Harrison Birtwistle

Sir Harrison Birtwistle (15 July 1934 – 18 April 2022) was an English composer of contemporary classical music, most famous for his operas, which often drew on myths. His well-known pieces include the orchestral work *The Triumph of Time* (1972) and the operas *The Mask of Orpheus* (1986), *Gawain* (1991), and *The Minotaur* (2008). In 2019, *The Guardian*'s music critics ranked *The Minotaur* as the third-best composition of the 21st century. Even his non-stage works frequently had a theatrical quality. His saxophone concerto *Panic*, performed during the BBC's Last Night of the Proms, brought him "national notoriety". He earned numerous international awards and honorary degrees.

Birtwistle grew up in Accrington, a Lancashire mill town near Manchester. His parents, Fred and Madge, ran a bakery, and his mother encouraged his musical interest, buying him a clarinet at age seven and arranging lessons with the local bandmaster. He attended Accrington Grammar School. He spent much of his youth exploring the countryside, and his later work was deeply shaped by his frustration with how modern technology disrupted nature. He also built amateur theatrical sets and imagined dramas within them. He became skilled enough to play in a local military-style band and in orchestras accompanying Gilbert and Sullivan productions and the local choral society's performances of Handel's *Messiah*. He began composing around this time, later describing his early pieces as "sub-Vaughan Williams".

In 1952, he entered the Royal Manchester College of Music on a clarinet scholarship. There he met contemporaries including Peter Maxwell Davies, Alexander Goehr, pianist John Ogdon, and trumpeter Elgar Howarth. From 1955 to 1957, he completed national service with the Royal Artillery (Plymouth) Band, based in Oswestry.

From 1962 to 1965, Birtwistle served as director of music at Cranborne Chase School. He then studied at Princeton University on a Harkness Fellowship, where he finished the opera *Punch and Judy* with a libretto by Stephen Pruslin. It premiered at the Aldeburgh Festival; Benjamin Britten reportedly left during intermission. This work, along with *Verses for Ensembles* and *The Triumph of Time*, brought him greater recognition. *The Triumph of Time*, inspired by a Pieter Bruegel woodcut, premiered in 1972. That same year, he wrote his only film score, for *The Offence* starring Sean Connery. From 1975 to 1983, he was musical director of the newly founded Royal National Theatre in London. He was knighted in 1988 and made a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour in 2001. From 1994 to 2001, he held the Henry Purcell Professorship of Composition at King's College London. In 1987, he won the University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition for his opera *The Mask of Orpheus*.

Though established in classical circles, Birtwistle remained little known to the general public until the mid-1990s, when two events raised his profile. In 1994, two anti-modernist musicians, Frederick Stocken and Keith Burstein, calling themselves "The Hecklers", staged a demonstration at the first night of a revival of his opera *Gawain* at the Royal Opera House. The following year, his saxophone concertante work *Panic* premiered during the second half of the Last Night of the Proms—the first contemporary piece ever played there—to an estimated worldwide TV audience of 100 million. The *Daily Telegraph* reported that many viewers found it incomprehensible.

In 1995, he received the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize. At the 2006 Ivor Novello Awards, he criticized pop musicians for playing too loudly and relying on clichés. Conductors who performed his works included Pierre Boulez, Sir Andrew Davis, Daniel Barenboim, Christoph von Dohnányi, Oliver Knussen, and Simon Rattle. Violinist Christian Tetzlaff premiered his violin concerto in 2011, and pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard premiered *Responses* for piano and orchestra in 2014.

Birtwistle kept a low media profile but occasionally gave interviews. In 2019, he was featured on BBC Radio 3's *Composer of the Week*. He married singer Sheila Duff in 1958; they had three sons, two of whom, Adam and Silas, are artists. Sheila died in 2012. Birtwistle suffered a stroke in 2021 and died at his home in Mere, Wiltshire, on 18 April 2022, aged 87.

His music does not belong to any single school or movement. For a time, he was grouped with Goehr and Davies as part of the "Manchester School", a term coined in parallel to the Second Viennese School. His work is complex and modernistic, with a clear, distinctive voice and a "sonic brashness". Early pieces sometimes recall Igor Stravinsky and Olivier Messiaen, both of whom he acknowledged as influences. His technique of juxtaposing sound blocks is often compared to Edgard Varèse. Hearing works by Boulez (*Le Marteau sans maître*) and Stockhausen (*Zeitmaße* and *Gruppen*) in his youth was also inspirational; Stockhausen in particular influenced his wind quintet *Refrains and Choruses* (1957). His early compositions often used ostinati and had a ritualistic quality, which later became less pronounced.