Sandy Goehr, influential ‘Manchester School’ composer

Sandy Goehr twice experienced something all composers dread: creating a work that proves too challenging for the musicians, the audience and the critics.
He was commissioned by the 1961 Leeds Triennial Musical Festival to write Sutter’s Gold, a cantata adapted from a draft film scenario by Sergei Eisenstein. The result was so complex that it defeated the Leeds Festival Chorus and the premiere, conducted by John Pritchard, was, in the composer’s words, “an almost unmitigated disaster”. It even prompted a leading article in The Times to suggest that the performance marked the death throes of the English choral tradition.
Goehr endured a second debacle in 1985 when his opera Behold the Sun received disastrous reviews from its first performance in Germany; its subject matter, the Baader-Meinhof gang, proved distasteful to some of those involved and the work never recovered. “It remains a catastrophe,” Goehr told Opera magazine in 2010. “Nothing can be done, it’s got stinking fish tied to it after the disaster in Germany.”
In retrospect the composer, once described as “the intellectual conscience of British new music”, came to see these as key works in his output and the associated scandals enhanced, rather than damaged, his reputation. Although an important voice in late 20th-century music, he was rarely fashionable, never enjoying the same profile as Harrison Birtwistle and Peter Maxwell Davies, his contemporaries from the so-called Manchester School.
This was in part because he had earned an early reputation as a “difficult” composer, a figurehead of the musical avant garde. The label persisted long after he lost interest in his youthful dogma, and he went on to produce a body of music known for its subtlety, deep originality and great beauty, as indebted, according to one observer, to the worlds of Claudio Monteverdi and Leos Janacek as it is to the innovations of Arnold Schoenberg and Pierre Boulez.
Despite the problems of Sutter’s Gold, Goehr’s choral music and stage pieces drew the most attention with works such as Two Choruses (1962) drawing on Milton and Shakespeare, and Babylon the Great is Fallen (1979) and The Death of Moses (1992) reimagined the biblical cantata. Yet string quartets, solo pianists and symphony orchestras were not ignored, highlighted by works such as Nonomiya (1969), an elaborate fantasy for piano inspired by John Ogdon; a violin concerto(1962) for Manoug Parikian; and a Romanza(1968) for the cellist Jacqueline du Pré.
As a composer Goehr was acutely conscious that he had little direct connection with the public. “It’s the performers who communicate with the people who go to concerts, buy records or take an interest in our tiny neck of the woods,” he told one interviewer, although a couple of minutes later he readdressed the question. “My ideal public is a person. I’d like it to be a blue-collar worker. I imagine this person comes back from their job and is seriously interested in music, writing and poetry, and spends their time and intelligence either participating in or following this world.”
Peter Alexander Goehr was born in Berlin in 1932, the son of Leila (née Rivlin) and her husband, Walter Goehr, himself a pupil of Schoenberg and a pioneering interpreter of Monteverdi. Within a few months the family had moved to Britain where Walter, who had accepted a job as musical director of HMV, attained a position of some eminence, conducting the first performances of works including Benjamin Britten’s Serenade and Michael Tippett’s A Child of Our Time.
Leading composers and performers often visited the Goehr household, including Tippett, whose pacifist ideals greatly influenced the young Sandy. He studied clarinet, violin and piano, though for much of his childhood “gave up” on music. He was educated at Berkhamsted School and at 15 decided to become a composer. However, there was little encouragement from Walter, who was dismissive of his son’s ability.
After flirting with joining the Young Communists he became involved with the Socialist Zionist Association and, in lieu of National Service, worked on a kibbutz in Essex. In 1952 the organisation asked him to move to Manchester, where he lived in a commune, worked in a psychiatric hospital and taught evening classes in Marxism.
An introduction from his father to Richard Hall, a professor at the Manchester College of Music, led to private composition lessons and after a year he turned down a place at Oxford in favour of continuing his studies with Hall. Birtwistle recalled the young Goehr in Bach classes being “a voice from the back of the hall, articulate, distinctive, wonderfully clear, taking issue with the lecturer”.
Goehr, Birtwistle, Maxwell Davies, Ogdon and others met frequently to play new music. Soon they had started the New Music Manchester Group, and sought to bring works of the European avant garde to audiences outside London for the first time. The enterprise was funded largely by Goehr’s student grant.
An Ogdon biography tells that Goehr, the most cosmopolitan of the group, was the only one with his own place and that he and his girlfriend Audrey Baker, an artist whom he married in 1954, were generous hosts: “They would eat and drink a good deal and sit up into the early hours (which sometimes meant till dawn) talking about music and literature.”
They had three daughters: Lydia, who is professor of philosophy at Columbia University, New York; Julia, who became music service co-ordinator for schools in Norfolk; and Clare, who leads a private life.
When the cohort left Manchester in 1955 William Glock, the chairman of the ICA Music Section, arranged a commemorative concert in London. It was widely reviewed, with the Daily Mail referring to the three composers as “the dull young things of the 1950s”, much to Goehr’s amusement. Although frequently referred to today as the “Manchester School”, they were a short-lived group, their final manifestation coming in the Wardour Castle summer schools of 1964 and 1965. They quickly grew apart, with Goehr later reluctant to comment in public about either his colleagues or their music.
In 1953 Goehr and Birtwistle had attended the British premiere of Olivier Messiaen’s Turangalila Symphony, which was conducted by Goehr’s father. The younger Goehr was greatly impressed and went to study with the composer in Paris. However, much of his time was spent in the company of Boulez, the most prominent of the ultra-modernists associated with the summer school at Darmstadt in Germany.
Goehr’s work had already been performed in Darmstadt in 1954, and two years later the premiere there of his Fantasia for orchestra seemed to confirm his adherence to the modernistic dogma of Boulez and his associates. Yet he grew increasingly alienated from their doctrinaire attitudes, going so far as to denounce Boulez in a provocative open letter in Finding the Key, a compilation of essays, lectures and talks published in 1998.
Returning to London in 1955 Goehr taught at Morley College and worked as a music copyist. A breakthrough came in 1959 with his first significant work, the powerful cantata The Deluge. It was conducted by his father who presided over the wildly successful premiere and then refused ever to perform it again, a vivid illustration of his ambivalent view of his son’s music.
The arrival of an important new compositional voice resulted in a string of commissions, although until 1967 Goehr was employed by Glock, who was then at the BBC. He went on to spend a couple of years at prestigious American universities followed by five as professor of music at the University of Leeds, where he was artistic director of the Leeds Triennial Musical Festival.
Meanwhile, Goehr’s first marriage was dissolved in 1971 and the following year he married Anthea Staunton, who with the composer Michael Nyman had been his assistant at the Brighton Festival Ensemble in the late 1960s. That was also dissolved and his third marriage, in 1982, was to Amira Katz, who is based in the department of Asian studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
By 1976 he had found his intellectual home at the University of Cambridge, where he spent the next quarter of a century teaching the brightest compositional talents of a generation, including George Benjamin and Thomas Adès. Yet he remained at pains to stress his outsider status. “I haven’t even got a degree, let alone a doctorate,” he told The Guardian in 2010.
Goehr, once an angry young man who neither prayed nor meditated, could be as voluble about the football World Cup as he could about opera. In 1987 he used the Reith Lectures to discuss the survival of the symphony in the 20th century. He continued composing, including Arianna, a reimagining of the lost opera by Monteverdi, which premiered at the Royal Opera House in 1995. “I find my best inspiration comes when my wife is shouting at me,” he semi-joked in 1997.
His operatic swansong was Promised End (2010), a take on Shakespeare’s King Lear with a libretto by Frank Kermode (obituary, August 19, 2020). “I love one of Lear’s last lines, ‘Undo this button’,” Goehr said at the time. “I shall say that when it comes to my time. Schoenberg said ‘Harmony’ and I shall say ‘Undo this button’.”
Alexander Goehr, composer, was born on August 10, 1932. He died on August 26, 2024, aged 92