Interview with Frederick May

An Irish Times article from 12 December 1974 in which Kay Kent talks to Frederick May on the occasion of the release of the composer's Quartet in C minor on Claddagh Records.

Copyright ©1974 The Irish Times Ltd. Reproduced by kind permission.

Complete Transcription

There are times when the inscrutability of Divine Providence is total. What possible purpose can the Almighty have in giving a man a great talent for music, then adding as a non-bonus an ever-increasing deafness and tinnitus which makes performance and composition alike impossible?

The wonder is that Frederick May kept going as a composer as long as he did. He has compared himself to a dog with a tin can tied to his tail. Yet he defied the infernal noise in his head for some 15 to 20 years, continuing to work as composer, critic and director of the Abbey Theatre Orchestra, before giving up the unequal struggle.

"I did the best 1 could, for as long as 1 could," he says now, "but with that racket torturing me all the time, and my anger at not being given a fair chance, it wasn't always possible to work and behave in a civilised fashion."

Now Frederick May prefers not to talk about his personal tragedy. He just wants to be remembered for his music. "I just hope that when I and all my damn personal failures are gone, there'll still be something left of use to people afterwards."

One such thing will certainly be the new recording of his String Quartet in C minor, believed by most critics and fellow musicians to be his finest work. Sadly, it is his only String Quartet.

"I wrote it in 1935, when my illness was just beginning to affect me. I hoped then that something might be done to free me from it, and the string quartet was influenced by that. Its musical form is largely abstract and I hope it will always be judged as such, but in personal terms it could be construed as an appeal for release. In particular there's a bit at the end of the first movement where the violin goes up on a long cadenza-like theme, which is a sort of plea.

"But I don't want people's reactions to my music to be coloured by my personal troubles. They are irrelevant to the quality of the music."

Frederick May's deafness has for many years made conversation with all but close friends almost impossible. However he now has a new type of hearing aid which helps considerably. Conversation must be a severe trial for him still, but for those privileged to spend an hour or so with him he is a stimulating and humorous companion.

He is most interested in talking about music, but digresses thoughtfully into politics as well. Talking of his Songs from Prison, in which he set words of the German poets Toller and Stadler to orchestral music, he says:

"I chose these poems because I thought they had great relevance to the condition of humanity under Hitler. As I was studying in Vienna in the '30s, I was emotionally very involved with the whole Hitler menace.

"Now I still think that Hitler's extermination of the Jews was the most appalling crime, but I can see that if I'd been more realistic I'd have understood that Hitler's defeat did not mean that humanity would be freed from his system. If I'd known more about politics I suppose I'd have been more percipient.

"All the same, however bad humanity may be now, I'm sure it would have been much worse if Hitler had prevailed."

Frederick May did not in fact spend long in Vienna, but it was long enough to see the city over-run by the Nazis. He was originally to have gone to study there under Alban Berg. On his death, he went instead to Schonberg's pupil Egon Wellesz. Now he seems to be quite out of sympathy with the Schonberg school and to remember Vaughan Williams, his first great teacher, with more affection and respect.

"I must say I could never really understand the doctrine of the Schonberg school," he says. "It certainly produced some wonderful work, like Berg's Wozzeck and so on; but if you look at the subject matter, it was all of the most horrifying nature. There seemed to be no room in their work for anything joyful like the coming of spring. Of course it's an absolutely legitimate interpretation of life, but it's the very antithesis of Haydn and Mozart, isn't it?

"I have great respect for Vaughan Williams, because he made such a great effort to rescue English music from the domination of Wagner and his ilk. He seemed to think salvation lay in English folk music. I'm not sure if he was right, but certainly he wrote some great music. His Serenade to Music and Job, a Masque for Dancing are particularly fine.

"I think Vaughan Williams recognised earlier than most composers that there was a danger that the international market would be taken over by serial and atonal music, leaving no room for national flavour; and this is why he tried to establish an English national musical tradition.

"If I hadn't been afflicted in this way, I'd have liked to try to bridge the national - international gap myself. This is something that Sean Ó Riada never quite managed to do. He did wonderful work for Irish folk music and developed himself greatly in so doing; but there was always a dichotomy between his Irish music and the work with which he achieved international recognition.

"The gap is a hard one to bridge for an Irishman. In the centuries that the French and the Finns were preparing to produce composers of the stature of Debussy and Sibelius, Ireland had no art music development at all. We had fine national ballads, all right, but everything else was imported. I think we're still suffering the results of that."

Frederick May admits to being of the romantic school himself. His most admired composers are Beethoven of the late quartets, Schubert, Mahler, Delius and Sibelius. He also has great regard for Bartok and admires particularly his exploration of the string quartet form.

Some people detect a Bartokian influence in May's own string quartet and the composer does not deny that it exists.

"Bartok was certainly a great master, with a great feeling for the national and the natural world. He also wrote a very impressive opera, King Bluebeard [sic].

"The poor man had a very unfortunate life. So did a good many composers.'