Peter Warlock

Peter Warlock was the name that Philip Heseltine used for his music. He was born in London in 1894, into a rich family. His father was a lawyer, and he died suddenly when Philip was two. In 1903 his mother married again, and the family moved to her new husband’s large house in the Welsh countryside. Philip went to Eton, a famous school for boys near London. He did not like the school, and he spent as much time as he could on music. He had very few music lessons, and he taught himself most of what he knew. An uncle of his, a painter, lived in France near the English composer Frederick Delius. Through this uncle the boy became curious about Delius’s music. In 1911, at 16, he went to a concert of Delius’s music in London, and there he met Delius, who was 32 years older. Delius was kind to the boy and encouraged him, and the two wrote letters to each other for many years.

In 1915, at 20, he became the music critic of a London newspaper. He always said exactly what he thought. The newspaper kept cutting his sharpest opinions, so after a few months he left. By then his writing had made many people in the London music world dislike the name Heseltine. Partly for this reason, from 1918 he published his songs under a new name, Peter Warlock. In 1920 Bartók, who was 13 years older, wrote him a long letter to introduce himself. The next year Heseltine visited Bartók in Budapest, and the two began to plan Bartók’s first concerts in Britain. In 1922 Bartók came to Wales to give a concert, and he stayed at Heseltine’s family home.

From 1921 to 1924 Heseltine lived again at the family house in Wales. These were the calmest years of his life, and he wrote a great deal of music. In 1922 and 1923 he wrote a set of three short songs called Peterisms, Set II. The first of them is Roister Doister. Its words come from an English comedy written in about 1552, which is often called the first comedy in English. In 1923 Heseltine published a book about Delius, the first full book about him. He loved English poetry and music from the time of Shakespeare and before. Much of this music had been almost forgotten. He found it in old books and papers, and he wrote out about 600 pieces again so that musicians of his time could read them. Among them were pieces for strings by Purcell, one of the greatest English composers of the 1600s. Many of the old poems he loved also became the words of his own songs, like Roister Doister.

In 1926, while he was living in a village near London, he wrote the Capriol Suite for strings, based on dance tunes from a French book about dancing printed in 1589. It became his best-known piece. As a young man he had been shy and quiet. It is said that in the 1920s he grew a beard and became a loud man who loved jokes. He loved English pubs, and he wrote cheerful songs about drinking beer. In 1927 he and a poet friend had very little money before Christmas. A newspaper was holding a competition for a new Christmas song, so they wrote one together. Their song, Bethlehem Down, won the prize. They spent the prize money on a big Christmas party. The newspaper printed the song on Christmas Eve, and choirs still sing it at Christmas.

In 1929, at 34, he and the famous conductor Thomas Beecham organised a festival of Delius’s music in London. Delius’s wife wrote that after Beecham, Heseltine had done the most to make it happen. In December 1930 he was found dead in his flat in London, at 36. The room was full of gas, and nobody knows whether it was an accident.

All his life he did two kinds of work. He found and wrote out hundreds of pieces of old English music, and this helped musicians to perform it again. And he wrote about 150 songs of his own, many of them on the old English poems he loved. His friend, the composer Constant Lambert, called him “one of the greatest song-writers that music has ever known.”