Though best known for his Horrortorio pastiche and the “pop cantata” Captain Noah and His Floating Zoo, Joseph Horovitz, who has died aged 95, was a master craftsman in a range of music genres, extending from chamber and orchestral through brass band and wind to opera and ballet. He also wrote at least 70 television and film scores over the course of his career, including that for Rumpole of the Bailey.
Many of his more serious works displayed a popular touch, too, but he consistently succeeded in writing music that was gratifyingly accessible without superficiality or sentimentality.
He began to achieve critical acclaim in the 1950s for two comic operas, The Dumb Wife, with a libretto by Peter Shaffer after Rabelais, and Gentleman’s Island, and for a series of ballets (he wrote 16 in all) beginning with Les Femmes d’Alger (1952) and continuing with Alice in Wonderland (1953) and Concerto for Dancers (1958). The former were performed by the Intimate Opera Company, for which he acted as a pianist-composer. In 1961 he was appointed professor of composition at the Royal College of Music, becoming a fellow in 1981 and continuing to teach there until shortly before his death.
Horovitz once cited the British composers Peter Warlock, EJ Moeran and Frederick Delius, as well as the Anglo-Dutch Bernard van Dieren, as influences, but notwithstanding occasional echoes of Warlock, there are few significant traces of English pastoralism in his works. Rather he developed an individual neoclassical idiom, drawing on neo-tonal harmonies, enlivened by jazz, Latin American and other popular elements.
The Trumpet Concerto (1963), written, according to Horovitz, to “demonstrate the agility and brilliance of the modern trumpet”, contrasts spiky, virtuoso material with indulgently mellifluous writing. The closing rondo – a favoured form of the composer – is spiced with Latin American rhythms that keep both soloist and orchestra on their toes. With its colourful orchestration including tambourine, side drum and xylophone, it affords an attractively good-humoured as well as challenging staple in the trumpet repertory. Originally associated with Philip Jones, who gave the first performance under the composer, it was subsequently recorded by a leading trumpeter of the succeeding generation, James Watson. Horovitz made similar contributions to the concerto repertory of many other instruments, too, including violin, clarinet, bassoon, percussion, tuba and euphonium.
Probably his best-known work, Captain Noah and His Floating Zoo, written in 1970, was composed to a text by Michael Flanders. Performed by the King’s Singers, it won the Ivor Novello award for the best children’s work and was set as a GCSE text. It was also adapted as a television cartoon and reorchestrated by the composer for a large-scale BBC performance in 2018, conducted by John Wilson, one of Horovitz’s many distinguished pupils.
Almost as successful was the Horrortorio, first performed at the Hoffnung astronautical music festival of 1961 at the Royal Festival Hall, and subsequently all over the world. Setting a witty libretto by Alistair Sampson, from a scenario by Maurice Richardson that lampoons Hammer horror films of the period with its storyline populated by Count Dracula, Frankenstein, Moriarty and Fu Manchu, the Horrortorio is a riotous but skilfully crafted pastiche of Handelian oratorio, Gilbert and Sullivan and Walton’s Belshazzar’s Feast.
Horovitz was born in Vienna, the son of Béla Horovitz, a publisher and co-founder of Phaidon Press, and his wife, Lotte (nee Beller). Escaping from the city just days after the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938, Joseph and one of his sisters travelled unaccompanied to Antwerp, where the family were reunited, reaching London soon afterwards. They spent the war years in Bath and Oxford.
After reading music and modern languages at Oxford he studied with Gordon Jacob at the Royal College of Music and for a year with Nadia Boulanger in Paris.
His first post as music director for the Bristol Old Vic provided both valuable experience – he continued to conduct throughout his life – and a grounding in the popular styles that were to become an intrinsic element in his own idiom.
His Jazz Harpsichord Concerto (1965), using a concertino of amplified harpsichord, drums and bass, was a curiously idiosyncratic work for a professor at the RCM to write in the mid-60s, but its skilful blend of classical and jazz procedures, and its infectious, foot-tapping enthusiasm, give it immense audience appeal.
The last of his five string quartets, dating from 1969, one of his finest works, uses gritty dissonance seemingly to recall the harsh experiences of his earlier life, with anguish forcefully invoked by insistent repetitions of Viennese waltz motifs. The disquiet alternates with wistful passages, however, and the quartet achieves a peaceful resolution on to a final consonance.
He composed the score for The Search for the Nile (1971), a miniseries, for a BBC production of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1976), for Lillie, a TV series about Lillie Langtry starring Francesca Annis (1978), and for Rumpole of the Bailey (1978).
The Jubilee Toy Symphony (1977), deploying toy instruments, bird sounds and percussion, was another popular success. Commissioned for the Queen’s silver jubilee, it was given its premiere by a stellar lineup of soloists under Colin Davis at a musical party in aid of the Musicians Benevolent Fund (now Help Musicians) at St James’s Palace, in the presence of the Queen Mother.
In the 1980s he composed music for the TV series Agatha Christie’s Partners in Crime and A Dorothy L Sayers Mystery.
A third opera, Ninotchka, based on the 1939 MGM film starring Greta Garbo, dates from 2006.
He is survived by his wife, Anna (nee Landau), whom he married in 1956, and their two daughters, Isabel and Sally, six grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
• Joseph Horovitz, composer, born 26 May 1926; died 9 February 2022
