Obituary
The Times: Monday July 6 1998
George Lloyd, composer died on July 3 aged 85. He was born on June
28th 1913.
George Lloyd's long career was a remarkable cycle of recognition and
neglect. Prodigiously successful in the 1930's, he saw a promising
future blighted first by traumatic wartime service in the Royal Navy,
which left him incapacitated for several years, and then by a change
in artistic fashion which meant that for decades his compositions
went unheard. For a time he gave up on music altogether and became
a market gardener instead.
Slowly however, he returned to composing and even more slowly his
musical fortunes turned. With his health restored and the wider
artistic climate transformed, he enjoyed an extraordinary Indian
summer in the last two decades of his life. New works were written,
recorded and performed. Other pieces were discovered and revived.
All were greeted with popular enthusiasm that was almost without
parallel in contemporary musical life. Given a chance to hear it at
last audiences found that they loved Lloyd's work.
It was not hard to understand why. Lloyd was an unashamedly late-
Romantic composer. His first love he once said has been for the
Italian Operatic masters Verdi, Puccini, Donizetti, Bellini.
Elgar was the English composer he most admired. Content to mine the
expressive potential melody and harmony in the grand 19th Century
tradition, Lloyd rejected the theoretical rigours of 20th Century
modernism as a musical dead end. Here was a contemporary composer
whose work sounded nothing like most contemporary music.
To listeners fond of asking why modern composers are incapable of
writing decent tunes, Lloyd's music came as a welcome revelation.
But the populist triumphalism of his noisier champions was no more
accurate a reflection of his achievements than the grudging response
of more professional critics. Conservative though it is in idiom,
Lloyd's music is free of easy nostalgia and pastiche. He may have
looked to the past for his inspiration, but his response is vital
and intensely personal to the world in which he lived.
Born in Cornwall to a comfortable family with some money
and a great deal of enthusiasm for music, George Walter
Selwyn Lloyd missed much of his schooling because of rheumatic
fever. He went on to study violin with Albert Sammons
and composition with Harry Farjeon.
His was a precocious
talent. His first Symphony, written when he was 19 was
premiered by the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra in 1933.
Two years later his career was well under way. A second
symphony had its premier at Eastbourne in 1935 and was
followed almost immediately by a Third which the BBC Symphony
Orchestra performed. |
Meanwhile
Lloyd's First opera Iernin had been performed in Penzance
in 1934. The Times critic, Frank Howes, on holiday in
that area, had given a glowing review, which lead to London
performances at the Lyceum the following year. A second
opera, The Serf was staged at Covent Garden when Lloyd
was just 25 under the baton of Albert Coates.
The war put a stop to this musical progress.
As Royal Marine bandsman, Lloyd doubled as a gunner, serving
on the notoriously dangerous Arctic convoys. I 1942 a
faulty torpedo did a U-turn in the sea and blew up his
ship. Lloyd was rescued but not before he had seen most
of his fellow gunners drowned in oil. The trauma and severe
shell-shock exacerbated the weak health he had suffered
as a child, bringing about a complete collapse. He attempted
to come to terms with his grim wartime experience in his
Fourth and Fifth symphonies, works which only the devoted
nursing of his Swiss-born wife Nancy enabled him to complete
(in 1946 and 1948 respectively).
Despite the severity of his illness, Lloyd managed to produce a third
opera, John Socman, about a Wiltshire soldier at Agincourt.
Commissioned for the festival of Britain in 1951, it had its first
performance at Bristol. The libretto, like those for the two previous
operas, was provided by his father William Lloyd.
Lloyd's health deteriorated further, and in 1952 he withdrew to Dorset
where for 20 years he was a market gardener growing mushrooms and
carnations. He continued to compose intermittently, rising at 4.30am
and writing for three hours before the start of the working day. But
he found it difficult to get his work performed and became increasingly
disillusioned, seeing himself at odds with a musical establishment
apparently in thrall to the serialist and a tonal orthodoxies of
European modernism.
"I sent scores off to the BBC" he later said. "They came back, usually
without comment. I never wrote 12-tone music because I didn't like the
theory. I studied the blessed thing in the early 1930's and thought it
was a cock-eyed idea that produced horrible sounds. It made composers
forget how to sing."
Nevertheless, he was not entirely without supporters. Among those who
continued to respond to his music's opulence, vigour and colour were
the conductors Charles Groves and Edward Downes and the pianist John
Ogden, for whom Lloyd wrote the first of four piano concertos, Scapegoat,
in 1963.
The tide began to turn albeit slowly. In 1970's Gavin Henderson, then
chief executive of the Philharmonia, gave useful support. The BBC,
after neglecting Lloyd for years, accepted his eighth Symphony for
performance in 1969 - and finally got round to broadcasting it eight
years later. His Sixth Symphony was given at the Proms in 1981,and in
the same year three of his symphonies were recorded by Lyrita
Records.
But perhaps the most influential figure in the recent revival of
Lloyd's fortunes was Peter Kermani an American entrepreneur and
music lover whose enthusiasm for Lloyd's work led to deal with the
Albany Symphony Orchestra from New York State. This brought forth
a flood of performances and recordings of both old and new compositions.
It has also brought Lloyd a whole new American audience and, in his
own delighted words, ""All of a sudden buckets of dollars!"
Among the new works recorded were Lloyd's Eleventh and Twelfth
Symphonies, which had their first performances in 1986 and 1990.
Other major new compositions included a large scale choral piece,
The Vigil of Venus, premiered at the Festival Hall in1989, nine
years after its completion, an a Symphonic mass , premiered at the
1993 Brighton festival under the baton of the composer. The latter
work was described by Gramophone magazine as "one of the finest
pieces of English choral writing of the 20th century": the Times
critic remarked, not unkindly, on its "overwhelming
retrospection".
Lloyd suffered heart trouble last year, but recovered sufficiently
to resume work on a Requiem, which he completed three weeks ago. He
is survived by his wife Nancy whom he married in 1937. They had no
children.
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