Guirne Creith: The Story So Far

by Katharine Copisarow

 

In 1940 The Times newspaper carried a small notice, recording the birth of a son “to Guirne Creith, wife of Walter Hunter-Coddington”. This crumb of information could easily have been missed.  There was certainly nothing to suggest that the mother was a composer who, only a few years earlier, had written a major violin concerto. Its manuscript score has only just re-emerged.  These days no-one has heard of Guirne Creith, this woman with the strange Celtic sounding name.  Neither her pupils, nor her friends and family knew that she had written at least five orchestral works, five chamber pieces, many songs and a ballet.  She certainly never kept any of her manuscripts and, with the exception of the ballet which was her last known work written during the late 1950s, she never spoke of her compositions either.  So finding this accomplished orchestral work, as this violin concerto promised to be, was both a surprise and an exciting opportunity to discover the music and the composer.

Her birth name was actually Gladys Mary Cohen and she was born in London on 21 February 1907, the same year as Elizabeth Maconchy and Imogen Holst.  She was a child with a prodigious musical talent and, in a rare personal account, she wrote that “by the age of eight I had developed a more than average talent for musical composition and I think that my parents were totally dumbfounded at having produced a child who didn’t conform to the accepted pattern.  However, they did their best for me and teachers were found.  By this time it was discovered too that I had what I believe Paderewski once called a total fluency in my fingers.  So I was handed over to additional teachers and, except for some hours a day devoted to general education, my life from then on was completely absorbed by music”.  She wrote this somewhat reluctantly during the late 1960s, in response to a request for ‘more autobiographical notes’ from her publisher, Mr Crawley of Faber & Faber.(1) 

In 1923, at the age of sixteen, she entered the Royal Academy of Music (RAM) as Guirne M Creith.(2) The origin of her new name is unknown, but while keeping the same initials, is thought to have been fabricated, entirely consistent with the actions of an imaginative and wilful teenager.  People have remarked on her apparent penchant for changing her name, which she did no less than five times. However, she was to keep the name Guirne2 for the rest of her life.  Guirne Creith was the recipient of the Josephine Troup Scholarship from 1924-29 and her years at the RAM were dominated by her study of composition.  Her professors included Benjamin Dale, Stewart McPherson, Adam Carse, and Stanley Marchant.  She won five prizes for composition, including the one-off Profumo prize, of 100 guineas - a very substantial sum in those days.  It was awarded for an orchestral piece lasting about ten to twenty minutes, written in the nature of an overture or a symphonic poem, to commemorate the visit of Ernst von Dohnanyi and the Bupdapest Philharmonic Orchestra to the Academy in June 1928.  “A letter from Professor von Dohnanyi was read, awarding the Profumo Prize to the composer of Rapunzel, pseudonym ‘Enigma’.  The Chairman opened the sealed envelope bearing the name ‘Enigma’, and read out the name of the successful competitor, viz: Guirne Creith.”(3) It was also noted in the Musical Times that “the winner was the youngest competitor and the only woman to enter”.(4)

Creith also studied viola with James Lockyer and played regularly in the students’ first orchestra under Sir Henry Wood, to whom she remained close for many years.  That his daughter Avril later became godmother to one of her sons is testament to their friendship.  Her other professors included Ernest Read for conducting and Harry Isaacs and Felix Swinstead for piano.  And although piano was only her third study subject she went on to explore it more seriously during the 1930s with Vladimir Cernikoff, a well-known Franco-Russian pianist and teacher who had settled in London.  It is clear from his light-hearted autobiography that Creith made quite an impression on him.  “I never thought, when I started giving lessons to Miss Guirne Creith, that she would become the fine artist that she already is.  At the start I strongly suspect she never worked between her lessons and had always a very great collection of plausible reasons why she could not do this or that.  But when she grew up Mademoiselle became intensely serious, worked like ….. at her technique and, as she is uncommonly gifted musically, and provided her health stands the strain,(5) I believe she will make an international career as a pianist and as a composer.  She has already written quite a number of good songs and pieces, a violin concerto, a ballet, and is working on an opera.”(6) 

After Cernikoff’s death, she became a pupil of Edwin Fischer, the renowned Bach interpreter, and continued her studies with him until 1952, when an accident left her with a permanent injury to her right hand, putting an abrupt and cruel end to her career as a concert pianist.  Nonetheless it was Creith who was invited by the BBC to present a commemorative radio programme of Fischer’s recordings in March 1963, three years after his death.(7) Details of her life as a concert pianist during the 1930s and 1940s are still sketchy.  So far only a few Wigmore Hall recital programmes, radio broadcast announcements and press reviews have come to light.  But it is clear her performance of the Rachmaninov Second Piano Concerto at the Queen’s Hall on 17 January 1934 went down a storm - as did her recital in Paris the following month, where she met Artur Schnabel.  Creith was managed by Ibbs & Tillett, one of the largest musicians’ agencies in London, in 1938-39 before being taken on exclusively by Wilfrid van Wyck.

Creith began writing letters to the BBC in an effort to get her works performed and broadcast when she was only twenty.  It’s a thankless task for any young composer today, let alone an impatient young woman in 1927.  But she was not to be put off or ignored.  Who would want to be on the receiving end of this particular tirade?  “During the seven months you have had my compositions I should have thought there was at least one programme that they would have suited.  When they are eventually performed – if ever – I shall be inclined to treat the occasion as a miracle.  Why is there so much delay?  Perhaps I have not approached the appropriate authority.”(8) Whether this actually progressed matters any faster than they would otherwise have done is highly unlikely.  However, the following year did see the first broadcast of one her orchestral works.  Two movements from Ballet Suite were broadcast on 8 February 1928, conducted by the composer.(9) Creith had won the RAM’s Charles Lucas Silver Medal for this four movement, twenty-minute work.  A few months later her tone poem May Eve received a BBC broadcast performance conducted by John Ansell.(10)

At this time composers weren’t able to send their demos to the BBC as they do today.  Instead they tried to get their pieces heard by a panel in one of the BBC’s regular ‘new works rehearsals’.  Another of Creith’s orchestral works to go through this process was the Profumo prize-winning tone poem Rapunzel.  The première was given at the Folkestone Festival in September 1933, and most likely conducted by Sir Hamilton Harty.  Four months later, the BBC broadcast a studio performance, conducted by Joseph Lewis.(11) Adrian Boult, the Head of Music at the BBC, had refused it for the Proms, and in a fit of pique, Creith turned down his offer of a performance in Paris under Pierre Monteux, the original conductor of The Rite of Spring.  She gave her reason as being because the concert wouldn’t be in England.  Boult clearly found her behaviour quite extraordinary, until she wrote to apologise for offending him.  During 1932 Eugene Goossens took the score and parts of Rapunzel to America, but it isn’t known whether or not he conducted it there.  In one of Creith’s subsequent letters, stating that the music had arrived back from America, we get an insight into Rapunzel, as she spells out the orchestration to the BBC.(12)

The discovery of a handwritten full score of a violin concerto after Guirne Creith’s death in 1996 came as complete surprise to her two sons.  They were able to verify that the handwriting was indeed that of their late mother.  The manuscript score is a large cloth bound volume, generally clear to read and in very good condition.  The composer wrote most of the work in ink, though there are some details in pencil.  Some of the pencil work remains, while some has been inked over, and the pencil work (badly) erased.  Most of the pencil work is in the last movement, suggesting that the composer rushed to finish the work in time for the performance.  Indeed, among the correspondence between Guirne Creith and the BBC is a handwritten letter to Adrian Boult8, dated 29th March 1935.

Another distinctive hand appears in the manuscript and this has been identified as belonging to Constant Lambert.  His bold conductor’s markings are made in thick blue crayon and, at the front of the score, there is a note of three corrections, which he made in pencil.  Clearly written at the top of the title page is the dedication “To Albert Sammons”.  Sadly no recording exists of the première performance, but it is well documented that it was given by Albert Sammons himself and conducted by Constant Lambert in a live broadcast concert for the BBC on 19th May 1936.  The programme, typical of a BBC studio concert at the time, was as follows, and published in that week’s edition of the Radio Times.(13)

A brief review appeared the following month in the Musical Times.  “Guirne Creith’s violin concerto is highly charged with lush, luscious romance; a pleasing change from modern frigidities.  Sammons gave it a fine send-off.”(14)

This wasn’t the first time Sammons had played a work by Guirne Creith.   Among the many student concerts which critics from the Musical Times often attended was “a more than usually interesting chamber concert” held at the Duke’s Hall  in the Royal Academy of Music on 30 May 1929.  “It was interesting to hear two movements of a Violin and Pianoforte Sonata in B flat, by Guirne Creith.  I have written before about this young student, for she promises to do things some day.  In this particular work there are good ideas but too many of them; in fact, at the moment the composer is a spendthrift, but so much of the writing is good, and much of it tuneful, that it attracts.”(15) Creith completed the sonata and, in a letter to the BBC the following year, she refers to ‘a new sonata’ in three movements of about 20 minutes long.  Albert Sammons, together with the pianist William Murdoch, was renowned for introducing new sonatas by British composers, including John Ireland’s Second Sonata.   And in a live broadcast of chamber music on 17 February 1931 Sammons played the Creith sonata, with the composer at the piano.(16) Then on 27 June 1933 Sammons and Creith gave a recital together at the Wigmore Hall and the programme included the first public performance of the sonata.  One critic from the Musical Times was more carried away by the fact that she was suffering from nerves than by the new sonata itself.   However, he did convey that the sonata had been “planned on a considerable scale” and that in his view the first movement Maestoso had the most character.(17) No recording was made of the BBC broadcast performance(18) and, to date, no-one has found the score to this intriguing sonata.

That fact that Creith was a pianist meant that she frequently included her own works in her recital programmes, as she did with the violin sonata.  While none of the music has yet come to light, we do know that for the piano she wrote Three Satirical Preludes, which won her the Cuthbert Nunn Prize in 1926, and A Portrait Gallery, based on a similar idea to Elgar’s Enigma Variations. The four movements are HA The Golden Voice, WW The Yorkshire heavyweight, HH The Melancholy Scott, and PN-G.  Another early work is the Quartet for strings in one movement.  The Musical Times comments “It is an admirably written little work and pleasantly melodious; its young composer should do even better things in the near future.”(19)  “It is a pleasing work, and the young composer is rapidly getting beyond the promising stage.”(20) The Fantasie Sextet, for piano and wind quintet, won her the Philip Leslie Agnew Prize in 1929 and, as reported in the Musical Times,  “Her work compels attention; there is a good tune by way of foundation, the music is cleverly worked out, and the construction throughout is musicianly.”(21)

Dutton Records has recorded the violin concerto and it will be released on the Dutton Epoch label, which specialises in 20th Century British music, coupled with two further première recordings of works for violin and orchestra by Richard Arnell and Thomas Pitfield.  The soloist is Lorraine McAslan, a prolific recording artist who is interested in the more neglected British composers.  Among her chamber music recordings are works by Dorothy Howell, Rebecca Clarke, Kenneth Leighton, Arthur Benjamin and Granville Bantock.  Since her critically acclaimed recording of the Britten concerto in 1987 she has built an impressive discography, including the Coleridge-Taylor concerto recently released on Lyrita and the York Bowen concerto with Vernon Handley, also released on the Dutton Epoch label.  Of the Guirne Creith concerto Lorraine McAslan says,  “The solo part is beautifully lyrical and explorative, quite technically demanding and it has a marvellous range.  Its ever-changing tonality is very much a transient thing, Romantic in style, and I think reminiscent of Ysayë.  It doesn’t sound very English until the last movement.”  Having only the original orchestral score to work from, and not the separate solo part, must have been quite a challenge.  “A lot of the markings, in terms of phrasing, aren’t there and you’re left wondering, does she really mean all these notes to be separated?  Maybe Albert Sammons had a particular style of playing, so she thought ‘Well, I’ll leave it to him and he can do his own thing’.  So I’m just going with the musical phrase and hoping I’m capturing what she intended.  This is my expression of her music and that’s where it’s very exciting.”  While it makes little difference to her that the composer was female, she says, “I do think the question needs to be aired.  In terms of the musical style I don’t think her writing has anything to do with being female.  And I would imagine she’d be so insulted as a composer - such a formidable woman - I don’t think she would have taken very kindly to being considered a ‘woman composer’!”

Currently recording the orchestral works of Richard Arnell to critical acclaim is conductor Martin Yates, with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, the same team that joined forces with Lorraine McAslan to record the Creith and Arnell concertos.  “It sometimes seems strange that an important work will have been overlooked and although there are of course many instances where this has been exactly the case, with the Creith Violin Concerto it is even more puzzling”, writes Yates.  “It's not like it wasn't ever played and when it was the soloist and conductor were seriously important figures in British music.  Could it simply be that the music wasn't really up to much?  Well, having just conducted the first recording of the work I can honestly say that I am more perplexed by its obscurity than ever. It firmly marks its young composer out as someone who first has something to say and secondly knows exactly how to say it.  As some of the orchestra commented to me at the recording sessions, “its such a well argued and organised piece” so it’s certainly not inferior music after all.

“Personally, I am delighted and also honoured to have been given the opportunity to conduct this piece; I really loved every bar of this score as it moved effortlessly from its slightly tempestuous first movement into its really beautifully haunting slow movement and concluding with one of the most uplifting and yet questioning rondos that I have heard. The language of the music nods in the direction of Elgar and also Delius, but that is not to be held against the composer or her work as it is elegantly crafted in its own style.  In any event Creith was writing the piece for Albert Sammons and he was a violinist who played in a certain and distinctive way. For my taste she captured all that was good about his style and brilliantly put it in this work.  In a time when simple elegant sophistication is being re-evaluated positively I think audiences would love this concerto.  I can't wait for the rest of Creith's orchestral music to be found.”

In 1952 life for Guirne Creith started to move in a different direction.  By then she was divorced, with two young sons to bring up, and the name of Creith had gone.  The devastating accident to her hand prompted the most extraordinary and remarkable response from her.  Guirne van Zuylen, as she became, took up singing in her forties.  Although this was to be a short-lived career she applied no less drive and determination to her studies with Reinhold Gerhardt at the Guildhall School of Music than she had to the piano twenty years earlier.  In 1956 three of her early songs were published under the name Guirne Javal(22) and appeared in the Boosey’s Modern Festival Series.  Two other previously published songs, including a four-part madrigal, have also come to light and it’s known from early accounts that she wrote other songs too.(23) 

During this period she also started to teach singing and to take in lodgers, mostly music students around the same age as her sons.  A former member of the Covent Garden Chorus remembers “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.  That her methods worked was borne out by the success of two other members of the Covent Garden Chorus.  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 her.”

One of her lodgers, artist manager Athole Still, remembers this period as one of “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 the 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 my hometown of Aberdeen.  Guirne remained a valued friend and ‘sounding board’ as I continued my journey towards my professional debut at Glyndebourne.”

American pianist John Kenneth Adams was another one of her lodgers.  “Although I never studied with her, I did play for her, especially lieder repertoire, and often went to play her lessons with Reinhold Gerhardt.  Even though we were somewhat opposite in our approach to the piano, she never once criticized what I was doing and I found that quite remarkable. I for one recognized that she was a formidable musician, and attending concerts with her were lessons in themselves.  To her I owe the ability to really listen to the singer and so many small details that I still think about constantly today.  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.”

On a visit to her sons’ school Guirne van Zuylen first met the young David Fanshawe, still a schoolboy.  It was an unorthodox audition by any standards, but their chance meeting left Fanshawe with the ambition to study piano with her once he left school.  As soon as he started his first job as a trainee film editor Fanshawe seized the opportunity and booked his first piano lesson with Guirne van Zuylen, whom he called ‘the Baroness’.  He was to study with her for four years.  “Under Guirne’s inspirational guidance and tutelage, I grew up.  Indeed, I became quite a proficient pianist.  Then suddenly, aged eighteen, I fell in love with a girl called Jill 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.”  Jill became a manuscript and won Fanshawe second prize in a competition.  It would have won first prize were it not for the mistakes, which according to the examiner, “stretched from here to Abyssynia”.  Fanshawe’s first published work was Escapade for piano solo, soon to be followed by Escapade no 2.  On the strength of his performance of these, his own published compositions, Fanshawe was awarded a Foundation Scholarship to the Royal College of Music to study composition.  He subsequently dedicated Escapade I & II to the memory of his late teacher.  “I owe Guirne a huge debt of gratitude for persevering with me.  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.  She was a genius, a great teacher, a mentor, a distinguished pianist and composer whose works deserve now to come out, to be recognised, performed, recorded and enjoyed by us all.”

By 1964, when she was still only 57, the musical chapter of Creith’s life had all but come to an end.  She lived in France for five years where she became an authority on food and wine.  She had two books published by Faber & Faber:  Eating with Wine and Gourmet Cooking for Everyone, which was subsequently brought out in a paperback edition.  She moved to Germany in 1970 to work for Deinhardt, one of the world’s oldest wine shippers, in Koblenz where she wrote a short book Beethoven & Wegeler: the story of a lifelong friendship to commemorate the opening in 1975 of a new and permanent exhibition in the house in which Beethoven’s mother was born, now owned by Deinhardt.  The following year she married Robert Siddons and moved back to England where she remained until her death in 1996. 

Creith’s music is coming to the fore once again.  The young Anglo-American violinist Tamsin Waley-Cohen, who is a cousin of hers, will perform the Violin Concerto in London on 4 July 2009.  “When I discovered that I was related to Guirne Creith it was exciting to find out where my musical gene may have come from – something I always wondered about.  To be asked to play a work that has the pedigree of a première by the great Albert Sammons is a real honour.  It is also an adventure, after the lifetime of the composer, to bring it back to life for a new generation of listeners.  I have a high standard to live up to!” 

Now that we are beginning to rediscover her music more than a decade after her death it’s clear from the evidence of the Violin Concerto that, while Creith was not a prolific composer, she was a good one and belongs properly among the group of fine women musicians who came out of the London colleges between the two World Wars.

© Katharine Copisarow 2008

Footnotes

1 Extract from a handwritten draft letter
2 Guirne is pronounced gher-na
3 Handwritten entry from RAM record of bequests
4 Musical Times: March 1930
5 Creith suffered from asthma
6 Humour and Harmony by Vladimir Cernikoff, publ. A Barker Ltd, 1936
7 BBC Home Service Programme PasB 21.3.1963
8 Original letter is held by BBC Written Archives
9 Radio Times, issue dated 3 February 1928, p 231
10 Radio Times, issue dated 1 June 1928, p 394
11 Radio Times, issue daed 26 January 1934, p 243
12 Rapunzel orchestration: 2+picc/2+ca/2+bcl/2+dbsn/4231/timp+2 perc/hp/stgs
13 The Radio Times, issue dated 15th May 1936, page 40
14 Musical Times: June 1936 ‘Wireless Notes’
15 Musical Times: July 1929
16 The Radio Times, issue dated 13 February 1931, p 371
17 Musical Times: August 1933 ‘London Concerts’
18 Readers may find online references to an existing recording, but there is no truth in this – it is a hoax
19 Musical Times: July 1926
20 Musical Times: December 1926
21 Musical Times: January 1930
22 Javal was the name of her French paternal grandmother
23 My Ship and I – words by RL Stevenson
The Lamb – words by William Blake
Where Go the Boats – words by RL Stevenson