Assembling and collating the list of works has been hindered by the fact that original manuscripts have survived for fewer than half of Moeran's published compositions, and of these, only a small number bear reliable dating evidence. The dates for some works can be deduced from Moeran's correspondence and from data extracted from articles in newspapers and music periodicals, and in some cases the titles of the works suggest possible dates. However, in many cases, no evidence for a precise date has been found, and an approximate date has been extrapolated from the date of publication. Since almost all Moeran's work was published during his lifetime, this has enabled the creation of this list, which is as chronologically accurate as possible.

Individual works are ordered by their known or deduced completion date. Works that were grouped as a set are ordered by the date of the collection.

List of Lost or Uncompleted Works

It is estimated that the list of surviving works represents less than half of the completed music that Moeran composed during his lifetime: many works were lost, destroyed or otherwise misplaced. This list comprises surviving uncompleted works and the pieces for which there is reasonable evidence of their former existence.

Black Risings, Conspiracies and Marronage, 1773–80

A favourite destination for pupils leaving Uppingham during the early decades of the twentieth century was Clare College Cambridge, and the college Admissions Registers record several entrants each year between 1909 and 1914. The family tradition established by Moeran's grandfather's generation was, on leaving school, to go to university and study for a career in either the law or the church. Moeran's father and uncle were both Cambridge alumni, and his brother William Graham had graduated with a BA degree from Emmanuel College, Cambridge in 1911. While it may have been Moeran's intention to follow their examples and apply for a place at Cambridge, and despite having claimed to be or to have been a student at Clare College Cambridge at least twice during the next few years, at some point during the summer holidays, he changed his mind – the musical opportunities available in London evidently proved to be too strong to resist. He had left Uppingham having developed into a musician of exceptional talent, and it is possible that his teacher Robert Sterndale Bennett recommended to Moeran and his parents that the young musician proceed to study at the Royal College of Music. The support of Sterndale Bennett and the financial backing of his parents would have ensured that acceptance into the college would have been a formality, and Moeran was enrolled at the college on 26 September 1912. He selected piano as his principal study with theory as secondary, and his father was named as fees guarantor. Amongst the students who entered the college at the same time as Moeran were Marie Goossens and her brother Adolphe, Brazilian violinist Edgardo Guerra and organist and composer Heathcote Statham. It seems to have been decided that while he was in London Moeran would live in Upper Norwood with his great aunt Sarah Graham, who, with her husband, had some thirty years earlier provided Moeran's mother with a home when her grandfather George Smeed died. As a minor living away from the parental home, Moeran would have required the guardianship of a responsible adult relative, and he probably moved into his room at his great-aunt's house in Auckland Road in mid-September.

The Royal College of Music term started in early October and Moeran would have begun his studies with enthusiasm, immersing himself in the musical life of the college and the city.

Letter 67

Bizet to his mother

Rome, 9 November 1859

Dear Mama,

We got back to Rome much later than we intended. As I told you in my last letter, I was ill for a week. Then after me Dubois was very unwell for another week. Then two of our companions who were to travel with us had to wait for money.

Anyway we’re back now. We’ve had a splendid trip, with marvellous weather. When I got to Rome I heard about the death of the wretched Mme Guillemin. All the Chevreux family are in France. M. Guillemin is in Pau with his young daughter. I had been expecting this dreadful misfortune for some time, but it has distressed me deeply, as you can imagine. M. Guillemin's behaviour has been very strange for a number of years. God will be the judge.

Passing to far less important matters, I must tell you how delighted I was by my report. Eight of the ten numbers are praised. Here's the full text, anyway:

Members of the Religious Affairs staff of the Control Commission were not chaplains. In most cases they were not ordained. Some, at various times in the history of the organisation, were either serving or were ex-military personnel. However, by the time the Control Commission staff arrived in Germany in the summer of 1945 to start their work, one group of British clergymen had already been in the country for some months. Those were the chaplains serving in the Royal Army Chaplains’ Department (RAChD). The relationship between the two groups, army chaplains and Control Commission staff, and their respective tasks, would need to be clarified both at a central and at a local level to ensure that the work of both organisations was not compromised. This chapter looks at some of the ways in which the relationships came to be defined in that first summer of the Commission's operation.

The RAChD of 1945 was different from that of World War One and different again from the modern chaplaincy service in the British army. Following a reorganisation in 1920, all chaplains, except for those from the Catholic Church, came under a single administrative structure. The Catholics had felt unable to join an organisation which would be headed by an Anglican. They thus belonged to a parallel organisation within the army. The larger ‘unified’ Department, as it was known, had worked reasonably well during World War Two. It was this organisation that administered the approximately 290 chaplains from the Church of England, Church of Scotland, other Presbyterian churches, the Methodist Church, and chaplains appointed by the United Board from Congregational, Baptist, and other smaller denominations who in the summer of 1945 were serving in Germany. The RAChD in 2nd Army, the largest British formation in 21 Army Group (21 AG) was under strength by some thirty chaplains. Many of those serving had been with their units since the Normandy landings in June 1944. They were led by the Revd J. W. J. Steele, the Assistant Chaplain General of the 2nd Army. In the arcane structure of the RAChD he held the rank of Chaplain to the Forces Class 1, ranking for military purposes as a Colonel.

Erasmus Darwin’s most important contribution to the science of farming was the publication Phytologia, a major treatise on agriculture and gardening that attracted some contemporary praise. More recently, Robert Schofield was puzzled that an ‘elderly, established doctor’ with ‘little public indication of an interest in agriculture’ should have published a treatise on the subject. And while Maureen McNeil argued that Darwin’s inspiration lay primarily in Scottish writings concerning agricultural improvement, the Agricultural Revolution and the ‘scarcity crisis of the 1790s’, along with some aspects of Linnaean botany and the creation of the Lichfield botanic garden, she still found it hard to explain how these provided ‘sufficient stimulus for a six-hundred page treatise on agriculture’. While some interest in the technologies of agricultural improvement and plant physiology were already evident in Darwin’s commonplace book from the 1770s, for McNeil ‘explanations of Darwin’s agrarian interest’ founded only upon his ‘personal situation’ are ‘inadequate’ and she saw ‘no necessary transition’ from prose and poetical ‘nature studies’ to agriculture. His medical interests did not provide a full explanation either, given the small part of agriculture that was devoted to generating ‘tools of medicine’. However, this underestimates the extent to which he mixed with farmers and landowners throughout his career, the extent of his experiences combating animal and plant diseases and the impact of his medical ideas and experiences upon his analyses of agriculture and horticulture.

Darwin was a strong supporter of the Georgian ideology of improvement, which, as Raymond Williams argued, like the notion of ‘cultivation’, contained meanings that were ‘historically linked but in practice so often contradictory’: ‘working agriculture’ existed alongside the costly ‘improvement of houses, parks, artificial landscapes’, interweaving the desire for increased wealth and productivity with landscape aesthetics reinforced by moral judgement. This chapter argues that Darwin’s belief that the sciences and medicine could be used to better harness nature and help realise a more productive countryside is evident in Phytologia, his medical treatise Zoonomia and the references to agriculture and gardening in his poetry and correspondence. McNeil has argued that, as such, his emphasis was on the ‘intellectual, rather than on the manual aspect’ of farming and that he was ‘eager to celebrate’ both agricultural as much as industrial ‘capitalists’ as ‘social heroes’ as well as those who helped encourage farmers to better organise their ‘space, capital and time’.

I end as I began, with a sermon. In the early twelfth century, a nun sat down at Nunnaminster in Winchester to copy out a sermon for Christmas Day, bearing in mind the mixed congregation of nuns, monks and clerics who would hear it. In her hand, that sermon, De natale Domini, begins with a tripartite individual address to fratres dilectissimi [most beloved brothers], virgines [virgins], and clerici [clerics], and goes on to address all three groups collectively, as ‘plebs ecclesiastice discipline’ [people of ecclesiastical discipline]. The large manuscript containing the sermon, now Bodley MS 451, was designed for public instruction and probably read aloud by the nuns.

As a sermon collected in a Nunnaminster manuscript by a self-named scriptrix [female scribe], De natale Domini provides a view of women as a key part of the monastic familia, working together with clerics and monks to celebrate one of the most important moments in the Christian calendar. As with the expansive definition of Christian community seen in the Old English Blickling 10 and HomM 8 discussed in Chapter 1, the Latin De natale Domini, through the address plebs ecclesiastice discipline, includes nuns as one part of a wider Christian community, expected to practice the same virtues and avoid the same sins as their monastic and clerical colleagues. However, two central sections of the sermon (paragraphs 4 and 5 in Hall’s edition) are addressed only to fratres karissimi [most beloved brothers]. My analysis of Blickling 10 and HomM 8 in Chapter 1 illuminates this moment in De natale Domini. Both those homilies begin with an address to men þa leofestan [most beloved people/men], and then specify explicitly that men could include both men and women. The later addresses to men in the homily therefore also include the whole listening congregation. Having included nuns and clerics at the beginning of De natale Domini, perhaps the later addresses to fratres karissimi function in the same way as men þa leofestan in the anonymous Old English homilies – a potentially exclusive address made deliberately inclusive in context. The change from the inclusive opening address, which explicitly includes monks, virgins and clerics, to the specific focus on fratres in the middle of the sermon could also suggest that the sermon was written for a male monastic audience originally, and that the address to women was added when the sermon was copied at Nunnaminster.

CRITICAL VIEWS ON BEETHOVEN's heroic style can be roughly split into two traditions. The first, classic, view states that certain elements of Beethoven's heroic style can be traced to music composed in France in the wake of the French Revolution. But in the last two decades, in contrast, scholars such as Stephen Rumph and Nicholas Mathew have argued that neither Beethoven's politics nor his music can be so easily linked to the French Revolution. They argue that his works should instead be situated in the context of more conservative German responses, and that we should be paying more attention to his occasional works such as Wellingtons Sieg rather than focusing just on canonic works such as the Third Symphony. I shall return to this revisionist account, but will start with the classic tradition.

The evidence of revolutionary influence on the heroic style is extremely substantial. Maynard Solomon writes that:

Early in 1918, elements of the Norfolk Regiment, including Moeran's 1/6th battalion, were transferred to Ireland to support efforts to control escalating Nationalist disturbances. While the exact date of this deployment is not known, it was probably during the first two weeks of February. This is suggested by the fact that Moeran did not play the piano accompaniment in the first performance of his Four Songs from ‘A Shropshire Lad’ at the musical club on 14 February. He was still in some discomfort from his injury, and, on his arrival in Ireland, he was again required to attend several Medical Boards. The first of these was dated 23 March, and it confirms that he was based at Boyle Barracks in County Roscommon. The Medical Board itself was held at the King George V Hospital in Dublin, to which it may be presumed that Moeran travelled from Boyle. No mention is made of the pain from which he had been suffering a few weeks earlier, and the conclusion of the Report was that ‘He has considerably improved since [the] last board [and] [h]e is now fit for general service: instructed to rejoin [sic] his present unit.’

Moeran was still assigned to light duties, with dispatch riding being the most likely activity, particularly since this is how he chose to recall his wartime experiences in later life. He was evidently able to travel around the country to some extent, the main evidence for this deriving from a manuscript notebook in the possession of Trinity College Library in Dublin and catalogued as Moeran's Last Notebook. During the mid-1940s, Moeran transcribed musical examples and compositional notes into a notebook he had acquired for the purpose, and this notebook contains information that is useful both in examining his music and in tracing his locations. However, when he compiled the notebook from his original manuscripts, it is probable that he mis-remembered or mis-transcribed dates that he had originally recorded, and so the evidence must be considered in the contexts of unreliable memories, poor handwriting and an agenda to reconstruct his own past. While some of the dates recorded are undeniably incorrect, it would be unrealistic to assume that they are all either wrong or misleading. Nonetheless, Moeran's imprecision has left the biographer with a conundrum, and a decision must be made as to which dates are to be regarded as dependable.

THE SYNERGY Julia Kristeva proposes here in this extract between women and the dynamics of fecundity resounds loudly with much of what I wish to investigate in the second chapter of this study, re-invoking also the Edenic materiality of the hortus conclusus examined in the previous chapter. As we have seen, in Eden's reworkings in the Auchinleck Life of Adam and Eve the matrixial impulses of Eve, released only after her exile from the ‘sterile’ garden, reshape the linear directionality of the entire Edenic narrative, producing instead more fruitful, cyclical processes – of gestation, birth, life, death and rebirth – before being reined back in by an enclosing ventriloquised Logos. Within this moment of ventriloquism, to coin a phrase from Irigaray, ‘life freezes in the expectation of a better beyond’. The reworked narrative ultimately returns, therefore, to the stasis of ‘ennui’ identified by Harrison in his appraisal of Eden's primary position within western thought. Thereafter, Eve undergoes a literal and figurative reburial, feeding the ‘old root’ of the phallologic enterprise (in this case, Adam, his seeds and their productivity) in the usual ways. The route to – and root of – ‘salvation’ within Christian tradition, then, will spring unequivocally from Adam's seed and body; the reconstituted Logos sprouts from his tongue and those of the patriarchs as the grand narrative obliterating Eve's flourishing unfolds. As such, for a second time, it is Adam's body that gives birth, whilst Eve's is reduced to the mere ‘soil’ needed to nourish the phallic Logos-tree Adam engenders.

Music in general

Melody – said to have been absent in much contemporary composition – made a comeback when a new generation of Italian operas appeared. Both Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana, given its first London performance in 1891, and Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, which appeared in 1893, were very successful. But not all critics were enamoured: F. Gilbert Webb declared Pagliacci, ‘with its characters of low animal type and brutal story’, to be ‘detrimental to the growth of appreciation of refined and intellectual artistic workmanship’. But this moral censure was not typical. H.F. Frost reacted very differently to the opera’s portrayal of low life: ‘Not one of the characters possesses any moral sense … The atmosphere is grim, unwholesome, and sordid to the last degree, but it is intensely and pitilessly human, and the author has arranged his material with consummate art, so that, aided by music surging with feverish vitality, the whole becomes irresistibly fascinating.’ Cavalleria and Pagliacci were welcomed by the Speaker critic as representatives of a new school of Italian opera where the music did not hold up the dramatic action and continuous melody replaced the endless declamation found in Wagner.

Another work whose success was attributed to melody was Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel, a ‘masterpiece’ according to one critic. All critics saw the strong influence of Wagner, but for the Speaker critic the influence was tempered by the use of ‘rhythmical, metrical, easily-to-be-remembered tunes’. It showed that Wagnerian methods did not preclude originality. But for the public it was the opera’s tunefulness that appealed.

Although the operas referred to above had a generally positive reception, in other respects contemporary composition continued to criticised for its ugliness. A revival of early music drew forth unfavourable comparisons between modern music and its forebears. J.F. Runciman, reviewing some recent music, turned with relief to the old, as revived and performed by Arnold Dolmetsch: ‘our music has more in it of human passion, often more of mere hysteria; and while the old music is never hysterical it generally equals ours, and sometimes beats it, in point of pure beauty’. Shedlock recorded a similar feeling evoked by a successful revival of Gluck’s Orfeo at Covent Garden: ‘the very simplicity seems a merit, and almost a condemnation of modern art’. He opined that contemporary opera bore the consequences of living in a ‘feverish’ age, where ‘tales of dishonour and death’ were to the public taste.

After the lunch, the newly-weds departed for a short honeymoon in Bala in north Wales, where ‘they found sunshine and fair weather’. According to Lionel Hill, their transport was Coetmore's unreliable old Wolseley Hornet. At the beginning of August, they returned to London to begin their life together in Coetmore's flat in Belsize Lane. In the meanwhile, Moeran's mother moved out of the Gravel Hill house in Kington and went to live with William Graham at his rectory in Ledbury.

Until he met and became besotted with Coetmore, Moeran had been a confirmed bachelor. He had reached the age of fifty having given little thought to what conventional married life entailed, and so it may reasonably be asked why he had allowed himself to get into this situation. Nothing about Moeran's life hitherto suggests that he was in any way suited to be a husband for anybody. However, it is clear not only that he had been coerced by his mother and brother and manipulated by Coetmore herself, but also that he had failed to consider objectively the reality of what was happening to him. While his letters reveal that he had divined Coetmore's underlying motivation, he was undoubtedly flattered by her attention, and this, together with pressure especially from his mother – who clearly had no understanding of Coetmore whatsoever – was evidently sufficient for Moeran to disregard any niggles of common sense that may have been trying to make themselves apparent.

Over the years since the ending of the Eynsford cottage ménage, Moeran had evolved for himself an itinerant existence in Britain and Ireland – variously living with his parents, staying with friends and acquaintances, taking occasional lodgings, or residing in hotels or boarding houses – which suited a composing process in which place was a key aspect. Moeran had convinced himself that to compose successfully, he needed an appropriate environment that was determined by the character of the music. Essentially, it was as if a composition that was begun or first imagined in a certain location became bound to that location, the effect being that he subsequently found it difficult to work on it anywhere else.

BRADFORD, LONDON AND A EUROPEAN EDUCATION

Granted the freedom of the city of Bradford in 1932, Frederick Delius was reported to have remarked: ‘I love Bradford … and it would have been the greatest pleasure in my life to have been able to visit the city to have the freedom bestowed on me there’. Rather less complimentary, and probably nearer to the truth, was his uncompromising disparagement of the Yorkshire conurbation as a ‘filthy place, full of factories’ imparted to Eric Fenby in his last years; and his memories of childhood in Bradford, for all the fondness he retained for the outlying moors, were tainted by the strictness of life at home. A propensity to exaggerate may have been a symptom of his illness, or, as Arthur Hutchings has suggested, ‘the [inheritance] of his father's hardness’. There is a widespread acceptance that Delius's father Julius warranted the description ‘Prussian martinet’. At home he exercised a ‘reign of fear’ at the family home at Claremont. An obsession with his sense of formality, to the point of militarism, may have been suffocating for his twelve children, but it belies the fact that Julius and his wife emanated from a well-established tradition of German Kultur where music was considered a valuable part of a broader education. Elise Delius (née Krönig) had come from a music-loving family in Bielefeld, and Julius himself was undeniably fond of music. Even Delius, according to Heseltine, admitted this: ‘My father loved music and used to tinker on the piano when he knew he was alone’. What is more, Bradford, a significant, prosperous and expanding Yorkshire conurbation when Julius Delius arrived there in 1850, was the beneficiary of various musical initiatives characteristic of expanding provincial music in northern Victorian England. In addition to the mill and pit bands, choral music thrived, and after the St George's Hall was opened in August 1853, the citizens of Bradford were able to enjoy large-scale concerts of orchestral and choral works, particularly after the Hallé Orchestra started to visit the city in 1858. Among the sponsors was no other than Julius Delius. In 1865 the Bradford Subscription Concerts began; Julius Delius was a committee member.

Prokofiev arrived in Moscow by train on 20 January in company with his wife Carolina (‘Lina’), née Codina, a soprano of Ukrainian-Spanish parentage whom he had met in America and married in 1923, shortly after leaving the United States to base himself in Europe. Before crossing the Soviet border, they stopped off in Riga to give a concert. An acquaintance from his student years invited the couple to his apartment for lunch. In the course of their conversation, their host produced a portrait photograph of Myaskovsky – almost certainly, the one which appeared on the frontispiece of the special ‘Russia’ issue of Musikblätter des Anbruch (and is also reproduced as the frontispiece of the present volume). ‘I was amazed at the change’, Prokofiev wrote in his diary later that day: ‘the boring appearance, the stony stare’. His reaction to the image is revealing: the subject's haunted expression, the searching intensity of his gaze registered merely as uninteresting, and the photograph itself as a poorly posed shot.

Myaskovsky came to his hotel to welcome him: Prokofiev found his former classmate charming and refined as of old and concluded that the photograph must have been taken at a bad moment. Although both were pleased to see one another, neither felt wholly at ease at this first encounter. The youthful prodigy who had left Russia in 1917 was returning as a figure of international renown: he felt a considerable weight of expectation and was anxious not to disappoint. Myaskovsky was also somewhat apprehensive, wondering how Prokofiev would be received and what he would make of musical life in Moscow. The homecoming of someone whom he regarded as the greatest living composer had an enormous personal significance. Since their resumption of contact, he had avidly followed the younger man's career and written regularly to communicate his admiring responses to Prokofiev's recent work as he became acquainted with it. The tone of these letters is at times striking.