Life
Bate received early training in music and had composed two operas by age twenty. He studied under Ralph Vaughan Williams, R.O. Morris, Gordon Jacob, and Arthur Benjamin, and then in Paris with Nadia Boulanger and in Berlin with Paul Hindemith. He wrote incidental music for performances at German playhouses, and toured Australia and the United States as a pianist. Bate was openly gay, but was married to fellow composer Peggy Glanville-Hicks from 1938 to 1949, when they divorced. After several years living in America, where Bate and Glanville-Hicks had moved in 1941, he returned to London; he received less praise in his birth country than abroad, and the lack of attention his works received resulted in his decision to commit suicide in 1959. There has been recent interest in his music with the high profile and well reviewed recordings of his Symphonies 3 & 4 with Martin Yates conducting The Royal Scottish National Orchestra on the Dutton Epoch label.
Read more about this topic: Stanley Bate
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“I have all my life been on my guard against the information conveyed by the sense of hearing—it being one of my earliest observations, the universal inclination of humankind is to be led by the ears, and I am sometimes apt to imagine that they are given to men as they are to pitchers, purposely that they may be carried about by them.”
—Mary Wortley, Lady Montagu (1689–1762)
“I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more—the feeling that I could last for ever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men; the deceitful feeling that lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain effort—to death; the triumphant conviction of strength, the heat of life in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows small, and expires—and expires, too soon, too soon—before life itself.”
—Joseph Conrad (1857–1924)
“Most things in life are moments of pleasure and a lifetime of embarrassment; photography is a moment of embarrassment and a lifetime of pleasure.”
—Tony Benn (b. 1925)