Sunday Feature: The Lonely Death of Stanley Bate

A precursory glance at the limited information on Stanley Bate will bring up luminaries of the musical world including the famed teacher Nadia Boulanger, composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, music critic and composer Virgil Thomson, and the list goes on and on. Bate, only a few years younger than Benjamin Britten, studied at the Royal College of Music with Vaughan Williams, Arthur Benjamin, Gordon Jacob and RO Morris. After a period in Paris with Boulanger including a spell in Berlin with Hindemith, and before the Second World War, Bate had a highly successful career particularly as a composer of ballet collaborating with the likes of Marie Rambert and Ninette de Valois. Yet all of this was to change, and with the outset of war he moved with his wife the composer Peggy Glanville Hicks to Australia, and then on to the USA. Although there were more successes to come, with music performed at Carnegie Hall, and then once back in the UK eventual broadcasts on the BBC, Bate's career was never to regain its pre-war position. There were further complications to his story as well, personal ones, including a breakdown and periods of depression, alcoholism, and also issues around his sexuality. Then came his early death. Did he take his own life as composer Ned Rorem suggested? If so, why? Simon Heffer lifts the veil on this composer who at one time as a student, won nearly all the awards available at the Royal College of Music. He begins with meeting conductor Stephen Bell, whose recording of the Bate Viola Concerto made such an impression. Heffer is joined by the composer Joseph Horovitz who remembers meeting Bate, and also by musicologist Suzanne Robinson whose biography of Peggy Glanville Hicks has shone a light into the murky personal world and career of Stanley Bate. Heffer also goes in search of music by Bate being performed and explored now, and joins Emily Gray and Timothy Salter to explore some songs they're planning to record