He is box-office poison nowadays but Ivor Novello, at his zenith, dominated the musicals genre and had a large charismatic capital on which he could draw. When, in 1951, he died a few hours after coming off stage at the Palace Theatre in London’s West End where he was heading the cast in his favourite musical, King’s Rhapsody, many of his devotees found it hard to be reconciled to the blow. Just as Hazlitt did not die of insignificance, to quote Virginia Woolf, neither did Ivor Novello die of public indifference. His funeral was broadcast live; thousands lined the streets; women wept.
Novello attracted crowds. The Dancing Years (1939) and Perchance to Dream (1945) were rooted in the national consciousness. Everyone had to go. Novello got receptions befitting a legend – ten curtain-calls, a thousand telegrams and hundreds of people at the stage door. He became the singular ruler of musicals. The critic, James Agate, hated musicals but admitted in a review that when the curtain went up on a Novello show the audience’s spirits went up with it. Glamorous Night (1935), his trail-blazer, drew capacity audiences. It drew King George V and Queen Mary into the huge Drury Lane Theatre where his first four musicals were mounted until ENSA took it over in the war. In the four roles of writer, composer, manager and lead actor in his musicals, a matinée idol and social icon, he lived at a rapid pace. He piled up successes and negotiated himself through failures (of which he had some but shrugged them off).
But now is the greatest failure, one that cannot be shrugged off. His musicals, so endowed with the power to draw audiences when he was around, were not endowed with permanence. Some of the songs and music are still performed, but basically Novello has proved vulnerable to charisma’s occupational hazard: time. Even in his own day it was something of a put-down that the culturally discriminating members of the Bloomsbury Group did not figure in his London audiences. Neither does he feature in Anthony Powell’s series of novels, Dance to the Music of Time, which pretty well covers his period.
Yet a cultural grounding Novello did to some extent have, albeit not under the name Novello. In 1893 he was born David Ivor Davies and, at ten years old, this boy in Cardiff won a choral scholarship to Magdalen College School, Oxford, where he was a choirboy for six years. He was grounded in classical choral music with its rhythmic complexities and choral weighting, and he learned the value of team-work. In the illumined arena of Magdalen College Chapel, he became a soloist. He exulted in performance; felicity was attained. Then his voice broke.
He found his vocation when he lost his voice. He did not sing again, but by the propulsion of his talents he kept with music. Magdalen College choir, however, was for him too exclusive a guide. Back in Cardiff, he was writing songs that, through the alchemy of his music, would reach a broader public. Under the sobriquet ‘Ivor Novello’, his Spring of the Year was published in 1910 by Boosey and Co., London. He took the name ‘Novello’ from his mother, Clara Novello Davies, the Novello element brought into the family nomenclature by her father’s whim. He, Jacob Davies, a miner of Tonyrefail and amateur musician, heard the acclaimed soprano, Clara Novello (1818-1908) either at the Three Choirs Festival where she appeared regularly, or at the old Opera House in Cardiff. She was a member of the musical Novello family – a group portrait of them by Edward Petre Novello c.1831 is in the National Portrait Gallery – which toured Europe and Britain. Charles Lamb, in a letter to Cowden Clarke in June 1834, tells how ‘at Winchmore Hill’ he could hear Clara, then only sixteen or seventeen, singing in The Music Festival in Westminster Abbey at that date. ‘She sang,’ says Lamb, ‘like an angel.’ Some twenty-five years later, the young Welsh miner, Jacob Davies thought so too and had his daughter, born 1861 – the very year the first Clara retired – christened after her. Only whim connected the Italian Clara Novello, whose forte was oratorio, with the Welsh Clara Novello Davies (both her maiden and married names were Davies) and her son, Ivor Novello, who acquired cachet by taking on that name.
Evangeline Florence sang Spring of the Year, as reported by the Daily Telegraph on 1 July 1911, at a concert in the Albert Hall, accompanied on the piano by the composer himself, aged eighteen. His mother had a poor opinion of his accompaniment. He hit upon a favourable resolution, however: to carry on writing songs. London became the area of necessity to him; he settled there and, aged twenty-one, had an outstanding success with his music for ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’ in 1914, a hinge year for him. Lena Guilbert Ford is generally thought to be the author of the words. She was an American poet living in London and has several lyrics attributed to her in the British Library catalogue. A friend of the family, she evidently gave the lyric to the aspiring twenty-one-year-old without signing a contract. She received no royalties. Novello later claimed the lyric was by him excepting for the last two lines. In another version, he was responsible for the opening line. But of the outcome there is no doubt. The song caught the mood of the time and Novello was raised to wealth. Lena Ford got nothing. How he dealt with her expectations is not known and never will be.She was killed at home by a zeppelin raid over London in 1918 and her correspondence and records went with her. For Novello, the success brought introductions and useful contacts. It defined his future – using the word ‘defined’ in the sense of setting limits. He was caught into popular work.
Support mobilised behind him in his light entertainment role and, strongly motivated to make money, he accepted that role. His music for Don Titheradge’s lyric And Her Mother Came Too (1921) was further proof that he had the élan the theatre-world looked for at that time. There was a co-ordination of events – Novello and his period of history. His powers ramified. Through the 1920s he was composing for theatrical reviews, acting in straight plays and appearing in films. He starred in The Constant Nymph and was directed by Alfred Hitchcock in The Lodger.
His mother wanted him to write operas but he had an aptitude for bewitching people, and circumstances conspired to keep it that way – writing musicals. What the public needed he supplied. He may have felt his higher artistic impulses thwarted, that his worldly success compromised his artistic side. MacQueen Pope, his first biographer and his PR Manager who worked with him for years, was convinced that was the case. Novello dealt with these tensions by evasion or obliquely coming at them in the narratives for his musicals.
The penniless composer in The Dancing Years, suddenly shot into affluence by an attention-grabbing song, reflects Novello’s own experience. At that story’s next stage the hero is thwarted in his affections. Maybe in an oblique way Novello was mirroring another aspect of himself. He had talents above the common run but in a spirit of contradiction he let them be thwarted by his own moneyed arrogance. He suffered from the jealousies of his own ambitions. Laurence Olivier asked whether he wanted to be a household name or an actor. He wanted both. He took on Henry V in 1938 and got temperate praise from James Agate, but financially the production was not fruitful. Such a risk Novello was not prepared to continue to take. In light entertainment the deals were better.
Another agent of persuasion to keep him in light entertainment was the Management of the Drury Lane Theatre, which did very well out of him. It objected to a section in the initial text of The Dancing Years where the hero is sentenced to death by the Nazis for protecting Jews. Such material was considered unsuitable for light entertainment. In a new version, the hero is reprieved at the last minute and that was soft-pedalled. One wonders whether Novello resented this interference and resented even more his own complicity in it.
He was trapped. In his narratives he shows a fascination for heroes who 79 take on a lower role in life than is rightfully theirs, who are outsiders, not native to the group they are with, and who assume a posturing identity to get on in life. A double-nature is suggested: one a genial ego, the other feigning detachment from ulterior motives – watchful, maybe with a hint of malice. Acting the part, Novello was the part. In Careless Rapture (1936) the virtuous but bastard hero is half- brother to a vicious but legitimate aristocrat. In Crest of the Waves (1937) Novello acted both hero and villain. He sensed an affinity. In him was this duality, the poetic and the dark, his aspiring artistic self and his Light Entertainment persona. His musicals involving disguised aristocrats dropping status to make a living are mythic re-enactments of his own condition in that his popular success lowered him to a cultural status well below that which his powers could have secured. In social terms, of course, it reflects his position in reverse. However, identity shifts were meat and drink to him.
There was that in his nature inimical to clear behaviour. In the autumn of 1944 he went to France, not far from the frontline, to entertain the troops with a play he chose: Frank Vosper’s dramatisation of Agatha Christie’s Love from a Stranger. He took the lead role – a man who marries a rich woman meaning to murder her and get her wealth. The rascal gets his comeuppance, and Novello himself, earlier that year, had got his when sentenced to four weeks’ imprisonment for ‘conspiracy to defraud’. (By some arrangement he had benefitted from government petrol at a time of strict rationing.) Thus, the play that Novello, soon after leaving prison, took to France was an odd one by which to entertain battle-weary troops. But the choice suggests he was lured by the play’s protagonist into looking at himself and was not altogether reconciled to himself. Maqueen Pope, in France with him, said Novello at the time looked as if he would welcome a stray bullet.
Nonetheless Mammon still beckoned when Novello returned to England. There were more successes, outstandingly Perchance to Dream (1945) which ran for ten years and for which he wrote, as well as the music, all the lyrics for the songs, of which one was We will Gather Lilacs. This came about because Hassall was still on war service. For King’s Rhapsody (1949) Hassall was back, writing lyrics for a musical more caustic than Novello’s work up until that time. Novello’s approach was yet sharper in Gay’s the Word (1951) where he mocked the romancing mode. He did not appear in it – he couldn’t, being lead actor in King’s Rhapsody during the run of which he died.
Many associates said Novello never really got over his four-week imprisonment. It impaired his health and he probably felt very bitter about it. The sentence was not appropriate; the magistrate should have been sent to prison.
Even a fine would have been excessive in view of the degree to which Novello’s work augmented public morale through the war. During the Blitz, with London theatres temporarily closed, he and his company toured England and Scotland, though not Wales where he was born. (From Wales, he lived the life of an exile, which is interesting given that the exilic experience was one of Novello’s central themes.) However, war-time tours were often hampered by stage sets arriving by rail late or damaged, by air-raids and various other problems. Yet wherever the venue, there was Novello hot-foot, night after night on stage, playing to cohorts of exhilarated fans. And in a social no-man’s-land, in temporary respite from his ‘living-it-up’ London life, he worked on his next musical. When London theatres were opened again he was back, playing to full houses, to soldiers on leave, to over- worked nurses, while understudies continued with the provincial tours. At times, four Novello shows ran concurrently, on tour and in London. His wartime career emphasises drive.
Something of this robustness migrated into his musicals – as well as seductive factors. Novello created the image of a romantic dynamo, creating complicated stories of a disguised aristocrat – the role he took – in picaresque or dangerous ramblings, of thwarted lovers, betrayals, father-and-son separations, disguises, shipwrecks and disasters. They mirrored some of the audiences’ experiences and anxieties at that time and some of his own. These tales, told through songs and music in settings of brilliant surface glitter that expanded the effect had, significantly, a ‘bloody but unbowed’ mood, a hovering optimism.
Enterprising, a man of business, Novello was, in fact, quite a cynic, aloof from the excitement he generated, operating from a different perspective. To outward show he was not contentious. He was charming. At curtain-calls he put on a naïve front; he feigned intimacy with the audience. But the charm masked a dark side. He said theatre was for make-believe and he made the public believe he was on their side. In reality, he looked down on it. There was a distance. Perhaps he gained creative potency from this distance. Perhaps it was an expression of residual resentments. The Dancing Years, a morale-booster in the war, was, in his off-stage parlance, The Prancing Queers. That would have got the attention of his public if revealed. His manipulative ability was a power-line parallel to his romanticism. In no way was he engulfed by romanticism. Novello said to a journalist, ‘I am not a highbrow. Empty seats and good opinions mean nothing to me … I am an unrepentant sentimentalist … Rightly or wrongly I believe that the theatre is primarily a place for make-believe’. Thereby Novello publicly announced himself: a sentimentalist appealing to the heart. In fact he was impervious to sentiment.
Just as subversions characterise the musicals’ story-lines, they characterise a side of him. He was homosexual. He did not have to get Christopher Hassall under his thrall, yet he did. Hassall, who wrote the lyrics for six of Novello’s eight musicals, was married with two children. Hassall’s son came to think of Novello as basically dishonest. Hassall’s daughter eventually committed suicide. Novello was attracted by the pull of danger. He was in a dangerous world. He was a predator himself. His demon drove him to create and to destroy – even himself.
Ironically, in view of the fact that Novello said theatre was primarily a place for make-believe, make-believe is the only way for anyone now to experience one of his musicals. Seats for a Novello musical are not just empty, they are not there. In his stories he showed interest in heroes adrift from their status, and that is the Novello problem now. There is in the Ivor Novello story a want of continuity.
In the long term, his death did not do him any good. A reputation for being mesmerising can become redundant. At the memorial service at St. Martin-in-the- Fields a few weeks after his funeral Trafalgar Square was packed with mourning fans to whom the service was relayed from the over-flowing church. Yet today in Cardiff, where he was born, there are many people who have not heard of him, others who just recall the song, ‘We’ll Gather Lilacs’. He is no longer an exile, however. There is now a bronze statue of him by Peter Nicholas, unveiled in June 1909, near the Millennium Centre at Cardiff Bay, the late Hilary David the moving spirit of the enterprise that was carried through by the then Lord Lieutenant of Glamorgan, Captain Norman Lloyd-Edwards. On the wider scene, Alan Bennett has his lead character in Enjoy sing snatches of Novello songs, and his songs and music are aired at concerts and after-dinner entertainments. But his musicals no longer capture the interest of theatre managers or sponsors.
Novello’s musicals had big casts – eighty dancers on stage at the same time in The Crest of the Wave. Earthquakes, sinking ships, train crashes – such episodes hitch the story along but can daunt a stage-manager. But practical difficulties are not the real reason why these musicals are out of favour. Novello is now seen as a romantic stuck in the obstructive past. In spite of his aristocrats-seeking- employment, he does not move very far from the old social realities. And there is no wit, nor is there potential for study. So an incompatibility has arisen. New persuasions and different perspectives hold sway. The public is more questioning, equivocal and splintered than in his day. Yet it cannot be said that Novello was unaware of escalating social change – there was an edge to his post-war work, and all along he had seen that relationships can founder, that social order can disintegrate.
But his personality, his verve, his power-line from Tonyrefail to great fame in his day, his complexity, his contradictions, his competitive success in London – theatre capital of the world – can still attract comment. His morale-boosting achievements are not really forgotten and neither should they be. The pressures of his times were such that the public had new emotional necessities which he addressed. He helped thousands through that dreadful period. Perhaps he sacrificed himself in doing so.