‘An Ireland Built Anew’: Bax’s ‘Tintagel’ and the Easter Rising

Abstract

Arnold Bax's tone poem Tintagel (1917-19) is one of his best-known compositions, familiar to listeners who know nothing else of his output. 1 But this very familiarity might cause commentators to overlook the complexities of the work. Its Celtic associations, suggestive Wagnerian allusions, and tonal and formal structure invite interpretation in the light of recent musicological developments both in hermeneutics and analysis. Hitherto, interpretative criticism of Tintagel has been of two kinds: pictorial and biographical. At the time of its premiere in 1921, 2 and for some decades after, most critics took the composer's descriptive programme for the work at face value: the music offered 'a tonal impression of the castlecrowned cliff of … Tintagel, … the long distances of the Atlantic', and the 'tumult of the sea', while also suggesting the 'literary and traditional associations of the scene' by way of a quotation of the so-called 'Sick Tristan' motif from the first act of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. 3 Viewed in this light, Tintagel could be comfortably aligned with other seascape compositions by English composers, such as Elgar's Sea Pictures (1899), Vaughan Williams's A Sea Symphony (1903-9), and Frank Bridge's The Sea (1910-11). 4 In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, however, the emergence of previously unknown biographical details has elicited another interpretation of the work. In September 1917 Cornwall was the location for Bax's ongoing extramarital affair with Harriet Cohen, a pianist 1 Lewis Foreman writes that 'Tintagel remained in the repertory when much of Bax's music was no longer heard'. Foreman, 'Bax, Sir Arnold', Grove Music Online, <http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com> (accessed 4 Nov. 2014). Tintagel is also Bax's most recorded work. See Graham Parlett's discography in Lewis Foreman, Bax: A Composer and his Times (3rd edn., Woodbridge, 2007), 507-27 at 524-5; and Christopher Webber, 'Tintagel on Record' (2007), <arnoldbax.com/tintagel-on-record-a-survey-by-christopher-webber> (accessed 4 Nov. 2014). 2 Tintagel was premiered on 20 October 1921 at the Bournemouth Symphony Concerts. The performance was conducted by Dan Godfrey. 3 There exist two programmes for Tintagel written by Bax: the short description found in the opening pages of the published orchestral score, and an extended version of this which Bax wrote for the performance of Tintagel at the Leeds Festival in 1922. The latter programme is quoted in full below, and it is from that programme that the above quotes are taken. 4 In the pre-1945 reception of Tintagel most critics took little notice of the mythological dimension of the work, preferring to focus on the seascape instead. The Musical Times wrote that Tintagel 'really suggests something of the majesty of the sea, being spacious and noble in quality'. Herbert Thompson, 'The Leeds Musical Festival', Musical Times, 63 (1922), 797. Some critics provided their own narratives of Bax's seascape. The Radio Times, for example, produced a very detailed account of the tone poe...