Joseph Holbrooke - Life - Success

Success

Whilst on tour, Holbrooke had sent the score of his orchestral poem The Raven to August Manns, conductor at the Crystal Palace. Manns accepted the work for performance and gave the premiere on 3 March 1900, whilst later that same year the orchestral variations on Three Blind Mice were also heard (Queen's Hall Promenade Concert, conducted by Henry Wood, 8 November 1900). In 1901 he won the Lesley Alexander Prize for chamber music with his Sextet in F minor and also received an invitation from Granville Bantock to become a member of the staff at the Birmingham and Midland Institute School of Music. He accepted the position, living with the Bantocks whilst teaching at the institution, but rapidly became dissatisfied with the routine and returned to London in 1902. There then followed a decade of prestigious commissions and performances, with notable works including the poem for chorus and orchestra Queen Mab (Leeds Festival, conducted by the composer, 6 October 1904), the orchestral poem Ulalume (Queen's Hall, conducted by the composer, 26 November 1904), the scena for baritone and orchestra Marino Faliero (Bristol Festival, conducted by the composer, 12 October 1905), the Bohemian Songs for baritone and orchestra (Norwich Festival, conducted by the composer, 25 October 1905), the poem for chorus and orchestra The Bells (Birmingham Festival, conducted by Hans Richter, 3 October 1906), the orchestral suite Les Hommages (Queen's Hall Promenade Concert, conducted by Henry Wood, 25 October 1906) and the choral symphony Homage to E.A. Poe (two movements first performed at the Bristol Festival, 16 October 1908). During this period Holbrooke also won a further prize, this time with his Fantasie Quartet, Op.17b entered for the 1905 chamber music competition initiated by Walter Willson Cobbett.

In 1907 Holbrooke was approached by the poet Herbert Trench who wished the composer to set his extended poem on immortality Apollo and the Seaman. This Holbrooke duly did, although only the final section of the poem (The Embarkation) is actually sung (by a male chorus), the rest of the score being a purely orchestral illustration of the verses. The completed work, styled "An Illuminated Symphony", was first performed at Queen's Hall on 20 January 1908, conducted by Thomas Beecham: on this occasion the orchestra and chorus were hidden from the audience behind an elaborate screen whilst the text of the poem was projected onto the screen using lantern slides at corresponding points in the music. The rehearsals for Apollo and the Seaman were attended by Thomas Scott-Ellis, 8th Baron Howard de Walden who shortly after the first performance approached Holbrooke with one of his own poems, entitled Dylan - Son of the Wave : this resulted in the composition of the opera Dylan, first performed at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, London, conducted by Artur Nikisch, on 4 July 1914. The staging included another technological wonder:

"in this work, in order to get convincing flights of wild fowl, films were made in the Outer Hebrides and projected on to the stage. This, of course, was in the days of the silent film, when there was no means of deadening the whirr or hum of the projector and the films themselves resolved into a series of flicks. The scoring, however, was vivid enough to cover the sounds, and this incipient film music was infinitely more successful than some of the over-vaunted high-level scores heard to-day. The theatre, however, was not ready for such an innovation, and the extra-musical effects were not taken seriously."

Collaboration on two further operas, The Children of Don (first performed at the London Opera House, conducted by Thomas Beecham, on 12 June 1912) and Bronwen, brought about the completion of Holbrooke's most ambitious project, a trilogy under the collective title The Cauldron of Annwn setting Scott-Ellis' versions of tales from the Welsh Mabinogion. Until his death in 1946, Scott-Ellis effectively acted as patron to Holbrooke, subsidising performances and publication of many of his works.

Throughout this period, Holbrooke also enjoyed a successful career as a virtuoso concert pianist. Besides his own compositions, his repertoire included the Toccata by Robert Schumann, Islamey by Mily Balakirev, Scriabin's Piano Sonata No.1, the fantasie Africa for piano and orchestra by Saint-Saëns, Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No.1 and Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No.2.