ABSTRACT
From 12 December to 2 January I was fortunate in being able to visit McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario and (through the good offices of Paul Rapoport) to spend a considerable time in the University’s Mills Memorial Library reading the collection of Havergal Brian’s letters to Granville Bantock which the University purchased at Sotheby’s in 1978. It was an enthralling experience. Many extracts from this important body of correspondence have already been published, as most members will know, in Reginald Nettel’s books and, especially, Kenneth Eastaugh’s Havergal Brian: the Making of a Composer. Other passages have been quoted by Trevor Bray in an unpublished article written some years ago, of which he kindly sent me a copy. But no amount of extracts can give the full flavour of this extraordinarily rich, provoking, sometimes baffling, often very funny, and frequently moving record of 30 years in the life of a struggling composer. It is no exaggeration to say that there is hardly a scrap of this correspondence that is without interest – human, historical, musical, factual or anecdotal. There is plenty of food for thought for the student of Brian’s musical development: this was my chief reason for wanting to read the letters, and the results of my thoughts will appear in due course, I hope, in Volume 3 of my book on the symphonies. There are, too, very many letters which must surely one day appear in any anthology of Brian’s correspondence. (The publication of such a volume is, I believe, one of the Society’s long-term objectives.) Brian was, in his own way, as entertaining and idiosyncratic a letterwriter as Elgar, and in full confidence of his close friendship with Bantock he ran the gamut of epistolary pyrotechnics.
