Peter Warlock

View moreBrowse piano sheets by Peter Warlock on Zen Virtual Piano. Heseltine, the composer who published under the pseudonym Peter Warlock, arrived in the world on October 30, 1894, at the Savoy Hotel in London, which his parents were using as their town residence, and the family was wealthy with strong artistic connections. At Eton he met the composer Frederick Delius and the two became close friends, and his first few songs, written in Cologne, like all his earliest work, were highly imitative of Delius. A friendship with Delius begun at school, beside first songs that imitated him closely, may suggest a young composer who started out following a musician he knew. Family wealth and artistic connections hint at a household where a creative career was easy to imagine. In late 1916 he was introduced to the Dutch composer Bernard van Dieren, a friendship that influenced him greatly, and he went on promoting the older man's music for the rest of his life. A contretemps over Van Dieren led him to submit some pieces as Peter Warlock, and he kept that pseudonym for everything he published in music afterwards, saving his own name for critical and analytical writing. A pseudonym taken up after a contretemps, beside a friendship with Van Dieren that he kept promoting for life, may suggest that the Van Dieren connection mattered to him in more than one way. Imitation of Delius in his first songs, beside a new name for his music, may suggest a move from borrowed models. He presided over nine issues of The Sackbut in a combative and often controversial style. Some of his best-known music, the song-cycles Lilligay and The Curlew among it, was completed in a period of intense creative and literary work in Wales, along with a string serenade honouring Delius's sixtieth birthday in 1922. He said that “Wild Wales holds an enchantment for me stronger than wine or woman”, and in 1924 The Curlew was chosen to represent contemporary British music at the Salzburg Festival. A combative editorial style, beside a Welsh period of intense creative activity, may suggest that energy marked both his writing and his composing. He wrote a study of Gesualdo and a book called The English Ayre, kept transcribing early music and produced a slowly decreasing number of original works, among them the Capriol Suite, perhaps his best-known piece. Over time his writing grew more disciplined and contrapuntal and less harmonic, while Elizabethan music added another influence and songs such as My gostly fader show a strong strain of medievalism and mysticism. He edited and transcribed 570 published items of early music and also wrote nine books, 73 articles and 51 reviews. A study of Gesualdo, beside 570 edited items of early music, may suggest a scholarly side that ran alongside his composing. He was found dead of gas-poisoning in his Chelsea flat on the morning of December 17, 1930. The coroner recorded an open verdict because there was not enough to decide whether his death was suicide or accident.

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