Tintagel

The castle of Tintagel stands on a clifftop in Cornwall overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. According to legend it was the birthplace of King Arthur; but many stories surround its ruins, and when Bax visited in the summer of 1918 he was in the first throes of a passionate illicit relationship with the pianist Harriet Cohen (1895-1967). He wove his emotions, as well as his visual impressions, into his symphonic poem Tintagel (completed in early 1919), painting the scene and its associations in all the glowing colours of the late-Romantic orchestra. Tintagel opens with a vista of the Atlantic “on a sunny but not windless summer day”. Brass fanfares portray the clifftop fortress, before Bax dives into the castle’s tempestuous mythology, including glimpses of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. The storm swells and breaks, and Bax ends on a final majestic vision: “the castle still proudly fronting the sun and wind of centuries”.