Frank Bridge (1879-1941) is not much heard of nowadays. He was born in Brighton of a working-class family and studied at the Royal College of Music in London from 1899 to 1903 under Charles Villiers Stanford and others.

Despite his “revolutionary” ideas, his composing career never took off. He later found success as a conductor.

Bridge’s pacifism didn’t go down well in World War I and his greatest solace came from the landscapes of the South Downs in Sussex. His biographer, Rob Barnett said, “Such was the spell cast by … the Downs and the seascape, that he was moved to write a musical nature poem, Enter Spring, which was his masterpiece.

Frank Bridge played the viola in a number of string quartets, most notably the English String Quartet, and conducted, sometimes deputising for Henry Wood, before devoting himself to composition, receiving the patronage of Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge. He privately tutored a number of pupils, most famously Benjamin Britten, who later championed his teacher’s music and paid homage to him in the Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge (1937), based on a theme from the second of Bridge’s Three Idylls for String Quartet (1906). Bridge died in Eastbourne.

Among Bridge’s works are the orchestral The Sea (1911), Oration (1930) for cello and orchestra and the opera The Christmas Rose (premiered 1932), but he is perhaps most highly regarded today for his chamber music. His early works are in a late-Romantic idiom, but later pieces such as the third (1926) and fourth (1937) string quartets are harmonically advanced and very distinctive, showing the influence of the Second Viennese School.