Programme Notes

JOHN NICHOLSON IRELAND (1879-1962)

OVERTURE, SATYRICON

The Satyricon is generally held to be the work of the 1st century writer Gaius Petronius, consul and governor of Bithynia, subsequently received by the Emperor Nero into his inner circle, and declared by him to be dictator on matters of taste at court: hence his nickname, Petronius Arbiter. The Satyricon, perhaps the first novel in literature, is a bawdy, picaresque tale of Imperial Rome, relating the scandalous adventures of two young men and their serving boy as they wander through the cities of southern Italy. The best-known episode is 'Trimalchio's Banquet', a fantastic feast given by a pretentious social climber who gets more and more drunk as a series of increasingly bizarre dishes succeed each other at table. The Satyricon was filmed by Federico Fellini in 1969, and achieved a certain succès de scandale.

John Ireland's overture takes off at speed with an exhilarating knockabout tune which could suggest any or all of the above. The music is punctuated with what sounds like boisterous laughter from the brass section: yet Ireland was a self-critical, melancholy, bespectacled man whose lack of confidence in his own abilities was possibly to blame for his decision to destroy nearly all his juvenilia and student compositions. One of the few works he allowed to be published, and then only at the end of his life, was a fine Sextet for horn, clarinet and string quartet. His parents were bookish people and throughout his life Ireland was fond of English poetry: he set poems by, among others, Housman, Hardy, Masefield and Christina Rossetti. He was born in the small township of Bowdon, Cheshire, and his parents died shortly after he became a student at the Royal College of Music at the age of fourteen. Ireland had to fend for himself while he studied piano, organ and composition, the last under Sir Charles Stanford, a notoriously strict teacher whose rigorous, even tyrannical ways are unlikely to have improved Ireland's self-esteem. Nevertheless he was recognised as an important and talented new composer in 1917 when his 2nd Violin Sonata was performed, and from 1923 to 1939 he taught composition at the Royal College: his pupils included Britten, E J Moeran and Alan Bush.

Ireland had begun as a follower of Brahms, but became strongly attracted by the modern French composers - Debussy, Ravel and Fauré - as well as Stravinsky and Bartók, in contrast to contemporaries like Vaughan Williams and Holst with their affinity to English folk song and the pastoral landscape.

Like Fauré, Ireland preferred small-scale, intimate forms of music to large orchestral works. Nevertheless he was able to write with confidence and authority for the orchestra, as in his London Overture, and his suite The Overlanders, finished in 1947 for Ealing Studios' Australian epic of that name, directed by Harry Watt.

Satyricon was Ireland's last work for orchestra: he began it in 1944 but finished it after completing his film score. It was dedicated as a wedding present to two famous broadcasters of the day, Anna Instone and Julian Herbage, producers of the Third Programme's Music Magazine, who were his Sussex neighbours. Sir Henry Wood commissioned the piece, and it is said to have cost Ireland much effort, although none of this is evident in the dramatically varied and sprightly music. The first performance was at a Promenade concert on 11th September 1946, conducted by Basil Cameron. The romantic central secti0n has a clarinet solo which Ireland intended for the great Frederick Thurston, for whom he had written his Fantasy-Sonata for clarinet and piano three years earlier.

On the flyleaf of the Satyricon score, Ireland wrote a quotation from Petronius: 'I am resolved...not only to improve our Learning but to be merry, and put life into our Discourse with pleasanter Tales.'

Programme Notes by Paul Vaughan ©

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