Episode 4

In today's programme, Grainger turns adversity to advantage in 'The Immovable Do' - a charming short composition built around a stuck key on his harmonium. Around the same time, he came up with the mildly eccentric idea of founding, in effect, a museum of Himself - the Grainger Museum - in his home town of Melbourne, Australia. It's a little as if Elvis had opened Graceland as a visitor attraction while he was still alive! The Grainger Museum may sound like a monstrously self-regarding enterprise, but in fact, with its display of first editions of his music, it came to represent to Grainger "a measure of his artistic defeat" rather than a celebration of his achievements; as he noted in an introduction to the proposed display, most of his music was no longer being played - and, as he put it, "music that isn't heard isn't alive." Another example of Grainger's unusual slant on reality was his concept of 'blue-eyed English' - an attempt to turn back the linguistic clock and expunge all traces of post-Norman-Conquest verbiage from the English language. Accordingly, concerts were 'tone-shows', quartets became 'foursomes' and vegetarians mutated into 'meat-shunners'. Grainger even went so far as to collaborate on a blue-eyed English dictionary, whose Newspeakish goal was to eliminate all alien admixtures from the language. Grainger carried on presenting his own 'tone-shows' - as an internationally celebrated concert pianist. But here too he acquired a reputation for eccentric behaviour - not many performers fulfil their touring commitments by jogging from one engagement to the next, with their concert clothes in a rucksack on their back; but Grainger did, even becoming known as 'the jogging pianist'.