I have an old suitcase that once belonged to Lord Berners. His heir, Robert Heber-Percy, was about to throw it out when I saw that the "rubbish" inside was, in fact, music manuscripts. I went through the papers and was given the suitcase. At that time, little of his music was recorded or performed, his books were out of print and his paintings (admittedly the least important part of his output) were dispersed and uncatalogued. Now almost all the music is available on CD, and the novels and arts of his autobiography have been republished.
I find that few days pass without my thinking of Lord Berners - perhaps because of the suitcase, which now occasionally houses my own manuscripts. From 1976 to 1983, the centenary of his birth, I was his official biographer, and although I wrote a number of pieces on him, arranged exhibitions and edited some unpublished scores, I eventually had to take the decision to be either a biographer or a composer. (There are people from each side who think I made the wrong decision.)
Lord Berners is familiar to many from his fictionalised portrait as Lord Merlin in Nancy Mitford's novel The Pursuit of Love. This portrait - of a sophisticated, witty aristocrat who dyed his doves all the colours of the rainbow and adorned his dogs with diamond necklaces - is affectionate and not wildly inaccurate. Osbert Sitwell said of him that "in the years between the wars, Berners did more to civilise the wealthy than anyone in England. Through London's darkest drawing rooms ... he moved ... a sort of missionary of the arts."
Cecil Beaton talked about how he first saw Berners from a distance, entering a Venetian palazzo; Beaton clearly wanted to be a part of his world. For his part, Berners, although he liked Beaton, lampooned him mercilessly in his homosexual roman-à-clef The Girls of Radcliff Hall, a spoof of a school story in which the photographer appears as "Cecily" and Berners as the headmistress. (Beaton tried to get all copies of the privately circulated book destroyed, but fortunately John Betjeman had given his copy to the British Library.)
In spite of his picaresque life and many eccentricities, it is, rightfully, as a composer that Berners is best known. There are only about 30 pieces in all. But what he did produce shows that he was one of the few truly original English composers of the past century. If his output sounds small, it is worth remembering that he also published six novels in his later years, two volumes of autobiography and had two one-man exhibitions of his paintings in the 1930s. Beyond that, he had many close friends within the worlds of literature, music and art, and was closely involved with the development of British ballet with his friend and ally Constant Lambert. They were the only English composers commissioned by Diaghilev for the Ballets Russes; and, of Berners's five ballets, two were choreographed by Georges Balanchine and three by Frederick Ashton - not a bad track record.
The bulk of his music was written between the two world wars - it was in 1918 that he inherited the title - although his earliest successful pieces were written before that, and accepted for publication, while he was a diplomatic attaché at the British Embassy in Rome. There he became friends with Stravinsky, who had a high regard for Berners's work, with Casella and with futurist artists (he owned at least one Balla painting). He found himself in Diaghilev's circle, based in Rome during part of the first world war.
Both Stravinsky and Casella were astonished at the original conceptions and advanced style of someone whose musical education had been so desultory. His principal teacher had been the German composer Kretschmer, whose opera The Fair Melusine was so despised by Mendelssohn that he wrote an overture of the same title in order to rid his ears of Kretschmer's music. But Berners learned his craft in a practical way: by attending performances and by acquiring scores. While others in England were looking to the pastoral for inspiration, his outlook was European and modernist. At the first International Society for Contemporary Music festival, in Salzburg in 1922, it was he who acted as translator when the young William Walton met Alban Berg.
Although his work after he had acquired his peerage became musically more accessible, this is mainly because he wrote almost exclusively for the theatre from that time on. The apparent easiness of, say, The Triumph of Neptune (his 1926 Ballets Russes score, commissioned by Diaghilev) is deceptive: there are many curious elements in the piece, not least a storm scene scored for percussion alone - unheard of in the mid-1920s - with the violinists playing comical-sounding flexatones.
Perhaps the ballet that has been most successful is the one that is almost entirely his. For the choral ballet A Wedding Bouquet (Ashton, 1936), he not only wrote the music, but also provided 30 costume designs, the painted backdrop and curtain and made many alterations to his collaborator Gertrude Stein's published text for the libretto.
His only opera, Le Carosse du Saint Sacrement, has the disadvantage of being a half-evening piece, and depends on being part of a mixed programme for production. This has not happened since its first performances in 1924. At the time, Stravinsky was with Gabriel Buffet-Picabia in her Paris apartment, taking great pleasure in playing through Berners's piano duets, Valses Bourgeoises, with her. One of the duets contained, according to Stravinsky, the four most impudent bars in all music.
When the Ballets Russes broke up after Diaghilev's death in 1929, Berners used the remnants of the company for the very beautiful, though seldom heard (let alone seen) ballet, Luna Park, choreographed again by Balanchine. But, by then, he had embarked on parallel artistic endeavours, culminating in his first one-man show of paintings at the Reid and Lefèvre Gallery in 1931. In his lifetime, he exhibited more than 100 oil paintings, all of which are now in private collections.
Most were landscapes, often with Corot as their model. Berners owned many Corots; his collection was the largest outside the Louvre. He found "the directness and simplicity of Corot's early paintings ... the perfect method of dealing with landscape".
When I used to stay at Faringdon, Lord Berners's country house in Oxfordshire, then owned by Lord Heber-Percy, my bedroom contained not only works by Corot, but also Polemberg, Dalí and Dürer. His taste in visual art was impeccable, though his own paintings are largely conventional.
At the same time, though, he maintained friendships with the avant-garde. Dalí, for example, was a visitor to Faringdon, and Berners arranged for the hire of the deep-sea diver's outfit for Dalí's lecture at the International Surrealist Exhibition in London in 1936. He was asked how deep Dalí was planning to dive. "To the depth of his subconscious," replied Berners without a flicker.
He also began to publish books, starting with the first volume of his autobiography First Childhood (1934) and followed by The Camel (1936). Later books were written quite quickly, although each one contains jewels of observation. Count Omega (1941), a hilarious parody of the kind of composer and aesthetic that Berners found abhorrent, was subject to advanced litigation when Walton felt he was about to be lampooned. Berners responded by threatening an injunction to prevent Walton from insinuating himself into his novels.
Emanuel Smith, the composer in Count Omega, is not Walton - he could be Edmund Rubbra - but there are countless portraits of friends and former friends scattered throughout the books. Berners portrays himself as Lord Fitzcricket in Far from the Madding War, a picture that is almost vicious in its ruthless near-accuracy: "He was always referred to by gossip-writers as 'the versatile peer', and indeed there was hardly a branch of art in which he had not at one time or another dabbled ... He was astute enough to realise that, in Anglo-Saxon countries, art is more highly appreciated if accompanied by a certain measure of eccentric publicity ... When travelling on the Continent he had a small piano in his car ..."
The "small piano" was actually a clavichord, and his chauffeur told me how the tool kit had been removed from under the front seat of the Rolls in order to house the instrument's case. Berners would use it to practise, or to compose, in hotels when travelling to and from his house in Rome (a wonderful address: One Foro Romano).
Nearly all of the other stories about his eccentricities are true. He did, indeed, for example, build the last traditional folly tower in England, clearly visible outside Faringdon on the road from Oxford to Swindon. The architect was Lord Gerald Wellesley, later Seventh Duke of Wellington, who, Betjeman said, was the only modern architect with a style named after him: the "Gerry-built" style.
The tower's classical/gothic hybrid arose from confusion between architect and patron, who arrived from Italy to find a partially completed 100ft classical tower. Berners had wanted gothic, and so a gothic top, the viewing room, was added. The notice at the entrance, though, was Berners's own: "Members of the public committing suicide from this tower do so at their own risk."
Berners will ultimately be remembered for his work, and that is what he wanted. There were few days in his life when he did not pursue some form of artistic activity, and his craftsmanship was meticulous in each. I never met Berners, of course; I was only seven when he died in 1950, and have little in common with him except our initials. But one aspect of Gerald Berners as a person that I like is the fact that he worked artistically even though he had no need to - a form of artistic purity. This is what I think Stravinsky meant when he said that Berners was an amateur, but in the "best, literal sense".
Paradoxically, this allies him with Erik Satie in that art-politics and art-economics had nothing to do with the production of art for either of them. It was as a result of Cecil Gray's book A Survey of Contemporary Music that Berners was referred to as the "English Satie". Although Berners's own copy of this book was heavily annotated (to the title page he added the words "one of the silliest books about music ever written"), it is interesting that there are no notes alongside the reference to him and Satie, probably the purest artist of all. Satie referred to Berners only once, when he described him as "an amateur" - meaning it, unfortunately, in the pejorative sense. But Satie is a different case.
· Gavin Bryars: A Portrait, is out now on Philips. I Have Heard It Said That a Spirit Enters: The Music of Gavin Bryars is out on CBC Records.