Heartily disapproving of her son’s musical leanings, his compositions and his friends, she would remain a perennial thorn in his side. Bitter arguments with his mother, who had remarried and returned to her native Wales, came to a head when he found she had sold the pianola in his absence.
#ONCE UPON A DECEMBER SHEET MUSIC CHORAL SERIES#
He was still only 17.ĭuring a year of cramming for Oxford, Heseltine spent a holiday with Delius and Uncle Joe in France, acquired a pianola in order to study the classics, and also the first of a series of motorbikes, most of which he crashed. While in Germany he wrote his first published article – one of the first serious studies of Schoenberg in English. Already he had started an intensive correspondence with Delius, and begun making arrangements of his works. Within a month Heseltine had left Eton for studies on the Continent. In June 1911 Colin Taylor wangled permission to take Philip to an all-Delius concert where he met the composer for the first time. Delius (‘whose works I positively adore’) was an acquaintance of ‘Uncle Joe’ in France and rapidly became a special passion. When he went to Eton in 1908 his music master, Colin Taylor, introduced him to much contemporary music, and soon he was writing to Strauss, Elgar and Delius for their autographs. As befitted a member of the moneyed classes, his schooling was of the best, and though he had no musical training his voracious interest in the art soon became apparent. Philip spent his earliest years in Hans Road, Chelsea (the house is now part of Harrods).
Heseltine published virtually all his music and his editions as Warlock, making Warlock the author of not just ditties like Captain Stratton’s Fancy and Yarmouth Fair, but the deeply expressive Sleep and Late Summer, the miasmic sound-world of The Curlew and the freshness and tenderness of his carols, such as Bethlehem Down. It’s often said that Heseltine, the sensitive scholar, resuscitated Elizabethan music, edited journals and wrote insightful books, while Warlock’s name is surrounded by rumours of involvement with the occult, experimentation with cannabis tincture, and an interest in flagellation. Heseltine/Warlock may be the most notorious example of a double personality in music. ‘Peter Warlock’ was a persona, a Rabelaisian alter ego, created by the composer, writer and scholar Philip Heseltine – but his name is much more famous than Heseltine’s own, principally for his brilliant output of songs. S trictly speaking, there was no such person.
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