Guirne Creith and her circle
Memories of Guirne Creith
I first met Guirne by chance, on Speech Day at Stowe School in July 1959. She was visiting her two sons, Robin and Jeremy, who happened to be in the same House as me. It was a meeting that would change the course of my life. Being a rather conceited seventeen year old, with a preference for jazz, I remember thumping out Fats Waller's 'Alligator Crawl' on the piano, with the windows wide open in the music director's study - hot competition to the organ voluntary, as parents filed out of Chapel! The balance of fate hangs upon a thin thread.
Suddenly, a total stranger popped her head in through the open window and demanded to know what I was playing. Delighted, I ushered the stranger in. She was quite obviously unmoved by Fats Waller.
'Do you play Bach? Do you study the exercises of Czerny?' she questioned.
Czerny, I subsequently learnt, only too well, was once the teacher of Liszt and terror of all would-be student pianists.
'Unfortunately not,' I replied, 'but I have just won the school music prize with my Debussy. Would you like to hear it?'
So, leaning over the keyboard and adjusting her glasses the stranger condescended to listen as I began what I thought was a wonderful rendition of a piece every aspiring school pianist has in his repertoire, namely the Prelude called - 'La Cathédrale Engloutie.' As I banged and crashed and imagined the waters of the sea covering the submerged cathedral with distant bells clanging under the waters, I thought to myself: 'Gee, I'm making a hit here!' The last ripples washed away, the performance came to an end and then in raptures, I at last sat back and awaited the tremendous ovation…
'Thank you, but it is quite clear to me that you do not even know HOW to put your hands on the keyboard' said the stranger. Those were her very words. Of course there followed a ghastly silence.
'What are you going to do when you leave school?' she asked. 'What is your name?' 'David', she remarked, 'you have no technique, you are so naïve, you know nothing.' … And that was how it all began.
The stranger who had popped her head into the music room after Chapel spent the rest of the afternoon with me and revealed that she was Baroness Guirne van Zuylen. After a long and memorable walk with the Baroness around the beautiful grounds of Stowe, I found I was beginning to have a new insight into music. At that stage, we were merely talking about the piano, how to play the piano, about technique and the discipline required to become a pianist. Guirne herself had been a brilliant concert pianist, so she really knew what she was talking about. She left me standing there, on my last few days at school, with a burning ambition: to go and study the piano with her in London once a week, as soon as I started my first job as a trainee editor in the film industry. She even gave me her phone number, which remained in my back pocket all the summer holidays; until I called her from a phone box in Holland Park announcing who I was - she had not forgotten! My first piano lesson was later on that afternoon, in her charming mews house in St John's Wood. So, that chance meeting at Stowe, ultimately led me to a career in Music, rather than Films.
Looking back, between the autumn of 1959 and the summer of 1963, under Guirne's inspirational guidance and tutelage, I grew up. Indeed, I became quite a proficient pianist, winning bronze, silver and gold in various competitions including the North and South London Musical Festivals. Then suddenly aged, eighteen, I fell in love with a girl called Jill from Spaniards Road and I found myself improvising at the keyboard at one of my lessons - I played it with some trepidation to the Baroness, who remarked:
'David, at last I know where you are going. You are going to become a composer, but it's going to take you years. We will have to start at the beginning, by filling in the chords.' (William Lovelock 1st Year Harmony).
You see, in spite of my expensive education, I had never actually studied harmony or theory and had no idea how to write my improvisations down. In today's world I would have had help for my dyslexia.
In 1960, with 'Jill' looking something like a music manuscript, Guirne encouraged me to enter it into the North London Musical Festival 'composer's category.' I was amazed to get a prize at all because the examiner, who invited me to play the piece to the class - a rapturous performance - remarked:
'Persto' (my pseudonym) if I had known it was going to sound like that I would have awarded you the first prize, but you will have to make do with the second prize, because your mistakes in notation stretch from here to Abyssynia!' (one of the reasons I later went to Africa)
Guirne was delighted with the outcome of this prize and it led to several of my other pieces being published by Paterson's Publications - directed by Michael Diack, a personal friend of hers.
It did take years - it's still taking years; but at least I progressed from being unpublished, to a published composer and ultimately was accepted to the Royal College of Music as a Foundation Scholar in composition, thanks to the wisdom of one of the most remarkable human beings I have had the honour and luck to encounter.
I owe Guirne Creith a huge debt of gratitude for persevering with me, one of her protégés. There isn't a day that goes by without my recalling her innate passion for music and interpretation, backed up by solid discipline and craft. I hear her voice in my head every day. It was a very sad day for me, when in 1963, she announced she would be unable to continue teaching me, because she was going to live and work in France. At the time I was absolutely devastated - how was I going to continue without the Baroness? And so our paths diverged and the RCM was soon to become my new alma mater.
Guirne Creith was a genius, a great teacher, a mentor, a distinguished pianist and composer whose works, though small in number, deserve now to come out, to be recognised, performed, recorded and enjoyed by us all. I can't wait to hear her Violin Concerto, a composition she never even mentioned all the while I was studying with her. She was obviously a very private person. Her works deserve to become valuable additions to British music representing female composers of the mid 20th Century.
Thank you, Guirne
Your eternal student,
David Fanshawe - composer & explorer: 2007
I first met Guirne in 1959 as a Fulbright student at the Royal Academy . Having at first planned to live with a family near the Academy, I had to make other plans at the last moment, and through Anne Rendall, whose husband Anthony was one of the creators of the famed Third Program, I learned about Guirne and made my home there for my first year in London. Although somewhat older than her two sons, I felt instantly at home, and thanks to her additional kindness, I could practice there during the day when all were gone. Although I never studied with her, I did play for her, especially lieder repertoire, and often went to play for her lessons with Reinhold Gerhardt.
She was always so supportive of my study, and even though we were somewhat opposite in our approach to the piano, she never once criticized what I was doing. I found that quite remarkable, as most musicians are often super critical of each other. I for one recognized that she was a formidable musician, and attending concerts with her were lessons in themselves. We went constantly to Wigmore Hall and Festival Hall, and I heard almost every great artist that year.
She paid a lot of attention to our education in other arts, and it was nothing after lunch on Sunday to hear her suddenly announce we would all go to the V and A and look at the watches and clocks, or to Hatfield House to see the windows, or to a film showing at an Art theatre near Baker Street. I am sure we were the best-fed family in London. She had a big heart, and many guests for meals came and went, all colourful, all interesting. As an American I had a unique opportunity to meet many well know professional people in many fields: critics, conductors, actors and antiquarians all came to 1 Cottage Mews.
She took up singing after her accident with her hand, and although it was late in life to do this, through remarkable will power she accomplished a great deal, including a Wigmore Hall debut.
This occurred during the Spring of my year with Guirne, and I knew every note of that recital. She was a superb interpreter of Richard Strauss, and I can still hear her in my inner ear giving herself completely to text and music. To her I owe the ability to really listen to the singer and follow not only the musical line when accompanying, but also to pay attention to the consonants and vowels in the text, how to delay ever so slightly to let those German S's be heard, before the vocal tone actually emerges. So many small details that I still think about constantly today. Her career seems especially impressive as she came along at a time when it was still difficult for women to be professional musicians, especially a composer. Many professional singers came to coach oratorio repertoire with her, and here her impressive keyboard skills were a great plus. But I would be amiss if I didn't say she gave as much of herself to the less talented ones as she did to her "stars".
She was first and foremost a born teacher, and nothing gave her more pleasure than to listen to your maturing thoughts about music, and then add her own perceptive comments. She was a formidable influence, and I vastly appreciate today all she did for me and so many others. The fact that my memories of her are undimmed after all these years speaks for itself.
John Kenneth Adams/USA: 2008
I met Guirne when I was playing for the lessons of the great Elena Gerhardt with whom she studied. I was immediately impressed by her musicianship, which was (is!) not usual in the average soprano, and she would often surprise me with very astute comments about music and other musicians. She was always striving to improve and we worked a great deal on our programs.
I think of Maria Callas and the time when I worked with her. She also never stopped striving to improve; but another thing Maria and Guirne had in common was an intense love for music and respect for the composer.
I played a number of concerts with Guirne including a Wigmore Hall recital.
Robert Sutherland
Accompanist to Maria Callas: 2009
I first met Guirne through the "Personal" column of The Times, where, as "a young, Scottish, singing student", I sought accommodation in London, while I furthered my operatic ambitions. With the generosity, which epitomised her character, Guirne offered me full board at a peppercorn rent in the elegant, St John's Wood house she shared with most welcoming sons, happily of about my own age.
The many months I lived there were an artistic revelation for me, as Guirne became a musical mentor and an exceptional "extra pair of ears", as she described herself, for judging my vocal technique. More importantly, however, her innate understanding and experience of musical interpretation brought home to me that the singer's objective must be not only to produce beautiful tone, but also to reveal to an audience the intrinsic meaning contained in words and music.
Guirne herself admirably demonstrated these indispensable elements of musical performance in a memorable master class on German Lieder and other Art Song, which she presented in the Art Gallery of Aberdeen, my hometown, at the invitation of the local music club.
Eventually, I found a flat and was joined in London by my wife and daughter but Guirne remained a valued family friend and "sounding board", as I continued my academic journey through the Guildhall, Morley College Opera School and on to my professional debut in the Magic Flute at Glyndebourne.
Although our paths diverged in later years, it is a measure of the impact, both musical and personal, which Guirne made on me, that recalling the above memories is both immediate and immensely pleasurable. She was a truly remarkable person and artist.
Athole Still: 2007
It was a lucky day indeed for me when I met Guirne whom I remember very well with fondness and great respect. Two things about her really surprise me – I had no idea that she was born as long ago as 1907. When I met her and became her pupil, about 1959, I believed she was about 39 (she was in fact 52 - Ed.) an age at which she seemed capable of remaining for a good few years if she wanted to! The other thing was her composing, which I don’t remember her ever mentioning. If the violin concerto is indeed revived I shall look forward to it with the greatest of interest.
You of course know all about her studies with Artur Schnabel, no less, in Paris before the war, with a view to becoming a concert pianist – an ambition thwarted, she told me, by an accident to her right hand which prevented her from stretching a full octave. Nevertheless I thought she was a marvellous pianist, with music bursting out of her every pore.
It was as the result of a chance meeting on a social occasion that I became her pupil. We were discussing music when I sang a couple of bars to illustrate a point. Her immediate reaction was that I had a voice worth working on, and so began 4 or 5 years of weekly lessons at the charming mews cottage at Swiss Cottage - for 15 shillings a week, if you can believe that! She was an excellent teacher, instilling the basics of proper breath control and thus support for the voice, clear diction, using the consonants to one’s advantage instead of glossing them over as a nuisance to be got out of the way as quickly as possible in the manner of some modern singers, and developing a seamless vocal line. Her demonstrations in her very individual high soprano were an inspiration. Eventually she handed me over to her own teacher at the Guildhall, Reinhold Gerhardt. I have to say that my lessons with Gerhardt were a disappointment after the ones with Guirne. He was impossibly vain and had a neurotic wife whom he had to telephone every half hour! Furthermore he was a rotten pianist, and totally uninterested in any music that wasn’t German! On the credit side he did give me an authentic insight into some of the German Lieder repertoire. Another plus was that when Guirne took me to sing to him I briefly met his famous sister Elena.
I have so many happy memories of Guirne, who was almost like a mother to me, too, in some ways. She was a great and richly-talented lady who was a formative influence in my life at an impressionable age. I am very fortunate to have known her.
Rodney Whitaker: 2007
She was a truly inspirational pianist, who radiated musicality. She brought a unique originality to all the things that she touched and to the people that she met; among whom were my daughters to whom she taught the piano. This work will manifest that same creative genius and will, I am sure be a joy to listen to. Its performance after so many years will be truly memorable, since she was herself an excellent pianist.
Jeremy Cresswell: 2007