Frank Bridge was born in Brighton in 1879, a younger child in a large family. He first learned to play the violin from his father, and enjoyed the benefit of early exposure to practical musicianship as a player in music-hall orchestras which his father conducted. In 1896 at age 17 he entered the Royal College of Music, where he studied violin and piano for three years. Following this, he received a scholarship to study composition for another four years under Sir Charles Villiers Stanford. On graduating in 1903, he was awarded a gold medal reserved for the 'most generally deserving pupil' and received the highest praise from respected composer and teacher at the RCM, Sir Hubert Parry.

On leaving the RCM, Bridge earned his living by teaching and performing. As a violin/viola player, he played in London's leading orchestras and was a member of three string quartets, and regularly coached student chamber groups at the RCM. In 1904, he performed in the British première of the newly completed Debussy String Quartet. In 1906 Bridge composed his own first String Quartet (in E minor) as an entry in a competition sponsored by the Filharmonica Accademica of Bologna, Italy. The same year, he formed a friendship with German-born businessman Edward Speyer - a relationship lasting to Speyer's death in 1934. In his memoirs, Speyer gives fond testimony to Bridge's role in the many delightful musical weekends enjoyed at his Hertfordshire home.

Bridge's future wife, Ethel Sinclair, returned in late 1907 from her native Australia, to England where she and Frank had been fellow students at the RCM. In September 1908 the Bridges were married and established themselves in Chiswick. In midwinter 1909-10, Bridge composed his famous Suite for Strings over a few short weeks.

Bridge was a thorough craftsman whose skill as a composer was finely sharpened by the depth of his practical musicianship. He soon established a solid reputation as violist in several quartets, most notably the English String Quartet, in which he played from 1903 into the early 1920s. He was also active as a conductor around this time, as rehearsal director of the New Symphony (then recently formed) and at London's Savoy Theatre during its 1910-11 season. It was around the time of the coronation of George V in 1911 that he composed his suite The Sea, which appeared frequently in Promenade concert programmes through the end of the 1930s. The great String Sextet (1912) is the culmination of this period in Bridge's creative development.

As a consequence of his professional reliability and his placing musicianship above career gamesmanship, he soon found himself too often fulfilling the role of 'last-minute' replacement conductor - a role which he openly disliked. These conducting engagements included Covent Garden (for Beecham) and the Promenade Concerts (for Sir Henry Wood). While Bridge felt hurt and underappreciated not to obtain a permanent conducting post, this failure was certainly attributable in part to an exacting and at times tactless manner. Though greatly respected, more than a few orchestra musicians viewed him as abrasive and unencouraging on the podium.

In 1914, the Bridges moved from Chiswick to Bedford Gardens, Kensington, where Frank composed his second String Quartet (in G minor), which won first prize in Cobbett's annual chamber music competition the following year. The beautiful tone poem Summer was composed that same year.

In 1916, Bridge as part of the English String Quartet began to cut back on public engagements, in favor of more private performances. One venue for such 'drawing room' concerts was the home of Marjorie Fass, who lived along the very same street as the Bridges, with whom she became a close friend. It is possible that around this time an intimate affair arose between neighbor Marjorie Fass and Bridge, who was then a married man of seven years.

With a decline in publishing royalties during and immediately after the Great War, Bridge's life was not easy, and he was compelled by economic hardship to spend much of his time teaching violin far and wide, which left very little for composing.

After 1920, Bridge took up a new direction with his music which was no longer to reach the same wide audience as did the light and more lyrical output of his pre-War Edwardian years. It is often repeated that the war with its unprecedented, irrational toll in human lives left a deep personal mark on pacifist Bridge and, by extension, his musical idiom. One writer has suggested, however, that this worn formula misses the mark, and that it was Bridge's growing awareness of the childlessness of his marriage which was the key to this change - a point supported by the close and affectionate mentoring relationship Bridge developed at this time with the young Benjamin Britten, the only pupil to whom he taught composition.

In 1922, Bridge had the good fortune of meeting American music patron Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge at the home of publisher Winthrop Rogers. That summer, Bridge and his wife Ethel, along with Rogers, toured France and the West Country with Mrs Coolidge. The Bridges and Coolidge soon established what was to become a lifelong acquaintance. Before returning to America, the wealthy and influential Coolidge extended to the Bridges an invitation to the following year's Berkshire Chamber Music Festival, in western Massachusetts.

Early in 1923, Bridge and Marjorie Fass purchased land near the South Downs village of Friston, with the aim of constructing adjacent cottages. In recalling his visits to the Bridges' cottage later in 1931, Benjamin Britten noted that Marjorie Fass, an amateur musician and artist, was always in and out of the Bridges' house, and had several nicknames for Bridge ("Franco", "Mr Brit", and "Duddles"). Composer, pianist, and music editor Howard Ferguson (in a phone interview with Britten's biographer Humphrey Carpenter in 1990) plainly said that he judged Fass was in love with Bridge and that it was a contented ménage à trois - a relationship possibly dating back as early as 1917, when Bridge frequented her home in connection with the English String Quartet's 'drawing room' concerts and rehearsals.

Through Coolidge's patronage, Bridge was able to bring his works to America's orchestras, touring the U.S. as guest conductor in 1923, also returning to visit in later years.

There was also another, more important, consequence of this patronage: he able to devote himself more exclusively to composing, though his health regretably began to fail after 1930.

Active throughout his life, Bridge later preferred spending time in the company of a few close friends in the quiet retreat of his South Downs cottage near Eastbourne, where he composed many of his finest works. During the winter of 1940-41 he was at work on a large composition for string orchestra. One very cold Friday afternoon in 1941, after checking over his car and exchanging a friendly word with a neighbor, he came back into the house saying he felt sick, lay down for a few hours, and died of congestive heart failure early that same evening. The large work for strings was never completed, and in the wake of what was to be a new and more terrible European war, his music was soon slipped into a temporary oblivion.

It was not until more than two decades later that Bridge's works began their reemergence, largely through the efforts of the Frank Bridge Trust.  In effect, modern recording technology has permitted many more people to hear Bridge's music than during his own lifetime, earning him in the time since his death, the recognition he would have so much appreciated.

-D Ruiz

Sources:
Paul Hindmarsh Frank Bridge: A Thematic Catalogue (1983)
Anthony Payne, article "Frank Bridge" in The New Grove's (1980)
Humphrey Carpenter Benjamin Britten: A Biography (1992)
liner notes (accompanying various recordings) by John Bishop, Anthony Payne, and Paul Hindmarsh