As a mysterious motto the word Altarus is difficult to beat. Though it looks ancient, it appears to have been first used by the English composer Havergal Brian, 1876 - 1972, who pencilled it on the title page of the score of his Third Symphony in 1932. He had second thoughts and erased it. Presumably from there it was adopted in the 1980s as a trade-name by a record company specializing in exotic piano specialities from the likes of Sorabji. It has now passed into the common currency of rôle-play gamers and science-fictioners, being a planet, a race or an individual according to mood. To them and to me it clearly implies something planetary, high-priestly or the will to rise up along the lines of "Excelsior" or "Resurgam" and the Latinate ending certainly suggests a word of power. Yet there is no such Latin word. Altar(e) and Altarium are the Low Latin from which the Old English Altar derives. In turn they stem from Altus meaning high. Altarus, however, is so high as to be misty.

Could it therefore be an anagram? We can get very nearly the whole way to Saturn, fall two letters short of Uranus, nearly find an unsavoury recipe for Salt with Urea, almost see the inspirational part of the foot that Blake's brother entered as a falling star, the tarsus. If we take out the promising Star we are left with the unhelpful Ula. Astralu is suggestive of an air-closet which might be Salutara, nearly healthy? Yet a meaning does seems to lurk there and the erasure suggests that Brian wished to keep it secret. It sounds like something that could have arisen from the mysterious pages of Paracelsus? Or was it just a word misremembered, or a word dreamed?

There is one word which just might be the solution as it uses all the letters: Austral. It does have a strong musical connection, Florence Austral being the name adopted by the soprano Mary Wilson, 1894 - 1968, to celebrate her native land. She was at the height of her powers in the late twenties and early thirties, singing regularly at Covent Garden. She was especially associated with the Wagnerian repertoire, famous for her Senta, Isolde and Brünnhilde. Nellie Melba, born Helen Porter Mitchell and Elsa Stralia, the Australian-born daughter of a German baritone called Fischer also chose to honour their native land in their adopted names. But Marguerite Guard, born in Tasmania turned into Margherita Grandi, suggesting it did not hurt to sound a bit Italian. Yet Mary Wilson who became Austral had actually begun life with yet another name and an exotic one at that, being known in childhood by her stepfather's name of Favaz.

Could Havergal Brian have had any contact with Florence Austral in his capacity as assistant editor of the journal Musical Opinion? In 1932 Austral would have been 38 and Brian 56 years old and a romantic connection seems highly unlikely between the successful international soprano and the older but ever-struggling writer-composer. His Third Symphony is a massively ambitious and stirring piece, remarkable for a strong Mahlerian flavour, unheard in English music until then. It is, however, purely orchestral with no obvious reason to be linked to the name of a singer.

Havergal Brian's circle of musical acquaintances was much wider in the nineteen thirties than his later isolated status would lead us to expect. He knew Tovey, Schoenberg, Paul Robeson, Fritz Busch and is said to have spent many evenings at the Savoy Hotel in deep conversation with Brother John Philip Sousa. Some of these names are highly suggestive of the kind of networks which should have led to performances. In fact Brian, like Elgar before him, seems to have been talent-spotted and sponsored for a while. His music was published in Germany and he was steeped in German idealism. The project was at its height in the year of the Third Symphony, 1932, when Cranz & Co. made the commercially baffling decision to engrave and publish not only the full score of the Gothic Symphony but also a Vocal Score of his surreal anti-war comic opera The Tigers. The vast Gothic Symphony waited until 1961 to be performed. To this day The Tigers has not been staged, though the BBC made a studio recording in the early 1980s.

Richard Strauss has been suggested as the driving force behind this act of German sponsorship which seems to have aroused forces more than equal and opposite in the British musical establishment. It may have been gratitude for this breathtaking display of generosity that made Brian choose German words for his next symphony, a choral work, now called the Fourth, or Siegeslied, The Song or Psalm of Victory. The words, Let God Arise, are Luther's version of Psalm 68 and the mood has been described as one of brutal violence. While this rather frightening symphony was being written in 1933, Hitler came to power in Germany. During the same period a supposedly extinct volcano was stirring in Worcestershire but the Third Symphony of Sir Edward Elgar, associated with the figure of King Arthur, was destined to remain a torso. Some sort of musical coup had failed spectacularly and the name of Havergal Brian became associated with the concept of Ordeal by Music, as Reginald Nettel entitled his biography, issued immediately after the war. Brian was not to be so easily rehabilitated. Perhaps not even a Walter Legge could have prevailed against a musical establishment which had made up its hidden collective mind.

Brian continued working on a substantial Violin Concerto, the score of which was mysteriously stolen at Victoria Station in June 1934. There are so many missing scores by Havergal Brian that the notion of an undeclared war on his works does not seem entirely crazy and the composer himself seems to have taken the loss philosophically. After writing a mainly new Concerto from what he remembered of the lost score, Brian fell silent for two years. When he again took up his pen to compose a symphony, it marked a return to the English language. The Fifth Symphony, called Wine of Summer is a setting for baritone and orchestra of words by Lord Alfred Douglas, Wilde's Bosie. He was now in his sixties and the composer visited him at his Brighton home in 1937. If anything, the choice of poet would have seemed even more bizarre in the late thirties than it does today. Douglas himself seems to have been surprised and flattered at this sudden display of interest in his work. The words Brian had chosen were forty years old and had been written in France in the aftermath of the Wilde affair. It is sensual and fluent verse of a Swinburne cast but Brian sets it in a hung-over, cold light of morning style which has puzzled some commentators. It is as if the composer wanted to reflect the disenchanted meaning rather than underline the music of the words themselves. "No joy is here but only neutral peace". Earlier the music has risen to a violent climax at the point where the poet and composer recall a lost world:

In his choice of the Wilde case to parallel his own, Brian seems more likely to be pointing to the cultural shift which it brought, rather than any more personal identification. At the time of the Wilde case, Brian would have been already nineteen years of age and it was an encounter the following year with Elgar's King Olaf which would inspire him to devote his life to composition. In that same year of 1896, he composed a Requiem, long since lost.

Though his music is driven along by craggy march-like motifs, Brian was never prepared to simplify his messages to connect with a wide audience and his sardonic humour can still baffle and alienate listeners today. So there was to be no Land of Hope and Glory to support his grand designs. His character and creative energy, which continued despite near total neglect in later life, have made him one of the great sphinxes of music. His time may never come in the way Mahler's did but he has inspired many devoted enthusiasts and, thanks to their efforts, his music is breaking the silence. He is not an easy or comfortable figure to fit into the history of twentieth century British music and this vital missing piece of the jigsaw suggests it was wrongly assembled without him. His awkward, left-over pieces were therefore binned like the Apocrypha, to be taken up by enthusiasts who always doubted the official version. It is not entirely surprising that the advocates should have a mental bin of their own and chose not to do too much joined-up thinking about the amazing objects they were digging up.

© James Beswick Whitehead, 2001