Radcliffe: String Quartet in D major (1939)

Andante sostenuto – Allegro – Andante
Vivace
Andante tranquillo e cantabile

Philip Radcliffe was born in Goldalming on 27 April 1905 and died tragically in a motor accident in France on 2 September 1986, together with his devoted and beloved sister Susan. He has been associated with King’s College Cambridge since 1924, and resided there virtually the whole of that time: firstly as an undergraduate reading classics, subsequently transferring to music under Prof. Edward Dent and being elected to a Fellowship in 1931. He was appointed university lecturer in 1947 – a position he held until his retirement in 1972, although he continued to give supervisions right up to the end of his life. There can be few who undertook the Cambridge tripos during those years who did not come into contact with him in one way or another, and surely not one single Kingsman reading music who was not profoundly affected by the wisdom and insight of his teaching or his unmatchable knowledge of music and musical history – most of which was acquired through first hand experience: for him music was a living reality, not a lifeless textbook subject, and so it is no surprise that he could be seen in the audience of almost every musical performance in Cambridge. Indeed, there will be many of us from those days, whether performers, composers, academics, or teachers, who owe a great deal of our musicianship to him, and will recall his presence with enormous affection and gratitude: we have all of us been taken by surprise the first time we sat on his piano stool, with its seat worn away into a hollow much deeper than expected! We all smiled inwardly at his enthusiastic but barely decipherable musical examples on the piano; and at the chaos of his rooms – books, music, papers everywhere, yet the right one always somehow located. We all had our worries over keyboard harmony, or our struggles with Palestrina, consoled by his gentle stroking of our hair! Certainly – in my day at least – his lectures on music history were by far the most compelling on the curriculum: we all of us attended avidly (which was not necessarily the case with others on offer….). Moreover, his great intellectual appetite extended far beyond the limited boundaries of the world of music, notably into literature, both English and Classical – he was a regular member of the weekly play-reading society the Ten Club, which included such notables as E.M. Forster, Donald Beves, and Patrick Wilkinson; and he also enjoyed the acquaintance of  T.S. Eliot and Vaughan Williams, among many others.

He never really considered himself a composer and therefore felt little obligation to keep up with contemporary trends: his style belongs unashamedly to the England of the early part of the twentieth century – “a sort of Vaughan-Brahms” was how he once described his quartet to us! It was begun in 1938 and completed the following Autumn – he recalled (with touchingly characteristic understatement) that the change from major to minor in the finale marked the outbreak of war! The writing demonstrates an understanding for the medium which has eluded many of his more illustrious predecessors; through a simple economy of means and an uncanny feel for four-part sonority he achieves here a beauty and clarity of line and texture which, together with a touching emotional understatement, adds up to an experience which is truly moving in its impression. It was not performed publicly until 15 January 1972, when the Fitzwilliam Quartet included it in a Cambridge University Musical Club concert at Downing Place. We followed this later in the year with performances in Bradford and Hindhead, near his Surrey home; but to my knowledge it did not receive another professional airing in the intervening 33 years up to a centenary concert in the college chapel (in which fellow Kingsman James Gilchrist also contributed a number of his songs).

The quartet was preceded by a set of orchestral variations, broadcast on the BBC in 1936, and followed in 1940 by an operetta Cats and Dogs, which takes a wry look at the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1940 – but was banned by the Lord Chamberlain on political grounds. Despondent, he composed only songs thereafter – but what songs! About 150 of them, revealing to the full his innate and wide ranging feel for literature: over eighty poets are represented in the list, a selection of which appeared on a fine LP recorded by Robert Tear and Philip Ledger.

To trace the influences of different composers on me would be an easy task…I am one who still sees melody as something basically diatonic. For better or worse I have not compelled myself to follow uncongenial trends, and have continued to write music that reflects the enthusiasms that came to me in youth and still remain undiminished in old age.

However, it is as a writer and teacher that he will probably be most remembered; indeed, he was considered an authority on Austro/German music of the early nineteenth century. In addition to countless published essays and articles he wrote definitive books on Mendelssohn, Beethoven’s string quartets, Schubert’s piano sonatas, and Mozart’s piano concertos. As he himself wrote of Boris Ord, “He valued honesty and independence of thought highly and, though he undoubtedly had his own prejudices, he made no attempt to proselytize others. He had no trace of self-importance and was willing to help in the most unexpected ways…” That was Philip as we all knew him.

© Alan George
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