Sorabji, Kaikhosru Shapurji, 1892-1988

TO THOSE WHOM IT MAY CONCERN, IF ANY, AND OTHERS WHO MIND ANYBODY’S BUSINESS BUT THEIR OWN.”
“Dates and places of birth relating to myself given in various works of reference are invariably false.”
“… Certain lexographical canaille, one egregious and notorious specimen particularly, enraged at my complete success in defeating and frustrating their impudent impertinent and presumptuous nosings and pryings into what doesn’t concern them, and actuated, no doubt, by the mean malice of the base-born for their betters, have thought, as they would say, to take it out of me by suggesting that my name isn’t really my name.”
“Insects that are merely noisome like to think that they can also sting.”
—Kaikhosru Sorabji

“A great composer, a great critic, and a prince among men, I know nothing about Sorabji (none of the particulars men usually know of each other, family affairs, education, hobbies, etc.) — nothing, but I think everything that matters, everything, as Jeeves would say, that is ‘of the essence.’”
—Hugh MacDiarmid, in The Company I’ve Kept, 1966.

For those interested in such matters, Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji was born in Chingford, Essex, England on 14 August 1892; his father was a Zoroastrian Parsi civil engineer and his mother English (for a long time, until the work of Sean Vaughan Owen, she was reputed to be part Sicilian, part Spanish). He spent most of his life in England. From his early ’teens he developed an insatiable appetite for the latest developments in contemporary European and Russian music and went to great lengths to obtain the latest scores of such composers as Mahler, Debussy, Schönberg, Skryabin, Rakhmaninov and others at a time and in a country where almost all such music was largely unknown and unrecognized. Of an independent and uniquely curious nature, it is perhaps unsurprising given the pre-War English environment that his education, both general and musical, was mostly private.

For a composer as prolific as he was soon to become, he was an unusually late developer and his voracity in absorbing all the most recent trends in other people’s music seems to have excluded from his mind the idea of making his own until he reached his twenties.

A close friend and confidant of the English composer Philip Heseltine from 1913, Sorabji wrote to him that he was considering a career as a music critic. Once he had begun to compose, however, the floodgates of his imagination burst and a tremendous river of musical creativity flowed forth almost uninterrupted until the early 1980s.

An intensely private person who loathed to participate in public gatherings of any sort, he performed some of his own piano works on rare occasions and with considerable success, most notably in the 1930s in Erik Chisholm’s historic Glasgow-based Active Society for the Propagation of Contemporary Music concert series. Sorabji’s final concert appearance (1936) may have coincided with a decision to withdraw his work from the concert platform by vetoing public performances without his express consent, an unusual and courageous step that led to virtual silence for almost 40 years, declaring that he considered them unsuited to conventional concert performance and that “no performance at all is vastly preferable to an obscene travesty”. While he never actually imposed an unequivocal “ban” on public performances of his works, as used to be claimed, the result was that concert-goers around the world heard almost none of his music for nearly four decades. In view of the colossal difficulties involved in performing much of his music, it was not unexpected that this regrettable situation would continue almost unchallenged for so long.

In the intervening years, Sorabji worked as a critic for The New Age and The New English Weekly until his retirement in 1945; he also continued composing richly expressive and extraordinarily elaborate music at a furious pace, mostly for the piano, without the slightest care as to whether or not it might ever reach the ears of the public.

He resented the intrusion of casual inquirers about himself and his work, as a result of which many entries on him in major music lexica were more notable for their conflict than for the reliability of their information about him. As a result, some of those who remembered his continued existence but knew little or nothing of what he was doing and why, chose — almost inevitably, one supposes — to spin webs of myth and legend about him. These tell more about their creators than they do about Sorabji. It has taken some years to wipe away the fatuous “Howard Hughes of Music” image of him which had been fostered by some who had little better to do.

He lived quietly and modestly in London and then in South Dorset in self-chosen isolation, undisturbed by the mêlée of professional public music-making. He had the good fortune of a small private income which allowed him this existence and permitted him to get on with his work uninhibited and undisturbed.

From 1976, the pioneering efforts of South African pianist Yonty Solomon began to turn the history of Sorabji’s reputation. In a monumental series of London recitals, he presented a number of Sorabji’s piano works for the first time and the interest which these generated has grown and developed ever since. This inevitably led to increasing international interest in his music; following Solomon’s pioneering, more performers presented authorised performances, broadcasts and commercial recordings, laying to rest at last the long-held myth of its unplayability. In suitable conditions, Sorabji permitted — even encouraged — this, once he recognised the existence of musicians capable of doing it justice. Cognoscenti of the major keyboard works do not predict such compendia of fearsome difficulties becoming “standard repertoire”, but whilst the music hurls uniquely forbidding challenges at performers, it exerts an immediate intellectual and emotional grip on listeners.

The 1980s witnessed, among other performances, an astonishingly accurate and powerful première of Sorabji’s two-hour Organ Symphony No. 1 (1923–24) and an absolutely stunning account of all four-and-three-quarter hours of his piano work Opus clavicembalisticum (1929–30), which proved to be the crowning glory of John Ogdon’s career. Further major premières have followed since.

Following Sorabji’s death at the age of 96, a series of CD recordings began to appear, including the two works mentioned above. The Sorabji Archive has encouraged major performers and scholars to create fine new editions of the composer’s works from his manuscripts.

International artists of distinction who have performed, broadcast and recorded Sorabji’s music include pianists Yonty Solomon, John Ogdon, Marc-André Hamelin, Michael Habermann, Donna Amato, Ronald Stevenson, Geoffrey Douglas Madge, Carlo Grante, Charles Hopkins and Jonathan Powell, organist Kevin Bowyer and sopranos Jane Manning, Jo Ann Pickens and Sarah Leonard.

His centenary was marked not only by performers and broadcasters but also by Scolar Press’s publication of Sorabji: A Critical Celebration, a multi-author symposium edited by Prof. Paul Rapoport. This first full-length survey of Sorabji was reprinted in 1994. One of its contributors, Prof. Marc-André Roberge, has since prepared a substantial Sorabji biographical study; entitled Opus Sorabjianum and first published online in 2013; it is updated from time to time to reflect newly discovered information.

Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji (born Leon Dudley Sorabji; 14 August 1892 – 15 October 1988) was an English composer, music critic, pianist and writer whose musical output spanned eight decades and ranges from sets of miniatures to works lasting several hours. One of the most prolific 20th-century composers, he is best known for his piano music, notably nocturnes such as Gulistān and Villa Tasca, and large-scale, technically intricate compositions, which include seven symphonies for piano solo, four toccatas, Sequentia cyclica and 100 Transcendental Studies. He felt alienated from English society by reason of his homosexuality and mixed ancestry, and had a lifelong tendency to seclusion.

Sorabji was educated privately. His mother was English and his father a Parsi businessman and industrialist from India, who set up a trust fund that freed his family from the need to work. Sorabji, although a reluctant performer and not a virtuoso, played some of his music publicly between 1920 and 1936. In the late 1930s, his attitude shifted and he imposed restrictions on performance of his works, which he lifted in 1976. His compositions received little exposure in those years and he remained in public view mainly through his writings, which include the books Around Music and Mi contra fa: The Immoralisings of a Machiavellian Musician. During this time, he also left London and eventually settled in the village of Corfe Castle, Dorset. Information on Sorabji's life, especially his later years, is scarce, with most of it coming from the letters he exchanged with his friends.

As a composer, Sorabji was largely self-taught. Although he was attracted to modernist aesthetics at first, he later dismissed much of the established and contemporary repertoire. He drew on diverse influences like Ferruccio Busoni, Claude Debussy and Karol Szymanowski and developed a style characterised by frequent polyrhythms, interplay of tonal and atonal elements and lavish ornamentation. Although he primarily composed for the piano, he also wrote orchestral, chamber and organ pieces. Sorabji has been likened to many of the composer-pianists he admired, including Franz Liszt and Charles-Valentin Alkan. Features of his works, not least their harmonic language and complex rhythms, anticipated trends in compositions from the mid-20th century onwards. His music remained largely unpublished until the early 2000s, but interest in it has grown since then.

Biography
Early years

Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji was born in Chingford, Essex (now Greater London), on 14 August 1892.[1] His father, Shapurji Sorabji[n 1] (1863–1932), was a Parsi civil engineer born in Bombay, India. Like many of his near ancestors, he was an industrialist and businessman.[3] Sorabji's mother, Madeline Matilda Worthy (1866–1959), was English and born in Camberwell, Surrey (now South London).[4] She is said to have been a singer, pianist and organist, but there is little evidence of this.[5] They had married on 18 February 1892 and Sorabji was their only child.[2]

Little is known of Sorabji's early life and musical beginnings. He reportedly started to learn the piano from his mother when he was eight,[6] and he later received help from Emily Edroff-Smith, a musician and piano teacher who was a friend of his mother's.[7][8] Sorabji attended a school of about twenty boys where, in addition to general education, he took music lessons in piano, organ and harmony, as well as language classes for German and Italian.[9] He was also educated by his mother, who took him to concerts.[10]

Entering the music world (1913–1936)
The first major insight into Sorabji's life comes from his correspondence with the composer and critic Peter Warlock, which began in 1913. Warlock inspired Sorabji to become a music critic and focus on composition. Sorabji had obtained a matriculation but decided to study music privately, as Warlock's claims about universities made him abandon his plan of going to one.[6][11][12] Thus, from the early 1910s until 1916, Sorabji studied music with the pianist and composer Charles A. Trew.[13] Around this time, he came to be close to and exchanged ideas with the composers Bernard van Dieren and Cecil Gray, who were friends with Warlock.[14] For unknown reasons, Sorabji was not conscripted during World War I, and though he later praised conscientious objectors for their courage, there is no proof he tried to register as one.[15]

Sorabji's letters from this time document his nascent feelings of otherness, the sense of alienation that he as a homosexual of mixed ancestry experienced and his development of a non-English identity.[16] Sorabji joined the Parsi community in 1913 or 1914 by attending a Navjote ceremony (probably performed in his home by a priest) and changed his name.[17][n 2] He had apparently been mistreated by other boys in the school he attended and his tutor, who sought to make an English gentleman out of him, would make derogatory comments about India and hit him on the head with a large book, which gave him recurring headaches. Sorabji said that in 1914, a "howling mob" with brickbats and large stones pursued him and "half killed" him.[22] These experiences have been identified as the root of his dislike of England,[9][n 3] and he was soon to describe English people as intentionally and systematically mistreating foreigners.[22]

In late 1919, Warlock sent the music critic Ernest Newman several of Sorabji's scores, including his First Piano Sonata. Newman ignored them, and in November that year, Sorabji privately met the composer Ferruccio Busoni and played the piece for him. Busoni expressed reservations about the work but gave him a letter of recommendation, which helped Sorabji get it published.[24] Warlock and Sorabji then publicly accused Newman of systematic avoidance and sabotage, which led the critic to detail why he could not meet Sorabji or review his scores. Warlock proceeded to call Newman's behaviour abusive and stubborn, and the issue was settled after the journal Musical Opinion reproduced correspondence between Sorabji and Newman.[25]

Sorabji has been called a late starter, as he had not composed music before the age of 22.[5] Already before picking up the craft of composition, he had been drawn to recent developments in art music at a time when they did not receive much attention in England. This interest, along with his ethnicity, cemented his reputation as an outsider.[26] The modernist style, increasingly longer durations and technical complexity of his works baffled critics and audiences.[27][28] Although his music had its detractors, some musicians received it positively:[29] after hearing Sorabji's Le jardin parfumé—Poem for Piano Solo in 1930, the English composer Frederick Delius sent him a letter admiring the piece's "real sensuous beauty",[30][31] and around the 1920s, the French pianist Alfred Cortot[32] and the Austrian composer Alban Berg took an interest in his work.[33]

Sorabji first played his music publicly in 1920 and he gave occasional performances of his works in Europe over the next decade.[34] In the mid-1920s, he befriended the composer Erik Chisholm, which led to the most fruitful period of his pianistic career. Their correspondence began in 1926 and they first met in April 1930 in Glasgow, Scotland. Later that year, Sorabji joined Chisholm's recently created Active Society for the Propagation of Contemporary Music,[35] whose concerts featured a number of distinguished composers and musicians. Despite Sorabji's protestations that he was "a composer—who incidentally, merely, plays the piano",[36] he was the guest performer to make the most appearances in the series.[37][38] He came to Glasgow four times and played some of the longest works he had written to date: he premiered Opus clavicembalisticum and his Fourth Sonata[n 4] in 1930 and his Toccata seconda in 1936, and he gave a performance of Nocturne, "Jāmī" in 1931.[34][39]

Years of seclusion
Ups and downs in life and music (1936–1949)
On 10 March 1936 in London, the pianist John Tobin played a portion of Opus clavicembalisticum. The performance lasted 90 minutes—twice as long as it should have.[n 5] Sorabji left before it finished and denied having attended, paid for, or supported the performance.[41] A number of leading critics and composers attended the concert and wrote negative critiques in the press, which severely damaged Sorabji's reputation.[42] Sorabji gave the premiere of his Toccata seconda in December 1936, which became his last public appearance. Three months earlier, he had said he was no longer interested in performances of his works, and over the next decade, made remarks expressing his opposition to the spread of his music.[34][43]

Sorabji eventually placed restrictions on performances of his works. These became known as a "ban", but there was no official or enforceable pronouncement to this effect; rather, he discouraged others from playing his music publicly. This was not without precedent and even his first printed scores bore a note reserving the right of performance.[44] Few concerts with his music—most of them semi-private or given by his friends and with his approval—took place in those years, and he turned down offers to play his works in public.[45] His withdrawal from the world of music has usually been ascribed to Tobin's recital,[46] but other reasons have been put forward for his decision, including the deaths of people he admired (such as Busoni) and the increasing prominence of Igor Stravinsky and twelve-tone composition.[47] Nonetheless, the 1930s marked an especially fertile period in Sorabji's career: he created many of his largest works[48] and his activity as a music critic peaked. In 1938, Oxford University Press became the agent for his published works until his death in 1988.[49]

A major factor in Sorabji's change of attitude was his financial situation. Sorabji's father had returned to Bombay after his marriage in 1892, where he played an important role in the development of India's engineering and cotton machinery industries. He was musically cultured and financed the publication of 14 of Sorabji's compositions between 1921 and 1931,[27] although there is little evidence that he lived with the family and he did not want his son to become a musician.[1][50] In October 1914, Sorabji's father set up the Shapurji Sorabji Trust, a trust fund that would provide his family with a life income that would free them of the need to work.[51] Sorabji's father, affected by the fall of the pound and rupee in 1931, stopped supporting the publication of Sorabji's scores that same year,[52] and died in Bad Nauheim, Germany, on 7 July 1932. Following an initial trip to India, Sorabji's second one (lasting from May 1933 to January 1934)[53] revealed that his father had been living with another woman since 1905 and had married her in 1929.[54] Sorabji and his mother were excluded from his will and received a fraction of what his Indian heirs did.[55] An action was instituted around 1936 and the bigamous marriage was declared null and void by a court in 1949, but the financial assets could not be retrieved.[56][57][n 6]

Sorabji countered the uncertainty that he experienced during this time by taking up yoga.[58] He credited it with helping him command inspiration and achieve focus and self-discipline, and wrote that his life, once "chaotic, without form or shape", now had "an ordered pattern and design".[59] The practice inspired him to write an essay titled "Yoga and the Composer" and compose the Tāntrik Symphony for Piano Alone (1938–39), which has seven movements titled after bodily centres in tantric and shaktic yoga.[60]

Sorabji did not perform military or civic duties during World War II, a fact that has been attributed to his individualism. His open letters and music criticism did not cease, and he never touched the topic of war in his writings.[61] Many of Sorabji's 100 Transcendental Studies (1940–44) were written during German bombings, and he composed during the night and early morning in his home at Clarence Gate Gardens (Marylebone, London) even as most other blocks were abandoned. Wartime records show that a high explosive bomb hit Siddons Lane, where the back entrance to his former place of residence is located.[62]

Admirers and inner withdrawal (1950–1968)

In 1950, Sorabji left London, and in 1956, he settled in The Eye,[n 7] a house that he had built for himself in the village of Corfe Castle, Dorset.[64] He had been on holidays in Corfe Castle since 1928 and the place had appealed to him for many years.[65] In 1946, he expressed the desire to be there permanently, and once settled in the village, he rarely ventured outside.[66] While Sorabji felt despised by the English music establishment,[67] the main target of his ire was London, which he called the "International Human Rubbish dump"[68] and "Spivopolis" (a reference to the term spiv).[65][69] Living expenses also played a role in his decision to leave the city.[65] As a critic, he earned no money,[51] and while his lifestyle was modest, he sometimes found himself in financial difficulties.[70] Sorabji had a strong emotional attachment to his mother, which has been partly attributed to being abandoned by his father and the impact this had on their financial security.[10] She accompanied him on his travels and he spent nearly two-thirds of his life with her until the 1950s.[71] He also looked after his mother in her last years when they were no longer together.[72]

Despite his social isolation and withdrawal from the world of music, Sorabji retained a circle of close admirers. Concerns over the fate of his music gradually intensified, as Sorabji did not record any of his works and none of them had been published since 1931.[73] The most ambitious attempt to preserve his legacy was initiated by Frank Holliday, an English trainer and teacher who met Sorabji in 1937 and was his closest friend for about four decades.[1][74] From 1951 to 1953, Holliday organised the presentation of a letter inviting Sorabji to make recordings of his own music.[75] Sorabji received the letter, signed by 23 admirers, soon after, but made no recordings then, in spite of the enclosed cheque for 121 guineas (equivalent to £3,574 in 2019[n 8]).[76] Sorabji was concerned by the impact copyright laws would have on the spread of his music,[77] but Holliday eventually persuaded him after years of opposition, objections and stalling. A little over 11 hours of music were recorded in Sorabji's home between 1962 and 1968.[78] Although the tapes were not intended for public circulation, leaks occurred and some of the recordings were included in a 55-minute WBAI broadcast from 1969 and a three-hour programme produced by WNCN in 1970. The latter was broadcast several times in the 1970s and helped in the dissemination and understanding of Sorabji's music.[79]

Sorabji and Holliday's friendship ended in 1979 because of a perceived rift between them and disagreements over custodianship of Sorabji's legacy.[80] Unlike Sorabji, who proceeded to destroy much of their correspondence, Holliday preserved his collection of Sorabji's letters and other related items, which is one of the largest and most important sources of material on the composer.[81] He took many notes during his visits to Sorabji and often accepted everything he told him at face value.[82] The collection was purchased by McMaster University (Hamilton, Ontario, Canada) in 1988.[83]

Another devoted admirer was Norman Pierre Gentieu, an American writer who discovered Sorabji after reading his book Around Music (1932).[1] Gentieu sent Sorabji some provisions in response to post-war shortages in England, and he continued to do so for the next four decades. In the early 1950s, Gentieu offered to pay for the expenses to microfilm Sorabji's major piano works and provide copies to selected libraries.[84][85] In 1952, Gentieu set up a mock society (the Society of Connoisseurs) to mask the financial investment on his part, but Sorabji suspected that it was a hoax. Microfilming (which encompassed all of Sorabji's unpublished musical manuscripts) began in January 1953 and continued until 1967 as new works were produced.[86] Copies of the microfilms became available in several libraries and universities in the United States and South Africa.[84]

Over the years, Sorabji grew increasingly tired of composition; health problems,[n 9] stress and fatigue interfered and he began to loathe writing music. After the Messa grande sinfonica (1955–61)—which comprises 1,001 pages of orchestral score[90]—was completed, Sorabji wrote he had no desire to continue composing, and in August 1962, he suggested he might abandon composition and destroy his extant manuscripts. Extreme anxiety and exhaustion caused by personal, family and other issues, including the private recordings and preparing for them, had drained him and he took a break from composition. He eventually returned to it, but worked at a slower pace than before and produced mostly short works. In 1968, he stopped composing and said he would not write any more music. Documentation of how he spent the next few years is unavailable and his production of open letters declined.[91]

Renewed visibility (1969–1979)
In November 1969, the composer Alistair Hinton, then a student at the Royal College of Music in London, discovered Sorabji's music in the Westminster Music Library and wrote a letter to him in March 1972.[92] They met for the first time in Sorabji's home on 21 August 1972 and quickly became good friends;[93] Sorabji began to turn to Hinton for advice on legal and other matters.[94] In 1978, Hinton and the musicologist Paul Rapoport microfilmed Sorabji's manuscripts that did not have copies made, and in 1979 Sorabji wrote a new will that bequeathed Hinton (now his literary and musical executor) all the manuscripts in his possession.[95][n 10] Sorabji, who had not written any music since 1968, returned to composition in 1973 owing to Hinton's interest in his work.[98] Hinton also persuaded Sorabji to give Yonty Solomon permission to play his works in public, which was granted on 24 March 1976 and marked the end of the "ban", although another pianist, Michael Habermann, may have received tentative approval at an earlier date.[99][100] Recitals with Sorabji's music became more common, leading him to join the Performing Right Society and derive a small income from royalties.[101][n 11]

In 1977, a television documentary on Sorabji was produced and broadcast. The images in it consisted mostly of still photographs of his house; Sorabji did not wish to be seen and there was just one brief shot of him waving to the departing camera crew.[102][103] In 1979, he appeared on BBC Scotland for the 100th birthday of Francis George Scott, and on BBC Radio 3 to commemorate Nikolai Medtner's centenary. The former broadcast led to Sorabji's first meeting with Ronald Stevenson, whom he had known and admired for more than 20 years.[104] Shortly after, Sorabji received a commission from Gentieu (who acted on behalf of the Philadelphia branch of the Delius Society) and fulfilled it by writing Il tessuto d'arabeschi (1979) for flute and string quartet. He dedicated it "To the memory of Delius" and was paid £1,000 (equivalent to £5,096 in 2019[n 8]).[105]

Last years
owards the end of his life, Sorabji stopped composing because of his failing eyesight and struggle to physically write.[106] His health deteriorated severely in 1986, which obliged him to abandon his home and spend several months in a Wareham hospital; in the October of that year, he put Hinton in charge of his personal affairs.[99] By this time, the Shapurji Sorabji Trust had been exhausted[107] and his house, along with his belongings (including some 3,000 books), was put up for auction in November 1986.[108] In March 1987, he moved into Marley House Nursing Home, a private nursing home in Winfrith Newburgh (near Dorchester, Dorset), where he was permanently chairbound and received daily nursing care.[109] In June 1988, he suffered a mild stroke, which left him slightly mentally impaired. He died of heart failure and arteriosclerotic heart disease on 15 October 1988 a little after 7 pm at the age of 96. He was cremated in Bournemouth Crematorium on 24 October, and the funeral service took place in Corfe Castle in the Church of St. Edward, King and Martyr, on the same day.[110] His remains are buried in "God's Acre", the Corfe Castle cemetery.[111]

The Sorabji Resource Site is an extensive repository of data on the life, music, and writings of Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji (1892-1988), the English composer, pianist, writer, and critic whose vast output spanning the years 1914 to 1984 includes the celebrated four-hour Opus clavicembalisticum and the compellingly beautiful “Gulistān”—​Nocturne for Piano and ranges from the four Frammenti aforistici (1 p.) to the Messa grande sinfonica (1,001 pp.). It is also the download location of Marc-André Roberge’s Opus sorabjianum: The Life and Works of Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji (xlvi, 647 pp.).