A song titled Ireland is the earliest extant work by Glanville-Hicks. In 1931 the Australian Musical News claimed it was a setting of Herrick, but the manuscript score reveals that the poem’s author was the Irish-born poet David McKee Wright. Taken from Wright’s “Dark Rosaleen” suite, it was published in An Irish Heart of 1918. The title refers to Wright’s own nostalgia for “my country”, having emigrated at the age of eighteen to New Zealand.
PGH had never shown any interest in early music until she met the wealthy Connecticut-born conductor, linguist and musicologist Newell Jenkins in 1953. He quickly became a close friend, who wrote amusingly quixotic letters referring to Virgil Thomson as “Voigil” and constantly sent her expressions of love and encouragement. In the summer of 1955 she visited Jenkins, living on the Via delle Coste in Fiesole, outside Florence. Among the colony of expatriate composers then living in Florence were Ned Rorem and David Diamond, but Jenkins was there for rehearsals and recordings with his chamber orchestra, Piccola Academia Musicale, managed by another American, Jack Murphy. After a brief stay in Fiesole in June PGH travelled to discuss her operas with publishing houses in Germany and then returned to Fiesole before accompanying Murphy and Jenkins on a visit to the island of Giglio, famous for its coves, caves, shipwrecks and sandy beaches.
Probably the most amusing of all the concerts PGH attended and reviewed for the New York Herald Tribune was Anna Russell’s in 1951. With a reputation for skewering the classics, especially Wagner, Russell appeared before a capacity audience at Town Hall singing various operatic arias and folk songs. An extract from the operetta The Prince of Philadelphia provoked “howls of merriment”, the Russian song “Da, nyet, Da, nyet” “reduced the audience to near hysteria” and a French song, in PGH’s words, flaunted “every cliché and near cliché of Frenchness in music, while the text with lunatic limpidity flows from ‘la plume’ to ‘filet mignon’ with every semblance of logic”. A Wagnerian aria performed with appropriate props—a winged helmet, corn-coloured pigtails and toasting fork—was also received with “hurricanes” of laughter.
PGH provided a hint, though, that she knew more than she was giving away, when she referred to Miss Russell’s “clipped British accent” and “tremendously thorough musical training” for both she and Russell had studied composition with Vaughan Williams at the Royal College of Music. As they were born a year apart (Russell on 27 December 1911 and PGH on 29 December 1912) and both were at the RCM for four years it seems likely that they were contemporaries and would have known one another. Russell, however, was perhaps not as serious a composer as PGH: in her memoirs she recalled that she was such a capable mimic that Vaughan Williams asked her to refrain from writing in the style of Gilbert and Sullivan because the tunes were so catchy they were interfering with his own composing (which at the time included his very bleak fourth symphony, completed in 1935).
Whereas some critics might have been condescending in their review, PGH was quite the opposite, concluding, “There is not too much humor around these days, and certainly not of a kind to combine every facet of the art from pure slapstick to the most erudite. Miss Russel’s [sic] mad recitals are sheer joy, and cannot be too highly recommended”. Russell went on to have a spectacular career, appearing in operas and on Broadway, recording several bestselling albums and touring South Africa and Australia, where she died in 2006.
Daughter of the iconic Australian composer and educator Miriam Hyde, Christine Edwards takes a look at her mother's musical legacy, and the @The_ASO's new initiative to support #WomenComposers. https://t.co/ZQUDPQqulm
— Limelight (@LimelightArtsAu) June 12, 2021
PGH began considering writing a piano concerto, the work that would eventually be named the Etruscan Concerto, in early 1953. Her short score is is dated 13 July 1954, suggesting that she had completed the first draft a few weeks before she arrived in Italy in August that year. Her destination was Fiesole, on the outskirts of Florence, a town based on the village of Faesulae, one of the main cities of the Etruscan confederacy. She had been to Florence once before, in April 1937 on holiday from studies in Paris. Then she must have visited the Museo archeologico nazionale, housed in a Medici palace, which holds terracottas, furniture, sarcophagi, ossuaries, vases and other Etruscan artefacts. In Fiesole in 1954 she could also have visited the Roman theatre, first-century baths, a Roman temple and tombs as well as an Etruscan museum, and on 29 August, on her way to Paris, she stopped in Ferrara and then Comácchio, which had been occupied by the Etruscans and Gauls. In a lagoon northwest of Comácchio is the remains of the Greco-Etruscan city of Spina where artefacts such as vases were found. The title of the concerto thus honours this visit to Italy as well as the vivid descriptions of Etruscan life in D.H. Lawrence’s Etruscan Places (1932). Unfortunately, even if it was personally a memorable experience, and even if seeing Etruscan remains and sites fuelled her interest in archaeology and the ancient world, she left no description in words. In Apollo magazine, however, Xavier F. Salomon recounts how he travelled to all the sites mentioned by Lawrence, including museums in Rome and Florence, and this gives the flavour of what PGH herself might have discovered only ten years after Lawrence himself had been there.
On 24 February 1937, having recently arrived in Paris, PGH noted in her diary that she had written the first movement of a flute concerto. Stanley Bate was also in Paris and this was the year he composed a flute sonata, recorded the following year for the Oiseau-Lyre label by Marcel Moyse (flute) and his son Louis (piano) so perhaps both composers were inspired by the playing of Moyse, then a professor at the Conservatoire and a friend of Nadia Boulanger. Although PGH’s concerto must have been completed—in 1943 she offered the score to the ABC in Australia—it has since been lost. Louise Dyer (of Editions de l’Oiseau-Lyre) was prepared to offer Bate a recording contract for whatever he wrote but found him difficult to work with. The flute sonata was reviewed in Music & Letters by E.R. (Edmund Rubbra?), who described it as “well-oiled music that, once it gets started, is able to go on its own momentum ad infinitum”. He also made the usual complaint about Bate’s immaturity, adding, “We shall know the stature of this young composer only when he has ceeased to gather hints on note-manipulation from a certain widely-influential Parisian school”. The flute sonata has recently been recorded by James Dutton with Oliver Davies for Willowhayne Records. It is a delightful work, typically French in its lightheartedness and typically a product of the Boulangerie in its whimsical meanderings with spicy modernist inflections.
Today is the thirtieth anniversary of PGH’s death. How did she want to be remembered? When Joyce McGrath painted her portrait in 1989 she chose to wear one of the capes that had been handmade for her in Greece, they used as background two Greek masks that she had hanging in the house and in her hand was a toy owl, representing Athena (or Minerva) goddess of wisdom. Thus the portrait tied her not just to her years of living in Greece but also to ancient Greece and its mythology. Almost certainly she was also making a statement about her own exceptionality.
