Roger Sacheverell Coke (1912-1972) ~ British Composers 1850

Roger Sacheverell Coke was from a wealthy family. He inherited the family estate of Brookhill Hall, Pinxton at the age of two, when his father, Lieutenant Langton Sacheverell Coke of the Irish Guards was struck in the head with a bullet near Ypres, in the first few months of World War One.

Coke began composing when he was at Eton College, where he was taught by Henry Ley, and was influenced to take up the piano by hearing Benno Moiseiwitsch. Coke's musical interests were strongly supported by his mother and for his 21st birthday, she had outbuildings on the family estate converted to a large music studio and performance space, equipped with a Steinway piano, and with capacity for an audience of several hundred.

His piano tuition was from Mabel Lander. He studied composition with Dr Frederick Staton and later with Alan Bush. He made his debut as a composer-pianist in 1932 with his first piano concerto, and formed the Brookhill Symphony Orchestra in 1940 to play his own and other neglected works.

Despite the failure of any publisher to take up his works, some were performed around Britain, and occasionally broadcast. Coke bore the cost of those of his compositions that were published, and often also the costs of performance. His early piano concertos brought him the greatest praise and the first three of these have recently been revived by Simon Callaghan.

In November 1959, Coke's three-act opera The Cenci, to his own libretto based on Shelley's verse drama, was given a single performance at the Scala Theatre in London, with the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sir Eugene Goossens. The critics were unanimously hostile and dismissive and Coke became seriously depressed, a condition he wrestled with most of his life.

By the 1960s, Brookhill Hall and its park was stranded in an industrial landscape bounded on one side by nineteenth century developments of Pinxton and the twentieth century M1 motorway, which cut through the park on the other. The buildings began to decay around Coke as he became more and more of a hermit. He sold family possessions including fine porcelain made on the family estate in the late eighteenth century. The decline seemed absolute and irreversible. Furthermore, Coke's chain-smoking (100 cigarettes a day) had fatally undermined his health and prevented the completion of the few commissions that came his way. It was while cycling into the village to buy a packet of cigarettes that he died. He was found at the side of the road and never regained consciousness.

Symphony No 2 - 1937

An unpublished work but the music resides in Chesterfield Library. It is dedicated to Sergei Rachmaninoff with whom Coke had a friendship with most of his life. There is no score available, just the individual parts.

The music is at times harmonically 'challenging' but it always drives forwards to a resolution. The 3rd movement is the most approachable - after the long soliloque on the oboe there is at 1:45 a glorious upsurge of emotion as the orchestra enter.

Here are samples from each movement.

1st movement: Moderato Maestoso