It was as a conductor of Tchaikowsky that I feel he excelled. He was a masterly Tchaikowsky interpreter. I should have loved to hear him play the symphonies. I content myself, however, with his Swan Lake and The Sleeping Beauty, and the realization of how much these two Sadler’s Wells productions owe to him. Never was the music for an instant dull, for Lambert always conducted it with a fine ear for contrasts of brisk with languid, happiness with toska.
Composer that he was, he devoted a large part of his life to conducting. His recordings are to be treasured. Conducting to him was not merely a source of livelihood, but a very definite form of self-expression, an important part of him. In my experience, I have found that composers are, as a rule, bad conductors, and conductors bad composers. Two exceptions I can name. Both British. Lambert was well nigh unique in his superlative capacity in both directions, as is Benjamin Britten today. Lambert, I feel, was not only one of the most gifted composers of his time, but also one of its finest interpretative artists. He had the unique quality of being able to enter wholeheartedly into the innermost essence of forms of art diametrically opposed to his own, even positively unsympathetic to him personally, and giving superlative performances of them.
Lambert was no calm liver, no philosophic hermit; a good deal of a hedonist, he met life considerably more than half way, and went out to explore life’s possibilities to the fullest. Moreover, he richly succeeded in doing so. He was a brilliant wit, both in writing and in conversation. His book, Music, Ho!, remains one of the most stimulating books of musical commentary and criticism of our time. He was the collector and creator of an innumerable number of magnificent but unprintable limericks, in the creation of which he was a distinct poet. He had composed a series of fifty on one subject—double bishops, i.e., bishops having more than one diocese, like Bath and Wells. A friend of mine who has heard Lambert recite them with that gusto of which only he was capable, tells me that they are, without doubt, one of the most brilliant achievements in this popular form.
Wit is one thing; stout-hearted, robust humor is another. Lambert had both. There was also a shyness of an odd kind, when a roaring laugh would give way to a fit of wanting to be by himself, wrapped in melancholy. His was a delicately poised combination of the introvert and the extravert, the latter expressing itself in the love of male company over pots of ale and even headier beverages. He had a keen appreciation of the good things of life.
This duality of personality was apparent in his physical make-up. There was something about his appearance that, in a sense, fitted in with the conventional portrait of John Bull. A figure of a good deal of masculine strength, he was big, inclined to be burly; his complexion was pink. He exhibited in himself a disconcerting blend of the most opposite extremes imaginable. On the one hand, a certain morbidity; on the other, a bluff and hearty roast-beef-and-Yorkshire Britishness. I have said that he resembled, physically, the typical drawing of John Bull. As a matter of fact, he bore an uncanny physical resemblance to Winston Churchill, and had elements in common with G. K. Chesterton. And a Hollywood casting director might have engaged him to play the role of the Emperor Nero, on strict type casting. He had an alert face on which humor often played good tunes, but on which, now and then, there used to settle a kind of stern gloom, not to be dispersed by any insensitive back-slapping.
He was as much at home in France as he was in England. His late adolescence and early manhood were spent in the hectic, feverish, restless ’twenties, with the Diaghileff Ballet and the French school of musical composition as the preponderant influences. As he grew older, his Englishness, if I may call it that, grew as well. The amazing thing to me was his ability to maintain such an even balance between the two.
Lambert had a passion for enigmas. He adored cats, and had a strange attraction to aquariums, zoos, and their fascinatingly enigmatic inhabitants. He was President of the Kensington Kittens’ and Neuter Cats’ Club, Incorporated. An important club, a club with a President who knew quite a lot about cats. There is a story to the effect that there was once a most handsome cat at London’s Albert Hall who was a close friend of Lambert’s, a cat called Tiddleywinks, a discriminating cat, and a cat with a certain amount of musical taste. Lambert, the President, would never proceed with the job he had to do at the Albert Hall without a preliminary chat with Tiddleywinks. And all would be well.
Constant Lambert was working on, among other things, an autobiography, concerning which he one day inquired about completely inaccessible places left in our shrinking world, particularly since the last war and James Norman Hall have pretty well exposed the South Pacific islands. What he actually wanted to know was an inaccessible place to which to hie after its publication, “because,” he said, “I’m telling the truth about everyone I know, including myself, and I shall have to flee the wrath of my ‘friends,’ and find a safe place where the laws of libel cannot reach me. You know, in my country at least, ‘the greater the truth, the greater the libel.’”
There was an infinite variety in his “drive.” He conducted ballet at Covent Garden; radio concerts at the British Broadcasting Corporation; symphony concerts, with special emphasis on Liszt and Sibelius, with the London Philharmonic Orchestra; made magnificent, definitive recordings; recited the Sitwell poems in Façade at every opportunity; composed fresh, vital works; made striking musical arrangements. He was at once composer, conductor, critic, journalist, an authority on railroad systems, trains, and locomotives, a student of the atom bomb, and a talker. There are those who insist he was not easy to get to know. It could be. He was, as I have said, shy. He was a highly concentrated individual, living a lot on his nerves. Despite this, to those who knew him, he was the friendliest of good companions, a perpetual stimulus to those who delighted in knowing him.
One had to be prepared, to be sure, to discover, in the middle of one of one’s own sentences (and, frequently, one of his own) that he was—gone. He would tilt his chin in the air, stare suddenly into far distant spaces, turn on his heel with the help of his stick, as swiftly as a ballet-dancer in a pirouette, and silently vanish. He was a good listener—if one had anything to say. He did not suffer fools gladly, and to bores—that increasing affliction of our times—he presented an inflexible deafness akin to the switching-off of a hearing-aid, and a truly magnificent cast-iron rigidity of inattention. The bore fled. So did Lambert.