Occupying much of my time over the past weeks and months has been the large sheet music collection of famed horn player, Dennis Brain (1921-1957). This collection was purchased at auction in 1998 by lawyer and keen horn player, Mark Andrews, in a bid to rescue it from dispersal. In 2023 the collection was entrusted to the care of the Royal College of Music. While my colleague, Robert Foster, has taken the manuscripts under his wing, the task of sorting and cataloguing the printed items – the bulk of the collection – fell to me, a long-lapsed horn player.
If there is one great hornist from the past that every horn student can name, it is Dennis Brain. Hailing from a long pedigree of hornists, Brain’s exemplary technique and affable personality rendered him the most in-demand player of the 1940s and 50s. His tragic death in a car crash in 1957, aged only 36, solidified the legend. Francis Poulenc’s Elegie for horn and piano, composed in response to this accident, is now a standard repertoire piece.
Coming face-to-face with the collection for the first time, I was initially taken aback by its extraordinarily miscellaneous nature. Not only did it contain horn solo works, but also chamber sets used by the Dennis Brain Wind Ensemble, orchestral parts for symphonies, and hundreds of miniature scores for standard (and not-so-standard) works. If I had been expecting a larger weighting towards the horn solo repertoire, this was a mistaken assumption; for the largest part of Brain’s performance activity was as an orchestral player, in both the Philharmonia and Royal Philharmonic orchestras. To judge from the sheer volume of orchestral scores in his possession, orchestral playing was no less of a passion than performing as a soloist.
One of the most obvious applications of printed music formerly owned by esteemed players is the study of their annotations to gain insight into their performance technique. Many such items in the RCM’s collections are used this way, most famously Fanny Davies’ copies of Brahms’ music, with annotations originating from performances under the composer’s own direction. Those hoping to use Brain’s collection in this way, however, will be sorely disappointed. The majority of his scores are free from meaningful annotations, with the exception of the odd dynamic marking here or there. The RCM’s Adrian Boult collection of scores formerly owned by the celebrated conductor shares this same characteristic. Yet even absence of annotation is, itself, an insight into performance practice; and both Brain and Boult’s lack of markings underline the fact that most of their performances were from memory.
What, then, is the use of such a collection? While some more imagination may be required in our approach, the collection’s value is not lessened by this deficiency. Personal inscriptions from composers to Brain reveal much about his friendships and networks; one such example is Benjamin Britten’s teasing remark, inscribed on a copy of his Serenade for tenor, horn and strings, op. 31: ‘For Dennis – in case he lost the other’. Several other scores offer insights into music publishers’ promotional techniques, sending complimentary copies to Brain in hopes that ‘it might interest you for performance.’ (E. C. Holmes of Chappell & Co., writing to Brain in 1954, regarding Leslie Bassett’s Sonata for horn and piano.)
As a snapshot into what music was bought and valued by musicians at a particular place and time in history, personal music collections – when kept together – can be extremely insightful, as certain repertoire falls out of fashion and is replaced by newer works. This was the main takeaway of hornist Stephen Stirling, one of the first people to seriously explore this collection’s potential (and, coincidentally, my former horn teacher). Writing in November 2021, Stirling observed that Brain’s collection included ‘several printed, yet virtually unknown works’, which ‘grabbed our attention for the simple reason that they were very well thumbed!’ He subsequently recorded, in partnership with Tony Halstead, Kathron Sturrock and Christian Halstead, a great number of these works on the CD release, From Dennis Brain’s Library. A second volume is in the works.
Having now catalogued the collection myself, I can concur with Stirling’s comments. Not only are much of its contents ‘virtually unknown’, it would also appear that, for some works, Brain’s copy is the only surviving in the UK, or even the world. No other UK libraries that I can discover, for example, profess to hold a copy of Hermann Blume’s Horn concerto; while if Carl Bowman’s Ballad for French horn and orchestra or Sverre Jordan’s Concerto romantico, op. 63 are available elsewhere in the world, they are extremely difficult to track down. Of course, one cannot say with certainty that these are unique copies (we all have piles of items waiting to be catalogued!), but, at least in the meantime, the cataloguing of Dennis Brain’s collection has brought these works to light and made them available to researchers once again.
For a handful of items, we can have greater certainty about their uniqueness. The obvious example is manuscripts. Brain’s collection had few of these, but those that survive are very interesting indeed. Alexander Ecklebe’s Sonata for horn and piano and Arnold Cooke’s Arioso and scherzo, for example, were both unpublished; both were recorded by Stirling for From Dennis Brain’s Library. Even for works that were eventually published, Brain’s manuscripts may hold information that will interest researchers. RCM MS 23772, for example, appears to be a pre-publication copyist manuscript used by Brain in the first performance of Michael Tippett’s Sonata for four horns. Other items are printed, but unique in other ways: a proof copy of Othmar Schoeck’s Horn concerto, op. 65, differs notably from its final published form and contains manuscript corrections, including a judicious observation that the compositor had forgotten to include tempo markings. In a similar vein, one of the collection’s most intriguing items is a corrected proof copy of the horn solo part to Ethel Smyth’s Concerto for violin, horn and orchestra, which was composed for Brain’s father, Aubrey (1893-1955), and is marked, ‘Mr. Brains part (for him to keep)’.
The printed portion of Dennis Brain’s collection is now fully catalogued and open for research enquiries.
Jonathan Frank
Assistant Librarian, Royal College of Music