William Henry Bell: Rosa Mystica, Concerto for Viola and Orchestra

The "story" of how this came about is very simple indeed: Michael Ponder told me of it's existence and Lewis Foreman (who wrote the biog of Arnold Bax) confirmed he had a microfilm of the Bell and the original existed in Cape Town University Library. The rest was easy... easy to get it, that is. Putting it together was the massive labour of Michiko Otaki. She deserves all the credit and the thanks of the music loving world.

William Henry Bell: Rosa Mystica, Concerto for Viola and Orchestra Although we think of W H Bell – always known by his initials – as a South Africancomposer, he was actually born at St Albans in the county of Hertfordshire. He spentthe first thirty-nine years of his life in or near London, not going to South Africa until1912. Having been a chorister at St Albans Abbey, he won a scholarship to the RoyalAcademy of Music (RAM) where he was a pupil of Frederick Corder. He also studiedmodal counterpoint with Stanford at the Royal College of Music (RCM). “Corder’smethods were in direct opposition to those which I afterwards learned were practisedby Stanford,” he wrote, adding, “I am perhaps the only English composer who cameunder the influence of both men. To put the matter bluntly, I think Corder actually‘taught’ too little… Stanford on the other hand perhaps imposed too much.”Largely making his living as an organist – at one stage of St Alban’s Abbey – andfrom teaching harmony at the RAM, Bell needed a post and it did not come until hesuccessfully applied for the job of Director of the South African College of Music inCape Town. Jobs in the Empire, particularly in Australia, Canada and South Africa, werethen highly prized and graduates from the London colleges of music could expect notonly to make their names in such a position but also to achieve financial security.

Until then he had enjoyed a growing reputation as a composer. Born the year afterHolst, when Bell left for South Africa he would probably have been thought moresuccessful than Holst. Bell had produced a succession of orchestral works, which wereheard, among others, at the Crystal Palace, at the Proms, in Beecham’s early concertsand at Bournemouth where notably Dan Godfrey produced Bell’s Walt WhitmanSymphony in 1902.However, Bell’s mature style did not really blossom until he went to South Africa,where for over thirty years he not only was a very successful teacher but also createda unique and substantial body of work still unknown by the wider public. This includedsix operas, five settings of Japanese No-plays (long before Britten thought of doing thesame), many orchestral works including five symphonies, tone poems and settings forvoice and orchestra including the deeply moving Walt Whitman cycle Songs of the LastPassage. As was the case for almost all British composers who worked abroad in theinter-war years, once they were personally no longer on hand to promote their musicin London they went unheard and were quickly forgotten in their homeland.The viola concerto Rosa Mystica was completed on 18 December 1916 andperformed in Cape Town on 8 November 1917. Unfortunately, we have not been ableto trace the programme for that concert and so the name of the soloist is not known.It would appear never to have been performed outside South Africa, and remainedunpublished. The present writer first explored this music on a microfilm sent fromCape Town; this performance has been made possible by Roger Chase, who securedphotocopies, and Michiko Otaki, who edited and created the full score and parts usingFinale computer software.As a musician associated with the RAM, Bell came under the influence of LionelTertis, who taught the viola there. Tertis was actively trying to develop the repertoireof the viola and encouraged all his friends and students to write pieces for him. In 1905Tertis and York Bowen (composer and pianist) included two pieces by Bell – Cantilenaand Arab Love Song – in their Æelian Hall concert. Thus, when Bell came to write forthe viola on a bigger scale there is little doubt that Tertis’s playing was the inspiration,even if the war and thousands of miles kept him from playing it.Bell prefaces his score with two verses from the fifteenth century carol The Flowerof Jesse by John Audelay. It was published in Edith Rickert’s pioneering collection‘Ancient English Carols 1400-1700’, which appeared in 1910, and presumably Bell tooka copy with him to South Africa. He thus suggests it is a Christmas meditation.“There is a flower, sprung of a TreeThe root of it is called Jesse,A Flower of Pryse“Of Lily white and Rose of RyseOf Primrose and of Flower de LyseOf all the flowers in my devyseThe Flower of Jesse beareth the prizeOf most of allTo save our soules both great and small.”‘Rosa Mystica’ usually refers to the Virgin Mary, but in wondering about thissuggestion of a programme it is also worth remembering that Bell would have beeneighteen when Oscar Wilde’s collection of poems entitled Rosa Mystica was published.However, Bell underlines his intent by quoting the first two phrases of Palestrina’sMotet ‘Assumption est Maria’.The Concerto is in three movements, though the second and third play continuously.Four horns in unison fanfare the opening of the first movement and a slow introduction,in which the soloist introduces a version of the theme of the allegro that follows. Avariety of themes and motifs are heard, constituting a first subject group, brilliantlyorchestrated. The lyrical, slower second subject that follows we might think of as the‘Rosa Mystica’ theme, and it will return at the end of the whole concerto.The strings are muted for much of the time in the elegiac slow movement, as isthe soloist when he first plays a long melancholy theme elaborated over some thirtybars. Indeed, the contrast between the soloist with and without mute is a feature of themovement. The use of muted trumpet calls – which carry over into the finale – are soreminiscent of distant bugle calls as to make one wonder if there is any programmaticintent on Bell’s part to acknowledge the distant Western Front where many of hisLondon friends then found themselves.At the opening of the third movement the strings are still muted, but once thescherzando mood returns (remembering a similar one from the first movement) themusic develops a considerable impetus and the long climax comes as the soloistrests. The return of the ‘Rosa Mystica’ tune from the first movement, all passion spent,presages the serene close. One has to say that it is a considerable comment on the waywe arrange our music that so eloquent a work has had to wait over ninety years foronly its second hearing, on this recording.W H Bell: a personal memoir by John JoubertMy first impressions of W H Bell were formed when, as a boy growing up in the 1930sin suburban Cape Town, I became aware of a framed newspaper cartoon hanging up onone of the walls of our family house. It was a full-length depiction of a striking if ratherunkempt figure with unruly hair, smoking a pipe and carrying a bundle of papers underone arm, which he seemed to be desperately trying to prevent from slipping to theground. I particularly noticed, as perhaps a small boy would, that his shoelaces wereundone. When I asked my mother who this was she told me that he was ProfessorBell, affectionately known by her and her fellow ex-students as ‘Daddy’ Bell, the thenPrincipal of the College.I thought no further about the matter, but had I been older I might have registeredthat Bell must have been something of a celebrity to have been the subject of anewspaper cartoon. I might even have noticed that the papers under his arm boreboth his name and the titles of some of his compositions. He was, in fact, South Africa’sleading composer and the focus of not a little national pride, even if some people hadtheir reservations about what they saw as the ‘modernity’ of his musical style.Some years later, in my mid-teens, I was to meet Bell in the flesh. The year was 1942and the circumstances were these. I had become more and more interested in music,so much so that I began to develop a consuming ambition to become a composer. Mymother, understandably alarmed at this prospect, took some of my early, barely literateattempts at composition to Bell for him to have a look at and advise on whether or notthere was any basis for proceeding further with the career I had so rashly envisagedfor myself. To the intense relief of us both, Bell was most sympathetic. I think he wasimpressed less by any intrinsic merits my work may have had than by the evidence ofthe powerful motivation that lay behind the notes, and which had caused me to make myown manuscript paper by ruling out by hand the necessary number of staves to containan orchestral score (trying to run before I could crawl, as Bell put it). In any event, heoffered to take me on as his pupil provided I was willing to go back to basics and masterthe fundamentals of my chosen craft. He refused to take any payment for this.So began an intensive period of study involving meetings that had to be fitted inwith our respective commitments – he with his composing and other pupils (he wasalso teaching Stefans Grové and Hubert du Plessis at this time) and I with my schooling.We met either at the Bells’ house at Gordon’s Bay, a charming seaside village on theopposite shore of False Bay, where they had been living since his retirement, or at theSouth African College of Music when the Bells were up in town. (I need hardly add thatit was Mrs Bell, sister of Sir John McEwen, one-time Principal of the RAM, who did thedriving.) Sometimes our lessons were continued by correspondence. Bell began withthe process of melodic construction, either by analysis (I well remember his basingalmost an entire tutorial on the melody of the slow movement of Beethoven’s FifthSymphony) or by actually composing melodies on a purely linear basis, i.e. withoutaccompanying harmony. After a while I began to grow impatient to start ‘proper’composing and, without Bell’s knowledge, composed a little Siciliano for Strings thatwas performed by the Cape Town Municipal Orchestra at one of their Sunday eveningConcerts. Far from disapproving of my presumption, Bell was complimentary about thepiece and we were soon immersed in the more complex matters of harmony, rhythmand form. These sometimes involved attempts by Bell to improve certain passages hefelt didn’t work, improvements I felt didn’t really solve the problem simply becausethey weren’t by me. These I would re-compose in my own way, a procedure that taughtme that composition is a growing process in which everything must be consideredboth provisional and subject to revision until it reaches its final form.Bell was a great Wagnerian, doubtless influenced in this by his own teacher atthe RAM, Frederick Corder. He used to play me extracts from both Tristan and DieMeistersinger on the piano to demonstrate Wagner’s use of melodic expansion. Indeed,he considered Die Meistersinger the greatest of all operas, an opinion I have no difficultyin endorsing. It certainly embodies in its very essence the Wagnerian principle of‘endless melody’. What finer composition lesson could any aspiring composer wish forthan Sach’s wise and patient coaching of Walther in his struggles to mould the Priesliedinto the miraculous phenomenon it eventually becomes?I have always been aware of what a great privilege it was to be able to study witha significant and still practising composer whose early works had been performed,in company with those by Bantock, Bax, Delius and Grainger and many others, at thefamous pre-1914 Balfour Gardiner Concerts by some of the most eminent conductorsof the time. Bell had always been a productive composer, but in his last years he wasenjoying a veritable Indian summer of creativity. One of the most impressive worksof this late period is the orchestral song-cycle to words by Walt Whitman composedin memory of his son, Oliver, killed in action in the 1943 North Africa Campaignduring WWII. Bell himself died in 1946, and later the same year I arrived in Englandon a scholarship awarded by the Performing Right Society. The judge who had thecasting vote in the competition for its award was Erik Chisholm, who earlier in theyear had been appointed Principal of the very College whose first principal had beenBell himself. I like to think that one of the works that helped me on my way was theorchestral Threnody I composed in memory of my old friend and mentor, and firstperformed by the Cape Town Municipal Orchestra in the year of his death. Certainlyfew young composers could have possessed a more positive role model than thisremarkable man.