Thirty-seven was Guy Woolfenden’s lucky number. He was born in 1937. He was associated with the Royal Shakespeare Company for 37 years. And he wrote songs and incidental music for all 37 of Shakespeare’s plays — or 37.5 if you include The Two Noble Kinsmen, which recent scholarship suggests that the Bard co-wrote with John Fletcher.
The tradition had been for theatre music directors to send in scores without knowing anything about the production. However, Woolfenden wanted his soundtrack to match the staging. “I was always guided by what the design team had planned for a production and had a much better idea of what was needed once I had seen the designs for the sets and costumes,” he said in 2013.
Sometimes that meant living on the edge, but as he told The Times in 1991: “Any big theatre organisation exists on controlled crisis management. If everything went according to plan it wouldn’t come off.” Much of his music would only be written at the last minute. “I worry for five or six weeks and then it comes out in a flood,” he said. The only thing he tried not to leave too late were the songs and dances. “It’s not fair to give them to the actors at the dress rehearsal. But incidental music? Forget it!”
He was generous and highly inventive, tireless in nurturing new talent while also inspiring seasoned professionals in his quest to bring music from being an after-thought to centre-stage.
Much of his work was actor-specific. For example, when Ian Charleson appeared as Ariel in The Tempest in 1978, Woolfenden was able to write a series of demanding songs knowing that Charleson had the voice to deliver them. When David Thacker’s production of The Two Gentlemen of Verona in 1991 – which completed Woolfenden’s 37 — was set in the Thirties, he wrote in the style of the era with a band on stage. And when Peter Hall wanted the music for The Wars of the Roses history cycle, starring Peggy Ashcroft, to be “medieval fascist”, Woolfenden “knew exactly what he meant”. His score for Trevor Nunn’s 1976 staging of The Comedy of Errors won several awards. Yet what made him proudest of the RSC had nothing to do with a score, a tune or an award, as he told The Times in 1991, “but the technique of putting music on stage, in costume, from memory, fully integrated into the play. All over the world there are theatres that can’t be bothered: they’d rather use records.”
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He was born Guy Anthony Woolfenden in Ipswich, which was also Nunn’s home town. His maternal grandfather had been a church organist and his father, a keen jazz player, ran a music shop. “I was a choirboy at Westminster Abbey,” Woolfenden told one interviewer of his childhood, adding: “Many of us wrote anthems and chants. We had to sing them every day. I thought, ‘I’d like to have a go at that’.” He was in the Abbey choir that sang at the Festival of Britain and for the Coronation.
When his voice broke, he moved to Whitgift School in Croydon, where he took up the French horn and heard concerts given by the Croydon Symphony Orchestra conducted by Colin Davis and Norman del Mar, who was himself a former horn player with the Philharmonia. He was also selected to play in the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, where one of his fellow horn players was Tim Reynish, who later became head of conducting at the Royal Northern College of Music.
He won a choral scholarship to Christ’s College, Cambridge — turning down an offer to read history at Worcester College, Oxford. When he found there were no horn parts in Honegger’s Joan of Arc at the Stake, such was his determination to take part that he auditioned as a singer. Raymond Leppard and Thurston Dart were among his tutors. “When I decided I wanted to get on with this conducting lark, I thought I’d better go to someone I knew and trusted,” recalled Woolfenden. As Del Mar was then head of conducting at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, it seemed the obvious place to go. He also continued his horn studies with Aubrey Brain, father of the celebrated horn player Dennis Brain.
Leppard was now head of music at the RSC and, needing a deputy, inquired if Woolfenden was interested. At first he turned it down, joining the Sadler’s Wells orchestra instead in 1960, but the next year he agreed to join the company as a staff conductor.
In 1962, Woolfenden was a runner up in the Philharmonia’s conducting competition, but a Times critic had some firm advice when he conducted a student orchestra a short time later, writing: “If he could learn to rely more on his wrist and less on his whole trunk, and perhaps also adopt a longer baton, he would achieve a far firmer grasp on the orchestra as a whole.”
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While at the Guildhall he had met Jane Aldrick, an oboist; the couple were married in 1962. Together they set up Ariel Music to publish his compositions; they also organised the World Wide Woolfenden project, which culminated in celebrations of his music at the Swan Theatre, Stratford, last May. She survives him with their three sons: Stephen, who has worked on several Harry Potter films; Richard, who teaches English; and James, who works for a courier company.
In 1983, an unlikely suggestion from Nunn after the success of Henry IV Parts I and II led to Woolfenden branching out into wind band music. “I remember bumping into Trevor as he went around the dressing rooms after the performance,” Woolfenden recalled. “He suggested that I took some time off to mould the music into a suite. I thought that was unlikely. After the production was over, the music would go into a drawer, never to be heard again.”
Yet days later his former NYO colleague Reynish got in touch asking for a piece for wind band. Woolfenden dug out the recent Henry IV score and adapted it as Gallimaufry, a Shakespearean word meaning “a confused jumble or medley of things”. There were more than a dozen wind pieces over the next 20 years or so, including Illyrian Dances, which takes its name from the setting of Twelfth Night.
Speaking last year, Nunn, who was artistic director of the RSC from 1968 to 1986, said: “Guy wrote wonderfully original, galvanising and haunting melodies that audiences yearned to hear again; music to be treasured, recorded and turned into suites and performed in concert halls.”
Woolfenden left the RSC in 1998, explaining later that it “was not that I didn’t love my job any more, but most of the directors I’d worked with had moved on. Both Peter Hall and Trevor Nunn went from the RSC to the National Theatre. Terry Hands, another wonderful RSC director . . . was also off to pastures new.”
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To add to his 150-plus Shakespeare scores, Woolfenden arranged several ballets, conducted at Scottish Opera and wrote the music for Hall’s film Work is a Four-Letter Word (1968) starring Cilla Black. He also presented Radio 3’s music quiz, Full Score.
On the night that he realised that the number 37 was associated with his name, he bought a lottery ticket, choosing 37 as one of his numbers; it came up in the draw. As he told his audience while proposing the toast to the immortal memory of William Shakespeare at the Bard’s annual birthday lunch in April 2002: “Alas, the other five numbers didn’t.”
Guy Woolfenden, OBE, composer, was born on July 12, 1937. He died on April 15, 2016, aged 78