Organist, composer, clerk, principal, author of a classic hand grenade manual: George Dyson was a versatile person. Despite his proletarian background, the educational system of the Royal College of Music enabled him to train as an organist and composer. Many years later, in 1938, he became director of this institution; the first RCM leader of such ancestry. Like so many of his generation, Dyson
… ended up in the trenches during World War I. "Our own guns are blazing away like mad, so that you can't hear yourself think," Dyson wrote back home. His teacher Hubert Parry was shocked to see how Dyson had deteriorated at the front. These experiences may have contributed to Dyson's talent for metaphysical dreaming. But perhaps this ability was simply ingrained in his British heritage, as any Bunyan, Blake or Harry Potter fan will suspect. "We are such stuff as dreams are made on," wrote Shakespeare. It could have been the start of the oratorio Quo Vadis, but Dyson chose William Wordsworth's 'Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting'. Dyson wrote the first part in 1939 for the Hereford Festival (which was canceled due to the outbreak of the next world war). The second part was written about 10 years later. Many will have felt disappointed at the rather restrained apotheosis of this colossal work. It depends on how you look at it. Yet surely here we have Dyson's final dramatic masterstroke; the very elusiveness of this final vision underlines the transient nature of life 'says the booklet of the CD. (HJ)more