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The development of Bridge's language after the Cello Sonata of 1913–17 is so sudden as to suggest some kind of inner upheaval. Perhaps it was associated with his revulsion against the war—Benjamin Britten has spoken of his teacher's passionately-held pacifist convictions—and there may too have been a feeling that his own cultural background had disappeared in the holocaust, along with so many lives and hopes. On the other hand, his developing language at the time of the Cello Sonata and the Second Quartet may have unlocked some door to his subconscious. Whatever the case, he appears to have experienced a crisis of style and perhaps of personality immediately after the War. It is significant, for instance, that with one exception no major work seems to have been conceived after the completion of the Cello Sonata until the crucially important Piano Sonata, begun in 1922 but not finished until 1925. The period between these two sonatas was almost exclusively devoted to collections of small piano pieces and a handful of songs, some of which indicate the beginnings of Bridge's new style. The single exception is the little opera in three scenes, The Christmas Rose, which was sketched in 1919 and scored ten years later. Moments of dramatic pressure elicited a rich harmonic response from Bridge in splashes of whole- and bi-tonal colouring; but over the work as a whole there lies an idyllic serenity in which the composer seems for the moment to be by-passing the problems which were soon to force themselves upon him. |
