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Antony Hopkins - Obituary

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Patrick Murtha
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« on: May 06, 2014, 08:39:22 pm »

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/10811830/Antony-Hopkins-obituary.html

Antony Hopkins, the composer and conductor, who has died aged 93, was best known for Talking About Music, the broadcast talks he gave on the BBC (and in 44 countries to which they were syndicated) from 1948 until 1992 — when they were discontinued as too elitist for the modern image of radio.

Hopkins’s ability to dissect a composition in intelligible technical language, with piano illustrations which he played himself and extracts from recordings, was appreciated by millions of listeners who were thereby enabled to understand music more fully.

One of radio’s great communicators, in the tradition of Sir Walford Davies, he modestly said that lecturing was an expedient forced on him as a cover-up for his “abysmally insecure” piano technique; it enabled him to skip all the bits he could not play, or to play them slowly under the pretext of analysis.

Hopkins’s gifts as a communicator also made him an obvious choice for children’s concerts such as the two series under the auspices of Sir Robert Mayer and Ernest Read. But he ruefully remarked that in Britain (although not in Japan and Australia) he was never offered engagements for adult concerts because the label of “children’s concert conductor” was so firmly attached to him.

Antony Hopkins was born Antony Reynolds on March 21 1921 at Enfield, son of Hugh and Marjorie Reynolds. His father was a gifted amateur pianist who worked as a schoolteacher and freelance writer but had very poor health. In 1925 he took his wife and their four children to live in Italy, and died that year in Genoa aged 34.

His penurious widow returned to England. On the advice of the former headmaster of Berkhamsted School, where her husband had been a pupil, she went to see the current headmaster Charles Greene (father of Graham Greene), who introduced her to one of the housemasters, Major Thomas Hopkins, and his wife. They volunteered to take five-year-old Antony under a joint guardianship agreement. Seven years later they officially adopted him and he took the name of Hopkins. Mrs Hopkins adored animals, and from her Antony acquired his passionate love of horses and dogs.

After attending Berkhamsted’s preparatory school, Hopkins entered the senior school as a day boy. At that time, riding took precedence over piano-playing. But in 1937 he went to Schwaz on the Innthal in Austria to a summer school for pianists. Hearing an Austrian musician play Schubert’s Op 90 Impromptus filled Hopkins with the desire to be a musician. He went to a private piano teacher in London and also began to compose. On leaving Berkhamsted in 1938 he spent a short time as a master at Bromsgrove School, where he was able to attend concerts by the City of Birmingham Orchestra.

A cartilage operation as a boy had rendered Hopkins unfit for military service (although he later served in the Home Guard), and in September 1939 he entered the Royal College of Music. He studied harmony with Dr Harold Darke and composition with Gordon Jacob but found the piano tuition inadequate.

A chance meeting with Cyril Smith, to whom he had once written a fan letter, led to occasional lessons at the pianist’s home and also to his winning the college’s Mathilde Verne piano scholarship. He later became accompanist in Dr Reginald Jacques’s choral class and rehearsal pianist for the Bach Choir, of which Jacques was then conductor.

Despite twice failing his teacher’s diploma exams, Hopkins won the college’s Chappell Gold Medal for piano (he would not have done so, he said, in anything but wartime conditions). As a result he was invited to give a recital, in May 1943, at Dame Myra Hess’s National Gallery lunchtime concerts. He also enrolled at Morley College to sing in the choir under Michael Tippett, then director of music, in works by Monteverdi, Gesualdo, Weelkes and Purcell.

Later Hopkins said he had learned more about music from Tippett than from anyone. They became friends, and Tippett advised him about his compositions. Hopkins sang in the chorus at the first performance of Tippett’s oratorio A Child of Our Time in 1944 and remembered how the orchestra behaved badly at the final rehearsal, showing hostility to the music and to the composer, who had recently been in prison for failing to comply with the orders of a conscientious objectors’ tribunal.

In 1944 Hopkins wrote the incidental music for a Liverpool production of Marlowe’s Dr Faustus (a commission turned over to him by Tippett) and this was followed by Louis MacNeice’s request for music for two radio plays. More BBC work followed, plus Hopkins’s first involvement with a London theatre production, Oedipus Rex with Laurence Olivier, Ralph Richardson and Sybil Thorndike.

Within three years Hopkins had 19 radio-drama scores to his credit, including one for Moby Dick. He toured France and Switzerland for the British Council as accompanist to the soprano Sophie Wyss, for whom Britten had written some of his early works. Music for the film Vice Versa followed.

In 1947 his one-act comic opera Lady Rohesia, from The Ingoldsby Legends, was produced at Sadler’s Wells to public approval and critical distaste and he was sent on a lecture tour of Germany by the Foreign Office. He also took over from Herbert Howells as lecturer on general musical topics at the Royal College of Music.

Hopkins’s gifts were noticed by the BBC producer Roger Fiske, who invited him to give a series of broadcast talks called Studies in Musical Taste. From these developed Talking About Music, in which a work to be broadcast during the week was discussed and analysed.

While continuing to compose during the 1950s — notably a successful short opera called Three’s Company, about life in an office, and music for the Peter Ustinov film Billy Budd — Hopkins also travelled far and wide as an adjudicator. In 1964 he spent six months as visiting professor of composition at the University of Adelaide.

In Britain he taught at the Royal College of Music, but was disappointed by the standard of entrants. He told the official who allocated pupils to teachers: “Either they must be very talented or very pretty. Otherwise I won’t take them on.”

In 1973 he adjudicated in Hong Kong and lectured in Japan, where he was awarded the City of Tokyo Medal for services to music. He returned to Hong Kong in 1979 to conduct its Philharmonic Orchestra.

Hopkins also wrote many books, several of them deriving from his BBC scripts, such as Talking About Symphonies (1961); Talking About Concertos (1964); and Talking About Sonatas (1971). Others included Music All Around Me (1967); Understanding Music (1979); The Nine Symphonies of Beethoven (1981); Songs for Swinging Golfers (1981); and The Concertgoer’s Companion (two volumes, 1984 and 1986). His autobiography, Beating Time, appeared in 1982.

He twice won the Italia Prize for radio programmes (1951 and 1957), and was appointed CBE in 1976.

Hopkins never regarded himself as an important composer, but his music has considerable charm and tunefulness. His gift for parody also ensured that much of it was witty. But it was as a lecturer and broadcaster that the warmth of his personality and his infectious enthusiasm, backed by expert knowledge, endeared him to listeners. A CD of some of his music was released to celebrate his 90th birthday.

He loved fast cars and lived for most of his life at Ashridge, near Berkhamsted, in the house which his adoptive parents had converted from two derelict cottages.

In 1947 he married the soprano Alison Purves, with whom he had fallen in love as a schoolboy when she sang in musical comedy. She died in 1991, and he married secondly, in 2012, Beatrix Taylor, who survives him.

Antony Hopkins, born March 21 1921, died May 6 2014
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Gauk
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« Reply #1 on: May 06, 2014, 09:13:57 pm »

I'm sorry to hear that - but he did last to a good age. I did correspond with him once - I wonder if I still have the letters.

He also, from time to time, would give public versions of his talks. I can still see him sitting at the piano talking about one of Beethoven's piano sonatas: "In the opening of this work, what Beethoven is saying is <plays loud repeating chords> 'THIS IS THE KEY OF F MAJOR AND DON'T YOU FORGET IT!'". 

One of his blind spots was Bruckner, who he admitted he had no taste for. I remember his talk of Bruckner's 8th symphony; he argued that after listening for three quarters of an hour, when it comes to the finale, the audience want something to really stir them up - and they get it with the dramatic opening of the movement - but after a couple of pages it's back to a plodding moderato, not what is needed.
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