Hugh Wood obituary

Directors of the BBC Proms had long supported his work. William Glock’s flood of new music in the 1960s included a commission for Scenes from Comus (1965), a choral work based on John Milton’s poem, and a Cello Concerto (1969) for Zara Nelsova, while Robert Ponsonby asked for (and after eight years finally got) a symphony in 1982 conducted by Gennady Rozhdestvensky.

However, the years between the symphony and the Piano Concerto were bleak. “I keep a chart of performances,” he told Michael White in The Independent, pulling a yellowing sheet of paper from a file. “And there’s a ghastly eight or nine-year patch from 1982. It’s as if the symphony was such a failure that people said, ‘We don’t want any more’.” Yet the symphony was not a failure, receiving glowing reviews in The Times and elsewhere.

Wood himself was full of contradictions. Interviewers reported how he sometimes broke into almost uncontrollable laughter.

At other times he could be truculent, complaining about how the music curriculum in schools “gives people the illusion that they can do what they can’t do” or badmouthing colleagues such as Witold Lutoslawski (“Not much of a composer really”), Luciano Berio (“The supreme journalist among composers”) and Mark-Anthony Turnage, who he famously described as “the Nigel Kennedy of the opera”.

Hugh Bradshaw Wood was born in Parbold, near Wigan, in 1932, the son of James Wood, a solicitor who played the piano, and his wife, Winifred (née Bradshaw), who had been a piano student of Frank Merrick. He had an elder brother, John, who played piano, trombone and French horn, but pursued a career in economics. Hugh had piano and violin lessons, and there were regular family expeditions to hear the Liverpool Philharmonic or Hallé orchestras, as well as visits to Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, Iolanthe being his favourite.

At the age of eight he was sent to board at Huyton Hill prep school, which had been evacuated from Liverpool to the Lake District. Moving on to Oundle School in 1945 he organised and took part in concerts, including one featuring English music from Purcell to Vaughan Williams. During these years he wrote both music and poetry, as well as setting the poetry of others to music, notably Cecil Day Lewis’s Now the Full-throated Daffodils which was sung at a school concert in 1949.

The previous year Wood had attended Bryanston summer school, the predecessor of today’s Dartington. It was a revelation to him and during a recital given by the French pianist Monique Haas he vowed to make a career in music and returned to Dartington for many years, first as a helper and later teaching classes himself.

Although music took second place during National Service, Wood listened to what he could, even when stationed at Suez in 1951. Back in Britain he read modern history at New College, Oxford, but was constantly distracted playing viola in a string quartet, singing with the university music club and attending music classes given by Thomas Armstrong and Egon Wellesz. Herbert Andrews, the organist of New College, suggested he try for a place at the Royal College of Music, but his interview there with Herbert Howells was a disaster, shaking Wood’s already uncertain confidence. “[Howells] just told me to go away — rather pompous, really,” he recalled. He was rescued by the composers William Lloyd Webber and Iain Hamilton, who helped him to tackle some of the compositional defects that Howells had identified.

Visits in the late 1950s to Darmstadt, the summer festival of contemporary music in Germany, introduced him to the Second Viennese School and back in Britain he started experimenting with highly chromatic harmony in Three Miniatures for clarinet and piano and his Variations for Viola. While these short works demonstrated his care for logic, structure and concision, such concerns were sometimes at odds with his own gift for lyricism.

In 1960 he married Susan McGaw, a pianist for whom he wrote his Three Piano Pieces, which she recorded. The marriage was dissolved in the 1980s and he is survived by a daughter, Rebecca, and a son, Chris, who lead private lives. Another daughter, Jenny, a committed environmentalist, was murdered while walking in Bavaria in 1988 and he produced several works that were memorials to her, including an elegiac Cantata (1989).

Wood also established himself as an excellent teacher, holding posts at Morley College in London and the universities of Glasgow, Liverpool and Leeds before becoming a fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, in 1977. The Beethoven bicentenary in 1970 was the occasion for a series of lucid and thought-provoking radio programmes on the composer.

Edward Venn’s comprehensive biography, The Music of Hugh Wood, was published in 2008 as was Staking Out the Territory, a collection of Wood’s essays.

Wood had a nice line in cheerful and slightly dotty Christmas cards; but he also had a notoriously short fuse. In 1992 he visited Barcelona for a rare performance of Roberto Gerhard’s opera The Duenna. Unfortunately, the lighting failed and the event was cancelled.

Wood booked a seat for the following Sunday, returning briefly in the meantime to attend to his students at Cambridge. However, he failed to notice the much earlier starting time of the next performance and arrived at the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona just as the curtain was coming down. One of his rages ensued.

Hugh Wood, composer, was born on June 27, 1932. He died of undisclosed causes on August 14, 2021, aged 89