Donald Mitchell
Musicologist who championed the work of Benjamin Britten and became close to him in his later years
DONALD MITCHELL, who has died aged 92, was the critic and musicologist most closely associated with the work of Benjamin Britten; he was the last surviving executor of Britten’s will, one of the original trustees of the Britten-pears Foundation and a founding member of Faber Music, the publisher set up with the composer’s backing, through which Mitchell also promoted composers such as Nicholas Maw and Peter Maxwell Davies.
Mitchell described how, since the composer’s death on December 4 1976, “Britten has remained for me a constant and living presence”. In 1979 he acquired Chapel House, the composer’s former hideaway at Horham in Suffolk, even using the “composing hut” at the end of the garden, where much of the composer’s late music was written, to work on his writing and editing.
He also became in effect Britten’s posthumous promoter, championing his work both in Britain and overseas. Although during the composer’s lifetime Mitchell had been charged with producing an authorised biography, he interpreted that task broadly. Pictures from a Life, co-written with John Evans, appeared in 1978, offering a pictorial account of Britten’s work.
More significantly, his work on three of the six volumes of Britten’s letters, the Letters from a
Life series, have in some respects proved to be more useful than a standard biography. He also produced a biography of Peter Pears.
Yet Mitchell’s interests ranged far wider. He was an admirer of Gustav Mahler, and the fruits of his research can be enjoyed in a series of books including The Early
Years (1958), The Wunderhorn Years
(1975) and Songs and Symphonies of Life and Death (1985).
To the wider musical world Mitchell was an amiable, accessible figure who was always willing to volunteer a nugget or two of little-known information to obituary writers when one of the many people associated with Britten and Pears died.
In his recollections of the two men Mitchell would go beyond the musical to tell of their personalities. On one occasion he had been page turning for Britten, who was accompanying Pears at the Edinburgh Festival in a Schubert song cycle. At the interval there had been an almighty row in the green room. “One of them, I forget which, had offended the other by wearing the wrong pair of shoes, brown instead of black,” he recalled in 2001, adding: “It didn’t seem to affect the magic of the second half.” He also remembered Britten’s “conspicuous annoyance when I played a game of croquet with him and inadvertently won”.
Donald Charles Peter Mitchell was born in London on February 6 1925 and educated at Dulwich College. In 1943, being like Britten a conscientious objector, he joined the Non-combatant Corps.
He was appointed assistant master at Oakfield prep school, Tulse Hill, in 1946, where he met his future wife, who at the time was married to the headmaster. They encouraged and supported him financially as he set up the journal Musical Survey. He then spent a year at the University of Durham, from 1949 to 1950.
Convinced of Britten’s musical importance, as early as 1952 Mitchell collaborated with Hans Keller to edit Benjamin Britten: a Commentary on his Works from a Group of Specialists.
During that decade he continued to champion the composer on the radio and in publications such as Musical
Opinion and Musical Times, where he covered a host of subjects – though Britten’s work remained a central focus. In 1959 he joined
The Daily Telegraph, remaining on its staff for five years, though hostile to the paper’s politics.
He then joined Boosey & Hawkes, the music publisher, only to find the company bitterly divided into those who believed that the future lay with Britten and those who championed Igor Stravinsky. Mitchell was barely a year into the job when he was sacked, at which point he and Britten approached Faber & Faber, where Mitchell had already been a successful editor. The outcome was Faber Music, with Mitchell as its first managing director.
He became increasingly close to Britten during the composer’s later years, helping in 1973 to establish the Britten-pears Library Trust, a forerunner of the Brittenpears Foundation, and encouraging Britten to revise the 1941 operetta Paul Bunyan. In 1971 Mitchell left Faber Music to be first professor of music at the University of Sussex and completed his PHD at the University of Southampton in 1977. He was able to bring his academic experience to bear at the Brittenpears School and at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, where he was honorary professor in 2006.
Mitchell, who was appointed CBE in 2000, married Kathleen Livingston (née Burbidge) in 1956. She died in May this year and he is survived by his stepson and an adopted son, another son having predeceased him.
Donald Mitchell, born February 6 1925, died September 29 2017