Frank Bridge

Frank Bridge (26 February 1879 – 10 January 1941) was an English composer, violist and conductor.

Bridge was born in Brighton and studied at the Royal College of Music in London from 1899 to 1903 under Charles Villiers Stanford and others. He played the viola in a number of string quartets, most notably the English String Quartet (along with Marjorie Hayward), and conducted, sometimes deputising for Henry Wood (Payne, Hindmarsh, and Foreman 2001), before devoting himself to composition, receiving the patronage of Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge (Banfield 1986, 62–86; Bray 1977, passim).

According to Benjamin Britten Bridge had strong pacifist convictions, and he was deeply disturbed by the First World War, although the extent of his pacifism has been questioned in recent scholarship. During the war and immediately afterwards Bridge wrote a number of pastoral and elegiac pieces that appear to search for spiritual consolation; principal among these are the Lament for strings, Summer for orchestra, A Prayer for chorus and orchestra, and a series of pastoral piano works. The Lament (for Catherine, aged 9 "Lusitania" 1915), for string orchestra, was written as a memorial to the sinking of the RMS Lusitania (Cerabona 2014). The piece was premiered by the New Queen's Hall Orchestra, conducted by the composer, on 15 September, at the 1915 Proms, as part of a programme of "Popular Italian music", the rest of which was conducted by Henry Wood (Anon. 1915; Anon. 2014).

Bridge's idiom in the wartime works tends towards moderation, but after the war his language developed significantly, building on the experiments with impressionist harmony found in the wartime piano and orchestral music. Bridge's technical ambitions (documented in his correspondence) prompted him to attempt more complex, larger works, with more advance harmonic elements and motivic working (Huss 2015, 127). Several of the resulting works have some expressive connections with the First World War, which appears to have influenced the mood of the Piano Sonata, and certainly Oration. However, as Huss has pointed out (drawing on Leonard Meyer's comments on direct causation theories in Meyer 1967,), it is inadvisable to identify the war as the primary stimulant for the development of a modernist language (Huss 2015, 118–19).

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