Havergal Brian is surely the last great British undiscovered composer. For the Havergal Brian Society I am producing a website devoted to the composer.

This site, which already runs to 400 webpages, is one of the most comprehensive sites devoted to a composer anywhere on the worldwide web.

The site is at
http://www.musicweb.uk.net/brian

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Frankly there are plenty of composers whose neglect, whilst sad, is understandable.  Brian is emphatically not in this category.  I would urge anyone to invest in the midprice CD of Brian's third symphony on Hyperion, or the most recent release in Marco Polo's continuing series - which contains a wide-ranging programme of Doctor Merryheart, For valour, and symphonies 11 and 15 - to find out why.

havergal
brian

William Havergal Brian was born on 29 January 1876 into a working-class Potteries family in Dresden, Staffordshire.  He gained his first musical experience in church choirs and after leaving school at the age of 12 he was in some demand as a church organist.  He learned the violin and cello, and played in local bands and orchestras.  A local teacher gave him a thorough theoretical grounding, but he was virtually self-taught in composition.  Nevertheless he rapidly acquired an invincible desire to be a composer and in the first decade of the twentieth century began to make a name for himself.

Some of his music was admired by Elgar, works of his were performed by conductors such as Henry Wood and Thomas Beecham, and for a number of years he and his family were supported by a wealthy Staffordshire businessman so that Brian would be free to compose.

All this came to an abrupt end, however, just before the outbreak of World War 1, when various personal crises forced him to leave his home and family.  In London he failed to consolidate such musical reputation as he had gained, and for many years he supported a growing second family with a series of menial jobs, often in some poverty.

His death came on 28 November 1972 as the result of a fall, two months short of his 97th birthday. Though he knew that the BBC was committed to broadcasting in due course all of his symphonies, not a note of his music was commercially issued on record during his lifetime, and he died without having heard many of his finest works.

  

 

 

 

 By the late 1920s Brian gained an assistant editorship on the journal Musical Opinion, through which he gained a clearer understanding of and greater sympathy with the latest continental developments than almost any other British composer. The musical establishment however - with the exception of his close friend Sir Granville Bantock - passed him by and his own growing body of mature work remained almost entirely unknown and unperformed.

With the death of Bantock in 1946, Brian lost his last advocate for performances of his music until the early 1950s, when his work came to the attention to a young BBC music producer named Robert Simpson, himself destined to become one of Britain's foremost symphonists.

The composer moved from London to Shoreham-by-Sea, Sussex, in 1958, where he embarked upon a final, immensely rich, ten-year Indian Summer of composition which included no fewer than twenty symphonies.  He finally ceased original creative work in October 1968 with the completion of his 32nd Symphony, but for the remaining four years of his life he retained full mental vigour and it always seemed possible that he might return to composition.