I have given some indication of the width of his interests. It was amazing. His gusto for life was unquenchable, and with it was a wise, shrewd appraisement of the human comedy—and tragedy. He was able to get through an enormous amount of work without ever seeming to do anything. Best of all, perhaps, he was able to enjoy a joke against himself. In this world of the arts and artists, where morbid egotisms and too exposed nerves victimize and vitiate the artist, it was a boon to him and an extraordinarily attractive characteristic.
Above all, he had an undying belief in British Ballet.
The last performance I saw Lambert conduct was the first performance of his last ballet, Tiresias, which was the occasion of a Gala in aid of the Ballet Benevolent Fund in the presence of H.M. the Queen and Princess Elizabeth, on the 9th July, 1951. Tiresias was a work on which Lambert had gone back to his collaboration with Frederick Ashton. The story he had made himself; it was a sort of composite of the myths about Tiresias; reduced to as much of a capsule as I can, it deals with the duality of Tiresias—as man and woman—and how he was struck blind by Hera, when Tiresias proves her wrong when she argues with Zeus that man’s lot is happier than woman’s. It was, this ballet, a sort of family affair in a sense; for Lambert’s wife, Isabel, designed scenery and costumes, setting the three-scened work on the Island of Crete.
After the first performance, we met at a large party to which I had gone with David Webster. Lambert and his wife, along with Ninette de Valois and Lady Keynes (Lydia Lopokova), joined us at supper. The ballet had been a long one, running quite a bit more than an hour, and there was general agreement among us that the work would benefit from judicious cutting. Lambert thoughtfully considered all the suggestions that were proffered; agreed that, conceivably, a cut or two might improve it, but the question was where and how, without damaging what he felt was the basic structure of the whole.
Not long after this, Lambert and I met at the door of Covent Garden, having arrived simultaneously. We had a brief chat, and he was his usual vastly courteous and amusing self.
A few days later, at the Savoy, my telephone rang quite early in the morning. “Madame’s” secretary, Jane Edgeworth, at the other end, informed me Constant Lambert had just died. I was stunned.
It appeared that Lambert had been taken ill while at a party and had been rushed to London Clinic, one of London’s most exclusive and finest nursing-homes, on Sunday evening, the 19th August. It was on Tuesday morning, the 21st August, that I received the news of his death. The funeral was quite private, since the entire Sadler’s Wells company was away from London performing at the Edinburgh Festival. Lambert was buried from the Church of St. Bartholomew the Great, at Smithfield, in the City of London. So private was the service that almost no one was there, and there were no Pallbearers.
I was present at the Memorial Service, held at the famous Church of St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields, at Charing Cross, overlooking the National Gallery. There were gathered his sorrowing company, now returned from Edinburgh, headed by Ninette de Valois, Frederick Ashton, and David Webster. The address was given by the Reverend C. B. Mortlock. Robert Helpmann, an old colleague, read the Lesson. The chorus of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, sang Bach’s Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring. At the close, John Churchill, one of Britain’s greatest organists and an old friend of Lambert’s, played on the organ that elegiac work Lambert had composed at the rape of Holland, and which he had conducted so magnificently at the Metropolitan Opera House—his Aubade Heroique.
Here at St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields his colleagues paid him honor. I was deeply moved. At the little funeral, I had been equally stirred. Here before me was all that remained of the great man who never took his greatness seriously; the man who would go to any trouble on behalf of those who tried, but who, for those who were lazy, or cynical, or thought themselves superior, and without justification, he had no use whatever. Here was a man about whom there was nothing of the academic recluse, but a man who loved life as he loved music, ballet, fully, strongly, with ever-growing zest and with ever-deepening understanding; the man who had done so much for ballet, its music, its standards; who had been of such vital importance in the fashioning of Sadler’s Wells. My thoughts went back to his creations, his arrangements. I was actually conscious of his imprint on all ballet. Memories of his wit, his brilliance, crowded into my mind.
I expected, I think, that with the sudden passing of a man of such fame, there would be an outpouring of thousands for his funeral, to pay their last, grateful respects. I was surprised. This was not the case, as I have explained. A few close distinguished friends and colleagues gathered beside the coffin in the Church of St. Bartholomew the Great, in the City: Sir William Walton, Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell, Sir Arthur Bliss, Edmund Rubbra, Alan Rawsthorne, Ninette de Valois, Frederick Ashton, and Robert Helpmann who had hurried down from Edinburgh.