Without being endowed with any sophisticated musical taste, I am nevertheless unusually fascinated by the lives of twentieth-century British composers and musicians. The love story between Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, for all the flaws of both men, is curiously affecting. Edward Elgar was an odd character in an interesting way, as was Vaughan Williams. All of the Beatles were pretty fascinating in their various different ways. There is something about the personal lives of musicians in history that fascinates me – maybe it is just that any historical group like this, given a morsel of attention, will reward that curiosity with resonant eccentricity. Yet I don’t find the lives of as many novelists or poets (art forms I understand better) quite so interesting.
Part of this is because the love affairs of these musicians often end up being fascinating. It is difficult enough that other peoples’ relationships are difficult to understand. How can we comprehend the complexes of jealousy, envy, love, lust, hope, disappointment and other emotions that drive the romances of ourselves, our friends and family, let alone historical figures? The little traces of their relationships are so tenuous, fragile and withdrawn. Even relatively well-known romances are inherently inscrutable. Such was the case with the famous ballet dancer Margot Fonteyn, and her less well-known lover, composer and conductor Constant Lambert.
When they began their relationship in 1937, this difference in fame was the other way around. Fonteyn was seventeen. Focused, quiet, shy (although not virginal), by 1937 she was quickly rising through the ranks of the Vic-Wells (later the Royal) Ballet company. While her feet were somehow ‘bad’, her poise, appearance and focus were exemplary, and her mentors were already seeing in her hope that Britain would finally produce a great ballerina. She lacked an extensive education, musical or otherwise.
In 1937 Constant Lambert was at a mature phase of his career: he had found a semi-secure job as the musical director of the Vic-Wells; he was producing new work; his 1934 book on the contemporary music scene, Music Ho, had been positively reviewed; and his masterpiece, The Rio Grande (first performed 1929) was popular and had been well-received. While his character is difficult to make out, mixing shyness, boisterousness and a profound disdain for fidelity, his friends agreed he was a musical genius. More than that, his knowledge of visual arts and literature was deep and profound enough to impress friends in those other arts. John Maynard Keynes said that he was possibly the most brilliant person he had ever met. Physically, a tendency towards drink and excess had made him decidedly bulky. Conducting a ballet version of the Rio Grande in 1937, he saw Fonteyn, the teenage ballerina, dance and was very taken with her.
Over the next few months he propositioned her relentlessly. According to later reports from her friends, she resisted for a while, but in not too much time they became lovers . Their relationship was to last for a number of years, years that included a dangerous incident in 1940 when the company became caught up in a retreat from the Nazi forces in Belgium. Their relationship was doubtless tempestuous, and the dance company was not a place for monogamy – according to many of the participants later in life, casual sex was common (although others denied this, pointing out that they were often too exhausted to indulge in complex love affairs).
Lambert helped develop and refine Fonteyn’s musical tastes: her biographers agree that he helped her develop a more intellectual understanding of music that was to help her throughout her career. Basically a child when they met, he was a teacher and a mentor to her as well as a lover – a dynamic that must be fraught with difficulty. For a time, at least, the inequality in experience, power, knowledge and age could have been overwhelming. She seems to have admired him greatly. But it was not a happy romance, in the end.
This was partly because Lambert was married. His wife, Florence (Flo) Kaye was the probably the daughter of a sailor from South-East Asia and a working-class London woman. They married when she was in her late teens, and they had met somewhat earlier. She was famously beautiful, but they had little in common, and their family life (their son, Kit Lambert, went on to manage The Who) was difficult. Money and alcohol compounded the existing lack of sympathy between them. From the two examples here we can maybe speculate about Lambert’s taste in women: he seemed to like (very) young – one might almost say girlish – women, and was perhaps favorably inclined towards east Asian features (Fonteyn had been, on occasion, been mistaken as being of Chinese extraction). The first part is slightly creepy – was it coincidence that he met both his major loves of the 1930s when they were in their early teens?
Creepy or not, his often-uneasy affair with Fonteyn ended at the same time as his marriage to Flo. Instead of marrying Fonteyn when his divorce came through, he immediately wedded artist Isabel Nicholas. Fonteyn was angry, and while they continued to have – by necessity – a professional relationship (and were perhaps still friends of a sort), their romance was definitely over. What was this romance? The affair seems to have affected them both in important ways, yet despite some of the sordid and not-so-sordid details surviving, so much of the emotional landscape of this curious pairing is lost.
Today, Fonteyn is remembered as the greatest English ballerina of the twentieth century. For all his genius, Lambert is a footnote. When writing about her own life later, Fonteyn edited out the relationship with Lambert – and the casual bohemianism of her early years in the ballet more generally. Her autobiography, a breathless, energetic, but heavily self-bowdlerized book, mentions Lambert only twice, in passing.
Source: Margot Fonteyn, Autobiography (London: W.H. Allen, 1975)