Biography
Born Matthijs Van der Meulen on February 8, 1888, in Helmond in the southern Netherlands, this outspoken and singularly inventive composer was originally slated by his relatives for a clerical path. Yet an early brush with music persuaded him that his authentic destiny lay in writing scores instead. He spent his modest stipend on manuscript paper while finishing ordinary studies, then left at nineteen for Amsterdam to launch a musical existence.
There he secured employment addressing envelopes at the Dutch Composers Publication Toonkunst and soon afterward contributed music criticism to the Catholic daily De Tijd. In 1910 he covered a performance of Marsyas by the major Dutch composer Alphons Diepenbrock; the older musician noticed the review, and the encounter grew into a lifelong friendship. Because scores by Wagner, Schoenberg and others remained inaccessible to him, the association deepened Vermeulen’s musical formation; it also led to his appointment as editor of the influential weekly De Groene Amsterdammer and, several years later, as arts editor of the Amsterdam newspaper De Telegraaf.
Difficulties surfaced at that post that would shadow much of his career. His reviews provoked incidents, including one in which the enraged husband of a well-known singer he had treated unfavorably appeared with a loaded pistol. Far graver was his assault on the intensely Germanophile conductor Willem Mengelberg, who dominated the Concertgebouw Orchestra and its board with absolute authority. Mengelberg favored German repertoire almost exclusively, offering scant tolerance for French or Dutch works beyond Brahms, Wagner, Strauss and Mahler. During World War I, Vermeulen denounced the German slaughter of Dutch-speaking populations as well as Mengelberg’s militaristic podium manner: “Whether it is necessary to march about on the podium, to keep pace as if using an exercise machine, whether it is necessary to drum out the din of Mahler with one’s fists, this will always remain an open question.”
Vermeulen drew no immediate link between his critical and creative roles, and was therefore taken aback when he presented his first symphonies to Mengelberg, who responded with contemptuous derision delivered in the grand German style. At the close of the tirade Mengelberg advised him to “take some lessons from Mr. Dopper!”—a lesser Dutch composer who had become Mengelberg’s devotee and consequently received performances denied to worthier compatriots such as Diepenbrock. Vermeulen later observed with satisfaction in the 1960s that scarcely a note of Dopper’s music remained in circulation. Mengelberg’s circle spread the claim that the conductor had rejected the symphonies to spare Vermeulen embarrassment and that Vermeulen was now pursuing a vendetta. Wounded by the pettiness, Vermeulen was driven to a defining gesture: during a Mengelberg-led performance of a Dopper symphony, in the silence after the final chord and before applause, he stood and cried “Long Live Sousa!” Two policemen escorted him and his wife from the hall and barred their return. After fruitless attempts to surmount the barriers erected by the Mengelberg rupture, Vermeulen and his family abandoned the effort and relocated to France.
He earned a living by writing music articles for assorted periodicals, yet existence remained harsh and his native country continued to disregard his work, declining even to publish his scores. Only in 1939 did the Society for the Performance of Dutch Music organize a reading of his Third Symphony under Eduard Van Beinum. The composer and his wife lacked funds to attend, and conditions stayed grim throughout the war years. His wife fell ill and died in 1944; a month afterward their son, serving in the French army of liberation, was killed. When liberation arrived, Vermeulen was living with his eldest child, a daughter, in a home without electricity, coal or shoes. Inside a cupboard rested his newest symphony, the remarkable Fifth. A Dutch colleague finally reached him and commissioned a book, which became Principles of European Music, one of the most original and provocative volumes ever issued in the Netherlands. This publication marked a reversal in his fortunes, and in 1946 he was able to resettle in his homeland.
Vermeulen died in Laren on July 26, 1967. His catalog was not extensive: seven symphonies, four war songs for voice and orchestra, two sonatas for cello and piano, a sonata for violin and piano, one string trio, one string quartet, several songs and the incidental music to Nijhoff’s The Flying Dutchman. He also produced several volumes on music, among them The Two Musics, Sounding Board, The Single Basic Note, The Mind’s Adventure, Principles of European Music and That Miracle, Music. The Voice of Those Living appeared posthumously in 1981.
Every composition bears the imprint of a highly personal cast of mind and technique. The orchestral songs, composed in France to French texts, naturally reflect that milieu. The symphonies, by contrast, display a more private character and constitute the summit of the composer’s considerable accomplishments. Of these, the Fifth exhibits a somber intricacy shaped by profound personal bereavement and privation amid the darkest period of World War II. Its robust, sinewy fabric attains passages of extreme polyphonic density in Vermeulen’s polymelodic idiom, superimposing broad stretches of opulent material and inserting stretches of suspended, motionless calm. It concludes most enigmatically on an unforeseen resolution that arises from an extended stream-of-musical-consciousness episode.
Donemus catalogues a three-CD set of Vermeulen’s chamber works and a three-CD set of orchestral music that includes all seven symphonies. Olympia lists recordings of the Third and Fourth Symphonies.
There he secured employment addressing envelopes at the Dutch Composers Publication Toonkunst and soon afterward contributed music criticism to the Catholic daily De Tijd. In 1910 he covered a performance of Marsyas by the major Dutch composer Alphons Diepenbrock; the older musician noticed the review, and the encounter grew into a lifelong friendship. Because scores by Wagner, Schoenberg and others remained inaccessible to him, the association deepened Vermeulen’s musical formation; it also led to his appointment as editor of the influential weekly De Groene Amsterdammer and, several years later, as arts editor of the Amsterdam newspaper De Telegraaf.
Difficulties surfaced at that post that would shadow much of his career. His reviews provoked incidents, including one in which the enraged husband of a well-known singer he had treated unfavorably appeared with a loaded pistol. Far graver was his assault on the intensely Germanophile conductor Willem Mengelberg, who dominated the Concertgebouw Orchestra and its board with absolute authority. Mengelberg favored German repertoire almost exclusively, offering scant tolerance for French or Dutch works beyond Brahms, Wagner, Strauss and Mahler. During World War I, Vermeulen denounced the German slaughter of Dutch-speaking populations as well as Mengelberg’s militaristic podium manner: “Whether it is necessary to march about on the podium, to keep pace as if using an exercise machine, whether it is necessary to drum out the din of Mahler with one’s fists, this will always remain an open question.”
Vermeulen drew no immediate link between his critical and creative roles, and was therefore taken aback when he presented his first symphonies to Mengelberg, who responded with contemptuous derision delivered in the grand German style. At the close of the tirade Mengelberg advised him to “take some lessons from Mr. Dopper!”—a lesser Dutch composer who had become Mengelberg’s devotee and consequently received performances denied to worthier compatriots such as Diepenbrock. Vermeulen later observed with satisfaction in the 1960s that scarcely a note of Dopper’s music remained in circulation. Mengelberg’s circle spread the claim that the conductor had rejected the symphonies to spare Vermeulen embarrassment and that Vermeulen was now pursuing a vendetta. Wounded by the pettiness, Vermeulen was driven to a defining gesture: during a Mengelberg-led performance of a Dopper symphony, in the silence after the final chord and before applause, he stood and cried “Long Live Sousa!” Two policemen escorted him and his wife from the hall and barred their return. After fruitless attempts to surmount the barriers erected by the Mengelberg rupture, Vermeulen and his family abandoned the effort and relocated to France.
He earned a living by writing music articles for assorted periodicals, yet existence remained harsh and his native country continued to disregard his work, declining even to publish his scores. Only in 1939 did the Society for the Performance of Dutch Music organize a reading of his Third Symphony under Eduard Van Beinum. The composer and his wife lacked funds to attend, and conditions stayed grim throughout the war years. His wife fell ill and died in 1944; a month afterward their son, serving in the French army of liberation, was killed. When liberation arrived, Vermeulen was living with his eldest child, a daughter, in a home without electricity, coal or shoes. Inside a cupboard rested his newest symphony, the remarkable Fifth. A Dutch colleague finally reached him and commissioned a book, which became Principles of European Music, one of the most original and provocative volumes ever issued in the Netherlands. This publication marked a reversal in his fortunes, and in 1946 he was able to resettle in his homeland.
Vermeulen died in Laren on July 26, 1967. His catalog was not extensive: seven symphonies, four war songs for voice and orchestra, two sonatas for cello and piano, a sonata for violin and piano, one string trio, one string quartet, several songs and the incidental music to Nijhoff’s The Flying Dutchman. He also produced several volumes on music, among them The Two Musics, Sounding Board, The Single Basic Note, The Mind’s Adventure, Principles of European Music and That Miracle, Music. The Voice of Those Living appeared posthumously in 1981.
Every composition bears the imprint of a highly personal cast of mind and technique. The orchestral songs, composed in France to French texts, naturally reflect that milieu. The symphonies, by contrast, display a more private character and constitute the summit of the composer’s considerable accomplishments. Of these, the Fifth exhibits a somber intricacy shaped by profound personal bereavement and privation amid the darkest period of World War II. Its robust, sinewy fabric attains passages of extreme polyphonic density in Vermeulen’s polymelodic idiom, superimposing broad stretches of opulent material and inserting stretches of suspended, motionless calm. It concludes most enigmatically on an unforeseen resolution that arises from an extended stream-of-musical-consciousness episode.
Donemus catalogues a three-CD set of Vermeulen’s chamber works and a three-CD set of orchestral music that includes all seven symphonies. Olympia lists recordings of the Third and Fourth Symphonies.