Influence of his mother Rose (Aldridge) from Adelaide entwined into brilliant and bizarre Percy Grainger's career
Percy Grainger and his Adelaide mother Rose (nee Aldridge). The Grainger Museum in Melbourne captures extraordinary aspects of Percy's life.
Image courtesy State Library of South Australia
Percy Grainger’s bizarre and brilliant life on the musical world stage in the early 20th Century cannot be separated from his Adelaide-born and raised mother Rose (nee Aldridge).
Percy and his mother are buried together at Adelaide's West Terrace cemetery – a symbol of their closeness in life.
Percy’s architect father John migrated from England to Adelaide in 1877 to join the engineer in chief’s office. He married Rose (Rosa) Aldridge, daughter of a prominent Adelaide hotelier and race horse owner, at St Matthew’s Church, Kensington Road, in 1880.
The couple moved to Melbourne where John produced designs for the Princes Bridge and, via her builder father David Mitchell, Nellie Melba’s Coombe Cottage.
But, in 1890, John Grainger left for England. He had passed on the disease syphilis to Rose.
This left Rose to devotedly foster Percy’s precocious talents. She arranged for him to be tutored in music. His first composition, a birthday gift for his mother, dates from 1893.
Percy’s talent was displayed in a series of Melbourne piano concerts and in 1895, with Rose, he left for Germany for more studies.
Rose continued as Percy’s constant companion as his moved around the world with his reputation soaring on many fronts including becoming a prime exponent of the music of his friend Edvard Grieg.
In 1911, he took the professional name of Percy Aldridge Grainger. Rose “managed” his business, social and emotional affairs, and guided his career single-mindedly. A display of whips (including those customised from conductors' batons) at Melbourne's Grainger Museum show Percy's liking to be flagellated to be among his sexual proclivities – as varied as his intellectual pursuits.
In 1913, Percy Grainger gave concerts in Finland and Russia. Between times, in London, he took pupils, played at “at homes” and went about in society in the way Rose considered essential to “getting on”. His record-breaking piano piece “Country Gardens" was published in 1919. Percy’s father had died in Melbourne of syphilis in 1917.
Rose’s suicide in 1922, possibly from despair at rumours of incest with Percy and the gathering effects of syphilis, was a crushing blow.
Grainger visited Australia twice during the 1920s, privately in 1924 to see his mother’s family in Adelaide.
