Organist, teacher, composer, army officer, writer, broadcaster, director of the Royal College of Music: this was the brilliant George Dyson, also father to mathematician and theorist Freeman Dyson. What’s harder to reconcile is that Dyson, author of Grenade Warfare, a standard military textbook, also produced such lusciously romantic music.
Dyson’s oratorio Quo Vadis was, in part, an attempt to purge the painful memories of serving in the first world war, confronting the vestiges of post-traumatic stress two decades on. Translated literally as Whither Goest Thou? the work represents a spiritual inquiry of an agnostic rather than Christian nature, questioning life, death and the great beyond. The 1939 festival for which it was intended was cancelled because of the outbreak of war; the first part of the work was performed at the Three Choirs festival in 1946, and then in full in 1949. In this fine performance some of Dyson’s soul-searching resonated still.
