Isolde Menges 1893–1976
English (United Kingdom)
English Violinist
Biography
During the interwar years, Britain could boast a galaxy of woman violinists: the sisters Jelly d’Arányi and Adila Fachiri; Marie Hall; May Harrison; Marjorie Hayward; Australian-born Daisy Kennedy; and Eda Kersey. Among these the name of Isolde Menges burned as brightly as any. But the intense competition and her own inclinations led her to be gradually defined in the public mind as a chamber music player; whereas she had actually been schooled in the Romantic tradition and had started out as a soloist along the lines of, say, Nathan Milstein. Her gifts as an educator helped to project a somewhat Olympian image of her. Yet she was a musician of humility who, unusually for her time, sought to meet the great composers on their own terms. Her contribution to British music was inestimable.
Eldest of four children in a musical family, Menges seemed predestined for her role; her parents, violinists themselves, ran a music school in Hove, Sussex, and her youngest brother Herbert became a conductor. When George and Kate Menges were on honeymoon in his native Germany, they bought a child’s fiddle and dreamed of having a baby who would grow into a great violinist. That firstborn, who arrived on 16 May 1893 and was christened Isolde Marie, soon showed signs of burgeoning musical talent: at three she could play six pieces by heart, before she could read music, and she was well schooled by her parents. After further lessons with Léon Sametini and Emile Sauret, she went in 1910 to study with Leopold Auer in St Petersburg and Dresden, staying with him three years and becoming one of his favourites. When she first played to Auer, she chose Bach’s C major Fugue; but he stopped her after about a page and said: ‘Your bowing is all wrong.’ For four months she had to concentrate on Auer’s slow bowing exercises, until he said: ‘Now you are ready to work on repertoire.’ Later Menges would tell friends: ‘Ever since then, I have never had any problems with the bow.’
For her London debut on 4 February 1913, Menges brought her local Brighton orchestra with her to Queen’s Hall to back her in Tchaikovsky’s Concerto and Lalo’s Symphonie espagnole. Perceptively the critic of The Times praised her ‘remarkable command of the bow’ and her ‘extraordinarily pure’ tone. Two weeks later she played the Wieniawski D minor and Beethoven Concertos, The Times again mentioning ‘very pure tone’ and ‘strikingly flexible bowing’; in March she gave a recital at the Bechstein Hall; in May she was back at Queen’s Hall for the Brahms and Glazunov Concertos with the LSO under Mengelberg; and in June she gave a recital there with Hamilton Harty at the piano. The autumn saw her make her Berlin debut, with Safonov conducting; and Mengelberg welcomed her to the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam.
A great career seemed assured but in the xenophobic atmosphere of World War I, artists of German descent were regarded with suspicion in Britain. So in 1916 Menges began a North America tour which lasted until 1919, taking in all the major orchestras: after her U.S. debut on 21 October 1916, Musical America called her ‘the best feminine violinist by far disclosed to New York’. In Canada she gave more than 100 free concerts for children, talking to them about the programmes. In 1920 she married the composer Harold Tod Boyd, whom she had met in Canada – she was to play some of his pieces, such as Samoan Lullaby, Serenade and Valse Capricieuse, and they were to have one child, David. In 1921 she again toured America (enjoying a reunion with Auer) and in 1922 she became the first to record the Beethoven Concerto complete (with Sir Landon Ronald conducting – the 1919 version by Joan Manén had been slightly cut). She even appeared on the same concert bill as Chaliapin. Menges’ repertoire took in all the usual concertos, including the Dvorák, but extended to rarities like Dohnányi’s First. She made regular appearances as a soloist at the Proms and toured energetically, finding particular success in Holland and Germany. Hamilton Harty composed his Variations on an Irish Air for her (the tune was Terence’s Farewell to Kathleen); and Eric Gritton wrote her a number of pieces. But in her mid-30s her career took a new turn.
She had played sonatas with the Belgian pupil of Liszt, Arthur de Greef, and more especially with Harold Samuel; but her epiphany came about through the cellist with whom Samuel and she made up a trio. Ivor James (1882-1963), ‘Jimmy’ to his friends, was a sympathetic teacher, a tireless educator and a profound musician. He knew more about Beethoven’s chamber music than anyone except Adolf Busch (who incidentally liked to have James as second cellist in the Schubert Quintet). In 1929 James directed a summer school at Westminster College, Cambridge – the first such course in Britain – and asked Menges to lead the resident quartet. Pierre Tas was the second violinist, Belgian-born Alfred de Reyghere the violist and James the cellist; and they worked so well together that when the course moved to the Royal Normal College at Bangor, Wales, the following year, the quartet was reconstituted – and the four met again there in 1931, by which time it was clear the association would have to be permanent.
‘Isolde was never meant to be a chamber music player,’ said her long-time associate, the violist Jean Stewart. ‘She was a soloist. But a new world opened to her when she found all this wonderful quartet music.’ The Menges Quartet quickly became one of the busiest in the country. Tas and de Reyghere soon had to drop out, to be replaced by Beatrice Carrelle and John Yewe Dyer; but de Reyghere found time to be second viola in the Menges String Quintet and String Sextet. The second cellist was Helen Just (Mrs Ivor James); and Ruth Pearl and Irene Richards came in for the Mendelssohn Octet. Menges programmed sextets by Martinu (a British premiere), Bach (the Ricercare), Bridge, Dvorák, Schoenberg and Tchaikovsky and Vaughan Williams’ Double Trio (a world premiere) and Phantasy Quintet, as well as the expected Mozart, Schubert and Brahms. On its own the Menges Quartet became known for its Beethoven cycles and the other Viennese Classics, but also for Franck, Sibelius, Delius (his Quartet was played in Berlin in 1937), Smetana, Dvorák, Tovey (Air with Variations), Tippett (First Quartet) and Bridge. Isolde Menges taught at the Royal College of Music from 1931; and she sought to educate her quartet audiences, too – though here she delegated the lecturing to the eloquent Ivor James. The summer courses at Bangor continued through the 1930s but later moved to Downe House, near Newbury.
Harold Samuel died in 1937 but Menges found a new sonata partner in Howard Ferguson – his own Violin Sonata was one of their party pieces. And when the war came, the Menges Quartet was one of the pillars of Myra Hess’s National Gallery Concerts. Hess, Menges and James played all the Beethoven Violin Sonatas and Trios; and Hess joined Menges in a number of sonata recitals in and out of London. At the Gallery the quartet gave lecture recitals as well as many normal concerts, premiering Vilem Tausky’s Coventry Meditation and Arnold van Wyk’s Five Elegies. Jean Stewart took over as violist from Yewe Dyer in 1941 and their most unusual premiere featured the work with prominent viola solos which Vaughan Williams wrote ‘for Jean on her birthday’: it was played twice at the National Gallery Concert of 12 October 1944, separated by the Haydn/Hofstetter Serenade Quartet. By then Beatrice Carrelle had ceded her place in the ensemble to the young Canadian violinist Lorraine du Val.
The Menges Quartet continued with equal vigour after the war. In the 1949–50 season (with Yewe Dyer back in the fold while Stewart raised a family) they gave an informal series of concerts in London at which major chamber works were discussed and performed; and their Beethoven cycles were still well received. But as Ivor James and Menges herself grew older, the ensemble’s activity inevitably decreased, ceasing altogether in 1956 when James gave up the summer school at Downe House. ‘Isolde Menges was a very great musician,’ said Jean Stewart. ‘She got under the skin of the Beethoven Quartets more deeply than anyone else I have ever heard, except Busch. She made us all listen more to each other. She could be a little stern – you could say what you wanted to say in rehearsal but it didn’t follow that you would win. But a bit of argument about music never did anyone any harm; and there was always Jimmy, who knew more than any of us.’ It is a great pity that no Beethoven was recorded by the Menges Quartet: all we have are two works by Dvorák, the Sextet and the great G major Quartet, Op. 106.
Isolde Menges’ violins were a 1714 Stradivari, a Guadagnini and an interesting bastard instrument, said by Hill’s to be the joint handiwork of Andrea Guarneri and Giuseppe Guarneri del Gesù. She and her husband, who died in 1946, had always been interested in Pekinese dogs and as she wound down her career, she began to breed them – some 50 Pekes shared her large Victorian house and garden at Barnes with cats, poultry, finches, waxwings, budgerigars and a parrot. Norman Rosenberg, who visited her in her eighties, described her as ‘a large, formidable lady’. Fond of gardening and reading, she took an interest in the occult and such subjects as philosophy, theosophy and Rosicrucianism. She died on 13 January 1976.
Menges named Bach and Beethoven as her favourite composers, with Mozart and Schubert not far behind. She was one of the first to record the Beethoven Concerto – only Joan Manén beat her to it. Among her other recordings, it is worth mentioning two by Bach: the Fugue from the G minor solo Sonata, BWV 1001, a remarkable piece of playing, and the E major Sonata, BWV 1016, with Harold Samuel. ContraClassics has the Kreutzer Sonata (with Arthur de Greef) and Brahms’ A major and D minor Sonatas (with Samuel). Menges was one of the most musicianly violinists and her innate modesty and good taste imbued all her recordings with the true Classical spirit. In her youth she was sometimes criticised for impulsiveness but in maturity she had an impeccable sense of rhythm; and in her best recordings the intellectual, expressive and technical demands of the music were held in ideal balance. The confident yet probing account of the Kreutzer Sonata with de Greef has always been considered one of the better interpretations, with the ‘size’ of this epic work amply conveyed. The two Brahms Sonatas are reminders that for the composer’s centenary in 1933, she and her friends played all his chamber music at the Wigmore Hall.
The pianists heard with Menges on the ContraClassics recordings were both sterling artists in their own right. Arthur de Greef, who was born in Louvain on 10 October 1862 and died in Brussels on 29 August 1940, was a composer who had studied with Gevaert and had known Liszt and Grieg. A piano pupil of Brassin at the Brussels Conservatoire, he was himself professor of piano there from 1887 and a busy travelling virtuoso, who liked to play from the music even in works he had performed hundreds of times. Much admired in the Classics, especially Mozart, de Greef was also Grieg’s own favourite exponent of his Concerto. Harold Samuel, who was born in London on 23 May 1879 and died there on 15 January 1937, was renowned on both sides of the Atlantic for his Bach recitals but commanded a wide repertoire, as befitted a pupil of Dannreuther. He made relatively few recordings, of which those with Menges were perhaps the best.