In 1959, The Deluge, a cantata for soprano, contralto and instrumental ensemble to a text, derived from the writings of Leonardo da Vinci by the Soviet film director Sergei Eisenstein, received a highly successful premiere. It was composed by Alexander Goehr, who has died aged 92, using the challenging 12-note idiom pioneered by Arnold Schoenberg, the Austrian modernist of the first half of the century, as his starting point.
However, a second Eisenstein cantata – Sutter’s Gold, for baritone, chorus and orchestra – prompted a crisis for Goehr when it was mounted at the Leeds festival two years later. The amateur chorus could not cope with its demands, bringing home to the composer the disappointment felt by performers who were bent on making music purely for the pleasure of doing so.
Resolving to find a way out of the post-Schoenbergian impasse towards which, he thought, European avant-garde composers such as Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen had steered composition in the 1950s, Goehr struggled to locate other ways forward.
Some of his instrumental and orchestral works of this period were certainly successful, such as his First Piano Trio (1966) and Romanza for cello and orchestra (1968), the latter written for Jacqueline du Pré. The drama of live theatre, enlivened by Brechtian and other ideas, supplied another facet to his output; he created, in Naboth’s Vineyard (1968), Shadowplay (1970) and Sonata About Jerusalem (1971), a small-scale kind of music-theatre, just as many other composers were doing at this period – and in the Music Theatre Ensemble, a short-lived company to perform it.
Still dissatisfied, however, Goehr once again reconsidered his whole compositional approach. The white-note sonorities of Psalm IV for voices, viola and organ (1976) signalled a move to a more transparent sound world: a new kind of modal harmony that was, in addition, rigorously controlled via recourse to the technical device known as figured bass, a notation for chord sequences common in the 17th and 18th centuries. He thought afresh about how to write tonal music that was valid for our own times.
Fusions of past and present were to dominate the composer’s output for almost half a century. Both orchestral works and chamber music continued to feature: Symphony with Chaconne (1987) and the Piano Quintet (2000), for instance, take various classical textures and procedures as their departure points.
Later, however, what some these days call “repurposing” inspired Goehr to try another approach to music drama: in Arianna, premiered in 1995, he reconstructed Monteverdi’s late opera of the same name, assembling on and around its only surviving elements – Ottavio Rinuccini’s libretto and a single aria, the famous Lamento d’Arianna – a curious cross between Monteverdian and late-20th-century idioms.
Born in Berlin to a Jewish musical family, just months before Hitler came to power, Alexander (known as Sandy) was swiftly removed to the UK, along with his parents, Laelia (nee Rivlin), a pianist, and Walter, a former pupil of Schoenberg who became well known as a conductor, particularly of contemporary music. Walter Goehr conducted the world premiere of Michael Tippett’s A Child of Our Time and the UK premiere of Oliver Messiaen’s Turangalîla Symphony. Though Sandy did not receive much compositional encouragement from Walter, he grew up in a household filled with music and musicians. In 1963, he wrote the Little Symphony, probably his first widely known composition, in his father’s memory, following his death in 1960.
Educated at Berkhamsted school, Hertfordshire, Sandy was involved with the Socialist Zionist Association. This resulted in a move to Manchester, and soon to composition studies with Richard Hall at what was then the Royal Manchester (now Royal Northern) College of Music.
Like his fellow students in the city, Harrison Birtwistle and Peter Maxwell Davies, Goehr became known as a member of the New Music Manchester Group, which had some success with their joint promotions in the mid-1950s. Goehr went on to study with Messiaen and Yvonne Loriod in 1955-56 in Paris, where he was briefly promoted by Boulez.
Since the British musical world still remained very parochial in the 50s, Goehr’s experiences, when still so young, of both his Schoenbergian heritage and the latest activities of the European avant garde helped to strengthen his position as a powerful advocate of the new. First working for several years as a BBC music producer (1960-67), and then teaching at Yale University and at Southampton, Goehr eventually became a university professor: first at Leeds (1971-76) and then at Cambridge, where he taught until his retirement in 1999 and was subsequently an emeritus professor. His broadcasting activities (he was the BBC’s Reith lecturer in 1987) and his teaching of several generations of British composers – among them George Benjamin, Julian Anderson and Thomas Adès – were supplemented by several books, including Composing a Life (2023).
His academic profile sometimes appeared to overshadow his composing career; only in his early years was he ever as prominent as Birtwistle and Maxwell Davies.
Goehr was married three times: first, in 1954, to Audrey Baker, an artist, their marriage ending in divorce in 1971; second, in 1972, to Anthea Staunton, an administrator, a marriage also dissolved; and finally, in 1982, to Amira Katz, who teaches in the department of Asian studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She survives him, along with three daughters from his first marriage, Lydia, Julia and Clare, and a son, Lorenzo, from the second.
• Alexander Goehr, composer and teacher, born 10 August 1932; died 26 August 2024
