Oliver Knussen
Dazzlingly talented composer and conductor whose varied works included a complex operatic version of Where the Wild Things Are
OLIVER KNUSSEN, who has died aged 66, was a composer whose distinctive and highly detailed works earned him a place at the heart of British contemporary music; as a conductor he could make even the most recalcitrant orchestra dance to his tune, and he quickly gained a reputation as a tireless and fearless proselytiser for the avant-garde, championing composers both of his own generation and younger.
He was composing and conducting from a young age, being parachuted in front of television cameras at 15 with his first symphony. Although grateful for the opportunities such exposure presented, the shy teenager was scarred from being depicted as a prodigy, and in adulthood became increasingly slow and reluctant to reveal his music to the world, often delaying delivery of new works by several years.
John Drummond, the Controller of Radio 3 and the Proms, considered him to be a “brilliant but capricious” composer, but soon ran out of patience, accusing him of leaving behind “a trail of cancellations and unwritten music”. Knussen pleaded guilty as charged, telling Tom Service of Radio 3 that “this room is littered with torsos”, when describing the number of part-finished works in his studio at Snape, Suffolk. Sometimes he would complete part of a piece then abandon it almost indefinitely. “All I hear is what’s wrong with them,” he said of his tardiness.
He could have rapid spurts of productivity. “One of my pieces was orchestrated [on a flight] between Boston and London on one of those big tables that you used to change a baby,” he told another interviewer. But this speed of working was the exception. As the critic Paul Driver observed: “To satisfy his ultra-fastidious ear, his pieces require minute inner working. Each phrase, each note, each semiquaver rest must be locked into position before eternity.”
Yet the music profession indulged “Olly”, knowing that the eventual outcome would be a fascinating new piece of music. Among his greatest champions was the conductor Simon (later Sir Simon) Rattle who, appreciating that a tormented talent was struggling to emerge, learnt to deal with the problem. “Put a temporary ending on and let’s do it,” Rattle told Knussen when Coursing (1979), a complex and multilayered work for mixed chamber ensemble, got bogged down. Michael Tilson Thomas, another conductor to whom Knussen would turn for advice, gave the premiere at the BBC Proms in 1979 of his Third Symphony, widely regarded as one of his most important works.
Knussen’s music often consisted of short pieces, yet they could be dense and concentrated, dazzling and multilayered. No two works were ever remotely the same, leaving admirers thrilled at his constant ability to produce new ideas, although critics suggested it hid an underlying reluctance to commit to any particular style or form – it certainly made him hard to pigeonhole or define. Some of his music showed a strong American influence, while he also displayed a deft ear for the harmonic richness of early 20th-century French music.
Knussen was one of the few composers since Britten whose operas have found a toehold in the repertory. There were two, both written with Maurice Sendak, the children’s author. Where the Wild Things Are (1979-83) is a charming story about an unruly child who is sent to bed early for misbehaviour and embarks on a magical journey. True to form his second, Higglety Pigglety Pop, which was intended to make a double bill with the first, was not delivered in time for the promised production by Glyndebourne Touring Opera in 1984, and the audience had to make do instead with Bamber Gascoigne reading passages from Sendak’s book.
By the following summer’s festival the teething troubles were resolved, even if the score was incomplete. Despite their origins in children’s books and their musical influence coming from composers whose music Knussen had loved as a child – Mussorgsky, Debussy, Ravel and Stravinsky – the pieces were in no sense music for children, being among his most complex and elaborate works.
By middle age Knussen was a big, burly, shambling man, with a personality to match; he was also prone to introspection and bouts of ill health – not helped by his morbid obesity. Some orchestral musicians found him a tyrant on the podium – on one occasion he gracelessly demanded a 14-hour rehearsal from members of a student orchestra at Aldeburgh – while others compared his personality to that of a cuddly bear.
Hans Werner Henze, the composer, considered him to be “an exceptionally fine conductor with a well-tuned ear and brilliant stick technique”, whose readings were “full of drama and violent contrasts, with surging tempi, toughness and sheer ferocity”.
In 1984 Knussen was appointed composer-in-residence with the Philharmonia Orchestra, but it proved to be a largely honorary title. In 1989 he became guest conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, but withdrew almost immediately, struggling to balance the demands of composition, teaching and conducting.
He admitted to being inefficient, suffering from neuroses and displaying a lack of routine. He often composed during the night, sometimes until as late as 4am, “largely because that’s when the phone doesn’t ring and there are less things to think about”.
Of his later music the Violin Concerto (2002), written for Pinchas Zukerman and commissioned by the orchestras of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, proved particularly popular, with its freewheeling finale. Alex Ross, the New Yorker critic, tried to describe his horn concerto of 1996, written for Barry Tuckwell: “The doleful D minor chords that kick off Oliver Knussen’s Horn Concerto smack of Gustav Mahler, although the helter-skelter instrumental writing that swarms all around has the effect of shoving Mahler into the middle of Piccadilly Circus.”
Stuart Oliver Knussen was born in Glasgow on June 12 1952, the son of Stuart Knussen, a double bass player of English and Norwegian ancestry, who was working with the Scottish National Orchestra, and his American-born wife Ethelyn (née Alexander). Young Oliver was a small child when his father moved to the London Symphony Orchestra as principal double bass, soon becoming chairman of the self-governing orchestra.
The LSO often made recordings at Watford Town Hall, close to the family home, and its players would drop by for lunch. Leopold Stokowski was a regular visitor and Tuckwell lodged with the family for a time. “Apart from the usual enthusiasm for toy trains and model aeroplanes, my favourite objects as a child were ’78s,” Knussen once said.
He began composing at six, soon winning a prize in the Watford and District music festival. By the time he was 11 his father had sent him for composition lessons with John Lambert, who had studied in Paris with Nadia Boulanger and who, Knussen recalled, “insisted on the avoidance of easy formulae or padding” in his compositions. His instrumental trio, written in the same year, was performed by youngsters from the Central Tutorial School for Young Musicians at Morley College.
Another early work was his setting to music of hums and songs from Winnie-the-pooh, but he was dismayed to learn that he needed permission from Disney, and the works were withdrawn for 15 years – though, unusually, he remained pleased with them.
His father, a member of Britten’s English Opera Group, spent time at Aldeburgh and as a boy Oliver was invited to take tea with the composer. He recalled how Britten “treated me seriously: was I doing counterpoint? Did I plan my pieces carefully?” Britten offered him a chamber music commission for the 1969 Aldeburgh Festival, which Knussen had the misfortune to call Fire: its first performance was scheduled only days after Snape Maltings concert hall burnt down. It subsequently became known as Capriccio.
Knussen was only 15, though already 6ft 3in tall, when his first symphony, a four-movement work, was performed in a blaze of publicity. He had been seen on television during The Music Men, film by Rediffusion about his father’s orchestra, and was invited to compose a work for them. It was to be conducted at the Royal Festival Hall in April 1968 by Istvan Kertesz, the LSO’S principal conductor. But Kertesz fell ill and because no one else knew the work the teenage Knussen had to step in, receiving a 10-minute ovation. The awkward teenager found the press coverage embarrassing, however, while there were also mutterings of nepotism.
Kertesz was still ill when the orchestra toured the US the same month, so Knussen travelled with them, appearing on even more newspaper front pages. He later told how he used his fees to go “absolutely bonkers” in the record shops of New York, buying every LP he could find by American composers such as Elliott Carter, Charles Ives, Gunther Schuller and others. When the fuss died down, Leonard Bernstein, who was associated with the LSO, invited Knussen to Tanglewood, where he studied with Schuller, who became his mentor.
Soon came the Concerto for Orchestra (1968-70), just as precocious as the symphony, yet it showed that the young composer had absorbed the influences of Britten, Berg and other 20thcentury symphonists. He was also championed in America by André Previn, who had taken over from Kertesz at the LSO.
If these experiences shaped Knussen professionally, they also made him highly self-critical and he soon withdrew his juvenile first a symphony. Nevertheless, the Second Symphony, written for Yehudi Menuhin conducting at the Windsor Festival in 1970, abruptly presented Knussen as a fully formed symphonist. A flurry of chamber music followed, aided by his first adult encounters with new British music, which came through Peter (later Sir Peter) Maxwell Davies, whose classes he attended at Dartington in 1974, and for whom he did occasional musical odd jobs. Yet he was soon slowing down, and by the end of the decade had a reputation for constantly revising and tinkering.
Soon his life was centred around Aldeburgh where, in 1983, he became artistic director of the festival at the invitation of Sir Peter Pears. He lived in a rambling house in rural Snape surrounded by piles of scores, CDS and manuscripts, juggling his many commitments and being subjected to “terrible invasions of nature”, as he described the crows that invaded his stove. He served as music director of the London Sinfonietta from 1998 to 2002, and often conducted the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group.
Although many found him sociable, Knussen admitted to intense bouts of shyness, particularly when working with a new orchestra. “The days preceding the first meeting with an orchestra I haven’t met before are not unlike a nightmare combination of the first day at school and simultaneously being tortured, I imagine,” he said. He was appointed CBE in 1994 and in 2016 received the Queen’s Medal for Music.
Knussen was a great supporter of younger composers, introducing a workshop element to Aldeburgh and using his various orchestral engagements to promote the music of Thomas Adès, Huw Watkins and the like. He was interested in the visual arts, always visiting galleries when on tour, and was widely read and well-informed, a fascinating conversationalist.
He vehemently defended the place of contemporary music in society, insisting that there was no need to court public opinion. “I don’t think one ever is going to convert the big public,” he said in 2015, “and neither should one try to because the big public isn’t interested in oysters and grit, they’re interested in having a nice ride on the tunes.”
In 1972 Knussen married Susan Freedman, an American-born television producer, who directed him and Simon Rattle in the BBC television series The Art of Conducting in 1994. They separated in the mid-1990s and she died in 2003; three years later he produced his requiem for her, Songs for Sue,a setting of four poems for soprano and chamber ensemble. He is survived by their daughter, Sonya, a mezzo-soprano.
Oliver Knussen, born June 12 1952, died July 8 2018