Muir Mathieson
Muir Mathieson | |
---|---|
Born | James Muir Mathieson 24 January 1911 Stirling, Scotland |
Died | 2 August 1975 Oxford | (aged 64)
Spouse | Hermione Darnborough |
Children | 4 |
James Muir Mathieson,
Born in Scotland, to a musical family, Mathieson won a scholarship to the
Among the composers from whom Mathieson commissioned film scores were Arthur Bliss, Ralph Vaughan Williams, William Walton and Benjamin Britten. Mathieson rarely wrote the music for the films on which he worked, considering himself to lack the talent for original composition, but he helped the composers who wrote for him to make their material precisely fit the action of the film, and he arranged concert suites from some of the scores he commissioned. He was responsible as musical director, arranger, conductor or occasionally composer for nearly a thousand films.
Life and career
Early years
Mathieson was born in Stirling, Scotland, on 24 January 1911, the elder of the two sons of John George Mathieson (1880–1955), an artist and engraver, and his wife Jessie née Davie (1884–1954), a violinist, pianist and teacher.[1] The younger son, Dock, followed Muir into the musical profession and became a conductor and musical director in British films.[2] Jessie ("Jen") Mathieson was a talented musician, who among other engagements foreshadowed her sons' careers by playing the piano accompaniment for silent films at the local cinema.[3] As a teenager Mathieson formed and conducted a youth orchestra in Stirling.[4]
After attending Stirling High School Mathieson went to the Royal College of Music in London from February 1929, winning a succession of scholarships.[5] At the college he studied piano with Arthur Benjamin and conducting with Malcolm Sargent.[6][n 1] As a student his talent for conducting attracted attention. The Times singled him out, commenting that in his handling of a college production of Benjamin's musical farce The Devil Take Her, Mathieson "made the points of a witty score pointedly".[8] While still a student he undertook a range of jobs, from conducting a choir of Welsh miners, to touring Canada conducting a ballet company, and taking the baton for an amateur production of The Pirates of Penzance.[9]
Korda
Mathieson graduated from the college in 1933, and Sargent recommended him to Alexander Korda as a conductor and assistant to Kurt Schröder, musical director of Korda's new company, London Films.[1] When Mathieson joined Korda's team the film industry was refining synchronised sound on film, with recorded music accompanying the on-screen images. According to Mathieson's biographer Andrew Youdell, Schröder contributed "a reasonable though hardly memorable background score" to Korda's first major success, The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933), after which political developments in Continental Europe led him to return to his native Germany in 1934, succeeded as Korda's head of music by Mathieson.[1]
Away from the film studio, Mathieson conducted Kurt Weill's A Kingdom for a Cow at the Savoy Theatre in June 1935. [10] This was a revised version of the thus-far unstaged Der Kuhhandel.[11] Despite good notices it was not a success.[12]
On 21 December 1935, at the
Youdell comments that Mathieson's name appeared so frequently on film credits as musical director that there grew a widespread assumption that he composed the music, but in fact he preferred to commission scores from other musicians, believing himself to have little talent for original composition.
While Mathieson was in charge of music for Korda, a range of composers provided scores, including his old teacher, Arthur Benjamin, and
Second World War
With the outbreak of the
Mathieson worked with many other composers during the war; apart from those with Vaughan Williams, his most conspicuous collaboration was with William Walton on Laurence Olivier's film of Shakespeare's Henry V (1944).[23] Mathieson and Walton had worked together on five films before then: Escape Me Never (1935), As You Like It (1936), and three war films: The Next of Kin (1941), Went the Day Well? and The First of the Few (both 1942).[24] In 1944, with Olivier's backing, Mathieson asked Walton to provide the music for the spectacular Technicolor adaptation of Shakespeare's play. Youdell describes the film of Henry V as "one of the greatest and most imaginative productions of the war period" and Walton's score as of "almost unparalleled beauty in its melody, orchestration, and construction".[1]
Walton did not share Mathieson's view that film music could or should be adapted for the concert hall or recording – he said, "Film music is not good film music if it can be used for any other purpose" – but he allowed Mathieson to arrange a concert suite from the Henry V music.[25] Walton conducted a recording of it in 1963,[26] though he later told André Previn that he found the suite "rather tame" compared with the original film score.[27] During the war Mathieson conducted frequent public concerts, sometimes programming suites from other film scores that he had commissioned.[1]
Post-war
By the end of the war Mathieson had become musical director for the Rank Organisation, which included several film-making units, such as Two Cities, The Archers, and Cineguild. He supervised the music of most of the major films produced under the Rank banner, continuing to engage leading composers including Richard Addinsell (Blithe Spirit 1945),[28] William Alwyn (Odd Man Out, 1946),[29] Arnold Bax (Oliver Twist, 1948),[30] Bliss (Men of Two Worlds, 1946),[31] Walter Goehr (Great Expectations, 1946) [32] and Walton (Hamlet, 1948).[30] For the 1945 film of Noël Coward's Brief Encounter Mathieson relaxed his insistence on newly commissioned music, and at Coward's behest arranged and conducted Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto with Eileen Joyce as soloist.[33]
In 1946 Mathieson extended his activities to directing, with Instruments of the Orchestra, a twenty-minute film for use in schools, showing the various instruments of the symphony orchestra playing separately and together. He commissioned a new work from Benjamin Britten: The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra, with a narration written by Britten's current librettist, Eric Crozier.[34] Sargent conducted the LSO as well as delivering the narration to camera.[1] The music won a permanent place in the worldwide concert repertoire,[35] and has become Britten's most widely played and popular piece.[36]
In
In his later years Mathieson worked as a freelance music director. He commissioned the score of Interpol (1956) from the nineteen-year-old Richard Rodney Bennett.[14] In 1958 he was invited to conduct Bernard Herrmann's score for Alfred Hitchcock's film Vertigo; it was to have been recorded in the US, but because of a musicians' strike there Mathieson conducted the recording in Vienna.[41] In 1966 he wrote and directed a series of twenty-four short films, collectively entitled We Make Music.[1]
His biographer S. J. Hetherington records that Mathieson arranged, directed, conducted, and occasionally composed, the music for almost one thousand films during his career.[42] In addition to his work in films he conducted in the concert hall, particularly with youth orchestras. He was appointed OBE for his services to music, and was a governor of the British Film Institute.[1]
Mathieson died at the Radcliffe Infirmary, Oxford, on 2 August 1975, aged 64, survived by his widow, who died in October 2010.[1]
Notes, references and sources
Notes
- ^ In her biography of Ralph Vaughan Williams his widow Ursula states that Mathieson also studied under her husband at the Royal College, but this is not substantiated in the biographies of Mathieson by Hetherington or Youdell.[7]
- ^ Wagner had propounded a theory of Gesamtkunstwerk ("total work of art") combining all the arts – visual, musical and literary – in a single stage work.[18]
- ^ Vaughan Williams later provided the score for the film Scott of the Antarctic (1948), which he reworked as his seventh symphony – the Sinfonia antartica (1953) – but the film score was not commissioned by Mathieson, but by his brother Dock as assistant musical director to Ernest Irving at Ealing Studios.[22]
- Oscar, but Adler was not mentioned in the nomination.[38]
References
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p Youdell, Andrew. "Mathieson, (James) Muir (1911–1975)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2012. (subscription or UK public library membership required)
- ^ McFarlane, p. 465
- ^ Hetherington, p. 16
- ^ Hetherington, p. 20
- ^ "Muir Mathieson's Visit", Faversham News, 10 September 1948, p. 8; and Hetherington, p. 33
- ^ Hetherington, p. 32
- ^ a b c Vaughan Williams, p. 239
- ^ "Royal College of Music", The Times, 5 June 1933, p. 8
- ^ Hetherington, p. 34
- ^ "Savoy Theatre", The Times, 29 June 1935, p. 12
- ^ Robinson, J. Bradford and David Drew. "Weill, Kurt (Julian)", Grove Music Online, Oxford University Press, 2001 (subscription required)
- ^ Schebera, p. 231
- ^ Reid, p. 206
- ^ a b Jacobs Arthur. "Mathieson, Muir", Grove Music Online, Oxford University Press, 2001 (subscription required)
- ^ Huckvale, p. 76
- ^ Mathieson, p. 7
- ^ Mathieson, p. 9
- ^ Millington, Barry. "Gesamkunstwerk", Grove Music Online, Oxford University Press, 2002 (subscription required)
- ^ Cobbe, p. 175
- ^ Vaughan Williams, p. 245
- ^ Vaughan Williams, p. 250
- ^ Hetherington, p. 114
- ^ Kennedy, p. 125–126
- ^ Lloyd, p. 120 and Hetherington, p. 49
- ^ Kennedy, pp. 117 and 126
- ^ Kennedy, p. 323
- ^ Kennedy, p. 255
- ^ Hetherington, p. 95
- ^ Hetherington, p. 121
- ^ a b Hetherington, p. 120
- ^ Hetherington, p. 57
- ^ Hetherington, p. 118
- ^ Hetherington, p. 96
- ^ Carpenter, p. 231
- ^ Mitchell, Donald. "Britten, (Edward) Benjamin, Baron Britten (1913–1976), composer", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2011. (subscription or UK public library membership required)
- ^ Matthews, p. 81
- ^ Mander and Mitchenson, p. 149
- ^ Holden, Raymond."Adler, Lawrence Cecil (Larry) (1914–2001), harmonica player and composer", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2011 (subscription or UK public library membership required)
- ^ Kennedy, p. 195
- ^ a b Hetherington, p. 266
- ^ Hetherington, p. 128
- ^ Hetherington, p. 41
Sources
- ISBN 978-0-571-14324-5.
- Cobbe, Hugh (2010) [2008]. Letters of Ralph Vaughan Williams. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-958764-3.
- Hetherington, S. J. (2006). Muir Mathieson: A Life in Film Music. Dalkeith: Scottish Cultural Press. ISBN 978-1-89-821811-1.
- Huckvale, David (2006). James Bernard, Composer to Count Dracula: A Critical Biography. Jefferson: McFarland. ISBN 978-0-78-642302-6.
- ISBN 978-0-19-816705-1.
- Lloyd, Stephen (1999). "Film Music". In Craggs, Stewart (ed.). William Walton: Music and Literature. Aldershot: Ashgate. ISBN 978-1-85-928190-1.
- McFarlane, Brian, ed. (2005). The Encyclopedia of British Film (second ed.). London: Methuen. ISBN 978-0-413-77526-9.
- OCLC 469979595.
- Mathieson, Muir (December 1944). "Aspects of Film Music". Tempo: 7–9. (subscription required)
- ISBN 978-1-908323-38-5.
- Reid, Charles (1968). Malcolm Sargent: A Biography. London: Hamish Hamilton. ISBN 978-0-24-191316-1.
- Schebera, Jürgen (1995). Kurt Weill: An Illustrated Life. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-30-006055-3.
- ISBN 978-0-19-315411-7.
External links
- Muir Mathieson at IMDb