Although Arthur Leslie Benjamin was born in Sydney on the 18th of September 1893, he spent only the first three years of his life in that city. In 1896 he and his parents, Abraham Benjamin and his wife Amelia, moved to Brisbane where he was educated at Bowen House School and Brisbane Grammar School. Abraham was a commission agent and Amelia was a competent amateur pianist whose playing was often enjoyed from under the piano by the infant composer. At the age of six he made his first public appearance as a pianist and his formal musical training began three years later with George Sampson, the Brisbane city organist. In 1907 he accompanied his parents on a tour of the Continent, taking several lessons with Frederic Cliffe in London. In 1911, at the age of eighteen, he returned to England to begin his training at the Royal College of Music. According to Herbert Howells, the young Australian already

He studied harmony and counterpoint with Thomas Dunhill, whom he had earlier met in Brisbane, and piano with Frederic Cliffe, quickly gaining a reputation as one of the brightest young talents at the College. In 1912 he won an open scholarship to continue his studies, after being encouraged by Cliffe to resume his composing (Benjamin hadn’t "written a note in years") and try out for one. The circumstances were later described in Benjamin’s sadly unfinished autobiography with a touch of the trademark embroidery–

Benjamin introduced himself and befriended the younger Howells, whose relatively modest finances meant that he very much needed the scholarship to be able to come up to London to study. In the afternoon the hopeful candidates sat the written papers, which consisted of a voice and piano setting and the completion of a scherzo for string quartet. Benjamin’s was one of three scholarships awarded, and he was sent to Stanford for composition and Sir Frederick ‘Westminster’ Bridge for fugue.

Benjamin was an excellent and witty writer and, in an extract from the same autobiography, he brought to life the student world he inhabited and some of its notable characters—

Stanford was, in Benjamin’s view, "without a shadow of a doubt, a great teacher", although he found the reasons hard to identify. Certainly the teacher and student seemed to suit each other, and Benjamin’s easy nature and quick talent sought and found out the best to be had from Sir Charles’ caustic and often bigoted instruction and frequent verbal bludgeoning. Witness the following diatribe, for instance, after he had written "for my own satisfaction" a Nocturne for small orchestra,

Michael Hurd's book The Ordeal of Ivor Gurney (OUP 1978) contains a description of the three particular friends, Benjamin, Howells and Gurney–

Benjamin had met Gurney, three years his senior, in 1912. The extraordinarily gifted Gurney, who had won the same open scholarship to the RCM in 1911 as Benjamin and Howells, was described by his Gloucestershire friend as

Hurd also recounts Marion Scott’s recollection of meeting the student trio at the first London performance of Vaughan Williams’ ‘Sea Symphony’ at the Queen’s Hall in February 1913 where she found them

This had not been the only source of excitement. The close friends Benjamin, Howells, Bliss and Goossens also attended the Diaghilev ballets and operas at His Majesty’s and Drury Lane, drinking the many new sounds and sights. The greatest impact came with their attendance in 1911 at the Diaghilev-Ballet Russe performance of Stravinsky’s ‘The Firebird’ at Covent Garden.

Ivor Gurney’s horrific war experiences, poetic genius and tragic post-war traumas are well-documented. Soon after Gurney’s committal to Barnwood House in Gloucester in September 1922, Benjamin wrote in alarm to Marion Scott, "I think that psychoanalysis is the only cure for him but that, of course, would mean entire confidence on Ivor’s part, which is doubtful. I used to know a great deal about Ivor and on that knowledge - the details of which it is impossible for me to discuss with you - I think that psychoanalysis is the only chance." It is an intriguing comment and is open to the interpretation that Benjamin, almost certainly homosexual, was convinced of Gurney’s similar leanings.

The friendship of those years produced from Howells an orchestral suite in five movements, each celebrating a close friend. The work ‘The Bs’, first performed in 1914, ends with an heraldic march movement entitled ‘Benjee’, saluting Benjamin who the previous year had given the première of Howells’ Piano Concerto no.1. The orchestral piece, ‘Procession’ (written for the 1922 Proms) is dedicated to Benjamin. At one stage the movement from ‘Howells’ Clavichord’, now known as ‘Bliss’ Ballet’ was entitled ‘Benjamin’s Brawl’. Benjamin, in turn, later dedicated the three-page ‘Saxophone Blues’ of 1929 to Howells.

In his student days he was much impressed by the music of Johannes Brahms, César Franck and Richard Strauss, although Brahms was frowned upon by some. Many years later he admitted: "Brahms had always been my favourite composer. I was just four years old when he died in 1897 [...] I had to keep my love of Brahms secret from my Royal College colleagues, though... Brahms was out of favour in the twenties and early thirties. It was the gipsy element they couldn’t take... too light and popular for them, you see." He was also greatly taken with the early works of Igor Stravinsky and had a lasting admiration for Maurice Ravel, whose influence is most obvious in the ‘Suite’ of 1926 for piano solo and the much later ‘Tombeau de Ravel’ of 1958 for clarinet and piano.

Benjamin was swept along with the upheaval and tragedy of the Great War. He joined up eagerly, notwithstanding his mother's entreaties to his teacher Hubert Parry, begging him to persuade her son to stay at home. Parry, in his pompous way, tried–

By then, however, Benjamin was already in the forces along with George Butterworth, Geoffrey Toye, Fox, Dyson, Bliss, Farrar and Vaughan Williams.

In 1914 he joined the Officer Training Corps, receiving a temporary commission on the 29th of April 1915. He served initially in the infantry as 2nd Lieutenant with the 32nd Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers and on the 4th of November 1917 he was attached to the Royal Flying Corps. Howells writes–

Whether there was anything rash about the sortie or not, his plane was shot down over Germany on the 31st of July 1918 and Benjamin was taken to Rühleben camp in Germany where he was interned until his repatriation on the 29th of November that year.

William Primrose recalls–

Also at the Rühleben camp since 1914 was the composer Edgar Bainton who was later to become Director of the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. Although both men suffered the expected privations of such a camp, they and the many other distinguished British musicians interned there were extremely fortunate in finding themselves in Rühleben and not one of the many other camps around Germany. The camp commander Baron von Taube appears to have been an enlightened and benevolent man who encouraged the formation of an orchestra, a madrigal society (‘Bainton’s Magpies’) and various other intellectual pursuits. Arrangements were even made so that prisoners could continue studying for British university degrees and other qualifications. In such a situation, it is understandable that Benjamin was able to continue his musical development with some semblance of normality.

Soon after the armistice Benjamin returned to Sydney to take up an invitation from Henri Verbrugghen to become Professor of Piano at the Conservatorium. The Belgian-born conductor Verbrugghen was the first Director of the NSW State Conservatorium and greatly encouraged his protegé’s composing and conducting. It was during this period that Benjamin began his first mature works which began to be published soon after his permanent return to London in 1921.

Following his appointment in 1926 to a professorship which he held for the next thirteen years at the RCM, Benjamin developed a distinguished career as a piano teacher. A roll call of his better-known students from that era includes the conductor and film music composer Muir Mathieson, composers Peggy Glanville-Hicks, Miriam Hyde, Joan Trimble, Stanley Bate, Bernard Stevens and Benjamin Britten, whose ‘Holiday Diary’ suite for solo piano is dedicated to Benjamin and mimics many of the teacher’s mannerisms. Britten otherwise made scant reference to the relationship, which may have been an uneasy one, judging by Benjamin’s comments to the composer Richard Stoker many years later–

Much has been written about Britten’s compositional connection to Bridge and the difficult relationship with Ireland, whose influence on the young composer has probably still not been fully acknowledged. Benjamin’s compositional influence, however, has received no attention whatsoever, perhaps because he never taught composition, believing like many before and since that it cannot be ‘taught’.

The inter-war years were a very productive, maturing and defining time for Benjamin. The manuscript of the unpublished Violin Sonata in E minor bears the date 1918, the only surviving work of that year and one of very few to be written by Benjamin during the war. Making up for lost time, perhaps, he continued writing chamber works for the next few years–’Three Pieces for violin & piano’ (1919-24); ‘Three Impressions’ (voice & string quartet, 1919); ‘Five Pieces for the ‘Cello’ (1923); ‘Pastoral Fantasy’ (string quartet, 1924), which won a Carnegie Award that year; ‘Sonatina’ (vn/pf, 1924). Orchestral works became more common after 1927–’Rhapsody on Negro Themes’ (MS 1919); ‘Concertino’ for piano and orchestra (1926/7); ‘Light Music Suite’ (1928); Violin Concerto (1932); ‘Overture to an Italian Comedy’ (1937); ‘Cotillon’ (1938). There appeared over twenty meticulously crafted songs and choral settings which led, logically, to the first fruits of Benjamin’s great love, opera. The two one-act operas ‘The Devil Take Her’ (1931) and ‘Prima Donna’ (1933) met with critical success and were to lay the foundation for the later full works ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ (1950) and ‘Tartuffe’ (1960). Herbert Howells relates–

In ‘The Devil Take Her’, a comic opera in a prologue and one act, a medieval London poet marries a beautiful woman born dumb. Refusing to accept his friend’s advice that a dumb wife is worth more than her weight in gold, the poet arranges to have her operated upon, as a result of which the girl, with speech restored, turns out to be a noisy shrew; the poet begs the devil to take her in... With a libretto by Alan Collard and John B. Gordon, it was first produced at the RCM on the 1st and 2nd of December 1931 when it was conducted by Thomas Beecham. ‘Prima Donna’ had to wait until 1949 for its première, at the Fortune Theatre in London. The librettist Cedric Cliffe, son of Benjamin’s piano teacher at the RCM Frederic Cliffe, later supplied the libretti to the two full-scale operas ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ and ‘Tartuffe’.

In between the two operas came the Violin Concerto of 1932, premièred by Antonio Brosa with Benjamin and the BBC Symphony Orchestra, after which it was played again in a series of six BBC concerts at the Queen’s Hall between the 1st and 12th of January 1934. Ernest Newman was impressed–

Again, articles in Grove are more neutral (did either of the writers hear the music, one wonders?). The same work, according to F.S.H. in Grove V,

Peter Pirie, in his generally dismissive biographical entry in Grove VI, makes the following debatable claim–

Another of Benjamin’s interests became apparent during this period. From 1934 onwards he began writing musical scores for major feature films and documentaries. Always the pragmatic professional, "film music", according toPirie, "was eminently fitted to his particular talents, and he contributed some successful examples, including scores for ‘An Ideal Husband’ and for a documentary about the ascent of Everest." In his penetrating obituary, Herbert Howells notes very early on that

Lastly, most of Benjamin’s solo piano music was produced during these years, both for concert purposes and for teaching. Like Bartók, Benjamin the pianist was presumably writing to some extent according to his own pianistic needs during the 1920s when he began what was a very promising performing career.

More ambivalent, Peter Pirie, in a curiously uninformative description, would have it that he "was a very good pianist, although not perhaps a virtuoso, and his playing affected both his style of composition and his musical career." Such a quotation serves to illustrate the mixed reception Benjamin and his music were to experience from here on and, to a great extent, the minor importance accorded his career by critics and musicians ever since. Nevertheless, Benjamin the pianist at this time was very active and gave a number of important premieres including the Piano Concerto by Constant Lambert (18th December 1931, Lambert conducting) and the suite ‘Masks’ for solo piano by Arthur Bliss (2nd February 1926). Before the war he had also given the première of the first Piano Concerto by Herbert Howells (1913). Also in 1926, a few days later on the 6th of February, Benjamin partnered Harriet Cohen at the Queen’s Hall for a performance of Bach’s Concerto for two Claviers. The same year, Benjamin wrote the solo piano ‘Suite’ and dedicated the first movement ‘Prelude’ to her.

He lived for many years at 66 Carlton Hill in St John’s Wood. In 1935 he accompanied the 10-year old Canadian ‘cellist Lorne Munroe on a concert tour of Europe. Three years later he wrote the delightful ‘Sonatina’ for Munroe, who later became the principal ‘cellist with the Philadelphia and New York Philharmonic orchestras and recorded the piece. Soon afterwards he resigned from his post at the RCM and left to settle in Vancouver, Canada. It was also in 1938, on his last examining tour to the West Indies for the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music, that he brought back the folk tune that he was to transform into the famous ‘Jamaican Rumba’. After a series of radio talks and concerts in addition to music teaching, conducting and composing, he became an outstanding figure in Canadian musical life. He frequently visited the United States, broadcasting and arranging many performances of contemporary British music. listen to Jamaican Rumba played by Joan & Valerie Trimble (private recording)

Benjamin remained in Canada for the duration of the war. In 1941 he was appointed Conductor of the newly-formed CBC Symphony Orchestra, holding the post until 1946. He was also Resident Lecturer at Reed College, Portland, Oregon between 1944 and 1945. Of this time Benjamin spoke warmly–

Again tailoring his composing to his needs as a teacher and the opportunities arising from his conducting position, Benjamin during his Canadian sojourn produced a substantial body of educational pieces for the piano and, more importantly, a number of serious orchestral works. Chief among them is the Symphony of 1945, mentioned above, a large scale four-movement work embodying Benjamin’s stated aim to "mirror the feelings–the despairs and hopes–of the time in which I live". Speaking of his reluctance to write anything in symphonic form before this time, Benjamin reflected–

Almost unknown today, the Symphony was given its British première at the Cheltenham Festival in July 1948 by Sir John Barbirolli and the Hallé Orchestra. Further performances by the same artists took place in Manchester, Liverpool and the Royal Albert Hall in London the following year. After one more performance by the BBC Symphony Orchestra in August 1954, conducted by the composer, the work would appear to have been utterly neglected until it was recently recorded by the Queensland Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Christopher Lyndon-Gee.

The other major work of the period was the darkly impressive Sonata for viola and piano of 1942, also known as ‘Elegy, Waltz and Toccata’ and bearing the dedication ‘Written for and dedicated to William Primrose’. It appears that Benjamin simultaneously prepared the work as a concerto, in which form (‘Concerto for Viola and Orchestra’) it was given its première not by its dedicatee but by Frederick Riddle and the Hallé Orchestra on June the 30th 1948, again conducted by Barbirolli. Riddle later recorded the work in its sonata version with the pianist Wilfred Parry for the BBC. Both the Sonata and the Symphony reflect not just the sombre mood of the times but also the darker territory that Benjamin had begun to explore.

Other orchestral and concertante works written in Canada were the Sonatina (1940), ‘Oboe Concerto on themes of Cimarosa’ (1942), ‘Ballade’ (1944), ‘Suite for Flute & Strings’ (1945), ‘Prelude to Holiday’ (1941), ‘Red River Jig’ (1945), ‘2 Jamaican Pieces’ (1942) (‘Jamaican Song’ and ‘Jamaican Rumba’–the orchestral setting of the Rumba), ‘From San Domingo’ (1945), ‘Caribbean Dance’ (1946) and two transcriptions: ‘Præludium’ (Mendelssohn) (1941), ‘Prelude & Fugue’ (Mendelssohn op.7) (1941).

The small amount of Benjamin’s music for children published at the time–’Brumas Tunes’ (1945), ‘Forest Peace’ (1945) and ‘Haunted House’ (1945)–was intended for very young players, unlike the series of ‘Fantasies’ and ‘Let’s go Hiking’ sets of the previous decade. The ‘Elegiac Mazurka’ of 1941 was commissioned as part of the memorial volume ‘Homage to Paderewski’ in honour of the great Polish pianist who had died that year. In 1945 a shortened piano solo arrangement of the ‘Jamaican Rumba’ was published.

Returning to England in 1946 at the request of his publishers, he quickly became an integral part of the British musical scene and resumed teaching at the RCM. Bernard Stevens recalled sessions in Benjamin’s apartments at 15 Ranulf Road Hampstead, where Edward Clark, Alan Rawsthorne, Constant Lambert, Benjamin Frankel and Benjamin himself, would read through and discuss new works. A number of film scores were written during the late 1940s, including ‘The Cumberland Story’ (1947), ‘Steps of the Ballet’ (British Council/Central Office of Information 1948) and ‘The Crowthers of Bankdam’ (Holbein Films 1947).

Writing of Benjamin in his book A Distant Music John Mansfield Thomson describes him as

As he said himself, the main reason for returning to London was to write music for the stage, and it was to the field of opera that Benjamin now devoted most of his energy. His second opera, the one-act comedy ‘Prima Donna’, received its première at the Fortune Theatre in London on the 23rd of February 1949, the same year Benjamin wrote his piano concerto ‘Concerto quasi una Fantasia’. The concerto, written to a commission from the Australian Broadcasting Commission, served as the solo vehicle for Benjamin’s Australian concert tour of 1950 and was premiered by him on the 5th of September with Eugene Goossens and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. Of the experience, Benjamin recalled–

The other major original works written during the 1950s were the Harmonica Concerto (1953)–written for Larry Adler, who performed and recorded the work with the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Basil Cameron–the ballet ‘Orlando’s Silver Wedding’ (1951), ‘Tombeau de Ravel’ for clarinet and piano, the second string quartet (1959) and the Wind Quintet (1960). Film scores included ‘Above Us the Waves’ (1956) and ‘Fire Down Below’ (1957/60).

Benjamin must have been heartened by the favourable reception of ‘Prima Donna’. Again provided with a libretto by his friend Cedric Cliffe, Benjamin set to work on his first full-length opera on the story by Charles Dickens ‘A Tale of Two Cities’. First produced by Dennis Arundell during the Festival of Britain in 1951, it won a gold medal and was later broadcast in a live performance by BBC Radio 3 (the ‘Third Programme’) on April the 17th 1953. After this performance, Benjamin revised the piece into its final version. The opera was successfully produced in this form in San Francisco in April 1960, days before Benjamin’s death on the 10th of that month.

Benjamin described ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ as a ‘romantic melodrama’ and was effusive in his praise of Cliffe’s work–

Cliffe certainly did possess this, as well as a sense of humour–

Evidently both men were united in their admiration for Puccini, so that such a trouble-free collaboration is not hard to understand. Benjamin clearly held Puccini and his methods as a model–

Benjamin was at his most engaging and enthusiastic when describing his working methods–

F.R. Blanks, writing in The Canon, declared that it was "[...] one of the finest new melodramatic operas in many years [...] A stage performance must now be eagerly awaited and there is no reason why Australia should not be the first in the field." As so often, this was not to be the case and the work still awaits production in this country. Other critics were even more positive. Ernest Newman, writing in the Sunday Times (London), wrote of the BBC broadcast–

Eric Blom was equally enthusiastic:

The next operatic project was more experimental. ‘Mañana’ was a one-act opera commissioned in 1955 and produced the following year by BBC television on the 1st of February. In fact, it was the first television opera ever produced. Unfortunately, it was judged a flop at the time and never revived, along with Bliss’ ‘Tobias and the Angel’ which shared the same unhappy fate. Nevertheless, Benjamin encouraged his former pupil Joan Trimble to accept a similar offer with the result that her opera ‘Blind Raftery’ was produced with rather more success in 1957.

Benjamin, although by no means immune to such knocks, possessed a healthy sanguine disposition and presumably took the same attitude as Howells did in describing the episode–

It must have been some recompense to be honoured by the Worshipful Company of Musicians when they awarded him the Cobbett Medal later that year.

His last comic opera ‘Tartuffe’ was never quite completed. Cliffe again provided the libretto based on the play by Molière. At Benjamin’s death the piece existed only in piano score with about 250 bars orchestrated. The rest of the orchestration was made by the composer Alan Boustead. The only performance ever mounted in this (or any other) version would appear to be that by the New Opera Company at Sadler’s Wells on the 30th of November 1964, conducted by Boustead.

Until further performances and recordings of ‘Tartuffe’, it will be difficult to assess its merits, but one would have to take seriously Benjamin's own opinion–

Arthur Benjamin died at the age of 66 at the Middlesex Hospital from a re-occurence of the cancer that had first attacked him three years earlier.

Herbert Howells might have been writing about a host of composers when he spoke of the almost generic epitaphs–

But in a touching tribute and an attempt to expose his friend’s greater depth of personality and genius, Howells made a plea for a more appreciative response and a wider view of the creative spirit that imperfectly lives in most of us–

One may feel some uneasiness about the Benjamin case: about the evaluation and quality of musicianship as one came to know it in him. No one would challenge the consensus of critical opinion that gives him secondary status. But it would be well to reflect upon his general powers. By any criteria these were remarkable. No one who [...] really knew the span of his general gifts would contentedly measure Benjamin solely by his scope in composition. Even when emphasis is lain upon his five operas, his Symphony, the many works in concerto form, the ‘Ballade’ for string orchestra and his other works–eighty or so, in all–one is aware of their common source. It is found in an exciting, immensely practical, wide-ranging musicianship.

More particularly, though, Howells reckoned that Benjamin

Eclectic, yet possessing an integrity and intelligence that reveal his output from 1913-1960 as stylistically coherent yet dynamic

Howells’ sarcasm is again apt, as well as personally felt–

Not long before his death, Benjamin was able in his characteristically amiable way to shed some light on his own response to some of the criticism levelled at him, in particular on these ubiquitous questions of style and reputation. Asked whether he minded being known almost exclusively as the composer of the ‘Jamaican Rumba’, he replied–

F.S.H., writing in the influential Grove V, found that "Benjamin has evolved no personal idiom, but is content to use common chromatic parlance for the expression of ideas which are his own. If these ideas are not very profound nor strongly individualized, neither are they on the other hand derivative [...]".

The same writer wrote the Times obituary and commented that ‘A Tale of Two Cities’

The opinion seems to have set the standard by which most subsequent reviewers have taken their cue. Considering these criticisms, the following qualification by the same writer was hardly an ovation–

Benjamin was not unaware of such criticism and offered an interesting and candid perspective on it. When asked whether it bothered him that it had been said that his serious works lacked ‘personal style’, he replied:

Or perhaps he was right in feeling that he simply hadn’t specialised early enough and was not taken seriously as a result. In his delightful reminiscences of sessions at the Benjamin home in Hampstead during the late 1950s, Richard Stoker recalls Benjamin’s becoming "[...] sad, as if a cloud had come over his smiling face. He said how he wished he’d concentrated on composition alone, and felt he’d spoiled his chances by being a piano teacher, a concert pianist (he’d given the British première of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue), a conductor, a light music composer, an arranger and a film music composer."

Above all, Arthur Benjamin prized ‘professionalism’, a notion he held to with rigour and which was probably instilled in him during the early years at the Royal College of Music where, even then–or especially then (!)–the relative certainties of Parry and Stanford were being dismantled by the younger turks. It was a notion that blended with his natural conservatism to produce, despite the criticism to the contrary, a quite individual and subtle musical language bent on retaining that connection with the audience which was, between and after the wars, being sorely tested by other more adventurous composers. Still, it is far from certain that his old teacher Stanford would have approved of all the modernisms in Benjamin’s music after World War II, and he may well have cried over him as another wayward pupil, as he had done in 1921–

He was touchingly pleased to see me, and thanked me for coming until I was embarrassed. With tears filling his eyes he said: "All my lovely pupils–mad! They’ve all gone mad! Vaughan Williams, Holst, Howells, Bliss–all mad!" Then, looking very fixedly at me: "Don’t you go mad, me bhoy!"

©Ian Munro 2000

•list of works

•CD Jamiacan Rumba 1—works for piano solo

•CD Jamaican Rumba 2—chamber works