Death of a maverick

With death of Peter Sculthorpe at the age of 85, Australia has lost its greatest, most progressive composer. By chance his Sonatina No 3 for strings, a minor work in a vast output, is due to be heard at the Queen’s Hall on August 25 in an Edinburgh Festival  concert by the Scottish Ensemble and Commonwealth Strings, but here in Britain he remains an elusive genius, his finest works still an unknown quantity.

Yet it was at the Usher Hall in 1974, during Peter Diamand’s regime as Festival director, that the Sydney Symphony Orchestra made its first visit to Scotland with Sir Charles Mackerras as conductor and Sculthorpe’s scorching Sun Music IV  as the centrepiece of its opening programme.

The title Sun Music - also the  name of his absorbing autobiography - came to personify him as a composer, without making him much better known here, despite the fact that Faber became his publisher.  What went  wrong?  Not necessarily his Australian braggadocio, which led him to claim that the future of music lay in the Southern Hemisphere rather than in Europe, just as its past, he asserted, had its foundations in Australia.

His  struggles to  compose at the age of seven resulted in his Tasmanian piano teacher smacking him because she considered them irrelevant to music as she recognised it. His use of ancient Australian instruments, including the 1000-year-old didgeridoo, in his orchestration  has inevitably limited the performance of some of his works outside Australia.

The bizarre sonorities of his eighteen string quartets - major works in his output - have likewise proved problematic, with one critic comparing the sound of his sixth quartet to that of an elephant dragging barbed wire across a corrugated iron roof.

But the premiere of his opera Rites of Passage, commissioned for the opening of the Sydney Opera House in 1973, was delayed for a year for other reasons. The simple answer was that Sculthorpe had not completed it. The precise facts were that he had fallen out with his librettist, the great Australian novelist Patrick White, in a dinner-table brawl that resulted in a valuable Sidney Nolan painting being spattered with food.

In the end, the work was performed with Sculthorpe’s  own libretto. It  still awaits its Covent Garden premiere. Too much of Sculthorpe’s music has yet to prove exportable. Seize your chance, then, and listen to his Sonatina for Strings in Edinburgh.
12 August 2014