16 Facts About Constant Lambert

1.

Leonard Constant Lambert was a British composer, conductor, and author.

2.

Constant Lambert was the founder and music director of the Royal Ballet, and he was a major figure in the establishment of the English ballet as a significant artistic movement.

3.

The son of Australian painter George Lambert and his wife Amy, and the younger brother of Maurice Lambert, Constant Lambert was educated at Christ's Hospital near Horsham in West Sussex.

4.

Constant Lambert had a great interest in African-American music, and once said that he would have ideally liked The Rio Grande to feature a black choir.

5.

Constant Lambert held a very positive view of jazz rhythms and their incorporation in classical music saying once that:.

6.

Constant Lambert was to take his interest in jazz much further in works such as the Piano Sonata and the Concerto for piano and nine Instruments, where the style moves away from the "symphonic jazz" of Gershwin and Paul Whiteman to something much more tense and urban, with popular and formal elements of composition closely integrated, rhythms jagged and extreme, and harmony sometimes approaching atonalism.

7.

Constant Lambert was appointed in 1931 as conductor and music director of the Vic-Wells ballet, but his career as a composer stagnated.

8.

Constant Lambert was ruled unfit for active service in the armed forces; decades of hard drinking had impaired his health, which declined further with the development of diabetes that remained undiagnosed and untreated until very late in his life.

9.

Constant Lambert himself considered he had failed as a composer, and completed only two major works after the disappointment of Summer's Last Will and Testament - they were the ballet scores Horoscope and Tiresias - though there were several smaller works, such as the white-note piano four hands suite Trois pieces negres pour les touches blanches, written for the identical twin piano duo Mary and Geraldine Peppin.

10.

Constant Lambert continued to be featured as a guest conductor until shortly before his death in 1951.

11.

An expert on painting, sculpture, and literature as well as music, Constant Lambert differed from most of his fellow English composers of the time in his perception of the importance of jazz.

12.

Constant Lambert responded positively to the music of Duke Ellington.

13.

Constant Lambert's father, while born in Russia and of American heritage, viewed himself as first and foremost an Australian.

14.

Constant Lambert was always conscious of his Australian connections, although he never visited that country.

15.

Constant Lambert was the prototype of the character Hugh Moreland in Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time, particularly in the fifth volume, Casanova's Chinese Restaurant, in which Moreland is a central character.

16.

Constant Lambert died on 21 August 1951, two days short of his forty-sixth birthday, of pneumonia and undiagnosed diabetes complicated by acute alcoholism, and was buried in Brompton Cemetery, London.