| Naxos |
According to his autobiography, Arnold’s own first composition was a piano sonata written at the age of twelve while he was recovering from sunstroke (‘very fittingly my enemies might snarl’, he quipped). Four years later he entered the Royal Academy of Music, where he soon gained a reputation as a phenomenal sight-reader at the piano but was overshadowed as a composer by several of his fellow students, though it is Bax’s work that has proved the most enduring. The turning-point in his life came in 1902, when he discovered the Celtic world through the poetry of W. B. Yeats. He soon visited Ireland, where he enthusiastically explored its culture, history and landscape; he even learned to read Irish Gaelic with ease but shied away from using it in the presence of native speakers. His music, which for some years had been under the sway of Wagner, now assumed an Irish identity, and he began to write what he called ‘figures of a definitely Celtic curve’. Having no need to earn a living, he was able to spend months at a time in a small coastal village in Donegal imbibing the local atmosphere and pouring forth a stream of emotionally charged poetry and music.
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