Malcolm Williamson

Master of the Queen's Music since 1975

Malcolm Benjamin Graham Christopher Williamson, composer: born Sydney, New South Wales 21 November 1931; Master of the Queen's Music 1975-2003; CBE 1976; Honorary AO 1987; married 1960 Dolores Daniel (one son, two daughters); died Cambridge 2 March 2003.

One would imagine that being appointed Master of the Queen's Musick – and thus following in the footsteps of Shield, Boyce, Elgar, Walford Davies, Bax and Bliss – would guarantee a composer enduring success. When Malcolm Williamson acceded to the position – on the advice of Benjamin Britten and Sir Adrian Boult – he was the 19th composer since Nicolas Lanier in 1626, and the first non-Briton.

But the honour proved to be a double-edged sword: the appointment marked the beginning of the decline of a career that had enjoyed almost two decades of extraordinary success. The conservative musical establishment whose back had already been put up by his music now saw the infidel in the palace, quite literally. Williamson saw himself otherwise, as an outsider. He was always an Australian, even though his post required him to live in Britain: "When I think about it," he said in 1965,

I am certain that my music is characteristically Australian although I have never tried to make it so. We Australians have to offer the world a persona compounded of forcefulness, brashness, a direct warmth of approach, sincerity which is not ashamed, and more of what the Americans call "get-up-and-go" than the Americans themselves possess.

On another occasion he aptly extended the characterisation to his work:

Most of my music is Australian. Not the bush or the deserts, but the brashness of the cities. The sort of brashness that makes Australians go through life pushing doors marked pull.

Malcolm Williamson was born in Sydney in 1931. After attending Barker College in Hornsby, New South Wales, he entered the Sydney Conservatorium in 1943, aged only 11, to study horn, violin and piano; his composition studies were under the tutelage of Eugene Goossens. His musical world broadened in 1950 when he moved to London and discovered the 12-tone music of the Second Viennese School and other modernists; it took on a particular importance when, from 1953 to 1957, he studied composition with Elisabeth Lutyens, then one of Britain's few serialists, and with Erwin Stein, a Schoenberg student. Visits to Paris brought him into contact with work of composers such as Olivier Messaien and the young Pierre Boulez. Messiaen's explicitly Catholic music took on especial resonance when Williamson himself adopted the faith in 1952.

He earned his keep in music from the start. While he was studying, he took a succession of journeyman jobs. Already a gifted pianist, he taught himself the organ and played at the Church of the Immaculate Conception, Farm Street (1955-58), and St Peter's, Limehouse (1958-60). The Lord not having all the best tunes, Williamson also played piano in a night-club. He proofread music for a publisher. He lectured (1961-62) on music at the Central School of Speech and Drama.

Williamson was soon able to support himself by composition alone, at an age when most composers can only dream of such independence. And he wrote with prodigious energy: operas, symphonies and other orchestral pieces, music for organ and piano, chamber works, a phenomenal amount of music for voices, and (a personal favourite) "cassations" involving the audience, a form initially developed to teach his own children how opera works – the list of his compositions in Contemporary Composers fills eight thick columns.

Success came rapidly. In 1957 his First Symphony, Elevamini ("Let Us Be Lifted Up"), and the overture Santiago de Espada were conducted at a private concert in St Pancras Town Hall by Sir Adrian Boult, who probably paid for the event, too. They revealed – as well the influence of Stravinsky, Britten, Tippett, Messiaen and the Schoenbergians – a sure hand with the orchestra and, in the symphony, a bold approach to form: it enfolds a central scherzo between two slow movements. It was, in fact, an orchestral requiem: it is inscribed "In memoriam M. E. W." – his maternal grandmother.

His operas went from desk to stage remarkably swiftly. Sadler's Wells staged his sun-sparkled Our Man in Havana, after Graham Greene, in July 1963, when the ink was hardly dry. The Happy Prince, a children's opera after Oscar Wilde, was finished in 1965 and premiered before the year was out; another children's opera, Julius Caesar Jones, followed almost immediately. His chamber opera English Eccentrics, after Edith Sitwell, was written and first performed, at the Aldeburgh Festival, in 1964; it was dedicated to his former teacher, Erwin Stein.

His major operatic achievement, the three-act The Violins of Saint-Jacques with a libretto by William Chappell derived from Patrick Leigh Fermor's novel, was premiered at Sadler's Wells in November 1966. It displayed a happy eclecticism: a Straussian richness sits alongside Lulu-esque Expressionism and a direct and memorable tunefulness. All these works display an interest in a central martyr figure, a victim.

Williams was untroubled by the criticism The Violins attracted. The former night-club pianist and church organist happily worked simultaneously on scores of radically different character. His first film score, for The Brides of Dracula (nine more were to follow, not including the title music for Watership Down), was written in 1960, as was his Second Piano Concerto, which sparkles with Shostakovichian wit, and the unaccompanied Dawn Carol.

One prominent premiere followed another. The Organ Concerto was a 1961 Proms commission, dedicated to Boult in thanks for his long-standing support. The Third Piano Concerto was unveiled by John Ogdon in Australia in 1962, the year that saw the composition of one of Williamson's most powerful works, Vision of Christ-Phoenix, written for the organ in Coventry Cathedral and prompted by the sight of the new building arising from the ruins of the old (he took the Coventry Carol as his own building material, fashioning a passacaglia and set of variations from it).

The Australian Elizabethan Theatre requested his ornithologically inspired ballet The Display for the 1964 Festival of the Arts in Adelaide; the choreography was by Robert Helpmann. That same year Menuhin asked for a violin concerto, first heard in 1965 at the Bath Festival. It is dedicated to the memory of Edith Sitwell, who died while Williamson was at work on the score; as with the First Symphony, two elegiac outer movements enclose a central scherzo. The Sinfonietta was a BBC commission in 1965 to commemorate the inauguration of Radio 3. The Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra ordered the Second Symphony in 1969 for its 75th birthday. The Stone Wall, one of his "cassations" involving the audience, enjoyed a television audience of millions when it was premiered during the Last Night of the Proms in 1971.

A documentary film, Williamson Down Under, broadcast by the BBC in 1975, showed an aspect of his work that few had suspected: an enthusiastic involvement in music-making for children with learning difficulties, and an intense engagement with Aboriginal rights.

In spite of the distinction conferred by becoming Master of the Queen's Musick (he quickly dropped the archaic "k") and his appointment as CBE a year after, Williamson soon found himself the victim of acerbic tongues when crossed wires between composer, conductor (Bernard Haitink) and the other parties involved meant that his Fourth Symphony failed to reach performance in time to mark the Queen's Silver Jubilee in 1977 (and it has never been heard since). But the truth was not allowed to spoil a good story.

Likewise, after a small stroke left him with slurred speech, word went round that he was hitting the bottle – and, though he liked a good drink as much as the next man, he could go for long stretches without alcohol. And – initially, at least, until his health began to fail him – he did deliver his royal commissions: the large-scale Mass of Christ the King, another Jubilee work, premiered at the Three Choirs Festival in 1978 (again, the delay was not his fault), and, in 1980, an Ode to Queen Elizabeth to mark the 80th birthday of the Queen Mother and the moving and intense Lament in Memory of Lord Mountbatten of Burma, for violin and strings.

Although in latter years he was less prolific than at the outset of his career, he produced several works on an impressive scale, many of them for his native Australia. The Sixth Symphony (1981-82), played by all seven of the ABC orchestras to mark the organisation's 50th birthday, is in a single span of 45 minutes, though it subdivides into 14 sections; it is scored for a huge orchestra. The Seventh (1984), for strings only, was a commission to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the founding of the state of Victoria. The Australian bicentennial year, 1988, produced two further works of substance, The True Endeavour, for speaker, chorus and orchestra, on texts by the historian Manning Clark, and the choral symphony The Dawn is at Hand, setting words by the Aboriginal poet Oodgeroo (Kath Walker) – whose obituary Williamson wrote for this newspaper. (Her son, before his death from Aids, made Williamson his tribal brother – the highest honour he could bestow.)

Back in Britain, interest in Williamson's music was waning. Although a touching song-cycle, The Year of Birds, for soprano and orchestra, to poems by Iris Murdoch, was heard at the 1995 Proms, his 70th birthday went unacknowledged in the 2001 season. Almost his sole champion was the conductor Christopher Austin, who from 1994 programmed Williamson's music regularly, most recently with the BBC Concert Orchestra, for a 70th-birthday concert in November 2001.

Austin's respect for the music was underpinned by a deep personal regard:

He was the most empathic person I've ever known and this underpinned his gifts as an artist and as a friend. His deepest feelings were never far from the surface, and the briefest phrase of music or poetry he loved – especially words he had set – would move him to tears. This made him vulnerable through his life but also, most crucially, lovable.

Martin Anderson

There was a deeply religious, indeed, a mystical aspect, to Malcolm Williamson's music and to his personal life, writes Rabbi Albert Friedlander. He was a devout Roman Catholic, but took great interest in the religious education his children received. It was he who brought his wife Dolores and the children to the Westminster Synagogue and he became involved in the study of Judaism. "You have to be a Jew to be a good Catholic," he said.

In his own work, one composition celebrated the land of Israel in which he took a passionate interest, and a text on the Jewish festival of Chanukah. When his son Peter was called to the Torah for his bar mitzvah, Malcolm took an active part in the proceedings.

Malcolm Williamson was deeply concerned with the interfaith dialogue, and turned to it in a somewhat difficult situation. At the time of the wedding of the Prince of Wales and Lady Diana Spencer, the Prince turned to the Welsh composer William Mathias to write the wedding hymn for the service at St Paul's. As the Master of the Queen's Music, Malcolm felt that he should make a gift of music to the royal couple. He came to me with an unusual request. Could I write a hymn for the occasion which he would set to music and then present to the couple as "a gift from the Jewish community and of the Master of the Queen's Music"?

I used part of the Song of Songs which described a royal procession and wrote a text which Malcolm supervised carefully before setting it to music. This was presented to Charles and Diana, but not performed at that time. Later, it had several performances in Great Britain, and then in Australia.

There were other occasions when we came together to discuss religion, and I always found him a questing, deeply searching man of faith. Even in his last years, when he was unable to speak, his family was aware of a great mind imprisoned after the massive stroke but reaching out to communicate.