Percy Grainger in Adelaide
Early portrait
Famous composers have always been a bit thin on the ground in Adelaide. One notable exception was George Percy Grainger. Although mainly remembered for ‘dishing up’ arrangements of English folk-songs, Grainger was a musical warrior of the early twentieth century. He was a renowned concert pianist, his golden locks adored by thousands of fans; a friend and musical champion of composers such as Delius and Grieg; a pioneer of modern ‘free’ music (decades before the first synthesiser); a reformer of language; a flagellant. In short, an unfettered mind in a closed, conservative world.
Percy was the only son of John and Rose Grainger. Rose Aldridge grew up in Adelaide, the eighth child (and third daughter) of a King William Street hotel-keeper. She was a tomboy, and would often join her numerous brothers climbing trees and running wild around the city and their Kensington home (‘Claremont’, 37 East Parade, North Kensington, now a nursery). When she was not racing a horse-and-cart around town she was practising piano, an obsession she would later share with her son.
Rose inherited her father’s strong will. She met John Grainger, who’d come to Adelaide in 1877 as Assistant Architect and Engineer for the SA Government. When he wasn’t busy designing buildings and bridges (such as the Albert Bridge beside the Adelaide Zoo), Grainger was painting, singing and founding Adelaide’s first string quartet. Soon, Grainger was a frequent visitor to ‘Claremont’.
Despite his reputation for heavy drinking and flirtation (he apparently fancied Rose’s sister, Clara), Grainger was welcomed into the Aldridge ‘brood-group’ and married Rose at St Matthew’s Church, Kensington Road, on 1 October 1880. The couple honeymooned in the Blue Mountains. Upon their return to Adelaide, Rose was greeted with a letter from England from her new husband’s other fiancée, informing her she’d had a child with him.
Rose was concerned, but committed. The Graingers quickly relocated to Melbourne, where John had won a competition to design the new Princes Bridge over the Yarra. Rose soon fell pregnant. She wasn’t optimistic about her long-term prospects with John but decided to make the most of motherhood. On 8 July, 1882, George Percy Grainger was born. As the child emerged, crying, John showed little interest. He even told the doctor it wasn’t his first.
Rose dominated every aspect of her son’s life: music, manners, literature, views on race and family. She was a mass of contradictions and extremes. As a child, Grainger couldn’t see the threat of possession. He later said, ‘As a child … the thought often came to me that mother was really God.’
Rose tolerated John until 1890, when she packed him off to England for ‘medical treatment’. Grainger was syphilitic and had given his wife his ‘sex-pox’. From then on Rose was always careful to shield Percy from possible infection. As she got older, the fear of insanity haunted her, and eventually contributed to her eventual suicide in New York in 1922.
Rose and Percy were spiritually joined in a way that many today find difficult to understand. Grainger always obeyed his mother. ‘She would smack my face,’ Grainger said, ‘which I found very annoying, the more so as I neared forty.’ They shared a bed for longer than was considered decent. Rose demanded her son practise piano for hours every day. She wanted to produce Australia’s first great prodigy, and nothing was going to stand in her way.
Percy prospered in Melbourne. By the early 1890s he was already giving concerts to packed venues such as the Royal Exhibition Building. Rose was determined that young ‘Perks’ would become an Aldridge, not a Grainger. She regularly brought him back to Adelaide to spend time with his extended family.
One such trip saw his staying at Richmond Park Stud, at Marleston (now St Martin’s Nursing Home on Cudmore Terrace). Jim Aldridge, one of Rose’s brothers, had bought the stud in the late 1880s. Jim knew his horses, and thoroughbreds raised on these now suburban paddocks were in demand throughout the country. ‘Pistol’, the most famous of these horses, sired the winners of over 600 races.
At the time of his visit, Grainger was ten years old. Jim thought Percy was wasting his time on the piano. He offered to give him a horse. Rose was furious. She asked her brother if he wouldn’t prefer to subsidise his nephew’s music lessons? But Jim told his younger sister that he ‘didn’t believe in music’.
Regardless, Grainger always saw the Aldridges as ‘superior stock’. In 1933 he said, ‘The Aldridges seem to me so proper, so wholesome … so loving, so mild … I wish I could mix my spunk with theirs …’
Meanwhile, John Grainger hadn’t forgotten Percy. He’d send him letters and books from Perth, where he’d become Chief Architect to the WA Government. Rose didn’t have much good to say about her ex-, but Percy was more forgiving. Once, when they were living in Melbourne, Grainger saw a man jumping over their fence and called out ‘Thief!’ He later explained, ‘This caused my father to overturn his Indian ink bottle over his design. Yet all he said to me was, “You are a silly chump”.’
The adult Percy continued to have an ambivalent relationship with his father. Mark Carroll, lecturer at the Elder School of Music, and Grainer expert, believes that, ‘Percy was proud of his father’s achievements as an architect … but loathed [him] as a wife-beating alcoholic who infected his mum with the ‘Spanish sickness’. Carroll’s co-edited book, Self Portrait of Percy Grainger, provides a clear insight into the mind of ‘PAG’. He concludes that the Rose/Percy relationship is so misunderstood because, ‘Ill-informed people keep banging on about it.’
Grainger kept returning to Adelaide. He especially enjoyed staying with his Aunt Clara and Uncle Frank at ‘Claremont’. Grainger described Frank as ‘feebleminded’ but loved him more than any of his other aunts and uncles. He’d spend hours walking with him around Kensington and Norwood. ‘Uncle Frank was like the Tsar-son of mankind, cured of the ills of [civilisation] by the tween-comst [handicap] …’ Most of the Aldridge brothers would tease Frank, who’d run and hide in the outhouse, crying, before Percy found him and consoled him. ‘When I met him again in 1924 and 1926 I real-knew [realised] stronger than ever before how alike he and I were.’
After Frank and Clara’s death, ‘Claremont’ was left to Grainger. He came up with the idea of turning it into a museum of the Adelaide Aldridges. To him, it was sacred to his mother’s memory, and to the Aldridge’s ‘fairness of skin, hair and eyes’. Monica Syrette, Assistant Curator at Melbourne’s Grainger Museum, explains that ‘he was unable to make the necessary arrangements prior to his death’. Grainger’s widow, Ella, felt unable to cope with the house’s upkeep and sold it.
Rose knew there was no future for her son in Australia. ‘Culture’ was a European concept. In 1895 she took the teenage ‘Perks’ to Frankfurt to study and, in 1901, mother and son arrived in London in search of fame. Grainger was soon playing ‘at-homes’ for the rich and powerful, developing a reputation and audience. As a 20-year-old he was already performing the Tchaikovsky First Piano Concerto. A critic from The Times wrote that he showed ‘a good deal of artistic insight’. In 1903 he toured Britain, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Women were soon falling at his feet. One patron, socialite Lillith Lowrey, introduced him to the world of sex, although he later said, ‘I don’t think any joy entered into it.’
Edwardian London was kind to Grainger. He composed pieces such as Brigg Fair, Country Gardens and Handel in the Strand. He came to the notice of famous composers such as Busoni and Grieg (with whom he developed a life-long relationship). At last, he and Rose had money and the recognition they’d craved for so long. Grainger still hadn’t found love. Rose was having none of that. Her boy was destined for greater things.
In the late teens the Graingers moved to America and settled in White Plains, New York. America’s multitude of orchestras, and opportunities, was too tempting. Grainger would live here until his death in 1961. Over the years, his fortunes and reputation would rise and fall, but for now, at least, he was still greatly in demand as a concert pianist, conductor and composer. In 1924, for example, his publishers sold 27,000 copies of the sheet music for Country Gardens.
In the same year he returned to Adelaide to stay with his Aunt Clara and now bed-ridden Uncle Frank at ‘Claremont’. During this visit he interred Rose’s ashes (after her 1922 suicide) in the Aldridge vault in West Terrace Cemetery. One of Grainger’s biographers, John Bird, explains that there is no record of this happening, and it’s generally believed that Grainger entered the cemetery one night and ‘buried her’ himself.
On the trip back to Melbourne, Grainger got off the train at Tailem Bend and decided to walk to Keith. Later he said, ‘The two nights under the bright moon and stars … all unforgettable.’ To break his journey, he stopped at a hotel but the landlady, guessing he was some sort of bum, refused to let him stay. He told her he was the pianist and composer Percy Grainger but she wasn’t impressed. He took her to an old piano in the dining room and showed her what he could do. She reluctantly gave him a room.
In November 1925, at the end of a tour of Australia, Grainger was back at ‘Claremont’. Determined to show his gratitude to his mother’s home town he wrote to Professor E. Harold Davies at the Elder Conservatorium offering control of the ‘Rose Grainger Orchestral Fund’ to the Council of the University of Adelaide. The fund, created to perpetuate Rose’s name, was created to help further the cause of music education and concert-giving (principally through the then South Australian Orchestra) in SA. Grainger originally put in for five hundred pounds. He also convinced fellow composers such as Ralph Vaughan-Williams to contribute.
Today, the fund still supports music education. The Elder Conservatorium Symphony, Wind and Chamber orchestras all benefit from Grainger’s generosity. In a September 1926 letter to The Register, Grainger explained, ‘… Australians, as a whole, do not yet realise the extent of the expenditures needed to provide reasonable opportunity for the proper development of all this natural talent …’ Which leads one to ask if much has changed in the intervening years. With almost Dunstan-esque vision he said ‘We must not rest until Adelaide is one of the great music centres of the world.’
On the morning of 20 February, 1961, as Grainger lay dying, he turned to Ella, the wife he only dared take after Rose’s death, and said, ‘You’re the only one I like.’ As he finally succumbed to abdominal cancer, he must have felt free: from the demands music, his mother, his family, the pressure to perform.
For Grainger, all paths led back to Adelaide. Even in death, he knew he was more Aldridge than Grainger. His body was returned to Australia, to St Matthew’s Church, Kensington, the site of his parents’ wedding. After a short service he was driven to West Terrace Cemetery, where he was laid to rest beside his mother in the Aldridge vault.
Percy and Rose had a remarkable relationship. Grainger once said, ‘People are wrong who think that children suffer from having tyrannical parents. They suffer from having willy-nilly parents.’ In a sense, Rose created the Grainger we remember.
Percy was the only son of John and Rose Grainger. Rose Aldridge grew up in Adelaide, the eighth child (and third daughter) of a King William Street hotel-keeper. She was a tomboy, and would often join her numerous brothers climbing trees and running wild around the city and their Kensington home (‘Claremont’, 37 East Parade, North Kensington, now a nursery). When she was not racing a horse-and-cart around town she was practising piano, an obsession she would later share with her son.
Rose inherited her father’s strong will. She met John Grainger, who’d come to Adelaide in 1877 as Assistant Architect and Engineer for the SA Government. When he wasn’t busy designing buildings and bridges (such as the Albert Bridge beside the Adelaide Zoo), Grainger was painting, singing and founding Adelaide’s first string quartet. Soon, Grainger was a frequent visitor to ‘Claremont’.
Despite his reputation for heavy drinking and flirtation (he apparently fancied Rose’s sister, Clara), Grainger was welcomed into the Aldridge ‘brood-group’ and married Rose at St Matthew’s Church, Kensington Road, on 1 October 1880. The couple honeymooned in the Blue Mountains. Upon their return to Adelaide, Rose was greeted with a letter from England from her new husband’s other fiancée, informing her she’d had a child with him.
Rose was concerned, but committed. The Graingers quickly relocated to Melbourne, where John had won a competition to design the new Princes Bridge over the Yarra. Rose soon fell pregnant. She wasn’t optimistic about her long-term prospects with John but decided to make the most of motherhood. On 8 July, 1882, George Percy Grainger was born. As the child emerged, crying, John showed little interest. He even told the doctor it wasn’t his first.
Rose dominated every aspect of her son’s life: music, manners, literature, views on race and family. She was a mass of contradictions and extremes. As a child, Grainger couldn’t see the threat of possession. He later said, ‘As a child … the thought often came to me that mother was really God.’
Rose tolerated John until 1890, when she packed him off to England for ‘medical treatment’. Grainger was syphilitic and had given his wife his ‘sex-pox’. From then on Rose was always careful to shield Percy from possible infection. As she got older, the fear of insanity haunted her, and eventually contributed to her eventual suicide in New York in 1922.
Rose and Percy were spiritually joined in a way that many today find difficult to understand. Grainger always obeyed his mother. ‘She would smack my face,’ Grainger said, ‘which I found very annoying, the more so as I neared forty.’ They shared a bed for longer than was considered decent. Rose demanded her son practise piano for hours every day. She wanted to produce Australia’s first great prodigy, and nothing was going to stand in her way.
Percy prospered in Melbourne. By the early 1890s he was already giving concerts to packed venues such as the Royal Exhibition Building. Rose was determined that young ‘Perks’ would become an Aldridge, not a Grainger. She regularly brought him back to Adelaide to spend time with his extended family.
One such trip saw his staying at Richmond Park Stud, at Marleston (now St Martin’s Nursing Home on Cudmore Terrace). Jim Aldridge, one of Rose’s brothers, had bought the stud in the late 1880s. Jim knew his horses, and thoroughbreds raised on these now suburban paddocks were in demand throughout the country. ‘Pistol’, the most famous of these horses, sired the winners of over 600 races.
At the time of his visit, Grainger was ten years old. Jim thought Percy was wasting his time on the piano. He offered to give him a horse. Rose was furious. She asked her brother if he wouldn’t prefer to subsidise his nephew’s music lessons? But Jim told his younger sister that he ‘didn’t believe in music’.
Regardless, Grainger always saw the Aldridges as ‘superior stock’. In 1933 he said, ‘The Aldridges seem to me so proper, so wholesome … so loving, so mild … I wish I could mix my spunk with theirs …’
Meanwhile, John Grainger hadn’t forgotten Percy. He’d send him letters and books from Perth, where he’d become Chief Architect to the WA Government. Rose didn’t have much good to say about her ex-, but Percy was more forgiving. Once, when they were living in Melbourne, Grainger saw a man jumping over their fence and called out ‘Thief!’ He later explained, ‘This caused my father to overturn his Indian ink bottle over his design. Yet all he said to me was, “You are a silly chump”.’
The adult Percy continued to have an ambivalent relationship with his father. Mark Carroll, lecturer at the Elder School of Music, and Grainer expert, believes that, ‘Percy was proud of his father’s achievements as an architect … but loathed [him] as a wife-beating alcoholic who infected his mum with the ‘Spanish sickness’. Carroll’s co-edited book, Self Portrait of Percy Grainger, provides a clear insight into the mind of ‘PAG’. He concludes that the Rose/Percy relationship is so misunderstood because, ‘Ill-informed people keep banging on about it.’
Grainger kept returning to Adelaide. He especially enjoyed staying with his Aunt Clara and Uncle Frank at ‘Claremont’. Grainger described Frank as ‘feebleminded’ but loved him more than any of his other aunts and uncles. He’d spend hours walking with him around Kensington and Norwood. ‘Uncle Frank was like the Tsar-son of mankind, cured of the ills of [civilisation] by the tween-comst [handicap] …’ Most of the Aldridge brothers would tease Frank, who’d run and hide in the outhouse, crying, before Percy found him and consoled him. ‘When I met him again in 1924 and 1926 I real-knew [realised] stronger than ever before how alike he and I were.’
After Frank and Clara’s death, ‘Claremont’ was left to Grainger. He came up with the idea of turning it into a museum of the Adelaide Aldridges. To him, it was sacred to his mother’s memory, and to the Aldridge’s ‘fairness of skin, hair and eyes’. Monica Syrette, Assistant Curator at Melbourne’s Grainger Museum, explains that ‘he was unable to make the necessary arrangements prior to his death’. Grainger’s widow, Ella, felt unable to cope with the house’s upkeep and sold it.
Rose knew there was no future for her son in Australia. ‘Culture’ was a European concept. In 1895 she took the teenage ‘Perks’ to Frankfurt to study and, in 1901, mother and son arrived in London in search of fame. Grainger was soon playing ‘at-homes’ for the rich and powerful, developing a reputation and audience. As a 20-year-old he was already performing the Tchaikovsky First Piano Concerto. A critic from The Times wrote that he showed ‘a good deal of artistic insight’. In 1903 he toured Britain, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Women were soon falling at his feet. One patron, socialite Lillith Lowrey, introduced him to the world of sex, although he later said, ‘I don’t think any joy entered into it.’
Edwardian London was kind to Grainger. He composed pieces such as Brigg Fair, Country Gardens and Handel in the Strand. He came to the notice of famous composers such as Busoni and Grieg (with whom he developed a life-long relationship). At last, he and Rose had money and the recognition they’d craved for so long. Grainger still hadn’t found love. Rose was having none of that. Her boy was destined for greater things.
In the late teens the Graingers moved to America and settled in White Plains, New York. America’s multitude of orchestras, and opportunities, was too tempting. Grainger would live here until his death in 1961. Over the years, his fortunes and reputation would rise and fall, but for now, at least, he was still greatly in demand as a concert pianist, conductor and composer. In 1924, for example, his publishers sold 27,000 copies of the sheet music for Country Gardens.
In the same year he returned to Adelaide to stay with his Aunt Clara and now bed-ridden Uncle Frank at ‘Claremont’. During this visit he interred Rose’s ashes (after her 1922 suicide) in the Aldridge vault in West Terrace Cemetery. One of Grainger’s biographers, John Bird, explains that there is no record of this happening, and it’s generally believed that Grainger entered the cemetery one night and ‘buried her’ himself.
On the trip back to Melbourne, Grainger got off the train at Tailem Bend and decided to walk to Keith. Later he said, ‘The two nights under the bright moon and stars … all unforgettable.’ To break his journey, he stopped at a hotel but the landlady, guessing he was some sort of bum, refused to let him stay. He told her he was the pianist and composer Percy Grainger but she wasn’t impressed. He took her to an old piano in the dining room and showed her what he could do. She reluctantly gave him a room.
In November 1925, at the end of a tour of Australia, Grainger was back at ‘Claremont’. Determined to show his gratitude to his mother’s home town he wrote to Professor E. Harold Davies at the Elder Conservatorium offering control of the ‘Rose Grainger Orchestral Fund’ to the Council of the University of Adelaide. The fund, created to perpetuate Rose’s name, was created to help further the cause of music education and concert-giving (principally through the then South Australian Orchestra) in SA. Grainger originally put in for five hundred pounds. He also convinced fellow composers such as Ralph Vaughan-Williams to contribute.
Today, the fund still supports music education. The Elder Conservatorium Symphony, Wind and Chamber orchestras all benefit from Grainger’s generosity. In a September 1926 letter to The Register, Grainger explained, ‘… Australians, as a whole, do not yet realise the extent of the expenditures needed to provide reasonable opportunity for the proper development of all this natural talent …’ Which leads one to ask if much has changed in the intervening years. With almost Dunstan-esque vision he said ‘We must not rest until Adelaide is one of the great music centres of the world.’
On the morning of 20 February, 1961, as Grainger lay dying, he turned to Ella, the wife he only dared take after Rose’s death, and said, ‘You’re the only one I like.’ As he finally succumbed to abdominal cancer, he must have felt free: from the demands music, his mother, his family, the pressure to perform.
For Grainger, all paths led back to Adelaide. Even in death, he knew he was more Aldridge than Grainger. His body was returned to Australia, to St Matthew’s Church, Kensington, the site of his parents’ wedding. After a short service he was driven to West Terrace Cemetery, where he was laid to rest beside his mother in the Aldridge vault.
Percy and Rose had a remarkable relationship. Grainger once said, ‘People are wrong who think that children suffer from having tyrannical parents. They suffer from having willy-nilly parents.’ In a sense, Rose created the Grainger we remember.
