Erik Chisholm: The pacifist who made music in the thick of war

William Wallace trained as an eye surgeon but alienated his father by abandoning medicine for composing. War saw him back as a medic, ending up in charge of all eye cases in Eastern Command during the First World War and, to the best of my knowledge, scarcely wrote a note of music after it.

Cecil Coles studied composition in Germany on a Reid scholarship, heard his music premiered in Stuttgart, and ended up as a band-master and voluntary stretcher bearer in France where he died of his wounds in 1916. His music only came to light in the 1990s through the efforts of his daughter, Penny, who had never known him.

But I am starting with Erik Chisholm because just this month a CD has come out of his opera Simoon. It is about war and it is all too relevant. Set in the 1890s in North Africa during the aggressive French colonisation of Algeria, the plot is focused on conflict between Muslim and Christian. It describes, with horrifying intensity, the use of psychological torture to drive a man to suicide. The libretto is a word-for-word translation of Strindberg’s play Simoon. Neither Strindberg nor Chisholm takes sides.

Chisholm’s eyesight was poor, so he started the Second World War painting white lines on pavements to guide people during the black-out. He made the best of it.

“When painting lines on steps and along the edge of pavements I lay on the paint as a musical stave – in five lines with four spaces between – and this gives me an advantage over the man who lives as it were only from line to line, doing what must be one of the most monotonous jobs in the world. Looked at in this way, our gang must have ruled enough five lines and four spaces to write the complete works of Bach and Beethoven! . . . Nor can I complain that my life lacks variety – this morning, for instance, I was helping in blacking-out 1,200 large windows in a large building and now I am going off to rehearse my piano concerto with the Scottish Orchestra.”

You can hear his Pìobaireachd Concerto on the Hyperion CD listed below. It usually takes governments a few months to realise that the arts are vital for morale in wartime, but they nearly all do in the end, so not only was Chisholm as soloist premiering his concerto in Glasgow, he was also commissioned by the BBC to write a work for children. The result was The Adventures of Babar for narrator and orchestra – a kind of parallel to Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf. It was first performed by the BBC London Symphony Orchestra under Adrian Boult. It is great fun, and starts off with an amazing orchestral imitation of air raid sirens. Chisholm dedicated the piece to his middle daughter, Sheila, whose personal copy of Babar he dismembered in order to decorate the score. She never forgave him.

Then came a remarkable statement in the form of the ballet The Earth Shapers, in four scenes. In the Prelude Tir-na-Moe, The Land of the Living Heart, the Earth Spirit pleads successfully for help from The Shining Ones – Brigit, Midyir the Mighty, Ogma the Wise and Angus the Ever-young – to rid the world of the Fomors under their King, Balor of the evil eye. In the end the Gods refashion the Earth, with the Spear of Victory, the Stone of Destiny and the sound of Angus’ magic harp promising peace and plenty in Eire.

This was potentially highly provocative. In the dark days of the Second World War, we have a ballet company in one of the combatant nations suggesting that regeneration will start in a country which was neutral, and much criticised for being so.

That it is the Republic of Ireland that is necessarily implied is indicated by the fact that at the end Brigit calls it “the White Island, the Island of Destiny – Eire”. It seems clear, then, that something approaching a neutral, if not pacifist agenda, can be detected in this work, although the Fomorian enemy would naturally be associated with Hitler and the Germans.

But the ballet invokes Celtic, not Christian, Roman, Greek or British gods, to see off the evil with which the world is confronted. The Earth Shapers was premiered in Glasgow’s Lyric Theatre in 1941. Much of its music migrated from Chisholm’s Second Symphony (see below), and some of William Crosbie’s designs for sets and costumes survive, including one which Crosbie entitled “illness”. He was himself ill at the time, but so was the world.

Chisholm was arranging a bagpipe march

Chisholm was also arranging a bagpipe march El Alamein, and going round army camps giving lecture recitals. Later he took charge of the Anglo-Polish ballet, touring with a piece called Pan Twardowsky.

Chisholm hated it, and made it plain he did, condemning it thus: “This horrible abortion, this balletic monstrosity, this unspeakable concoction of bits and pieces (set to the most blatantly plagiaristic and dully pretentious music it has ever been my misfortune to hear – by one Vladimir Launitz) has been dragging its slimy trail across England and Scotland for three interminable years, purporting, if you please, to be an example of Polish artistic endeavour at its finest.”

The Anglo-Polish Ballet was then posted to Italy, following the Allies’ push north. Chisholm narrowly escaping being killed, the two lorries in front of his being blown up by land mines. When he got to Rome, he took the opportunity of visiting Alfredo Casella, whom he had invited to Glasgow in the 1930s and with whom he had shared a piano, performing Casella’s Pupazetti.

Casella was a Fascist and a great Mussolini supporter, facts which did not prevent left-wing Chisholm from arranging for food-parcels to be sent to the Casellas from ENSA stores.

“Towards the end of World War II, when British and American forces occupied Italy as far north as Ravenna, I called on Casella . . . His wife opened the door and told me she was doubtful if her husband could see me as he had been ill, on and off, for the past two years.

“While waiting in the music room which was all but filled by two concert grand pianos, I noticed on one of them a large photograph of Mussolini signed by the Duce with the inscription ‘To my dear, devoted and loyal friend, Alfredo Casella.’ On the other piano was an equally large photograph of Roosevelt (signed by the President) and inscribed in words to the same effect, ‘To my dear, devoted and loyal friend, Alfredo Casella.’”

At the end of the war, after a period in India and Singapore, Chisholm was appointed Dean and Professor of the Cape Town University Music Faculty, and Principal of the College of Music. He was also in charge of the Opera School and was able to compose operas knowing they had a good chance of performance.

It is one of these, Simoon, that deals with the effects of war upon humans at the most personal levels of hatred and mental suffering and which was released on CD this month. It is a stunning work: one which demonstrates why Chisholm is beyond doubt Scotland’s leading modernist composer.

Creating an orchestra...

Chisholm and his daughter Sheila in uniform

IN November 1945 Chisholm was posted to Singapore where he founded the Symphony Orchestra: “ The authorities really wanted an orchestra there and were prepared to give me carte-blanche to get it. The Japs had just vacated Singapore and the Allied Authorities moving in had little enough transport for their own official business, so in rickshaws and tongas I started to search the entire neighbourhood for orchestral musicians; within a week we had our first rehearsal and within a fortnight of my arrival in the country our first concert. I doubt if any such cosmopolitan orchestra has ever been assembled before or since.”

Amongst the soloists to perform with them was the great Jewish violinist, Szymon Goldberg, who had only recently been released from Japanese internment in Java. Fortunately he had been able to save his precious Stradivarius violin by hiding it up a chimney. Goldberg gave the world premiere of Chisholm’s Violin Concerto recently recorded for the Hyperion label, with Matthew Trusler and the BBCSSO conducted by Martyn Brabbins. It is due out later in 2017.

The wind of conflict 

Strindberg’s one-act play dates from 1890 and is set in Algeria “at the present time”, a period of continuing brutal colonisation by the French.  There are three characters; Biskra, an Arabian girl utterly consumed by a desire for revenge for the murder of a former lover; Yusuf, her present lover; and the Frank, Guimard, a lieutenant in the Zouaves. The Zouaves were a regiment, originally of native soldiers, fighting for the French. Guimard (who is French) is therefore an enemy. 

Biskra knows that Guimard is approaching a sacred sepulchral chamber in the desert and will already be exhausted and disorientated by the Simoon, the strong, sand-laden, suffocating desert wind. She intends to use her magical skills to reduce him to such a state that he dies of despair and wretchedness. She persuades Guimard that his senses are totally confused and that he has rabies and cannot drink water though he is dying of thirst. She taunts him with false visions of his wife’s affair with his best friend; then that his son is dead. She makes him lose faith in his religion, and believe that he has deserted his own troops. Finally, she shows him a skull, and Guimard, now utterly distraught, is persuaded that it is his own. Dead in his own heart and imagination, he dies in truth, and Biskra and Yusuf celebrate their triumph in music of compelling and awful power.

It is now half a century since the opera was composed, and well over a century since the text was written, but the opera belongs to the here and now. An invading power and religion are confronted by a fundamental resistance, merciless in its sense of justice. From Afghanistan to the Middle East, to North Africa and to Guantanamo Bay, and no doubt to places of which we have not even heard, such things continue with much the same motivation, much the same ‘justification’. But neither Strindberg nor Chisholm takes sides.

Simoon does not come up with easy answers. Indeed, it does not take a stance. It simply gives powerful expression to powerful emotions and beliefs. What is achieved is a deeply disturbing insight into the kind of human motivation that leads to torture (both psychological and physical), and murder in the name of religion and under the cloak of ‘warfare’. There is  horror in its beauty. It is a brave work, but it leaves judgement to others.

The list of recordings of Chisholm’s music is a long one and best consulted at www.erikchisholm.com. Here is a selection. Erik Chisholm, Simoon, Opera, Delphian DCD 34139. Chisholm, Pìobaireachd and Hindustani Piano Concertos, Hyperion CDA 67880. Erik Chisholm, Symphony No.2. ‘Ossian’, Dutton CDLX 7196. Chisholm Pictures from Dante, Dutton CDLX 7239. Erik Chisholm, Music for Piano in 7 CDs, diversions DRD 0222, 0223, 0224, 0225: Dunelm ddv 24140, 24149, 24155. Songs for a Year and a Day, Claremont GSE 1572.

There is a full-length critical biography of Chisholm – Erik Chisholm, Scottish Modernist 1904-1965 – Chasing a Restless Muse by John Purser, published by Boydell & Brewer in 2009. This is available in hard copy from the Erik Chisholm website and also as a download from the publishers.