Constant Lambert

Did You Know?

• Lambert once said he would have ideally liked The Rio Grande to feature a black choir.
• The second movement of his Piano Sonata features a blues in rondo form.
• His son Kit Lambert was buried in the same grave in 1981.

Early life and music

Lambert was the son of Australian painter George Lambert and his wife Amy, and the younger brother of Maurice Lambert. He was educated at Christ's Hospital near Horsham in West Sussex, and wrote his first orchestral work at age 13. His contemporaries included Angus Morrison, Guy Warrack, Thomas Armstrong, Gavin Gordon, Patrick Hadley, and Gordon Jacob. In 1925 he received a high-profile commission to write a ballet for Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, Roméo et Juliette (1926), choreographed by Nijinska. He enjoyed celebrity through the success of his next ballet, the neo-classical Pomona (1927), and through his participation as narrator in performances of William Walton and Edith Sitwell's Façade.

Later career

Lambert was appointed in 1931 as conductor and music director of the Vic-Wells ballet, later the Royal Ballet, but his compositional career stagnated. His major choral work Summer's Last Will and Testament (1935), after the play by Thomas Nashe, proved unfashionable following the death of King George V, though Alan Frank hailed it as Lambert's finest work. The Second World War took a toll on his vitality and creativity; he was ruled unfit for active service, and decades of hard drinking had impaired his health, which declined further with undiagnosed diabetes. Lambert considered he had failed as a composer, completing only two major works after Summer's Last Will and Testament: the ballet scores Horoscope (1938) and Tiresias (1951), along with smaller works such as the piano four hands suite Trois pièces nègres pour les touches blanches. He concentrated mostly on conducting, working closely with the Royal Ballet until his resignation in 1947, and continued as a guest conductor until shortly before his death in 1951.

Broader cultural interests

Lambert was an expert on painting, sculpture, and literature as well as music, and differed from most fellow English composers of his time in his perception of the importance of jazz, responding positively to the music of Duke Ellington. His book Music Ho! (1934), subtitled 'a study of music in decline', remains one of the wittiest volumes of music criticism in English. Lambert was always conscious of his Australian connections, though he never visited the country. For the first performance of his Piano Concerto (1931), he chose the Sydney-born, Brisbane-trained Arthur Benjamin as soloist. Despite his disapproval of homosexuality, he formed a good working relationship with Benjamin's fellow Australian Robert Helpmann, and later entrusted another Australian musician, Gordon Watson, with the piano part at the première of his last ballet, Tiresias.

Personal life

Lambert married Florence Kaye on 5 August 1931; their son was Kit Lambert, one of the managers of The Who, named after the painter Christopher 'Kit' Wood. Lambert soon engaged in an on-and-off affair with ballet dancer Margot Fonteyn, who according to friends considered him the great love of her life; aspects of this relationship were symbolized in his ballet Horoscope (1938), in which Fonteyn was a principal dancer. After divorcing Kaye, in 1947 Lambert married artist Isabel Delmer, who designed sets and costumes for his ballet Tiresias; after his death, she married Alan Rawsthorne. During the 1930s Lambert also had a long affair and friendship with Laureen Goodare, mother of actress Cleo Sylvestre, his goddaughter. Close friends included Michael Ayrton, Sacheverell Sitwell, and Anthony Powell, and Lambert was the prototype of the character Hugh Moreland in Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time. He died on 21 August 1951, two days short of his forty-sixth birthday, of pneumonia and undiagnosed diabetes complicated by acute alcoholism, and was buried in Brompton Cemetery, London.