Britain’s last great composer has died
NewsSir Harrison Birtwistle, a British composer of inimitable originality and global success, has died some months after suffering a stroke.
Harry was 87. We will not see his likes again.
Raised on a poor farm near Accrington, in the northwest of England, he once told me that everything he did came from walking on stony hills with the wails of a clarinet in his head and the structure of Greek drama.
He went to study in Manchester and formed a gang with Peter Maxwell Davies, Alexander Goehr, Elgar Howarth and John Ogdon. Max, he said had ambition. Sandy had a cultured background and knew people like Messaien and Schoenberg. Gary Howarth could conduct anything and the tragic Ogdon ‘was the genius among us’.
Britten and Pears walked out of Harry’s first opera, Punch and Judy, at Aldeburgh and Covent Garden reneged on his first commission. It was English National Opera that staged Mask of Orpheus in the mid-1980s, setting Harry on the path to operatic productivity. Covent Garden made amends with Gawain in 1990, and several further operas.
Never an ‘easy’ composer, he posed problems that good conductors loved to tackle. Christoph von Dohnanyi, Pierre Boulez, Daniel Barenboim and Franz Welser Möst were among those who found fulfilment in his extraordinary Earth Dances, as gripping an evocation of nature and ritual as Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.
Like Samuel Beckett, he mystified those who could not penetrate his works and delighted those who could.
Contrary to some slick media portraits of a solitary artist, he was highly sociable and tremendous fun with those he liked and trusted. He had a slow, dry way of telling jokes, all the more explosive for the long buildup.
I had great affection for him and grieve at his passing.
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