Album insights
Havergal Brian's "Gothic" Symphony is often described in superlatives. It is regularly touted as not only the longest symphony ever written but also as requiring the largest number of musicians for its performance. Even if these claims may not be entirely accurate, the duration and size certainly speak for themselves. It is an immense work in every sense. Martyn Brabbins, who conducted the recorded concert performance at the BBC Proms in 2011, was quoted in an interview shortly before with these words: "I hope it leaves the audience speechless in awe and admiration, knowing that such a piece exists and a composer spent years putting it on paper—without real hope or prospect of a performance."
Havergal Brian was born in Dresden, Staffordshire, into a family of ceramic workers. With eleven years, the choir boy left school but received a thorough education in harmony and counterpoint. Although baptized as William Brian, he took the name Havergal in his early twenties, inspired by the Victorian hymn collector W.H. Havergal, as he aimed for a career as a church organist. Brian was largely self-taught as a composer, influenced by great choir festivals and brass bands of the English Midlands, the Hallé Orchestra under Hans Richter, the splendid music of Handel, Beethoven, Berlioz, and Richard Strauss, as well as newer British music from Edward Elgar. Brian was an early advocate of Elgar in the Midlands and received encouraging words from Elgar himself regarding his early works. In the early 20th century, Brian made a name for himself as a promising member of the younger British composer generation, befriended Granville Bantock, received acclaim for orchestral works performed by Henry Wood at the Proms in the Queen’s Hall, and briefly secured support from a wealthy Staffordshire pottery industrialist.
Despite early successes, by 1913 Brian's career began to wane after the failure of his first marriage, leading him to move to London. During World War I, he was employed to inventory the belongings of fallen Canadian soldiers in France, an experience that inspired his burlesque anti-war opera, "The Tigers" (1916–1918). Supporting his growing second family with breadwinning jobs as a music copyist and journalist, he followed this work with the Gothic Symphony (1919–1927). By the late 1920s, Brian was already considered a largely forgotten composer. However, during the interwar period, he tirelessly promoted contemporary music as a critic, particularly as deputy editor of Musical Opinion, composing large-scale works without concrete performance prospects. After World War II, during which he worked as a clerk in the Ministry of Supply, Brian experienced an unprecedented "second spring" in his career, composing four operas and a total of 27 symphonies (out of 32) even in his 70s. In 1958, he moved from Harrow to Shoreham in Sussex, where he passed away at the age of 96 following a fall.
In addition to symphonies and operas, Brian composed other orchestral works, concertos, choral pieces, some piano compositions, and numerous songs. Since the 1950s, when BBC producer Robert Simpson established a friendship with him, interest in Brian's work has been renewed. Describing Brian's music has always been challenging. While rooted stylistically in late-Romanticism, his pronounced skepticism constantly subverted conventional expectations, making his music more demanding—or even unsettling—upon initial listening compared to that of his British contemporaries.
In 1907/08, Brian composed a programmatic piece called A Fantastic Symphony, but he soon destroyed half of the movements, retaining only two as separate works. Therefore, the Gothic initially appeared as "Symphony No. 2." In 1966, Brian renumbered his early symphonies, making it the "Symphony No. 1."
The title page of the Gothic bears two verses from the final scene of Goethe's Faust II:
"Whoever strives steadfastly, We will be able to redeem." In his massive symphony, Brian had indeed "strived steadfastly" to create a monumental work following the structure of a symphony—a time when he faced personal and financial difficulties and his professional career hit a plateau. At the same time, it is also a tribute to all the music he knew and loved, as well as the people who were significant to him. This work, he wrote to his friend Granville Bantock on June 27, 1926, "has been in my heart for a lifetime, and of course, it carries within it all those who have been and are dear to me—and those who have helped and shaped me." On another occasion, he described the fifth movement (the "Iudex") as a personal homage to Hans Richter, who inspired Brian as a young man while conducting the Hallé Orchestra. The Gothic is a sign of gratitude to the past and a manifesto for the future: a colossal reaffirmation of the idealism of the "musical renaissance" in England that was brutally shaken by the First World War. It is likely that the moments of terror and violence in the work directly stem from the wartime experience.
To his friend, composer, and writer Harold Truscott, Brian expressed that the work was a lightning bolt of such intensity that he would have liked to condense the entire piece into around twenty bars. This statement reveals something crucial about Brian. He was not an extravagant or excessive composer but rather precise. In the Gothic, he captured a moment of intense inspiration as concisely as possible. This is evident in his entire late work; he does not smooth the path from one idea to the next but composes essential, not filler passages.
The orchestra is extended with many unusual instruments: Oboe d'amore, Bass oboe, Basset horn, Contrabass clarinet, Cornets, Bass trumpet, and Euphoniums are among them. Brian credited Henry Wood for suggesting in 1907 that he write a piece covering the full range of wind instruments—such as the entire oboe family, all clarinets, and so forth. However, Brian does not use them to achieve an undifferentiated volume level but rather attains an unparalleled range of refined orchestral colors.
In addition to its "all-encompassing" approach to instrumentation, the Gothic is also an encyclopedic collection of musical styles, ranging from echoes of Gregorian chant and Elizabethan church music to atonality and pulsating cluster chords (in the "Iudex"). Brian incorporated everything he knew; one thing familiar to him from his earliest days were first-rate and virtuosic choirs that competed and sang the most challenging repertoire with utmost precision. While the orchestral musicians face considerable challenges in the Gothic (the xylophone solo in the third movement is a transcendental study for the instrument), these are a mere child's play compared to the choral parts, especially with regard to the intense chromatic polyphony dominating the Te Deum.
Fortunately, Brian found a publisher, the London branch of the German publisher Cranz, who released the orchestral score in 1932 in two huge (and error-riddled) volumes. Although the printed score bears a dedication to one of Brian's lifelong role models, Richard Strauss, who found the composition "magnificent" after reviewing it and expressed hope for a soon premiere, the work shows little traces of Strauss's influence (aside from perhaps in some passages of the first and third movements). A more significant precursor is Berlioz, particularly his Grande messe des morts. In fact, the Gothic represents the most extreme example of that risky genre hybridization pioneered by Beethoven with his Ninth Symphony.
How is Brian's work a "Gothic" Symphony? He does not use the term in the comparatively modern sense that "Gothic" holds today, meaning "macabre"—although dark and ominous events do indeed transpire throughout the work. Instead, he refers to the High and Late Middle Ages (approximately 1150–1550), the era of Gothic, characterized by its defining product, Gothic architecture, whose ultimate expressions are found in the great Gothic cathedrals of Western Europe. This period ignited the imaginations of the great Romantic artists, and it is within this tradition that Brian stands. Just as the stone of their cathedrals, this era was marked by the utmost certainty that life is a struggle between good and evil.
Developed over a period of seven or eight years (mostly at night, while Brian worked as a music copyist and journalist during the day, supplemented by various odd jobs), the Gothic combines two long-held plans—a work based on Goethe's Faust and a setting of the Te Deum—into a symphonic vision of the Gothic as an epoch of almost boundless expansion of human knowledge, be it spiritual or secular, wonderful or terrible. The first three movements for large orchestra refer generally to the first part of Goethe's Faust (Faust as a prototype of the Gothic man, a curious mystic in search of hidden knowledge). However, these are merely a prelude. The fourth, fifth, and sixth movements span a monumental hour-long setting of the Te Deum, requiring four vocal soloists, two large choirs totaling about 500 singers, a children's choir, four brass bands, and an orchestra surpassing even the most demanding requirements of Mahler, Strauss, or Schoenberg. The score mandates at least 32 woodwinds, 24 brass, two timpanists, a percussion section with 17 players, two harps, celesta, organ