarge his idiom." He started including tone rows and aspects of serial technique in his compositions around the time of the Concertino, op. 49 (1955) and the opera Ruth (1955-6). His shift in opinion was demonstrated in an interview with The Times in 1959:

I'm not opposed to serial music; I've benefited from studying it, and I have sometimes found myself writing serial themes - although I don't elaborate on them according to strict serial principles, because I'm quite definitely a tonal composer. And there are some exceptions to the gospel of intellectualisation - I enjoyed listening to the record of Boulez's Le marteau sans maître very much, because there the timbres of the music were attractive in themselves.

Works

(selected list)

Opera

Orchestral

Choral

Solo vocal

Chamber

Piano

Guitar

Clarinet

Flute

Violin

Selected recordings