Remember Me for My Art, Not My Potboilers

Back in 1937 when we were reactivating my father's long-uninhabited birthplace, I came upon a stack of Etude' magazines from the first decade of this century. (You remember the Etude. It was a product of the music publisher Theodor Presser of Philadelphia. Besides musical articles and musical news, it contained a section of piano music--published by guess who!-­and every home that contained a piano must have subscribed to it at one time or another.) There were a number of references to the musical wild-men of the day--such names as Debussy and Reger and Ravel and Mahler and Scriabin and Cyril Scott. At that time I had, through determined effort, acclimated myself to the ear-bending mysteries of Debussy and Ravel (remember that I was nurtured on Stephen Foster and the Episcopal hymnal!), and I took it as a matter of course that I would some day become acquainted with Scott, whose name was new to me.

A few years afterward I found myself purveying sheet music in a New York musical emporium, and once in a while some elderly person would come in and buy something by Cyril Scott--little diddly­poo salon pieces like "Lotus Land" and "The Blackbird's Song"--and I figured that if this was Scott, the folks at Etude must've been having their little joke. Otherwise Scott's art and name--and presumably Scott--were defunct. And much to my surprise, after a generation, Cyril Scott, age 90, published a lively autobiography in 1969! (He died a year later.) Now, very slowly, we are being permitted to hear some of Scott's serious music (as opposed to the little potboilers his publishers demanded of him to pay the costs of bringing out the big works).

It's hard really to figure out how Scott got lost. He supposed that his "advanced" harmonies blacklisted him with audiences--though anyone who understands the language of his friends Ravel and Debussy and Delius (not to mention a host of Hollywood film composers) will find him totally intelligible. Perhaps it was his association with the so-called Frankfurt Group, for the other Frankfurters, who included Roger Quilter and Percy Grainger, came to be regarded as salonists rather than real hotdogs. (And names like Cyril and Percy are unsuited to our century!) Or perhaps it was his reputation as something of a weirdo, for Scott was deeply into occultism, yoga, theosophy, astrology, and health-food--years ahead of his time, some would say.

Along with scads of mostly trivial pieces in the smaller forms, Scott turned out three operas, three symphonies, six concerti, three trios, two quartets, two quintets, and a number of other big works. The piano concerto was completed just before World War I and was premiered by Sir Thomas Beecham in 1915, with the composer at the keyboard. Scott was, by all accounts, a whiz-bang pianist, and his serious works for the instrument make great technical demands on the soloist. He had an affection for the concerto and was disappointed that others did not play it very often; he recalls five other performances in his ninety years, three of them his own! He says, not entirely jestingly, of the first movement, "It is as if Scarlatti had lived in China,'' and adds that the whole is what he meant it to be: "Not a deep work, but an enlivening one." Given a chance, it would, he thinks, have achieved a popularity like that of the Bruch fiddle concerto.

The soloist here is the brilliant John Ogdon, winner of the 1962 Moscow Tchaikovsky competition, and inveterate promoter of forgotten pianistic causes. The conductor is the late lamented Bernard Herrmann, whom old hands will recall as the adventurous conductor of the CBS Symphony in radio days, and whom almost everyone knows as perhaps the greatest of American film composers.