Mention of Wales almost invariably calls to mind the famous line from Robert Bolt’s play, A Man for All Seasons, in which Sir Thomas More says to his perjurious betrayer, Richard Rich, “Why Richard, it profiteth a man nothing to gain the whole world and lose his soul, but for Wales?” Actually, Wales is a rather nice place and, without losing one’s soul, one can discover that fact by listening to the music of William Mathias (1934-1992), one of Wales’s finest 20th-century composers. For years, I used to scour through London gramophone shops to find records of his work (I bagged a total of nine). In recent years, his music has found an increasingly generous representation on compact disc, now numbering at least nine as well.
Mathias was born in Wales in 1934 and spent almost his whole life there. A child prodigy, he began piano lessons at age three. He started composing in his fifth year. When he was twelve, he wrote a march and school song for Whitland Grammar School that are still in use today. Largely self-taught, Mathias nonetheless studied composition at the Royal Academy of Music with composer Lennox Berkley and piano with Peter Katin. He then taught for many years at the University of Wales, Bangor, before retiring to concentrate exclusively on composition. Illness felled him at the relatively early age of 57. As his third and last symphony shows, Mathias was in full stride as a composer when he was struck down.
Mathias was a specifically Welsh composer in that his work is steeped in Celtic ethos and myth. His son, Rhiannon, explains that “my father’s psyche was fired by the qualities which can be detected in the great poems of Welsh Medieval poetry, where, in his words, ‘Celtic consciousness [is both] rhetorical and lyrical; on the one hand darkly introspective and, on the other, highly jeweled, dance-like, and rhythmic.
Mathias wrote a celebratory, ecstatic kind of music, full of mystery and bardic solemnity. It is splashed in vivid orchestral colors and clothed in shimmering textures, and punctuated, at times, by a barbarous, even jazzy, raucousness (as in the final movement of Symphony No. 2). It combines ritual feeling with uninhibited spontaneity. Melancholic brooding is always interrupted by eruptive fanfares that announce an underlying joy in answer to life’s travails. Mathias said, “Music must be one immense act of celebration,” and that is what we hear.
Mathias’s music is kaleidoscopic, fluent but not facile. Some critics have complained that, in his symphonies, Mathias’s discursive lyricism weakens the formal structures. Mathias proved in a number of compositions, most especially in his brilliant series of concertos, that he could write formally pleasing works. But his aim was not to be tidy. He called a number of his compositions “landscapes of the mind,” and this title seems a more accurate way to express his goals. “Incantations” would be even better. Mathias wished not so much to write symphonies as to use symphonic resources to conjure a world no less real for being nearly beyond reach. He was one of the few 20th century composers who could transport a listener to a place that is both past and present, a world charged with mystery, occasionally engulfed in gloom, but finally enlivened by ecstatic joy. Thus his works seem to operate as much by psychological as musical rules. One is never at a loss as to what is being felt or conveyed, which is why even the music’s many surprises delight and seem right. The communication is both urgently direct and novel. Mathias’s music emanated from a man in the grip of a vision, who was impelled to share it.
If Mathias’s music has been somewhat critically neglected, it is most likely because of its fundamental optimism and its accessibility. It also contains easily ascribable influences, leaving it open to the charge of being derivative. Mathias used a musical language solidly in the vein of Benjamin Britten, Michael Tippett, and Malcolm Arnold. At 50, Mathias acknowledged Messiaen and Tippett as “genuine deep influences.” Tippett’s influence is especially prominent in the florid lyricism of Mathias’s work. Some of Mathias’s music could have come out of Tippett’s lovely opera, Midsummer Marriage. Mathias’s Invocation and Dance, for example, is so startlingly similar to some of Tippett’s music from that opera that I am left wondering if he was directly quoting Tippett, or whether they both found the same source material in Welsh folk song. Tippett’s later development, however, seems to have been derailed, perhaps by the baleful influence of the thought of Karl Jung. Mathias’s music sounds like what Tippett could have written had he stayed in his more lyrical mode and not wandered off into knotty hermeticism. One could also add Stravinsky and Bartok as influences on Mathias, but it would not change the fact that Mathias was right to conclude, “Ultimately, I know I have my own voice.”
Two pairs of compact discs from Nimbus and Lyrita are indispensable introductions to Mathias’s enchanted world. The Nimbus compact discs contain his three symphonies, a delicious oboe concerto, and two “landscapes of the mind,” entitled Requiescat and Helios. The Lyrita compact discs feature three of Mathias’s finest concertos for clarinet, harp, and piano, and a group of orchestral works, including the enlivening Dance Overture, Sinfonietta, two string works, and Laudi and Vistas, more “landscapes of the mind.”
Of his First Symphony, Op. 31, Mathias said: it “is essentially a work of energy, color, and affirmation.” Mathias’s description of the qualities of Welsh medieval poetry serves particularly well in capturing the attributes of this work: “brightly jeweled colors contrasting with dark introspection, declamation with tenderness, and intellectual tautness with an almost improvisatory lyricism.”
Symphony No. 2, Op. 90, Summer Music, follows the First Symphony by 17 years, yet shares the same musical language. Its mood, though, is more nocturnal, reflective, and brooding, yet again finally affirmative and deliciously scored, with a raucously jazzy finale.
The Third Symphony was finished just before Mathias died. The first movement begins with a wildly swirling Mussorgskian dance theme, followed by highly rhythmic ostinatos out of Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. Whatever the geography of the piece (a Celt on the steppes of Russia?), it is highly arresting and has a gripping coherence and grandeur that even critics of his first two symphonies admitted.
Mathias’s concertos display his talent for highly memorable themes and colorful orchestration, but most especially his rhythmic vivacity. It is almost impossible to stay physically still while listening to them. Mathias was a master of the dance, as his Dance Overture so irrepressibly demonstrates on the Lyrita compact disc of his orchestral works. The other Lyrita compact disc (SRCD.325) features three of his best concertos. The Harp Concerto is a joy and one of Mathias’s works to which I return most frequently. The scoring is a miracle of delicacy, with single wind and brass only, along with timpani, percussion, and celeste coloring the strings. In it, Mathias deploys several of his best melodies. The result is radiant.
Luckily, there is also a very fine performance of this work on Koch International Classics (3-7261-2H1), coupled with Alberto Ginastera’s Harp Concerto. One can also hear how Mathias developed his talent for writing for the harp on a very beautiful Nimbus Records CD (NI 5441), offering his Sante Fe Suite for harp and Improvisations for Harp, along with other 20th-century harp classics from Arnold, Britten, Faure, and others.
Mathias’s Clarinet Concerto, on the same Lyrita compact disc, has a haunting lyricism and is inflected with perky, syncopated jazz rhythms. It is a thoroughly winning piece. The Third Piano Concerto is a more percussive, brazen work, which adds a big-city seriousness to its jazzy proceedings. It can also, however, in the turn of a phrase and without missing a beat, somehow reconnect with a lost runic world of the Welsh countryside. As this work demonstrates, Mathias was able to sound thoroughly modern and archaic simultaneously, conflating past and present seamlessly.
There are two excellent compact discs of Mathias’s church and choral music: one on Nimbus Records, featuring Christ Church Cathedral Choir, under Stephen Darlington; and the other, entitled The Doctrine of Wisdom, on the Gloriae Dei Cantores label, sung by a group of the same name, conducted by Elizabeth Patterson. The two compact discs share only the Rex Gloriae in common. Each features a different Mass and different anthems. Mathias’s church and choral music is written in a highly declamatory style, sometimes stridently so, but with ample lyrical respites. The relative simplicity of means in these often homophonic works does not allow for the rich allusiveness of Mathias’s complex orchestral works.
The choral pieces are fairly straightforward and clearly expressive. This is not to underestimate their delicacy and tenderness, or their complementary robust exuberance. Some of the anthems may sound simple, but they have a childlike innocence and charm, and effectively serve their purpose with freshness and without a whiff of sanctimony. The impulse to praise is heartfelt. Mathias said, “[T]he concept of light, consciousness, praise (call it what you will) is prominent in my music to a degree unusual in this century. It is also one of the reasons why I am able to integrate music for the church into my work without loss of identity.” My choral favorite (on the Nimbus CD) is the rousing Ave Rex, a Carol Sequence, Op. 45, the Sir Christemas portion of which has become a Christmas favorite in Great Britain. Anyone who enjoys Britten’s music of this kind should likewise appreciate Mathias’s.
According to music writer Geraint Lewis, Mathias said that “music is the art most completely placed to express the triumph of Christ’s victory over death—since it is concerned in essence with the destruction of time.” This is a fascinating and seemingly self-contradictory remark, because music is the art most dependent upon time for its existence. How, then, can music destroy time? What Mathias must have meant is that music is singularly able to transport man into sacred time where time stops in the raptness of revelation. In this sense, all of Mathias’s music is sacred. It brings you dancing toward that exhilarating final moment that will last forever.