ABSTRACT
In discussing the music of Havergal Brian with fellow musicians, reading music critics’ opinions of concerts and broadcasts of Brian’s music and reading analytical studies of Brian’s works by the various musicologists expert in his music, it becomes very clear that all of us listen to Brian in different ways. What for one listener might be a stunning experience may for another be half an hour or so of total boredom – and this is as it should be. We all have our own personalities, our own tastes in food, art and literature, our own preferences in styles of dress and our own perfect right to state our beliefs. Thus, it is not unusual for differences of opinion to occur concerning the merits of individual works of art. What is sometimes surprising is to find that one is in opposition over one particular work with a person with whom one usually agrees. Such an instance is the opposing views taken by Malcolm MacDonald and myself over Brian’s Symphony No. 14 in F minor. I have long been greatly impressed by this work, even before the opportunity arose to study it with a score, and was therefore somewhat dismayed to find that Malcolm (with whom I am normally in agreement in matters concerning Brian) gives the work a considerable hammering in the second volume of his study of the symphonies. Even more surprising was the fact that the Symphony No. 13, which I personally consider to be a crude patchwork of ideas (despite the impressive opening and glorious lyrical outburst around fig. 30) concluded by what must surely be one of Brian’s most banal codas, received comparatively lenient treatment. In a letter answering a criticism by David J. Brown, Malcolm MacDonald (cf. David J. Brown’s review of MacDonald’s Volume 2 in Newsletter 18, pp. 7–8) assures us that opinions set out in his studies of the Brian symphonies are purely personal ones, and not to be taken as “holy writ”. Therefore I feel fully justified in offering my own view of the much-maligned Fourteenth Symphony in the hope that people will be persuaded to give it another chance.
