Edward Sackville-West, 5th Baron Sackville
Encyclopedia
Edward Charles Sackville-West, 5th Baron Sackville (13 November 1901 – 4 July 1965) was a British music critic, novelist and, in his last years, a member of the House of Lords
. Musically gifted as a boy, he was attracted as a young man to a literary life and wrote a series of semi-autobiographical novels in the 1920s and '30s. They made little impact, and his more lasting books are a biography of the poet Thomas de Quincey
and The Record Guide, Britain's first comprehensive guide to classical music on record, first published in 1951.
As a critic and a member of the board of the Royal Opera House
, he strove to promote the works of young British composers, including Benjamin Britten
and Michael Tippett
. Britten worked with him on a musical drama for radio and dedicated to him one of his best known works, the Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings
.
, who later became the fourth Baron Sackville
, and his first wife, Maud Cecilia, née Bell (1873–1920). He was educated at Eton
and Christ Church, Oxford
. While at Eton he studied the piano with Irene Scharrer
, his housemaster's wife, and became highly proficient, winning the Eton music prize in 1918. His partner Desmond Shawe-Taylor
said of him, "not many boys can have played at a school concert the Second Concerto
of Rachmaninov
. He even contemplated a pianist's career, but was deterred by poor health." At Oxford he made many literary friends, including Maurice Bowra
, Roy Harrod
and L. P. Hartley
, and literature began to rival music as his chief interest. He left Oxford without taking his degree and embarked on a career as a novelist, writing a series of autobiographical novels.
He published a further three novels, Mandrake over the Water-Carrier (1928), Simpson: A Life (1931) and The Sun in Capricorn (1934). They were reviewed politely but made little stir. Reviewing the third novel, The Times
said, "The book is extremely cleverly and amusingly written, but to an ordinary intelligence it seems to be entirely inconsequent." Simpson: A Life was the best received. Its study of a children's nurse was judged "impressive and in its way original, the more so because Simpson has such a cool, aloof quality and so little resembles the conventional Nanny of fact or fiction." In this period, away from fiction, Sackville-West wrote A Flame in Sunlight: the Life and Work of Thomas De Quincey
(1936), for which he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize
.
, a post he held for twenty years, contributing weekly reviews of recordings. The Times wrote that his articles "were distinguished not only for their command of the jewelled phrase but for their zealous propagation of young British composers." He was an early admirer of and campaigner for the music of Benjamin Britten
. During World War II
, Sackville-West joined the BBC
as "an arranger and director of programmes". In 1943, he wrote The Rescue: a Melodrama for Broadcasting, for which Britten composed the music. It was first broadcast that year and was revived several times. The BBC producer Val Gielgud
rated it as "a genuine broadcasting classic". The theme of The Rescue was the end of The Odyssey
. Maurice Bowra dubbed it "The Eddyssey." In the same year, Britten dedicated his Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings
to Sackville-West.
In addition to his column in The New Statesman, Sackville-West contributed a substantial quarterly article to The Gramophone
, and, with Shawe-Taylor, wrote The Record Guide
, first published in 1951, a large volume reviewing all significant classical music recordings then available. They soon found the flow of new releases overwhelming and enlisted the aid of two younger critics, Andrew Porter and William Mann. A revised and updated edition of The Record Guide published in 1955 ran to 957 pages, and Sackville-West, Shawe-Taylor and their colleagues did not publish any more editions.
From 1950 to 1955, Sackville-West was a member of the board of the Royal Opera House
, Covent Garden, where he continued to work for the cause of modern British music, including that of Michael Tippett
, whose opera The Midsummer Marriage
was premiered in 1955.
in Kent
. He maintained rooms there, but it was not until 1945 that he had a home of his own. Together with Shawe-Taylor he set up home at Long Crichel
House near Wimborne. Along with the painter Eardley Knollys
and later the literary critic Raymond Mortimer
, they established "what in effect was a male salon, entertaining at the weekends a galaxy of friends from the worlds of books and music." In 1956 he also bought Cooleville House at Clogheen
in county Tipperary
, Ireland. On the death of his father on 8 May 1962 he inherited the title Baron Sackville. He took his seat in the House of Lords
but never made a speech.
He died suddenly in 1965 at Cooleville, aged 63. Shawe-Taylor wrote, "Barely a quarter of an hour before, he had been playing to a friend, who was staying with him, the new record of Britten's Songs from the Chinese [performed] by Peter Pears
and Julian Bream
. When I arrived for the funeral a few days later, the record was still out of its cover—something the meticulous Eddy would never have allowed." He was succeeded in the barony by his cousin Lionel Bertrand Sackville-West.
House of Lords
The House of Lords is the upper house of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Like the House of Commons, it meets in the Palace of Westminster....
. Musically gifted as a boy, he was attracted as a young man to a literary life and wrote a series of semi-autobiographical novels in the 1920s and '30s. They made little impact, and his more lasting books are a biography of the poet Thomas de Quincey
Thomas de Quincey
Thomas Penson de Quincey was an English esssayist, best known for his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater .-Child and student:...
and The Record Guide, Britain's first comprehensive guide to classical music on record, first published in 1951.
As a critic and a member of the board of the Royal Opera House
Royal Opera House
The Royal Opera House is an opera house and major performing arts venue in Covent Garden, central London. The large building is often referred to as simply "Covent Garden", after a previous use of the site of the opera house's original construction in 1732. It is the home of The Royal Opera, The...
, he strove to promote the works of young British composers, including Benjamin Britten
Benjamin Britten
Edward Benjamin Britten, Baron Britten, OM CH was an English composer, conductor, and pianist. He showed talent from an early age, and first came to public attention with the a cappella choral work A Boy Was Born in 1934. With the premiere of his opera Peter Grimes in 1945, he leapt to...
and Michael Tippett
Michael Tippett
Sir Michael Kemp Tippett OM CH CBE was an English composer.In his long career he produced a large body of work, including five operas, three large-scale choral works, four symphonies, five string quartets, four piano sonatas, concertos and concertante works, song cycles and incidental music...
. Britten worked with him on a musical drama for radio and dedicated to him one of his best known works, the Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings
Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings
The Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings is a song cycle written in 1943 by the English composer Benjamin Britten, scored for tenor accompanied by a solo horn and a small string orchestra...
.
Early years
Sackville-West was born at Cadogan Gardens, London, the elder child and only son of Major-General Charles John Sackville-WestCharles Sackville-West, 4th Baron Sackville
Major-General Charles John Sackville-West, 4th Baron Sackville, KBE, CB, CMG was a British Army general and peer who served throughout the First World War and reached the rank of major general. In 1919, Sackville-West was British Military Representative on the Supreme War Council and from 1920 to...
, who later became the fourth Baron Sackville
Baron Sackville
Baron Sackville, of Knole in the County of Kent, is a title in the Peerage of the United Kingdom. It was created in 1876 for the Honourable Mortimer Sackville-West, with remainder, failing heirs male of his body, to his younger brothers the Hon. Lionel and the Hon. William Edward...
, and his first wife, Maud Cecilia, née Bell (1873–1920). He was educated at Eton
Eton College
Eton College, often referred to simply as Eton, is a British independent school for boys aged 13 to 18. It was founded in 1440 by King Henry VI as "The King's College of Our Lady of Eton besides Wyndsor"....
and Christ Church, Oxford
Christ Church, Oxford
Christ Church or house of Christ, and thus sometimes known as The House), is one of the largest constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England...
. While at Eton he studied the piano with Irene Scharrer
Irene Scharrer
Irene Scharrer was an English classical pianist.Irene Scharrer was born in London and studied at the Royal Academy of Music with Tobias Matthay....
, his housemaster's wife, and became highly proficient, winning the Eton music prize in 1918. His partner Desmond Shawe-Taylor
Desmond Shawe-Taylor (music critic)
Desmond Christopher Shawe Taylor, , was a British writer, co-author of The Record Guide, music critic of The New Statesman, The New Yorker and The Sunday Times and a regular and long-standing contributor to The Gramophone.-Biography:Shawe-Taylor was born in Dublin, the elder of two sons of...
said of him, "not many boys can have played at a school concert the Second Concerto
Piano Concerto No. 2 (Rachmaninoff)
The Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor, Op. 18, is a concerto for piano and orchestra composed by Sergei Rachmaninoff between the autumn of 1900 and April 1901. The second and third movements were first performed with the composer as soloist on 2 December 1900...
of Rachmaninov
Sergei Rachmaninoff
Sergei Vasilievich Rachmaninoff was a Russian composer, pianist, and conductor. Rachmaninoff is widely considered one of the finest pianists of his day and, as a composer, one of the last great representatives of Romanticism in Russian classical music...
. He even contemplated a pianist's career, but was deterred by poor health." At Oxford he made many literary friends, including Maurice Bowra
Maurice Bowra
Sir Cecil Maurice Bowra was an English classical scholar and academic, known for his wit. He was Warden of Wadham College, Oxford, from 1938 to 1970, and served as Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford from 1951 to 1954.-Birth and boyhood:...
, Roy Harrod
Roy Harrod
Sir Henry Roy Forbes Harrod was an English economist. He is best known for his biography of John Maynard Keynes and the development of the Harrod–Domar model, which he and Evsey Domar developed independently...
and L. P. Hartley
L. P. Hartley
Leslie Poles Hartley was a British writer, known for novels and short stories. His best-known work is The Go-Between , which was made into a 1970 film, directed by Joseph Losey with a star cast, in an adaptation by Harold Pinter...
, and literature began to rival music as his chief interest. He left Oxford without taking his degree and embarked on a career as a novelist, writing a series of autobiographical novels.
Novelist
His first novel, The Ruin: A Gothic Novel, was plainly autobiographical, and its depiction of turbulent, unconventional and ultimately calamitous relationships included characters readily identifiable from Sackville-West's circle. Its publication was therefore delayed, and his second novel, Piano Quintet, was published first. Sackville-West's biographer, Michael de-la-Noy, wrote, "The Ruin, like all the gothic literary efforts over which Sackville-West took infinite but rather pointless pains, was heavily laced with the mannered style of the late nineteenth-century 'decadent' movement … with whose work Eddy had unfortunately become enamoured when he was seventeen."He published a further three novels, Mandrake over the Water-Carrier (1928), Simpson: A Life (1931) and The Sun in Capricorn (1934). They were reviewed politely but made little stir. Reviewing the third novel, The Times
The Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...
said, "The book is extremely cleverly and amusingly written, but to an ordinary intelligence it seems to be entirely inconsequent." Simpson: A Life was the best received. Its study of a children's nurse was judged "impressive and in its way original, the more so because Simpson has such a cool, aloof quality and so little resembles the conventional Nanny of fact or fiction." In this period, away from fiction, Sackville-West wrote A Flame in Sunlight: the Life and Work of Thomas De Quincey
Thomas de Quincey
Thomas Penson de Quincey was an English esssayist, best known for his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater .-Child and student:...
(1936), for which he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize
James Tait Black Memorial Prize
Founded in 1919, the James Tait Black Memorial Prizes are among the oldest and most prestigious book prizes awarded for literature written in the English language and are Britain's oldest literary awards...
.
Musical work
In 1935 Sackville-West became music critic of the magazine New StatesmanNew Statesman
New Statesman is a British centre-left political and cultural magazine published weekly in London. Founded in 1913, and connected with leading members of the Fabian Society, the magazine reached a circulation peak in the late 1960s....
, a post he held for twenty years, contributing weekly reviews of recordings. The Times wrote that his articles "were distinguished not only for their command of the jewelled phrase but for their zealous propagation of young British composers." He was an early admirer of and campaigner for the music of Benjamin Britten
Benjamin Britten
Edward Benjamin Britten, Baron Britten, OM CH was an English composer, conductor, and pianist. He showed talent from an early age, and first came to public attention with the a cappella choral work A Boy Was Born in 1934. With the premiere of his opera Peter Grimes in 1945, he leapt to...
. During World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
, Sackville-West joined the BBC
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
as "an arranger and director of programmes". In 1943, he wrote The Rescue: a Melodrama for Broadcasting, for which Britten composed the music. It was first broadcast that year and was revived several times. The BBC producer Val Gielgud
Val Gielgud
Val Henry Gielgud was an English actor, writer, director and broadcaster. He was a pioneer of radio drama for the BBC, and also directed the first ever drama to be produced in the newer medium of television....
rated it as "a genuine broadcasting classic". The theme of The Rescue was the end of The Odyssey
Odyssey
The Odyssey is one of two major ancient Greek epic poems attributed to Homer. It is, in part, a sequel to the Iliad, the other work ascribed to Homer. The poem is fundamental to the modern Western canon, and is the second—the Iliad being the first—extant work of Western literature...
. Maurice Bowra dubbed it "The Eddyssey." In the same year, Britten dedicated his Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings
Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings
The Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings is a song cycle written in 1943 by the English composer Benjamin Britten, scored for tenor accompanied by a solo horn and a small string orchestra...
to Sackville-West.
In addition to his column in The New Statesman, Sackville-West contributed a substantial quarterly article to The Gramophone
The Gramophone
Gramophone is a magazine published monthly in London by Haymarket devoted to classical music and jazz, particularly recordings. It was founded in 1923 by the Scottish author Compton Mackenzie...
, and, with Shawe-Taylor, wrote The Record Guide
The Record Guide
The Record Guide was an English reference work, listing, describing and evaluating gramophone recordings of classical music in the 1950s. It was the precursor of modern guides such as The Penguin Guide to Recorded Classical Music-Publication history:...
, first published in 1951, a large volume reviewing all significant classical music recordings then available. They soon found the flow of new releases overwhelming and enlisted the aid of two younger critics, Andrew Porter and William Mann. A revised and updated edition of The Record Guide published in 1955 ran to 957 pages, and Sackville-West, Shawe-Taylor and their colleagues did not publish any more editions.
From 1950 to 1955, Sackville-West was a member of the board of the Royal Opera House
Royal Opera House
The Royal Opera House is an opera house and major performing arts venue in Covent Garden, central London. The large building is often referred to as simply "Covent Garden", after a previous use of the site of the opera house's original construction in 1732. It is the home of The Royal Opera, The...
, Covent Garden, where he continued to work for the cause of modern British music, including that of Michael Tippett
Michael Tippett
Sir Michael Kemp Tippett OM CH CBE was an English composer.In his long career he produced a large body of work, including five operas, three large-scale choral works, four symphonies, five string quartets, four piano sonatas, concertos and concertante works, song cycles and incidental music...
, whose opera The Midsummer Marriage
The Midsummer Marriage
The Midsummer Marriage is an opera in three acts, with music and libretto by Michael Tippett. The work's first performance was at Covent Garden, 27 January 1955, conducted by John Pritchard...
was premiered in 1955.
Personal life
Sackville-West's family home was KnoleKnole House
Knole is an English country house in the town of Sevenoaks in west Kent, surrounded by a deer park. One of England's largest houses, it is reputed to be a calendar house, having 365 rooms, 52 staircases, 12 entrances and 7 courtyards...
in Kent
Kent
Kent is a county in southeast England, and is one of the home counties. It borders East Sussex, Surrey and Greater London and has a defined boundary with Essex in the middle of the Thames Estuary. The ceremonial county boundaries of Kent include the shire county of Kent and the unitary borough of...
. He maintained rooms there, but it was not until 1945 that he had a home of his own. Together with Shawe-Taylor he set up home at Long Crichel
Long Crichel
Long Crichel is a hamlet in east Dorset, England, situated on Cranborne Chase five miles north east of Blandford Forum. The hamlet has a population of 81 ....
House near Wimborne. Along with the painter Eardley Knollys
Eardley Knollys
Eardley Knollys was an English artist of the Bloomsbury School of artists, art critic, art dealer and collector, active from the 1920s to 1950s...
and later the literary critic Raymond Mortimer
Raymond Mortimer
Charles Raymond Mortimer Bell , who wrote under the name Raymond Mortimer, was a British writer, known mostly as a critic and literary editor....
, they established "what in effect was a male salon, entertaining at the weekends a galaxy of friends from the worlds of books and music." In 1956 he also bought Cooleville House at Clogheen
Clogheen, County Tipperary
Clogheen is a village in South Tipperary, Ireland. The latest census of 2006 recorded the population of Clogheen at 509.-Location:It lies in the Galtee-Vee Valley with the Galtee Mountains to the north and the Knockmealdowns in close proximity to the south. The River Tar which is a tributary of...
in county Tipperary
Tipperary
Tipperary is a town and a civil parish in South Tipperary in Ireland. Its population was 4,415 at the 2006 census. It is also an ecclesiastical parish in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Cashel and Emly, and is in the historical barony of Clanwilliam....
, Ireland. On the death of his father on 8 May 1962 he inherited the title Baron Sackville. He took his seat in the House of Lords
House of Lords
The House of Lords is the upper house of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Like the House of Commons, it meets in the Palace of Westminster....
but never made a speech.
He died suddenly in 1965 at Cooleville, aged 63. Shawe-Taylor wrote, "Barely a quarter of an hour before, he had been playing to a friend, who was staying with him, the new record of Britten's Songs from the Chinese [performed] by Peter Pears
Peter Pears
Sir Peter Neville Luard Pears CBE was an English tenor who was knighted in 1978. His career was closely associated with the composer Edward Benjamin Britten....
and Julian Bream
Julian Bream
Julian Bream, CBE is an English classical guitarist and lutenist and is one of the most distinguished classical guitarists of the 20th century. He has also been successful in renewing popular interest in the Renaissance lute....
. When I arrived for the funeral a few days later, the record was still out of its cover—something the meticulous Eddy would never have allowed." He was succeeded in the barony by his cousin Lionel Bertrand Sackville-West.