Obituary for DENIS
APIVOR
born April 14 1916;
died May 27 2004.
Denis ApIvor, who has
died aged 88, was the last remaining
member of the small circle of British
modernist composers that emerged in
London during the mid-1930s, which also
included Humphrey Searle and Elisabeth
Lutyens. Of Welsh-English parentage,
ApIvor began his musical studies from
an early age, learning piano, organ
and clarinet and singing in the choirs
of Christ Church Oxford and Hereford
Cathedral. He arrived in London in 1934
to train in medicine at his parents’
instigation, eventually specializing
as an anaesthetist. Musical exploration
persisted alongside these studies in
a manner akin to the defiance of Berlioz.
He took sporadic lessons in composition
from Patrick Hadley and Alan Rawsthorne,
the only tuition he was ever to receive
in this respect, and, by 1939 had produced
a substantial body of songs in the Warlock-Van
Dieren tradition. The war temporarily
disrupted further development with ApIvor
spending much of his time in London
hospitals and the Royal Army Medical
Corps. The post-war period brought new
and daring experiments however, as ApIvor
dabbled for the first time with Schoenbergian
serialism, learned second-hand from
Edward Clark.
ApIvor’s public career
reached its peak during the mid-fifties:
he came to prominence in 1950 with a
work composed over ten years previously
– a highly original setting of T. S.
Eliot’s The Hollow Men (1939)
- which was broadcast by the BBC under
the baton of his friend Constant Lambert.
He then proceeded to make his reputation
as a composer for the stage, receiving
several commissions from the Royal Ballet,
of which the most successful were his
adaptations of Esther Forbes’ A Mirror
for Witches (1952) with Andrée
Howard, and Lorca’s Blood Wedding
(1953) with Alfred Rodrigues. He was
commissioned by Sadlers Wells to write
his highly expressionistic opera Yerma
in 1954, partly composed in Trinidad
while working as a consultant anaesthetist,
and eventually broadcast by the BBC
in 1960.
The discovery of Webernian
serialism through the Robert Craft recordings
brought a dramatic change of style in
1960, which persisted well into the
1970s. During this period he profited
from the Glock ethos at the BBC, receiving
a number of regular commissions and
broadcasts of his orchestral and chamber
music, including the televised ballet,
Corporal Jan (1968). During the
early 1980s ApIvor underwent a crisis
centred around his disillusionment with
"ways of composing" and of
"music about music"’, finding
an eventual resolution in 1989 following
his exposure to John Tavener’s The
Protecting Veil and Arvo Pärt’s
Berliner Messe. With renewed
energy he entered a final much simplified
‘diatonic’ period which occupied him
until his sight began to fail in the
late 1990s.
As a medical man by
profession, for much of his career ApIvor
retained a distance from the music establishment
that ultimately protected the integrity
of his work. Stylistic decisions were,
in his words, ‘struggles of conscience’,
pursued in accordance with his creative
needs, rather than in any attempt to
court favour with the critics. As a
result his music was often regarded
with confusion or indifference by his
peers. Significantly, much of his musical
development was stimulated by extra-musical
ideas, frequently derived from his close
study of the other arts. His settings
of challenging British poets, including
T.S. Eliot and Dylan Thomas, for example,
gave rise to some of his most original
music. His passion for the dramas of
Lorca dominated his thinking as a theatrical
composer during the 1950s. His interest
in the paintings and drawings of Paul
Klee provided the inspiration a number
of his most fascinating abstract compositions
of the 1960s.
Taken as a whole, the
scope of ApIvor’s total output is substantial,
with over one hundred opus numbers,
spanning a period of over sixty years
of British musical life. The breadth
of the material is equally impressive
with contributions of substance to all
the main musical genres – opera, ballet,
symphony, concerto, chamber music, classical
guitar and song. His music has attracted
a multitude of accomplished artists
over the years, including Constant Lambert,
Julian Bream, Eiluned Davies and Rafael
Wallfisch. At the time of his death
ApIvor was witnessing the beginnings
of a revival of interest in his music,
with major research at the University
of Leeds and an increasing frequency
of public performance of his works.
Mark Marrington
see also obituary
by Martin Anderson
Dennis
ApIvor website
