To what extent an interpreter of a composer’s music should have regard for that composer’s life and psychology is an old question. ‘I don’t know, and I don’t care!’, declared Vernon Handley, when asked if he knew what tumult led Sir Arnold Bax to write his Second Symphony: ‘What I do care about is that all the thematic material of that symphony is laid out in the first four or five pages of the score!’ Conversely, Graham Parlett is but one Baxian scholar who notes the ‘variety of influences’ upon this English composer’s life and work, including the ‘artistic vogue for “pagan” subjects’ dominant across the early decades of the 20th century. Bax, who knew well the Celtic, Gaelic, Scandinavian and Greek legends, would seem to qualify Parlett’s view when, in 1943, he himself wrote:

I can’t help being (fundamentally) a very primitive being. I believe in conditions of ecstasy – physical or spiritual – and I get nothing from anything else. I think all the composers who appeal to me – Beethoven, Wagner, Delius, Sibelius – were primitive in that they believed that the secret of the universe was to be solved by ecstatic intuition rather than by thought.

Certainly, Sibelius appointed Bax his ‘son in music’. Sir Henry Wood paints him as ‘that dear, dear, kind man of the shy smile’. Shy, or coy? Similarly, in the draft score of the Third Symphony, Bax quotes two lines from Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra: ‘My wisdom became pregnant on lonely mountains; upon barren stones she brought forth her young.’ As ecstatic an image as this is, it also teases a kind of sensuality, a sensuality reflected in the symphony’s second movement, in which something of great passion – perhaps a noble birth, perhaps the embrace of two lovers – begins with innocence, undergoes a trial, and concludes transformed. The epilogue of the Third heightens this transformation all the more.

Fundamentally, a composer’s score must stand upon its artistic quality, not the extra-artistic considerations that may be associated with it. And yet, in the case of Bax, it has become impossible for me to separate the lived passions of this man’s life from the expressed passion saturated throughout his work. The more I learn about him, the more I seem to better grasp the moods he conjures – even if, in the case of his seven symphonies, craft and style are plainly printed upon the page.

Bax was a self-styled ‘brazen romantic’. He enjoyed lovemaking to the extent that his 1943 autobiography, Farewell, My Youth, pines for the ‘lovely, bewitching entanglement of sex!’ For him, the fantasy of feminine beauty was constant, and he described it with ready appreciation. He reports in Farewell of ‘a small dryad face beneath a cloud of jet black hair’ that captures him during the premiere of his Christmas Eve on the Mountains; he delights in the ‘pair of bright eyes, brimmed with mischief’. Likewise, his anthology of short stories, Children of the Hills, published under his Irish pseudonym, Dermot O’Byrne, includes such lines as ‘multi-coloured romance’ (in ‘Through the Rain’) and ‘her small breasts heaved tumultuously like red roses tossed in the wind’ (in ‘Seanoidín’). He goes further in his poem, A Summer Memory, which through metaphor would seem to flirt with blatant eroticism:

O loving mouth, was it so hard to guess

The one rich hour had come for you to press

The cup of fire Love held for you to drain?

Can such a day and night return again?

This wit, however, should not be confused for lewdness. Bax was able to apply his conception of romance broadly. Enchanted by Celtic twilight, he anthropomorphised Ireland ad nauseum: ‘I was in love with Ireland… I needed no mortal mistress… I adored my beloved in all her symbolic presentments.’ So, too, did sensuality serve as a metric against which the work of his contemporaries could be measured. He was unconvinced that ‘healthy and natural things’ could ‘ever be associated with such a turgid medium’ as atonalism, and declared Pierrot Lunaire, Wozzeck and Lulu to be the results of ‘sexual inhibitions’ on the part of their creators.

In 1909, Bax embarked upon an ill-fated attraction to one Loubya Nicolyevna Korolenko – not her real name, but the pseudonym he assigns her in his autobiography. She was a well-travelled Ukrainian, the daughter of a landed yet destitute Cossack. Bax, immediately infatuated, crowned her his ‘golden Roussalka with ice-blue eyes’, equipped with ‘spun-gold hair’ and the ‘graceful body of a water-nymph’. When in 1910 Loubya announced suddenly that she would be returning to St Petersburg, a breathless Bax requested to accompany her. She accepted, although with a detectable trace of disinterest.

By January 1911, Bax had returned to England and even married. But he and Elsa Sobrino struggled to establish their home together, and after several failed attempts to do so spanning London and Dublin, the two separated in 1918. With the breakdown of his marriage, Bax turned to mistresses; chief among his lovers was the pianist Harriet Cohen. He had conducted an affair with her since 1914. She was his ‘Tania’, christened ‘the piano witch’ by Einstein, and more than 12 years Bax’s junior (and another mistress, Mary Gleaves, was a good deal younger than her). Tintagel, The Maiden with the Daffodil, the Left-Hand Concertante, and many of Bax’s other works are inspired by Cohen. In a Dermot O’Byrne poem, A Girl’s Music, he takes her for his subject; as Professor Barry Spurr observes, he presents her as a ‘tortured beauty’. ‘Among the piano’s fire-lit keys / Intoxicate her fingers creep’; he imagines further that she is under the spell of some hidden demon, a ‘vicious-hearted djinn’, that makes her ‘drunken with these wild / Sad dronings’. The sensuality of the poem tends to overpower its musical components, as ‘the gorged drowsy fiend… gloats / On her half-naked loveliness’. Whatever the fiend may be experiencing, there is no doubt that Bax is simply enthralled. The penultimate stanza does give prominence to a specifically musical evocation, as the place of Cohen’s playing:

Vibrates with rhythmic hammerings,

With thunderous noise of pear-shaped drums,

And some hunched rocking goblin thrums

Outlandishly on golden strings.

A Girl’s Music, much like A Summer Memory, does not shy from suggesting physical intimacy through metaphor. Characteristically, the poem concludes with reference to the ‘ecstasy’ of Cohen’s playing.

Whether ecstatic intuition or mere lust motivated Bax, one thing is certain: he could not abide permanence. This fact emerges in his art, especially his music, just as it does through his intimate relationships and travels. ‘He escapes by gates of sensuous beauty,’ argues L. Henderson Williams, ‘as a student lifts his head to a window, refreshing himself with the serenity of sun on sward’. Bax felt no imperative to reinvent music, as Stravinsky and Schoenberg did. Rather, his work is ever glancing backwards, nostalgic for ancient themes and the serenity of his childhood. In this pining, he might be compared with another upper-class, brazen romantic: Sergei Rachmaninoff.

It is true that Bax relishes moods that are fleeting and complex. In his poetry collection Farewell, My Muse, Clifford Bax describes his brother’s music as ‘Music fierce as fire, or hazed with unrelinquished / Adolescent dreams of more than life can give’. Bax has a distinct talent for tide-like motifs and textures – contours that ebb and flow, alike to the shorelines from which he drew such inspiration: Glencolmcille, Morar and the Old Head of Kinsale. It occurs to me that this rising-falling material could also be thought of as the heating and cooling of passion. Take, as accessible examples, piano music like A Mountain Mood and A Hill-Tune (or, for something darker, Winter Waters), with their rolling, sighing phrases. In the symphonic music, tempo ever fluctuates, as if the beat of some fluttery heart swept up in romantic anxieties. This illustration could well be apt. Recent research by Claire Colebourn, of the British Society of Echocardiography, has drawn attention to Bax’s ventricular-septal defect, discovered by Sir James Mackenzie in 1916. ‘Bax’s cardiac diagnosis is writ large through every fact I read about his life and is to me the missing link to his character and actions,’ concludes Colebourn. No doubt, as he aged, Bax’s condition limited his capacity for the lovely, bewitching entanglements of which he was so fond. In the same vein, the Seventh Symphony is not as fiery as its predecessors.

I suspect that Bax’s conception of, and need for, physical intimacy was but a subcomponent of his pantheistic impulses. Whether atop Olympus or in the dark, idyllic woods of faerie, love is bountiful. Further, let us not forget Bax’s ‘first conscious apprehension of beauty’. He was six years old and on holiday with his parents in West Sussex. That which captured him was no dryad or water-nymph, but the sunset from Arundel Park. Watching ‘speechlessly’, the ‘unimaginable glory of flame’ before him, in its ‘sheer all-conquering splendour and majesty’, was akin to Ragnarök itself.