This is not to be wondered at. Although born in Australia, Grainger’s youth was spent mainly in Germany and England; his spiritual home was Scandinavia (‘the farthest north of humanness’), but quite early on became an American citizen. Grainger’s achievement was also maverick: he anticipated much twentieth experimentation in music yet left a small output of which the greatest portion consists of ingenious arrangements of existing melodies. Some original pieces, such as Hill Song Number Two (1907) are as good as anything from the period. Much is not. However, Grainger also collected folk-song assiduously, pioneering modem methods of ethnomusicology including the use of sound recording, and was always ready to apply himself to ‘mechanical music’: he was probably the first to compose specially for the pianola roll. Meanwhile, he kept his ailing mother and himself by giving piano recitals, the impact of his gifted and impulsive performances long outlasting the surprisingly frequent lapses of memory at the keyboard, and his sheer nervous terror. Grainger loathed the tyranny of the concert platform, and yearned for the day when he had saved enough money to be free of it. This goal so dominated his life that he attributed his energy to ‘workforce’ rather than ‘lifeforce’: yet he was driven to walk from Yarram to Sale in twelve hours, and to stoke the ship’s boilers when sailing to South Africa. Not only did he eschew alcohol and tobacco, and later meat, he was also capable of being his own scourge: whipping himself ‘scientifically’, he sought nothing so much as a female companion to birch reciprocally. Flagellation remained pivotal for him: there are good grounds for believing that he did not have his first orgasm until the age of twenty.

To all of this the letters add a new dimension. And what extraordinary letters they are! Written usually in English, but often in Danish, and even in Dutch and German, they contain various combinations of these together with a private love language for his little ‘meatmate’, Grainger’s somewhat repellent term for Karen Holten. Although Grainger seems to have known five or six languages at the time, and lets it drop that he is learning Dutch, Maori and Gaelic, it seems that even these were not enough for him: his inventiveness keeps breaking through. Committed to creating a ‘blue-eyed’ English devoid of all Latinisms, he comes up with such words as ‘worth-weighter’ for critic, ‘foursome’ for quartet, and the engaging ‘louden lots’ for molto crescendo. (Less successful are ‘hearer-host’ for audience, or ‘a-chance-for-all-y’ for democratic.) Percy could not help himself: the same tricks appear in his Danish. It is fascinating to note that such experimentation is essentially literary, not what one would expect from a musician at all: Graingerese is often quite difficult to get one’s tongue around, evidence of it having been written for the eye.

More to the point, the letters contain such sharp, pen-pricking intensities that many of the phrases have the arresting quality of poetic exactitude: the flagellant responds to Australia’s hills of the ‘bitingest blue’. One love letter, that to Karen of 2 October 1910, is positively Lawrentian in the way it combines a lack of inhibition with the deep surge of desire, and is quite extraordinary in its particularity. But there are also discourses on male-female relations, on the animal health of much male coarseness (since men of all kinds can unite in praise of women), a few apostrophes on the nature of composition, marvellous impressions of travel, reflections on England, and even more insightful ones on Australia. ‘Something in the life here wipes out achievement, memory & importance’, he declared. But his attachment to the country, however fitful, was never in doubt. With characteristic economy he wrote from a Leongatha hotel:

I am quite happy in such a place as this. Glorious district, & really admirable Australian types riding about freely & carelessly on the same dear easygoing horses. Everyone kindly & careful, no flippancy. Grand meals, melting chicken and maddeningly good rhubarb pie with floods of local cream & flirtless unconversational women waitresses.

The letters presented here cover Grainger’s London years, 1901 to 1914. We see him arriving with his mother as a nineteen-year-old from Frankfurt, which he loathed, and followed his fortunes as he establishes a name for himself first as a pianist and then as a composer. The immediate pre-war years were probably the peak of his career: ‘It is doubtful if any living composer,’ ran one press comment, ‘has achieved such widespread popularity with so few works as Mr Percy Grainger.’

The narrative thread ends shortly after the outbreak of war, when Percy and his mother decided, within a week, to quit England for America. Although uncomfortable about allegations of cowardice, which he later did his best to rebut by enlisting in the US Army, Grainger believed that ‘my music will bring more honour to Australia than any solider work I could have done in British armies.’

The volume also reveals the story of Grainger’s first great love affair, that with Karen Holten, a Danish girl he met in London but who went back to her own country. For most of the time, the affair was carried on by correspondence, augmented by rapturous summer spent together in Jutland. Eagerly Percy would write, looking to these meeting and expounding his views on sex, which saw basically as an entertainment. Soon he dared to birch Karen, and she him. But when she expressed her desire to marry, he viewed it with a terrible detachment. Don’t be faithful, he told her, that’s a waste of time: I make no demands, so none can be made of me. As for children, that’s just ‘rabbit-longing’. Masturbate, he told her, to relieve the pressure. In another letter, the five options listed for her included breaking off the relationship, and suiciding. Nevertheless, it was not until Percy failed to turn up in Denmark as anticipated that the affair waned. (Karen returned his whips.) Although Grainger spoke of a shortage of money as being the obstacle to their marriage, plus his desire to remain a free spirit, it was all too evident that the free spirit desired nothing so much as to attach himself to his mother. Rose, having already acted as his concert manager, now actually insinuated herself into the orchestra as a percussionist to perform one of his pieces: meanwhile, Percy had told her, in one of his ‘yearning’ letters, that theirs was ‘the only real passionate relation of my life’. Some years later, when another disappointed girlfriend spread rumours of incest between them, Rose suicided.

Percy Grainger rated his letters highly, ‘telling Karen on one occasion that they were not, as she proposed, to be buried with her. ‘My letters shall be admired by a yet-unborn generation; can’t you see that I always write, with an eye to a possible public?’ Certainly they indicate the traditional role of the gifted Australian expatriate, seeking to reduce a sense of marginality by imposing order on the wider world by exercising careful judgment. Such omnivorousness is present in Grainger, as is also the compulsiveness of the autodidact. Percy had only three months of formal schooling, so he was cursed with a further sense of his uniqueness. Everything had to be tried; many things had to be tried afresh. Much was never quite clinched. (Amongst other things, the whipping expressed a pathological desire to dig deeper.) Apart from his mother, the one constant was himself, an endless source of fascination and analysis as these letters show. Grainger was quite right in seeing his correspondence as his most characteristic work, for all these discordant elements are present in his letters to their enrichment.

The present volume, edited by the curator of the Grainger Museum, could not point Percy at the public more capably. Kay Dreyfus supplies an excellent introduction and superb notes, placed in the margin convenience. These are models of their kind, and almost faultless. (The one error I detected placed Eupen in Belgium, as it now is, rather than in Germany, as it then was.) The work has been massive: 550 big pages collate letters from all over the world, a considerable body of them specially translated. Moreover, common sense has prevailed over academic aggrandisement. Here is one-third of the letters known to have survived from the period: sensible omissions include a 129-page letter to Karl Klimsch of 1903. (On the other hand, we are given three later writings to round out the narrative.) Much of Grainger’s further correspondence, if John Bird is to be believed, is a rambling whinge about lack of recognition. The decision to concentrate on the London years was therefore a sound one; and the work has been done so well that fifty years’ hence people may rate Grainger’s letters more highly than they rate his music.