Ashton lives in London in a house in a little street quaintly called Yeoman’s Row, on the edge of Knightsbridge and Kensington. Here he often does his own cooking and here he works out his ideas. It is a tiny house, the work-center being a second-floor study, crowded with gramophone records, books, photographs and statuettes, all of which nearly obscure the red wall-paper. The statuettes are three in number: Anna Pavlova, Fanny Ellsler, and Marie Taglioni. The photographs range from good Queen Alexandra, through bull-fighters, to dancers.
The Sadler’s Wells hierarchy seems to travel in groups. One such group that seemed inseparable included Ashton, “Bobby” Helpmann, Margot Fonteyn, and Pamela May. Occasionally Constant Lambert would join in, to eat, to drink, to have fun. For “Freddy” is by no means averse to the good things of life.
“Freddy” Ashton is another of those figures of the dance who should never regard the calendar as a measure for determining his age. I believe the youthful spirit of Ashton is such that he will live to be a hundred-and-fifty; that, in 2075, he will be the last survivor of the founding of Sadler’s Wells, and will then be the recipient of a grand gala benefit at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, where, that night, he will share the Royal Box with the then reigning monarch.
CONSTANT LAMBERT
It is difficult for me to write without emotion of the third of the trio, Constant Lambert, whose loss is deeply mourned by all who knew him, and by many who did not.
A picturesque figure, Lambert was a great conductor, a great musician, a composer of superior talents, a critic of perception, a writer of brilliance and incisiveness, a life-long student of the ballet. Lambert’s contribution to the making of the Sadler’s Wells Ballet has, I suspect, been given less credit than it deserves. I have said that, in my three decades-and-more of ballet management, I have never known a ballet company with such high musical standards. These standards were imposed by Constant Lambert. Not only did he compose ballets for the company, but when music of other composers was used, it was Lambert who provided the strikingly brilliant orchestral arrangements—witness, as a few examples: Les Patineurs, Dante Sonata, The Faery Queen, Comus, Apparitions, Les Rendez-vous, Balabile, in which he made alive for ballet purposes the assorted music of Meyerbeer, Liszt, Purcell, Auber, Chabrier, respectively.
Born in London, in 1905, the son of a painter, brother of a well-known sculptor, he spent a substantial part of his childhood in Russia, where his grandfather supplied the Trans-Siberian Railway with its locomotives. He was a living proof of the fact that it was possible for an Englishman to be a musician without being suspected of not being a gentleman. His was an incisive mind, capable of quick reactions, with a widely ranging emotional experience.
With the Camargo Society, Constant Lambert established himself not only as a conductor, but as the musical mind behind British ballet. However, it was not an Englishman who discovered him as a composer. That honor goes to a Russian, Serge Diaghileff, who, when Lambert was bordering on twenty-one, commissioned him to write a ballet for his company. No other English composer shared that honor before Diaghileff died, although Diaghileff did produce, but did not commission, Lord Berners’ The Triumph of Neptune. And so Lambert stands isolated, with his Romeo and Juliet, which was first produced at Monte Carlo, in 1926, with Lifar and Karsavina as the protagonists; and his second ballet, Pomona, which Bronislava Nijinska staged at the Colon Theatre, Buenos Aires, in 1927.
Constant Lambert’s English education was at Christ’s Hospital. Early in his school days he underwent a leg operation that compelled him always to walk with a stick. All his life he was never entirely free from pain. At the Royal College of Music he was a pupil of Ralph Vaughan Williams. Ballet came into his life at an early date, and remained there until his untimely passing. To it he gave the best years of his life in acting as a sort of hair-spring to Ninette de Valois’ mainspring in the development of Sadler’s Wells. On his sound musical foundation Sadler’s Wells rests.
It is not within my province to discuss Lambert as a composer; but his accomplishments and achievements in this field were considerable. It is, of course, as a musician he will be remembered. But I could not regard Lambert as a musician pure and simple. He had a wide variety of interests, not the least of which was painting. Both painting and sculpture were in his family, and, from conversations with him I frequently got the notion that, had his technical accomplishments been other than they were, he would have preferred to have been a painter to a musician. Much of his music had a pictorial quality, witness his ballets, Romeo and Juliet, Pomona, Horoscope, and Tiresias; observe his Piano Concerto, Rio Grande (“By the Rio Grande, they dance no Sarabande”), Music for the Orchestra, Elegiac Blues (a tribute to the American Florence Mills), the Merchant Navy Suite, Summer’s Last Will and Testament, Hogarthian in color and treatment; and the work I shall always remember him conducting as a musical interlude in the first season in New York, the Aubade Heroique, the reproduction in sound of a Dutch landscape, a remembrance of that dawn in Holland when Lambert, a visiting conductor with Sadler’s Wells, witnessed the invasion of The Hague by Nazi paratroopers.