Journeys into English piano music part 3

The intriguing case of William Baines: a centenary retrospective

Works discussed:

The story of William Baines is intriguing and poignant. This year marks the centenary of the young Yorkshireman’s death at the tragically premature age of twenty three, and the occasion offers an ideal opportunity to explore and reassess his output. He was a piano composer above all else, with a markedly individual and distinctive sensibility for pianistic colour and sound. Furthermore, despite occasional inconsistencies and weaknesses in his writing – unsurprising for such a young composer – Baines’s music conveys such palpable vision, poetic tenderness and ecstatic strength to have assured for it an enduring place in the repertoire.

The son of a church organist and cinema pianist, Baines was born at Horbury in the West Riding on 26th March 1899. His studies were confined to his native Yorkshire and undertaken chiefly at the Yorkshire Training College of Music under the guidance of that institution’s principal, Albert Jowett. William’s piano teacher, Arthur Fountain – later to become a church organist in Lancashire – recalled his young charge as “a particularly sensitive and nervous pupil with strong artistic inclinations…a frail, delicate-looking boy, but always absorbing to teach in view of his intense interest at all times.” Baines rarely travelled far outside his native Yorkshire, dying of consumption at his parents’ home, 91 Albemarle Road in the city of York on 6th November 1922. Plagued by illness, Baines barely survived into adulthood, yet completed 216 works in all and achieved a compellingly original compositional voice in the best of them. His language lies somewhere, perhaps, between Chopin, Scriabin and Debussy but is extremely distinct from all three, Baines’s pianistic and musical influences being absorbed into a highly personal idiom. At his best as a miniaturist, Baines communicates a wealth of ideas, a cauldronful of searing passions and a kaleidoscope of colouristic effects. Roger Carpenter, in his monograph on Baines’s life and work, concludes that “William Baines is to English piano music as Emily Jane Bronte is to English poetry.” That is to say, an artist of supreme importance and individuality whose life was snapped off in its prime, but not before it had found expression in a handful of masterpieces deserving of immortality.

This exploration of the piano music of William Baines turns first to the luxuriant impressionistic washes of Paradise Gardens, a tone poem that brought the composer his earliest conspicuous public success. The nineteen-year-old Baines was finding his feet as a composer and a new maturity was beckoning, yet the threat of military service cast a cloud over his mood. On 3rd June 1918 Baines wrote in his diary of a walk with his mother and brother near York:

“Last night Mother, Teddy and I went by car as far as Haxby and then had a very pleasant walk. It was a beautiful evening. Returning home we came on the walls and there was a lovely view overlooking the gardens of the Station Hotel. You looked through thick green foliage on to the grounds, which were beautifully laid out with flowers – and in the centre a little fountain was playing. A perfect blue sky and the sun shining low made indeed a grand picture. “Paradise Gardens” will on some future occasion probably be used as a title for one of my compositions.”

Baines began work on the piece just two days later, and it is not difficult to see why Paradise Gardens achieved public success. It is serene, impassioned and poised, its lyrical opening giving way to broad climaxes and episodes of melting tenderness and liquidity. Full of long-breathed phrases and warm lyrical lines, the unfolding musical narrative is spiced with surprising touches of Bainesian chromaticism.

The Naiad comes from a set of Three Concert Studies, which Baines’ biographer Roger Carpenter brands “his finest achievement in terms of pianoforte technique”. Initially entitled “Bowery Nook”, The Naiad is headed by a quotation from Keats:

A bowery nook will be Elysium –

An eternal book, whence I may copy

Many a lovely saying about the leaves and

Flowers – about the playing of

Nymphs in woods and fountains.

Carpenter notes that Baines modelled the piece on Ravel’s Ondine, and the work is certainly a major achievement for a composer still not twenty-one years of age. The work’s dedicatee, Frederick Dawson, describes the central lyrical episode as “seraphic”, whilst the outer sections evoke the dancing of waves and rivulets.

Completed during the closing months of 1920 and the opening few days of 1921, Silverpoints comprises a set of four evocative and highly perfumed character miniatures and was published by Elkin at the end of 1921 with a dedication to Baines’s loyal champion, the pianist Frederick Dawson. The inspiration of the sea always loomed large in Baines psyche, often extended to fanciful imaginative horizons, and the opening piece is a good example of this. Labyrinth (subtitled “A Deep Sea Cave”) evokes a mysterious and menacing mood and is somewhat Debussyan in its colours and textures. In its watery contemplation it is slightly reminiscent of the French composer’s prelude La Cathedrale Engloutie, but the harmonic language and pianistic design is entirely Baines’s own. The right hand ostinato figure is presented in compound time, with much of the left hand in simple time, and the large intervallic leaps in the left hand melody breathe a desperate intensity into the majestically wrought climactic moments. Water Pearls, founded on a repeated bass figure, is a scurrying scherzo requiring a breathless effervescence in performance. Frederick Dawson suggested that it should convey “the flash and glitter of falling water.” The third piece in the set, The Burning Joss-Stick, is darkly evocative, mystical, even unsettling. Roger Carpenter brands it “a progression of chords redolent of Cyril Scott’s mysticism like drifting clouds of incense.” Carpenter goes on to tell us that Frederick Dawson described the final whispered E major second inversion chord, heard against a majestic E flat minor chord, as “the door of Heaven closing on sinners but allowing a chink of light to shine faintly through the gloom.” The Burning Joss-Stick bears a separate, individual dedication “to Mrs Frederick Dawson” and the piece gave rise to a delightful story told of a recital Baines gave in Leeds. Two elderly ladies were sitting in the audience and one asked the other “What is a joss-stick?”. “Something to do with an aeroplane I think”, replied her friend, to which her companion retorted: “Ah, yes, they say he’s been in the Air Force.”

The final piece, Floralia, is one of Baines’s most sublime and ecstatic creations, harnessing luxuriant arpeggios and irregular metres to striking effect. Dawson commented that the specified use of the sustaining pedal contrived to catch the effect of a “bagpipe drone.” The piece is prefaced with the following unreferenced quote:

Nymphlike children danced and threw flowers o’er the

Festive shrine of fair Flora.

Zephyrus joyfully sang through the trees with the

Scent of all the woodland May-flowers in his breath.

Tides, a sequence of two mature and dramatic tone poems, was the last work the composer saw through the press. It is among Baines’s finest, most dramatic and consistent creations, and again it draws its inspiration from the sea, and specifically the moods of the composer’s beloved Yorkshire coast. In a 1920 interview Baines made some revealing comments about his approach to composition: “I am like Debussy; I have learnt more from the wind than from any master. Music was in me, naturally. I am a great believer in exercising the imagination, and I think the reason I have attained a distinctive style all my own is that I have always tried to do something different from anything I have ever heard.” Several commentators have noted colouristic parallels between Tides and Britten’s much later opera Peter Grimes (written some twenty years after Baines’s death), and it is tempting to reflect upon the distinctive North Sea aura which wove its distinctive spell around both composers. In his monograph on Baines Roger Carpenter writes that “the North Sea’s thick fogs and consequent phenomena must often have impressed themselves on Britten’s mind, and Baines could write of “the lonely grey which always seems to cloak our beloved Flamboro’ towards night-time”.”

The Lone Wreck paints a compelling, haunted picture of an abandoned seacraft deep in the ocean, the cries of seabirds ringing over the flurries of waves and swirls of seaspray. The piano writing is superbly effective and idiomatic. The autograph carries the following heading:

“In the hidden beach the deep sea rolls around the lonely wreck;

Where the albatross with wings outspread –

White like the beaten foam,

Flies o’er and about the silent masts

All hung with seaweeds –

(and now touched with sungold).

Goodnight to Flamboro’ carries a quotation from Edward Dowden: “Cry, Sea! It is thy hour; thou art alone.” The sea moans throughout in a repeated left hand semiquaver figure, over which lyrical chordal movement gently undulates, rising to fever pitch in a pounding con fuoco climax. The work ends in tranquil repose, all passion spent and Baines’s darkly menacing chromaticism threading a deep vein of melancholic uneasiness until a shaft of light suffuses a pure C major chord at the very end.

The Island of the Fay is a striking, richly-hewn and densely-textured journey in sound, originally composed as a piano piece, then orchestrated (as Island of the Fay, with the definite article dropped). It packs a veritable kaleidoscope of shifting colours and myriad shades of light into its short duration, and the warmly lyrical lines are etched against a backdrop of sinewy chromatic shifts and pulsating inner intensity. It is easy to see why Baines might have envisaged a reworking for orchestra, but such is his individual – one might say orchestral - approach to piano sound and colour that for me this is undeniably a solo piano piece in conception and design, albeit in an iconoclastically Bainesian language. It is all about liquidity of sound and blend, with compelling inner voices and a rapt intimo middle section.

The three pieces which comprise the sequence Pictures of Light were assembled posthumously by Frederick Dawson and prepared for publication in 1927. The sequence opens with the hypnotic Drift-Light, headed by the quotation: “…The angels’ ladders are shafts of light…” Baines’s biographer Roger Carpenter eloquently sets the scene for the piece’s compelling interplay: “Within the compass of a single octave in B major the right hand sets up a scintillating rotary movement of semiquavers; scraps of melody glint through this haze, and another octave bass meanders beneath.” The second piece of the set, Bursting Flames, is mercurial and quixotic, its flames raging in devastating torrents whilst embers of melody surge in the tenor and reappear, veiled and reflective, at the end. Carpenter suggest that “While Scriabin’s spirit certainly infuses the fidelity with which intermittent outbursts blaze up towards an incandescent climax, this energy soon burns itself out, until the spark flickering and glowing peters away.”

The final piece, Pool-Lights, to which – as Dawson observed – “ a melancholy interest attaches”, was Baines’s very last composition and it seems to me to be infused by both a spareness of aesthetic and a transcendental lucidity of utterance. This icy musical landscape is, as Carpenter remarks, “as far removed from the luxuriance of Paradise Gardens, completed a mere 34 months previously, as are Scriabin’s five last preludes from his set of op.11”.

Two sets of piano preludes exist in Baines’s catalogue. The better known set of Seven Preludes appears on my EM Records disc EMRCD012/13 and was seen through the press by the composer. These works were composed in 1919, shortly after Baines’s demobilisation and his return to the family home in York for a long period of recuperation. He had been removed from his brief military service as a matter of emergency for, as the 1918 influenza epidemic was ravaging Europe, the frail Baines was posted to duty in the freezing conditions of Blandford Camp in Dorset where his health succumbed to the strain almost immediately. The composer’s parents were called to his bedside and his mother nursed him day and night. These preludes are utterly entrancing, magically effective and strikingly varied in style, ranging from the rapt and spiritual stillness of the so-called “Amen” Prelude (no.3) to the edgy impressionism of no.5, headed “…Poppies gleaming in the moonlight…” and the torrential explosiveness of no.4. The renowned pianist Frederick Dawson was one of the most committed advocates of Baines’s music and once stopped a recital after this fourth Prelude to brand it “the most astounding piece of music for the piano ever written by an Englishman.” The second Prelude bears a quotation from the composer’s close friend Karl Wood:

“A serene peace reigned in the Convent garden

Only broken by the love-song of a blackbird as he sang to the lilies”

The final, seventh Prelude was added later, Baines’s response to a request from his publisher, Elkin, for a more vigorous conclusion to the set. The composer set out to replicate the gravitas of “a forceful page of Dante, but Roger Carpenter notes “a certain lack of inspiration betraying its provenance as the only work Baines ever composed to order”.

The set of Eight Preludes was constructed posthumously by the pianist Robert Keys from various manuscripts left by Baines, all but one left without performance directions and requiring ingenuity and imagination based on Baines’s wider oeuvre. I came to this set following a long acquaintance with the composer’s published piano music, and I was delighted and fascinated to recognise a strong family likeness in the colouristic tints, intervallic shifts, lyrical shapes and pianistic layout I found in these intriguing pieces. Some of the titles were suggested by Keys, for instance that of the final prelude – Eroica – and that given to the third (Ebbing Tide) to replace the original suggestion of In the Tide-Rip. Wind Sprites is a deliciously light and virtuosic confection, whilst Ebbing Tide spins a magical lyrical repose via a meandering melody set against a rocking accompaniment. As always, Baines maintains a signature predilection to, as Roger Carpenter observed, “unfold the unexpected”, and this unpredictability lends enchantment and excitement to passages which might otherwise have been merely pedestrian. Shade-Imagery flickers with nervous energy, whilst A Fairy Story was, as the manuscript tells us, “told by William especially for Bessie Dawson”, the eleven-year old daughter of Lady Dawson at Baines’s beloved Nun Appleton Hall. The final Eroica is elemental and wild, a furious stampede in octaves. Six of these preludes were given their first broadcast performances by Robert Keys – a pianist, member of the Royal Opera House music staff and a lifelong advocate for Baines – on the BBC Home Service in October 1956.

Despite the advocacy of several pianists, notably the late Eric Parkin, and a small clutch of recordings in the catalogue, William Baines has maintained a precarious hold on the attentions of pianists and listeners in the century since his premature demise. My own efforts to bring his music before the public in this anniversary year are just one aspect of a wider initiative, and it is to be passionately hoped that the coming years will see a resurgence of interest in this compelling composer and his distinctive sound world.

Duncan Honeybourne 2022

First published in Spirited, the magazine of the English Music Festival, 2022