Each of the three works featured on this recording represents an important milestone in Havergal Brian’s long creative journey. Symphony No 6 (‘Sinfonia tragica’) marks the beginning of Brian’s late orchestral style, Symphony No 12 marks the end of a major phase in Brian’s production of his thirty-two symphonies, and Agamemnon is the last of his five operas. The works also show a unique intertwining of the twin obsessions of Brian’s mature composing career: symphony and opera. As far back as 1918, Brian told his close friend Granville Bantock that ‘I shall never write anything but opera in the future—all my instrumental work will spring from some operatic scheme’. In 1958, the year after completing Symphony No 12 and Agamemnon, Brian had barely modified his position when he wrote to Harold Truscott that ‘most of my symphonies are a growth from poetry or the [sic] drama’. The sixth and twelfth symphonies embody these claims with remarkable fidelity, the former starting life as an orchestral prelude to an unwritten opera and the latter proposed by Brian as a potential prelude to the opera Agamemnon.

Brian composed his Symphony No 6 in 1948 at the age of seventy-two. Far from being a valedictory ‘late’ work, the symphony marks a turning point in his output as the first purely instrumental manifestation of the allusive, impacted syntax that was to form the basis of his late style. The symphony was originally intended as the orchestral prelude to a projected opera on J M Synge’s play Deirdre of the Sorrows. The opera never came to fruition, because it transpired that the Austrian-British composer and conductor Karl Rankl was also setting the same play as a 1951 Festival of Britain commission from the BBC and the Royal Opera (though, in the end, neither body actually performed it). Brian recast his prelude as an independent work, Sinfonia tragica, only admitting it to his formal symphonic canon in the late 1960s, when he renumbered his early symphonies, dropping the withdrawn original Symphony No 1 and slotting this one in as No 6.

The work is therefore both a ‘sinfonia’ in the sense in which the word is applied to the overture in Baroque opera and a true one-movement symphony in the mould of Sibelius’s seventh. It is one of Brian’s most potent and compelling scores and one of the best introductions to his unique sound-world.

With the greatest possible economy, the opening instantly evokes a nocturnal ride through a wild, haunted landscape. Mysterious trumpet fanfares, flecks of colour from the harp and tam-tam, and keening low flutes all add to the understated menace of this compressed and apparently fragmentary opening ‘movement’. A solo cor anglais introduces a lamenting theme based on multiple repeated notes (track 2)—this theme will become important later in the symphony. At length the steady tread of harp and low pizzicato strings (track 3) supports the gradual unfolding in the violins of a noble, austere, almost chaste melody. This processional moves to the woodwind, punctuated by hymn-like strings, before the melody returns, this time in warmer harmonies and richer colours, before being abruptly shut off in typically Brianic style. Woodwind polyphony, steadily climbing and strikingly dissonant, dissolves into a long cello melody supported by rippling harp arpeggios. Drums and cymbals mark a change in mood (track 4), the lamenting theme returns, now passionately protesting, and the long-anticipated catastrophe finally erupts in a ferocious climax, with baleful horns howling above a violently rhythmic accompaniment from the full orchestra. A diversion into lighter scherzando music offers momentary relief, before the dark forces gather and swoop once again. A final return of the lamenting cor anglais and the earlier funereal tread leads to a dark yet strangely radiant major/minor cadence, snuffed out at the last by a soft tam-tam stroke.

Sinfonia tragica had to wait eighteen years for its first performance, given in January 1966 by the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, conducted by Douglas Robinson—ironically, the same company that had failed to perform the Rankl commission that supplanted Brian’s planned Deirdre opera.

In 1957, nine years after the sixth symphony, and with five more symphonies and three full-length operas all composed during that time, Brian was poised, at the age of eighty-one, for the final and most astonishing phase of his creative life: a further twenty-one symphonies, before he eventually ceased composing at the age of ninety-two due to eyesight problems. He also completed one more operatic project: the single-act Agamemnon. It seems scarcely believable that both Symphony No 12 and Agamemnon should have been composed and fully orchestrated within the same four-month period, yet it is true: the symphony was completed on 4 February and the final page of the opera is dated ‘April 1957’. There is no evidence that Brian commenced work on the opera before writing the symphony—he was normally a strictly sequential composer, for all but his very largest projects—but thoughts of Aeschylus’s tragedy seem to have been in his mind during the seven-month compositional gap that occurred after completing his four-act opera Faust on 11 May 1956. On 27 May that year, the BBC Third Programme (the modern-day BBC Radio 3) broadcast a new translation of Agamemnon by Philip Vellacott and it is quite possible that Brian may have listened to it (I am indebted to Keith Warsop for this information). Clearly, both symphony and opera were conceived together, so Brian’s suggestion that the symphony would make an appropriate prelude to the opera was not an idle one.

The two works share no specific musical material, but the sense of impending tragedy that is palpable in much of the twelfth symphony, together with the brutality of its climaxes, provides a fitting introduction to the harsh dramatic and musical world of the opera. Nevertheless, the symphony’s status as an abstract statement is never in doubt; indeed, the twelfth is one of Brian’s most cogent and compelling late symphonies, though it may take some work on the listener’s part for its secrets to be fully revealed, such is its extreme compression.

At the time it was written, the twelfth was by far the shortest of Brian’s symphonies. It is said that when it was played at the 1966 Proms, by the BBC Symphony conducted by Norman Del Mar, to mark Brian’s ninetieth birthday, the Proms Director William Glock, who disliked Brian’s music, chose it because he thought it was his shortest symphony, not knowing that a year earlier Brian had completed the even shorter Symphony No 22 (‘Symphonia brevis’). In one respect, Glock may have been right all along: the performance of No 12 presented here is actually shorter than some previous performances of No 22.

Despite its concision, Symphony No 12 is no pocket-sized sinfonietta. For a start, it is scored for a large orchestra that includes six horns, a euphonium and nine percussionists, all employed to make some very big sounds indeed. The work is also conceptually big, traversing a huge range of expression and embracing a four-movements-in-one design.

The opening is one of the most evocative in all of Brian’s music: against softly sustained string octaves and a timpani roll, a solo glockenspiel picks out a few bare notes—an allusion to the shining beacon at the start of the opera perhaps? A snarl from the muted brass, a panicked cry from the three flutes, and the symphony sets off on its troubled journey. After a fragmentary introduction, the first movement turns into a tough, hard-pressed, intensely polyphonic essay, offering the merest glimpse of a more reflective and lyrical expression, before the onward rush of events resumes. A brief transition leads to the second movement (track 6): a funeral march of epic grandeur unfolding in two great arches, each topped by an overwhelming climax—all packed into the space of just two-and-a-half minutes. After the huge sounds of the funeral march, a ‘slow movement’ (track 7), scored for strings alone, offers both textural contrast and the chance to unlock some of the lyricism to which the first movement had briefly pointed. The richness of the scoring is notable, with the strings divided in up to thirteen parts. A signal from two horns playing in octaves, echoed by two muted horns, marks the end of the slow movement and the beginning of the finale. Instantly, we are plunged back into the turbulent world of the first movement, but with a new heroic quality (track 8—nothing is wasted in this symphony: those octave-spaced horn signals lead the way). There is even room for a moment of grotesque humour in the form of a bizarre trio for piccolo, trombone and xylophone, lasting all of two bars, before the full force of the orchestra gathers for a pitiless final climax, which is abruptly shut off … and we are suddenly back where we started. The music sounds and feels different from the opening—for example, the original glockenspiel rhythm has now been transferred to the timpani—but the landscape is instantly recognizable. Before we have time to reflect on the strange journey that has brought us to this bleak place, a single tam-tam stroke extinguishes the symphony, just as it did in Sinfonia tragica, and leaves us—at least in this recording, and as Brian intended—outside the granite walls of the citadel of Mycenae overlooking the Argolid plain.

If Brian heard the 1956 broadcast of Vellacott’s translation of Agamemnon, he did not use it for his opera. He turned instead to the 1850 translation by John Stuart Blackie (1809-1895), no doubt because it was out of copyright, and added some elements of his own, mainly in the passages for the chorus. Brian had shown himself to be more than capable as a librettist in his satirical anti-war opera The Tigers (1917-29), so it is perhaps regrettable that he did not make his own version of the libretto for Agamemnon. Blackie’s translation, flowery and contorted as it is, feels at odds with the compressed fury of Brian’s music. It does at least preserve some of the formality of the original text and is often vivid, drawing from Brian some powerfully imaginative music in the last vocal composition he was ever to write.

The plot of Agamemnon is brutally simple: Agamemnon, King of Mycenae, returns in victory from Troy, having sacrificed his own daughter Iphigenia to the gods to ensure favourable winds for his fleet and success in battle. He brings with him as concubine the prophetess Cassandra, who foretells the downfall of the royal dynasty. Agamemnon’s queen, Clytemnestra, first greets him with due deference, encouraging him to tread hubristically on luxurious purple tapestries as he enters the palace, before murdering him with an axe while he takes his bath. She justifies her actions to the citizens of Argos as revenge for his murder of her daughter. She presents her lover Aegisthus as the new king, but the people reject him and demand that Clytemnestra’s son Orestes avenge his father.

Brian thought of his opera as a curtain-raiser to Strauss’s Elektra, a work he hugely admired. Wildly impractical as that notion may be, Agamemnon certainly contextualizes the events of Strauss’s opera. Consciously or not, it even offers a musical link, its thunderous D major final chord connecting to the opening D minor chord of the Strauss. Otherwise, as in all Brian’s operas, the music often seems to pursue its own symphonic narrative, sometimes supporting, but often detached from, the stage action. There are no leitmotif-like themes as such, but there are certain recurrences, such as the opening oboe theme (track 9), which reappears at the start of the chorus’s ‘Whence these shapes of fear that haunt me?’ (track 16), and again in the very last bars on blazing trumpets.

In adapting Aeschylus’s tragedy to this compact opera, Brian significantly changed the function of the chorus from active participants in the drama, frequently setting the scene and providing contextual detail, to a reactive body whose role is simply to respond emotionally to the events as they unfold and to provide musical punctuation. The long narration that Aeschylus gives to the chorus near the opening of the drama, recounting Iphigenia’s death at the hands of her father, is therefore entirely omitted by Brian, so that, until Clytemnestra justifies her actions after Agamemnon’s murder, no mention is made of her motivation—Agamemnon’s sacrifice of Iphigenia. This shifts the dramatic focus of the original tragedy, which had problematized the sacrifice of a child (legal, because it is commanded by the gods) against the murder of Agamemnon (illegal, because it is an act of regicide). The chorus’s defiant dismissal of Clytemnestra at the very end leaves no room for doubt as to the opera’s moral position. Brian does at least make room for Clytemnestra to refer to the filicide of her daughter; in Elektra, Strauss and his librettist Hofmannsthal erase Iphigenia’s memory entirely.

Of the six solo roles, the parts of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra are respectively assigned to a heroic tenor and a dramatic soprano, both of whom must contend with some uncompromisingly massive orchestral textures, especially during their central stichomythia (alternation of lines—track 15). By contrast, the part of Cassandra is written for a low alto and is more transparently scored. Her poignant foretelling of her own end and that of the house of Atreus is a dramatic highpoint of the opera (track 18), leading directly to the (unseen) cries of the dying Agamemnon (track 19), the revelation of Clytemnestra standing with an axe over the bloodied corpses of her husband and Cassandra, and, in a brilliantly original touch, the horrified reaction of the chorus—singing pianissimo to a swirling orchestral accompaniment.

Agamemnon was premiered in a concert performance in January 1971 by the mainly amateur forces of Kensington Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Leslie Head. The first broadcast was given in March 1973, by the BBC Northern Singers and Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Richard Armstrong, with Milla Andrew as Clytemnestra, Ann Howard as Cassandra and William MacAlpine as Agamemnon.

John Pickard © 2025