I am, I hope, one of the least
nationalistic people alive, but I could not help thinking, when seeing a Gramophone list of ‘Top 10
English Composers’ for St George’s Day, that we could do a great deal better
than that. John Tavener (rather than John Taverner)? Delius, seriously? The ludicrously
overrated Britten (who might make it in for The
Turn of the Screw, but for little else)? Not that I expect members of the
Campaign for Real Barnacles to agree, but I thought I should offer an
alternative top ten, celebrating not only, in ‘nativist’ style,
those born here, but those who lived and worked here.
John
Taverner: composer of music of such complexity as to make most post-Schoenbergian
music seem like ‘easy listening’. He saw the light, thank goodness; he
seems to have become a proper Englishman and gave up on music.
William
Byrd: a traitor in hock to un-English, Italianate Popery who composed for other
such traitors (the politically correct might call them ‘recusants’ or even 'victims of state-sponsored religious persecution', the Muslims of their day).
Henry
Purcell: the English Orpheus, whose music, alas, drew far too heavily upon
Frenchified nonsense.
George
Frideric Handel: a German ‘migrant’ in the service of German ‘migrant’
monarchs.
Franz
Joseph Haydn: a shady ‘Croat’ who shamelessly took away ‘British jobs for
British people’, even ‘sending home’ the money he purloined; Gordon Brown would
have had none of that.
Felix
Mendelssohn: Another temporary ‘migrant’, not only German, but shock horror,
Jewish too. Still, he visited Birmingham.
Edward
Elgar: composer of German music, masquerading as an Englishman.
Alexander
Goehr: son of a German ‘migrant’ who, still worse, was a pupil of Schoenberg
and had the temerity to introduced Monteverdi’s foreign 1610 Vespers to this
scepter’d isle.
Harrison
Birtwistle: composer of such cacophony that a group of common-sense Englishmen assumed
their patriotic duty to ‘heckle’ performances of music closer to Stravinsky
than to H Balfour Gardiner. From ‘The North’.
Rebecca
Saunders: a woman, who moved to Germany. I can’t imagine why.
And I’ve still had to omit John
Dowland and many others. Oh well: next year.
