Spend enough time treading the corridors of the Guildhall, the Royal Academy of Music, the Royal Conservatoire, or reading the dustier tomes of musical history, and you will find a name. A composer, far from the leagues of Mozart or Brahms, less well known than even the most distantly removed Bachs, who was nonetheless a visionary in his busy, brief career.
Little is known of Walter Schwartz-Purcell’s early life. He was born on the 30th of July, 1886, to the wealthy land-owner and scholar Elliot Schwartz and his wife, who’s name has not been recorded by history, save her distant relation to the Purcell of greater musical fame. For the first eighteen years of his life he moved between boarding schools around their modest estate in the Herefordshire countryside, rarely spending more than a year or two without being moved on. His dismissal letters, donated by his family to the Bodleian, cite nothing more than “delinquency and listlessness” as reasons for his treatment, though rumours of a darker nature still abound. What is reliably known is that, at the age of 18, he followed in his father’s example and began studying natural history at Oxford.
After a year and a half, though, Schwartz-Purcell was imprisoned for treatment in the Fairmile Hospital in Cholsey, Oxfordshire for “Perversions of the mind and body, masturbation, and spiritual delusion”. Despite the harsh punishments and poor conditions of mental hospitals at the time, his father’s influence and money saw to it that Walter was well looked after and, in fact, lived in relative comfort in the largest cell in the hospital. It was during his eight-month stay at the hospital that he acquainted himself with his mother’s heritage and became interested in composition and performance. Also held in the Bodleian are letters that Schwartz-Purcell wrote to his father and the nurses at the Fairmile Hospital, requesting books on musical theory and history, parchment paper, musical manuscripts and even a parlour grand piano, all of which Elliot Schwartz’s deep pockets paid for. Indeed, it was during his stay at the hospital that Walter affixed his mother’s maiden name to his own surname. Musical works were not the only texts Walter requested, though. Slipped among the lists of supplies and educational materials were stranger works- the medieval occult works of Christian Rosenkreutz, a translation of the Key of Solomon, and Crowley’s then newly published Book of Law. Most importantly to the legend, though, is that it was here that Schwartz-Purcell first read Christopher Marlowe’s most well-known play, The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus.
From Schwartz-Purcell’s diary, held not at the Bodleian, but instead by a Kensington private collector, it is clear that Doctor Faustus had a clear effect on him. At times, he writes coherently, talking for many pages about Marlowe’s life and the context in which the play was written, noting how subtle Elizabethan political circumstances present themselves in the dialogue of the characters and the morals of Faustus’s deal. At others, he merely repeats the titular character’s name in shaky handwriting, interspersed at times with half-finished musical ideas and thoughts written in scratchy freehand staves. Some writers, notably Dr Quentin Small of the Cambridge musical faculty have interpreted this as an attempt at a left-hand occult ritual, intended to bring about some connection between Schwartz-Purcell and the fictional, doomed protagonist of the story. Others have interpreted it, perhaps not unfairly, as the crazed rantings of a madman. Regardless of his sanity, he was discharged around two months after requesting the copy of Doctor Faustus, and so, in 1906, Walter Schwartz-Purcell was released back into public.
He did not return home, nor did he resume his studies in Oxford. Instead, now consumed by his passion for music, particularly the new impressionist movement of the European composers, he travelled to France in order to study under the recently-appointed head of the Paris Conservatoire, Gabriel Fauré. Fauré, unimpressed by his “musical jottings and half-formed harmonies”, as Schwartz-Purcell’s diary quotes, dismissed him, telling him to get a musical education before coming back. Determined not to leave Paris without joining in with this new wave of complex, creative music which he had studied on manuscripts and phonographs in the hospital, he tried to approach Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy, both students of Fauré. They, like their mentor, refused Schwartz-Purcell’s musical advances.
Frustrated by a lack of artistic progress and the rejection by the French musical establishment, Schwartz-Purcell fell into a deep depression, worsened by the lack of acceptance for his ideas on harmony and melody in the still Teutonic-dominated English orchestral world. As had occurred twenty years previously with the Swedish playwright August Strindberg, this depression proved a path back to the occult. Now though, free of the watchful if remarkably liberal eye of the doctors and nurses of Fairmile Hospital, he was able to experiment with his ideas. His diary goes on to account in incredible, if somewhat tedious detail, several ritual and alchemical workings he attempted in his garret-laboratory in the Latin quarter.
On his birthday on the 30th of July, 1906, Schwartz-Purcell wrote of a final, successful experiment. Envisioned in absinthe-fuelled dreams of the night before, he claimed to have pictured the universe as music, melody and harmony wrapped around itself and found, with a little help from the soul of the legendary inspiration for Marlowe’s Faustus, the exact combination of musical notes, spoken words, and physical imagery that opposed this natural harmony; in short, to be able to break through reality itself.
Several things are known to have occurred on that hot, Parisian night. Three streets away from Schwartz-Purcell’s tiny apartment, a fire caught in the Hôtel-Dieu hospital, ripping through three floors of one wing and killing a dozen patients too sick to flee; two corpses were found in the Seine the next morning, horribly but strangely mutilated, as if by a surgeon who wasn’t quite familiar with the human body; strange, auroral glow was seen not just above the grime-choked streets of Paris, but across much of Central Europe, with some blaming a passing comet; and, of course, Walter Schwartz-Purcell claims to have spoken with that same demon who had dragged Doctor Faustus’s soul down into hell. There, in his cramped bedsit on the Rue Malebranche, in front of the battered, poorly tuned upright piano Schwartz-Purcell had spent hours lugging to the top floor of the terraced house, stood Mephistophilus himself, wreathed in sulfurous smoke and burning eyes aflame.
Schwartz-Purcell is surprisingly brief in his description of the encounter. Whether he truly courted a diabolical presence that night, or merely suffered hallucinations due to untreated mental illness and alcoholism is unknown, but it is undeniable that the experience had a deep impact on him. In short words written in a shaking hand, he recounts the deal that he struck with the demon. He was promised artistic success, the acclaim of his peers, and everlasting fame as a composer, as long as, before he turned thirty years old, he performed a concerto in honour of the demon Mephistophilus, praising his power and name. If he did not meet these demands, though, he would be taken down into the earth, to the depths of hell to meet his hero Faustus, and there together, the Doctor and the Pianist would be tortured together until the end of days.
Whether it was satanic influence or merely a change in fortunes, a pronounced difference can be seen in Schwartz-Purcell’s life and art around this time. Suddenly his music began to go far beyond the perfunctory Germanic melodies and baroque chorales he had managed to churn out in the asylum. He wrote piano sonatas and concertos that seemed to predict changes in the musical landscape which soon would be adopted by many of his contemporaries, quoting ideas from folk songs in some cases months or years before they would be officially recorded by Vaughan Williams or Broadwood. Each of his concert performances of his own piano work would be more successful than the last, and he even garnered acclaim for a few secular choral works before deciding to focus on orchestral pieces.
The music of this period is astounding in its emotional depth and impact. Though rarely performed, recordings of his fifth and sixth piano concertos are still available, though highly priced, and there are very few works in the English canon of such sublime sincerity. Ultimately, his success would peak in 1913 with the premier of his first and only symphony. After this, aged 26, and weary of his impending deadline, he intended to take a few months off performances in order to write what he thought would be his masterpiece, Piano Concerto No. 8- Mephistophilus.
The month after deciding on the sabbatical, he inherited his home in Herefordshire after his father’s sudden death from cancer of the pancreas and, while he hoped retreating to the countryside might help give him more time to work, away from the socialising and gossip of London, he in fact found the opposite to be true. Instead, he now had his father’s business affairs to look after, an incredibly complex situation based around ancient land-holdings and border hedgerows that had stood since the Domesday book. In fact, he confessed in his diary that, as he crossed into his 27th year, he had yet to write a single note of Mephistophilus– or, as he playfully called it in his darker moments, his “silent swan song”. He even, for the brief spell he could manage to take away from business, rented the same bedsit he had lived in seven years previously and engaged in the same vices. Instead of transcendental realisations and doorways into beyond, though, he found hangovers and a musty room infested with rats. Despondent, he returned to England in the spring of 1914, and entered a sort of hermitage in his manor, communicating with others only through letters, and writing in his diary daily.
On the 4th of August, 1914, mere days after Walter Schwartz-Purcell turned 28, England declared war on Germany, and inspiration struck.
With each day, more news came from the Western Front, and Walter Purcell, who by this point was attempting to distance himself from his Germanic-rooted father, added more to his Eighth Piano Concerto. The headlines read as chords to him; photographs of the great European war machine as progressions; death tolls as melody. The wrecked villages of France and Belgium were manuscript paper on which he inscribed key signatures and tonalities of bloodshed. Schwartz-Purcell threw himself into his work, declaring himself a conscientious objector as, from the safety of his estate in the heart of England, he painted in music an image of trenches and cannon-fire, mustard-gas and mayhem, with the cackling, all-powerful figure of Mephistophilus reigning above it all.
Over the course of the next twenty-two months, Schwartz-Purcell entered a sort of perfectionist haze, barely leaving the house save for absent walks around the estate and allowing his staff to handle all business concerns. On the 30th of May, 1916, Schwartz-Purcell wrote in his diary three words: “It is done.”
At last, he re-entered the world, and found it had changed since he was last active. Several of his colleagues and contemporaries, men whose approval he had once fought hard to receive, had gone to war, including his sometime rival, sometime idol Ralph Vaughan Williams, and talented composers like George Butterworth, who would never return. Still, though, he planned a grand premiere for Mephistophilus. It was to take place on his 30th birthday, the 30th of July, 1916, and he quickly wrote to remaining musicians across the country to form his large orchestra of 90 instruments. Initially, he planned to have the premiere outside, on the village green of the nearby village of Credenhill. He was, however, surprised to find himself blocked by a suspicious and angry populace. At best, they thought that Schwartz-Purcell a coward for not joining the war and, at worst, based on his name and secretive nature, they thought that he was a sympathiser or even a spy. Either way, in the end he decided to host the premiere himself, in the spacious ballroom of his ancestral home.
Accounts differ as to how Walter Schwartz-Purcell died on that summer morning. The most likely version of events is that an angry local killed him in his home, bludgeoning him as he slept or stabbing him before the concert. After all, he had chosen a bad time for his premiere- news was just filtering through of the disastrous 6th of July attack in the Somme, and nearly a whole generation of young people from Credenhill fighting in the local “pal’s battalion” had fallen in the first 24 hours of fighting. This story, however, is not the one repeated by gossiping students in the halls of the Royal College, nor is it the one noted half-ironically in the less reputable musical histories. No, one of two possible demises for Walter Schwartz-Purcell is mentioned more frequently.
The most obvious one is that Mephistophilus, incensed by the amount of time Schwartz-Purcell had taken in preparing his tribute, or outraged at his portrayal as the murderer of millions, appeared out of the ground and dragged Schwartz-Purcell kicking and screaming into the depths of the deepest circle of Dante’s imagination, to meet his idol Faustus as he had been promised all those years ago. However, even this fantastical tale is not the one that captures the imagination of many.
The popular imagining is that all was going to plan. The music for Piano Concerto No. 8 Mephistophilus had been printed, the musicians had arrived, and despite some protests from angry and grieving locals, the concert was nearly ready. The orchestra were preparing their instruments, tuning strings and polishing brass, waiting for Schwartz-Purcell to appear when, all of a sudden, they heard a shriek from the store room adjoining the ballroom, out of which a servant ran, crying. Nearly dropping their instruments in shock, several musicians rushed to check what the matter was, and saw something that they would remember for the rest of their lives.
There, in the store room, was Walter Schwartz-Purcell’s prized Bösendorfer grand piano. Under its lid, strings, pulled taught on the frame, glistened with blood, and it was only when one of the musicians, a particularly curious cellist, plucked one of the strings, that they realised with nauseating clarity that they were gut strings.
The lid was held open with a human femur, still rancid and yellow with fresh blood and gore. On the four legs of the piano, splayed obscenely around the casters at the bottom, a pair of human hands and feet spread outwards. The ivory keys of the piano were replaced with broken shards of ribs, ulnas, tibias. The inside of the piano, usually cushioned in a layer of red velvet, was now upholstered with what the assembled, sickened musicians took to be human muscle, crushed and spread across the dark, ebony wood like sausage meat.
Most of the black notes of the keyboard was in-lain now with a precious and rare substitute for the mother-of-pearl traditionally used in instrument decorations. A full set of upper teeth was present on the keys, gently filed flush with the wood so that the nerves and meat within were exposed. There, at the front of the piano, a lower jaw replaced the music stand. In between it’s teeth it held a folio of human skin, printed with blistered notes branded while the flesh was still alive; dizzying arpeggios, thick, weighty chords, gentle pianissimo staccatos at the top of the register. The front page of the book bore two things- the words “Walter Purcell: Piano Concerto No. 8- Mephistophilus”, branded carefully into the flesh, and the face of the aforementioned pianist, hollow and empty, it’s mouth open in shocked, idiot pain. His tongue sat as a place marker in the book.
Of course, this story is likely embellished, and even those who repeat it are unsure whether the inhuman degradation of his body was enacted by angry locals or diabolical actors. The only facts we have are that Walter Schwartz-Purcell was born on the 30th of July, 1886, and died thirty years later to the day. It is impossible too to know what he died of. In 2007, with permission from the local council and the pianist’s last, distant relatives, the family mausoleum on the estate at Credenhill was opened. Schwartz-Purcell’s coffin was removed and found to be empty.
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