Leonard Constant Lambert (23 August 190521 August 1951) was a British composer, conductor, and author. He was the founding music director of the Royal Ballet, and (alongside Dame Ninette de Valois and Sir Frederick Ashton) he was a major figure in the establishment of the English ballet as a significant artistic movement.
His ballet commitments, including extensive conducting work throughout his life, restricted his compositional activities. However one work, The Rio Grande, for chorus, orchestra and piano soloist, achieved widespread popularity in the 1920s, and is still regularly performed today. His other work includes a jazz influenced Piano Concerto (1931), major ballet scores such as Horoscope (1937) and a full-scale choral masque Summer's Last Will and Testament (1936) that some consider his masterpiece.
Lambert had wide-ranging interests beyond music, as can be seen from his critical study Music Ho! (1934), which places music in the context of the other arts. His friends included John Maynard Keynes, Anthony Powell and the The Sitwells.[Motion Andrew (1996). The Lamberts. George, Constant and Kit.] To Keynes, Lambert was perhaps the most brilliant man he had ever met; to de Valois he was the greatest ballet conductor and advisor his country had ever had; to the composer Denis ApIvor he was the most entertaining personality of the musical world.[Stephen Lloyd. Constant Lambert – Beyond The Rio Grande. Introduction.]
Early life and music
The son of Australian painter George Lambert and his wife Amy, and the younger brother of
Maurice Lambert, Constant Lambert was educated at Christ's Hospital near
Horsham in West Sussex. While still a boy he demonstrated formidable musical gifts, and wrote his first orchestral work at the age of 13. In September 1922 Lambert entered the Royal College of Music, where his teachers were Ralph Vaughan Williams, R. O. Morris and Sir George Dyson (composition),
Malcolm Sargent (conducting) and
Herbert Fryer (piano).
His contemporaries there included the pianist Angus Morrison, conductor
Guy Warrack, Thomas Armstrong (a future head of the Royal Academy of Music), and the composers Gavin Gordon,
Patrick Hadley and
Gordon Jacob.
[Lloyd, Stephen (2015). Constant Lambert: Beyond the Rio Grande. p. 32.]
In 1925 (at the age of 20) he received a high profile commission to write a ballet for
Sergei Diaghilev's
Ballets Russes (
Roméo et Juliette, 1926, choreographed by
Nijinska). For a few years he enjoyed celebrity, through the broader success of his next ballet (the neo-classical
Pomona of 1927, choreographed again by Nijinska), and through his participation as narrator in many public performances (and a recording) of
William Walton and
Edith Sitwell's controversial
Façade.
Jazz influence
Lambert's best-known composition followed.
The Rio Grande (1927), for piano and alto soloists,
choir, and orchestra of brass, strings and percussion, sets a poem by Sacheverell Sitwell. It achieved considerable success, and Lambert made two recordings of the piece as conductor (1930 and 1949). He had a great interest in African-American music, and once said that he would have ideally liked
The Rio Grande to feature a black choir.
He held a very positive view of jazz rhythms and their incorporation in classical music saying once that:
Lambert was to take his interest in jazz much further in works such as the Piano Sonata (1929) and the Concerto for piano and nine Instruments (1931), where the style moves away from the "symphonic jazz" of Gershwin and Paul Whiteman to something much more tense and urban, with popular and formal elements of composition closely integrated, rhythms jagged and extreme, and harmony sometimes approaching atonalism.[Hardy, Lisa (2012). The British Piano Sonata, 1870-1945. pp. 129–140.] The second movement of the Sonata features a blues in rondo form.[Easterbrook, Giles (1995). "Notes to Hyperion CDH55937".] The Concerto's unusual chamber scoring becomes something of a hybrid between a jazz band and the ensemble used in Schoenberg's Pierrot lunaire.[ 'Lambert, Concerto for Piano and Nine Instruments'. A Tune A Day.]
Later career
Lambert was appointed in 1931 as conductor and music director of the Vic-Wells ballet (later The Royal Ballet),
but his career as a composer stagnated. His major choral work
Summer's Last Will and Testament (1935, after the play of the same name by
Thomas Nashe), one of his most emotionally dark works, proved unfashionable in the mood following the death of
George V, but
Alan Frank hailed it at the time as Lambert's "finest work".
The Second World War took its toll on his vitality and creativity. He was ruled unfit for active service in the armed forces; decades of hard drinking had impaired his health, which declined further with the development of diabetes that remained undiagnosed and untreated until very late in his life. Lambert's childhood experiences (which included a near-fatal bout of septicaemia) had given him a lifelong detestation and fear of the medical profession.
Lambert himself considered he had failed as a composer, and completed only two major works after the disappointment of Summer's Last Will and Testament - they were the ballet scores Horoscope (1938) and Tiresias (1951) - though there were also several smaller works, such as the white-note piano four hands suite Trois pièces nègres pour les touches blanches, written for the identical twin piano duo Mary and Geraldine Peppin.[Motion Andrew (1996). The Lamberts. George, Constant and Kit.] Instead he concentrated mostly on conducting, working closely with the Royal Ballet until his resignation in 1947. He continued to be featured as a guest conductor until shortly before his death in 1951.
Broader cultural interests
An expert on painting, sculpture, and literature as well as music,
Lambert differed from most of his fellow English composers of the time in his perception of the importance of jazz. He responded positively to the music of
Duke Ellington. His embrace of music outside the 'serious' repertoire is illustrated by his book
Music Ho! (1934),
subtitled "a study of music in decline", which remains one of the wittiest, if most highly opinionated, volumes of music criticism in the English language.
Lambert's father, while born in Russia and of American heritage, viewed himself as first and foremost an Australian. Constant was always conscious of his Australian connections, although he never visited that country. For the first performance of his Piano Concerto (1931), rather than select a British-born pianist, Lambert chose the Sydney-born, Brisbane-trained Arthur Benjamin to play the solo part. Despite his disapproval of homosexuality he formed a good working relationship with Benjamin's fellow Australian Robert Helpmann. Afterwards he entrusted yet another Australian musician, Gordon Watson, with the task of playing the virtuoso piano part at the première of his last ballet, Tiresias.[ Graeme Skinner, musicologist ]
Personal life
Lambert's first marriage was to Florence Kaye, on 5 August 1931;
their son was
Kit Lambert, one of the managers of
The Who, named after his friend the painter Christopher "Kit" Wood.
But he was soon engaged in an on-and-off affair with the ballet dancer
Margot Fonteyn. According to friends of Fonteyn, Lambert was the great love of her life and she despaired when she finally realised he would never marry her. Some aspects of this relationship were symbolised in his ballet
Horoscope (1938), in which Fonteyn was a principal dancer. After divorcing Kaye, in 1947 Lambert married the artist Isabel Delmer, who designed the stage sets and costumes for his ballet
Tiresias; after his death, she married
Alan Rawsthorne.
[Jacobi, Carol (February 2021). Out of the Cage: The Art of Isabel Rawsthorne, London: The Estate of Francis Bacon Publishing.] In 1945 Florence married Charles Edward Peter Hole; their daughter Anne later took the stage name
Annie Lambert. During the 1930s Lambert also had a long affair and friendship with Laureen Goodare (mother of actress
Cleo Sylvestre, Constant's goddaughter). Laureen was a dancer and cigarette girl at the Shim Sham Club in Wardour Street, Soho. Their affair lasted until his untimely death in 1951.
Close friends of his included Michael Ayrton, Sacheverell Sitwell and Anthony Powell. He was the prototype of the character Hugh Moreland in Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time, particularly in the fifth volume, Casanova's Chinese Restaurant, in which Moreland is a central character.[Powell, Anthony (1976). Memoirs, Vol 4, To Keep The Ball Rolling.]
Lambert died on 21 August 1951, two days short of his forty-sixth birthday, of pneumonia and undiagnosed diabetes complicated by acute alcoholism, and was buried in Brompton Cemetery, London.
Major works
Ballets
-
Romeo and Juliet (1925)
-
Pomona (1927)
-
Horoscope (1938)
-
Tiresias (1950)
Choral and vocal
-
Eight poems of Li Bai (1928)
-
The Rio Grande (1927) (a setting of a poem by Sacheverell Sitwell)
-
Summer's Last Will and Testament (1936; to words by Thomas Nashe)
-
Dirge from Cymbeline (1947)
Orchestral
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The Bird Actors Overture (1924)
-
Music for Orchestra (1927)
-
Aubade héroïque (1941)
Chamber
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Concerto for piano, 2 trumpets, timpani and strings (1924)
-
Concerto for piano and nine instruments (1931)
Instrumental
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Elegiac Blues (1927, orchestrated 1928)
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Piano Sonata (1930)
-
Elegy, for piano (1938)
-
Trois Pièces Nègres pour les Touches Blanches ''Three, piano duet (4 hands) (1949)
Film music
-
Merchant Seamen (semi-documentary; 1941)
-
Anna Karenina (1948)
Bibliography
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Drescher, Derek (producer). Remembering Constant Lambert, BBC Radio 3 documentary, broadcast 23 August 1975.
-
Lloyd, Stephen. Constant Lambert: Beyond The Rio Grande. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2014. .
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McGrady, Richard. The Music of Constant Lambert. In Music & Letters Vol 51, No 3, July 1970
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Motion, Andrew. The Lamberts: George, Constant & Kit. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1986. .
-
Shead, Richard. Constant Lambert. London, 1972. .
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