Misleading information

[Segilla]

Thinking about the psephologists and their wrong General Election prediction, I do wonder if it might have been torpedoed by a few like the late Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji.

In Percy A Scholes' voluminous musical compendium first published around 1950 I recall reading the entry about Sorabji. Scholes having been thwarted in his attempt to get information from the eccentric composer simply reproduced some of the words he had received, which from ancient memory read something like:-

'I make a point of misleading lexicographical persons such as yourself'.

This was expunged from later editions but maybe there is someone with access to an early copy could give the precise words.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

It's in the 1955 edition:-

"In view of the fact that the birth-date and birthplace of this composer as above given have been contested, and various other dates given, it may be added here that a close inquiry has been made and official confirmation obtained. (The composer, it appears, resents 'stupid and impertinent inquiries from lexicographical persons' and makes it a practice 'deliberately to mislead them as to dates and places'. Letter to the author of this book - 22 Feb. 1952.)

[Serial_Apologist]

I hope ahinton gets to see this thread. If anyone in the world knows as much as there is to know about Sorabji, it is he.

[Bryn]

On the topic of misleading information, try the last item on today's Afternoon on 3 listing. Not only does it unquestioningly attribute BWV565 to JSBach, it claims it to have originally been written for organ. I though the current dominant view was that it was probably not by Bach, and was originally written for violin.

[P. G. Tipps]

I hope ahinton gets to see this thread. If anyone in the world knows as much as there is to know about Sorabji, it is he.

[ahinton]

He has.

OK - here goes.

Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji was born on 14 August 1892 in Chingford, Essex (his birth certificate, of which I have a copy, proved this) to Shapurji Sorabji, a Parsi born in Mumbai in 1863 and Madeline Matilda Worthy, an Englishwoman born in 1866 in England; he was at that time given the provisional forenames Leon and Dudley, although why this was the case is at present uncertain.

He adopted the forename Kaikhosru and his father's forname Shapurji as a middle name at some as yet unidentifed date probably during WWI at - so legend has it - a ceremony in which he was supposedly formally accepted into his father's Parsi (Zoroastrian) faith, although specific documentary evidence of this has yet to be unearthed. The composer's parents had married in February 1892 when his mother ws aleady pregnant with him.

Some years later, probably at some point during the 1920s, Sorabji's by then long absentee father married an Indian woman bigamously, which was illegal in both pre-independence India and in Britain at the time.

The composer's father had also married another Indian woman in the 1880s and, as there's no evidence that she had died before 1892, the possibility remains that he may also have married the composer's mother bigamously, so it may well be argued that the composer's father was a serial bigamist although, as there is as yet no further evidence of his having subsequently married anyone else bigamously, he could perhaps not quite reasonably have been described as a total serial bigamist (not that any useful conclusions could in any case be drawn from any of this about Sorabji's later negative attitude to total serialism from these facts alone).

It seems clear that the composer was unaware of is father having married in the 1920s (or whenever it was) until he found himself obliged, much against his will, to tavel to Mumbai to sort out his father's affairs following his death in Bad Nauheim, Germany in 1932 and it was no doubt a shock to him. It seems that, in the 17 or so subsequent years in which efforts were made legally to annual this bigamous marriage that he also only discovered for the first time what one mighty reasonably presume to have been his father's first marriage in the 1880s in India, so all of this bigamous activity seems to have been entirely unknown to the composer and his mother before the early 1930s once his father was dead.

Will that do for now? - or might you or anyone else now wish that no one had asked? Either way, I don't think that psephologists of the time (if any) could reasonably be blamed for the existence of subsequent misleading published lexicographical data on the composer, be it by Scholes or anyone else; had anyone unearthed any or all of the bigamous truth by the early 1950s when bigamy and its offspring would probably have been regarded in UK as being at least as reprehensibly illegal as homosexuality (and Sorabji's sexual inclinatons were homosexual even if, in practical terms, he was probably largely celibate for most if not all of his adult life), Percy Scholes (and possibly other lexicographers) would likely have had found himself/themselves with considerably more about which to write, provided that he'd/they'd have felt able to go ahead and do so without either publisher constraints or the risk of inviting possible lawsuits...

I think that the above should probably be sufficient to be going on with for the time being but, if anyone nevertheless feels the need to know more, they have only to ask, especially if curious about the at times apparently anti-Semitic pro-monarchist anti-establishment figure who wrote without a care as to what anyone thought of his music and who at the same time plugged such composers as Bach, Liszt, Alkan, Chausson, Reger, Szymanowski, Mahler, Godowsky, Berg, Busoni, van Dieren, the great French 19th/20th century song composers and York Bowen...

Ahem...

[Segilla]

Thanks for the contributions. Since I've a tendency to mislead psephologists I now wonder if the idea comes from reading the Scholes item in my formative years!

[french frank]

As this is Platform 3 rather than Talking About Music …

I had occasion to delve into the life of an obscure 19th-c. writer who (born before the days of birth certificates) was discovered to have altered his birth date by six years, amended his surname, added an addition middle name and glossed over his place of birth when giving details to compilers of various reference books. In his case, he had a (politically) 'disreputable' youth that he wished to hide from the staid Victorian establishment.

So there are similarities with the case of Sorabji, albeit that the composer himself was blameless - other than, perhaps, in wishing to conceal the skeleton (or two) in the family cupboard.