Composer known for his uncompromising modernism
Sir Harrison Birtwistle, who has died aged 87, was “the most feted British composer of his generation”, said the Financial Times. Unsentimental and “artistically fearless”, he created music that is sensuous and often exquisite, but “never pretty or picturesque”. The feeling, in his powerful and uncompromising pieces, is of an “unflinching engagement with the natural and human worlds, or the point at which the two meet”. Abrasive, dissonant and structurally complex, his work did not delight everyone, however, said The Daily Telegraph, and in the 1990s, two incidents won him a degree of public notoriety. The first was in 1994, when his 1991 opera Gawain was revived at Covent Garden. A group of anti-modernists known as the Hecklers organised a campaign against it, and as the curtain fell on opening night, about 20 people in the cheap seats started booing and catcalling; over in the stalls, Birtwistle’s admirers then responded by clapping wildly and trying to instigate a standing ovation. One reviewer described the scenes in the opera house as pantomime-like.
The following year, Sir John Drummond, the “mischievous” director of the BBC Proms, asked Birtwistle to write a piece for the Last Night of the Proms. A concertante for alto saxophone, it was called Panic, and panic was what ensued when BBC bosses realised that this raucous and violent music would be broadcast to millions of viewers on BBC1, just before the flags came out for Land of Hope and Glory. They tried to persuade Drummond to shift it to the first half of the concert, on BBC2, or to another concert – but he refused. Inevitably, the BBC switchboard was jammed by calls from angry viewers, and the tabloids stoked the furore. Drummond, however, was unrepentant. “If the mummified corpse of the Last Night ever experiences any sort of reanimation, Birtwistle’s Panic may have played its part,” he wrote later. As for the composer, he was (in media interviews at least), a man of relatively few words, who seemed unperturbed by how his work was received. “The question of accessibility,” he once said, “is not my problem.” On another occasion, however, he did suggest that it would be better if people would “sometimes just shut up and listen”.
Harrison Birtwistle (always known as Harry) was born in the Lancashire town of Accrington in 1934, where his parents, Madge and Fred, ran a bakery store. Their house had a bathroom, he told The Guardian, but “the toilet was outside in the backyard like everyone else’s”. His first pair of shoes were clogs, and he recalled lying in bed in the mornings, listening to the clatter of clogs outside, as workers headed to the mills. He was also inspired, however, by the rugged landscape that surrounded the industrial town, which he would roam for hours. Music came into his life when he was seven, and his mother bought him a clarinet. In his teens, he played in the local East Lancashire military band, and from Accrington Grammar School, he won a scholarship to the Royal Manchester College of Music, to study clarinet and composition. There, he met Peter Maxwell Davies, John Ogdon and other members of the group that became known as the Manchester School.
In 1965, he sold his clarinets, as a statement of his intention to become a full-time composer, and took up a Harkness scholarship in the US. Three years later, his opera Punch and Judy, which reflected his interest in “cyclical violence”, premiered at the Aldeburgh Festival, said The Daily Telegraph. There were lean times early in his career, but in 1975 Peter Hall made him the National Theatre’s director of music, which gave him a base from which to write more of his own works; these included The Mask of Orpheus (1986), Theseus Game (2002), and The Minotaur (2008). Birtwistle and his wife Sheila Duff, a singer, lived in various places, including a chilly cottage on the Hebridean island of Raasay, before settling in an old silk mill in Wiltshire, where he worked from a shed in the garden. He also bred turtles, and tended to the collection of moths that he’d first started aged 13. Sheila, whom he had married in 1959, died in 2012. He is survived by their three sons.