Obituary, Harrison Birtwistle (1934-2022)

The Lancastrian composer Harrison Birtwistle has died at the age of 87. The year of his birth, 1934, saw the deaths of Elgar, Holst and Delius and the births of Peter Maxwell Davies, William Mathias and Birtwistle himself, making it a symbolic changing of the guard in British music history. Born in Accrington (in the north-west of England, roughly midway between Blackburn and Burnley), Birtwistle initially trained as a clarinettist and played in various professional ensembles in the area, before pursuing further study of his instrument at the Royal Manchester College of Music (today’s Royal Northern College of Music) in 1952.

It was here that Birtwistle’s early forays into composition – which he himself later compared unfavourably to Vaughan Williams and the English Pastoralists – began to develop into a mature and unique style, which always defied easy categorisation but showed the influence of Boulez, Messiaen, Stravinsky and others. At Manchester he came into contact with Maxwell Davies and Alexander Goehr, as well as the like-minded trumpeter Elgar Howarth and pianist John Ogdon, who formed the New Music Manchester group to promote contemporary music. The three composers, in particular, are often referred to as the Manchester School – likening them to the Second Viennese School earlier in the century.

Rejecting his earlier works entirely, Birtwistle declared a tabula rasa in 1957 with a new “Opus 1”, his Refrains and Choruses for wind quintet. By 1965, he had transformed fully into a composer; he sold his clarinets and moved to the USA for a time, and the next three decades saw him produce perhaps his most iconic works. The controversial and violent Punch and Judy, The Mask of Orpheus and Gawain all met with critical acclaim and bolstered Birtwistle’s reputation as both a radical and a composer devoted particularly to the stage – though the monumental The Triumph of Time was a purely orchestral work, based on a Renaissance Flemish woodcut.

Despite his growing status within the contemporary classical sphere, he remained relatively unknown to the general public until 1995, when his Panic for wind and percussion was premiered at the Last Night of the Proms. Set against the comfortable predictability of conventional Last Night programming, it is hard to overstate the shock that this performance created among audiences. Predictably (as would happen again a quarter of a century later with 2020’s unorthodox reworking of Jerusalem by Errollyn Wallen), the BBC was inundated with complaints, and non-musicians fell over themselves to offer their negative appraisals of the work. Birtwistle, though, had undeniably made his breakthrough in characteristically iconoclastic fashion, perfectly in keeping with his lifelong disdain for establishment acceptance and his persona as a bluff curmudgeon. Proudly unrepentant, he later commented on having trodden “on a sacred cow and the attendant manure”.

Further operas followed, perhaps most notably 2008’s The Minotaur, and a number of smaller-scale chamber-theatrical compositions and the haunting choral Moth Requiem, though Birtwistle’s later years were overshadowed by the growing illness of his wife Sheila (who died in 2012). He is survived by his sons Adam and Silas, both of whom pursued artistic, though not musical, careers; the former is a painter renowned for his portraits of composers, and the latter primarily a sculptor, particularly concerned with using recycled materials to raise awareness of ecological issues.

Fellow composer Oliver Knussen, who died in 2018, summed up Birtwistle’s uncompromising and often challenging music fittingly: “It seems to me that you can’t just be indifferent to it. And that’s the mark of a great artist, I think.”

Harrison Birtwistle - a selected discography