A languid Saturday is a good day for Cyril Scott. Though I suppose under ideal circumstances it would be a rather balmy day full of cicadas and satyrs.
Scott was one of the so-called Frankfurt Group, a collective of up-and-coming musicians who studied at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, in the 1890s. The group included conductor and composer Balfour Gardiner (the great uncle of John Eliot Gardiner), songwriter Roger Quilter, and the nearly forgotten Norman O’Neill. The youngest of the bunch was a quirky, 13 year-old piano prodigy by the name of Percy Grainger.
Scott’s fame, such that it is, rests primarily on a piano miniature called “Lotus Land,” which helped insulate the piano benches of musical grandmothers everywhere. But he also left behind a sizable body of dreamy, wayward orchestral works, including two symphonies, four operas, four oratorios, and concertos of all stripes, to say nothing of his chamber and instrumental music. Often referred to as “the English Debussy,” Scott could usually be counted on for a good wallow. Alban Berg described his music as mushy.
His works, more or less neglected for decades, beyond some notable recordings of the piano concertos by John Ogdon, have received a lot of love in the recording studio over the past ten years.
Scott was fascinated by the occult. His claim to have contacted Grainger’s mother from beyond the grave put an end to their friendship. He was also occupied with the subject of health foods. His writings on diet and alternative medicine prefigure a school of thought which has become practically mainstream in the present day.
Someone must have sold off the library of Eugene Ormandy at some point since, somewhere in my own collection, I’ve got a book inscribed to Ormandy by Cyril Scott.
Happy birthday, C.S. (1879-1970).
Scott plays “Lotus Land”: