The death of Alexander Goehr at the age of 92 brings to a close what was perhaps the most important chapter in British music in the second half of the 20th century. If Goehr’s own music has come to seem less significant than his importance as a teacher of some of the leading British composers of subsequent generations, then his role in creating what became a genuinely new force in British music after the second world war cannot be overestimated.
Together with his fellow students at Manchester University and the Royal Manchester College of Music, composers Harrison Birtwistle and Peter Maxwell Davies, trumpeter and later conductor Elgar Howarth and pianist and composer John Ogdon, Goehr was a founder of the New Music Manchester group, which rapidly became a distinctive, progressive force in what was the generally parochial and conservative world of British music in the early 1950s.
The Manchester group not only performed their own works but, largely thanks to Goehr’s awareness of what was going on across the Channel, it also introduced music by the European avant-garde to Britain: Goehr had been born in Berlin in 1932, but his family emigrated to Britain only a few months later. His father, Walter, was a conductor and a former pupil of Schoenberg. He became an important figure in London musical life, conducting the premiere of Tippett’s A Child of Our Time and the first British performance of Messiaen’s Turangalîla Symphony, but he discouraged his son’s ambitions to be a composer. Yet after leaving Manchester, Alexander spent a year in Paris studying with Olivier Messiaen, where he met Pierre Boulez and became caught up in the world of total serialism, relaying what he learned back to his contemporaries in the UK.
Perhaps because of that cosmopolitan background, Goehr matured more quickly as a composer than either Maxwell Davies or Birtwistle, both of whom only really began to make their mark in the 1960s. The pieces Goehr composed in the late 1950s and early 60s – which gradually moved away from the strictures of serialism towards a more freely expressive language, such as the cantata The Deluge and his Little Symphony (composed as a memorial to his father) – remain some of his most convincing. Later in the 1960s, he was one of the pioneers of music theatre in Britain, composing a trilogy of pieces for the Music Theatre Ensemble, which he founded in 1967; he also composed five larger-scale operas, including Arianna, a realisation of a lost opera by Monteverdi, which he composed for Covent Garden in 1995.
As their stature increased, comparisons with his Manchester contemporaries became more inevitable, and Goehr’s music increasingly came off worse. Crucially, where Birtwistle and Maxwell Davies always seemed to be instinctive composers – you could hardly imagine either of them having had any other career – Goehr always seemed much more self-conscious in what he wrote. To my ears at least, there was something contrived about his music, as if the constant dialogue with history, stretching back beyond the works of Monteverdi, had come to matter more than the music that resulted, even though some of his works seemed to transcend the technical obsessions and packed an undeniable expressive power.
Yet perhaps it was that constant obsession with his own musical language and technique that made Goehr such an effective teacher. He had worked at Yale and at Leeds University before becoming professor of music at Cambridge in 1976, where his students included some of the most significant British composers of our time, including George Benjamin, Thomas Adès and Julian Anderson. He inspired great loyalty in those who performed his music, too; it’s significant that the late Oliver Knussen, one of the most discriminating of composer-conductors, was one of his most enthusiastic champions. However “difficult” Goehr’s music sometimes seemed, there’s no doubt that he was a hugely influential figure in British music for more than half a century.
