Chris Latham wants Australians to discover the country’s answer to Chopin: Septimus Kelly. Photo: Carol Jones.
Septimus Kelly is Australia’s greatest wartime cultural loss. He is the closest thing we have to an Australian Chopin, yet curiously his piano works remain unknown.
Born in Sydney in 1881, Kelly grew up in a musical family overlooking the harbour, on which he sailed each weekend. A fine athlete, he enjoyed swimming at Bondi and went on to become the greatest amateur sculler of his time, eventually winning a gold medal at the 1908 London Olympics.
He also became a savant pianist who revered Chopin, playing him in almost every recital.
On 4 May 1916, while on leave after serving at Gallipoli, he delivered the corrected proofs of both of his sets to Schott, his publisher in London, just days before being shipped off to fight in France.
Six months later, on 13 November 1916, he was killed in the Somme, aged 35.
To address his neglected piano works, the Flowers of Peace is featuring them in a tour to mark 110 years since his death.
These events will begin with the launch of his biography, a labour of love more than 20 years in the making, written by Dr Therese Radic and Olympic gold medal-winning rower Martin Cross.
It will be followed by the screening of the internationally award-winning documentary Elegy, which explores how Kelly’s most famous work depicts the burial of his friend and fellow officer, Rupert Brooke. Filmed on location in Skyros, Greece, it will be introduced by its creator, Michael Walsh.
The events will conclude with performances of Kelly’s virtuosic piano music by Edward and Stephanie Neeman, interspersed with diary readings by Carrillo Gantner, revealing the true scale and depth of Kelly’s talent.
F.S. ‘Septimus’ Kelly was killed in the Battle of the Somme (gravestone, second from right). Photo: Supplied/Chris Latham.
Over the last 18 years I’ve grown increasingly close to Kelly as we’ve recovered his scores and had them typeset. We did a vast amount of this cultural recovery work in Canberra, starting with his songs with pianist Alan Hicks, and singers Louise Page and Christina Wilson. Now Edward and Stephanie Neeman are exploring his piano works.
The hope is that if enough people are made aware, and specifically if pianists start to play his works, over time he will enter the canon. The canon is the repertoire from which we assemble our concert programs and which our musicians are expected to know or be able to learn.
That would be good for ‘Sep’, but mainly it would be good for Australia, because it would signal that we finally have the cultural confidence in our own musical history to value it.
I often wonder about our cultural insecurity, our instinctive looking for geniuses overseas, rather than our own. It turns out that on top of being a dumb strategy that is more expensive in the long run, it also has catastrophic side effects.
In Finland, they grow their own talent by training them from the age of children, which turns out to be far cheaper than importation, and avoids what happened to England, which imported European music wholesale, creating a cultural desert locally with no major
composer between Purcell (who died in 1696) and Elgar (who was born in 1857).
Turns out not having confidence in your own artists and repeatedly choosing international voices over your own doesn’t lead to a thriving culture.
I know this bias toward overvaluing outside voices is baked in because when the first recording of Sep’s Elegy for Rupert Brooke was made in 2006, I took it to Peter Sculthorpe (for whom I worked as editor) to get his validation.
We would play a game where we would rate pieces as A, B or C – being Masterworks, Very Good and Also Rans, respectively. The point of the exercise was to focus on the A and B pieces and leave the C works behind.
I asked Peter about the Elegy, and he said without any hesitation it was an A piece. It was probably only because of his vote of confidence that I’ve stayed the course over the subsequent 20 years, working to recover, complete, perform and record Kelly’s catalogue.
The truth is that Septimus Kelly wasn’t remembered because he was untalented, not because he wasn’t brave, but because he was working as a musician in London when WW1 broke out and so enlisted with a British Division, rather than with an Australian battalion.
To his British fellow officers, he was an amusing and beloved colonial, deeply missed after his death, but whose memory was fated to fall between two stools: caught between two nations who both assumed the other would remember him.
Culture is what unites a people.
We offer Septimus Kelly, the Australian Chopin, for consideration in our shared story.
May his music find its way into our hearts.
Kelly’s music will be played live at the Wesley Music Centre, 20-22 National Circuit, Forrest, at 2 pm on Saturday, 14 November. The complete sheet music of FS Kelly is freely available online.
Chris Latham is the artist-in-residence at the Australian War Memorial and director of Flowers of Peace.
