Peter Heyworth

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Peter Lawrence Frederick Heyworth (3 June 1921 – 2 October 1991) was an American-born British music critic and biographer. He wrote a two-volume biography of Otto Klemperer and was a prominent supporter of avant-garde music.

Life and career[edit]

Peter Heyworth was born in the Lawrence Hospital, Bronxville, New York on 3 June 1921.[1] He was the son of Lawrence Ormerod Heyworth (1890–1954), a prosperous commodity dealer born in Argentina,[2] and his first wife Ella, née Stern (1891–1927), who was born in the US.[3] The family moved to England when Heyworth was four. His mother died when he was six, and he was much influenced by her mother, a good pianist of Viennese Jewish family.[2] He was educated at Charterhouse, and, after wartime service, Balliol College, Oxford (1947–1950) and the University of Göttingen (1950).[1]

Heyworth's military service included a period in Vienna, which helped form his musical preferences, which favoured German rather than French music.[4] His ambition to become a political or foreign correspondent was frustrated by poor health: he contracted tuberculosis and then Addison's disease.[2][4] He joined the London weekly The Times Educational Supplement in 1952,[4] and then another weekly, The Observer, under its chief music critic, Eric Blom, whom he succeeded in 1955.[4] He was also a European musical correspondent and critic for The New York Times from 1960 to 1975.[5]

Although lacking any formal musical education – he had great difficulty reading scores – Heyworth championed his preferences and attacked his bêtes noires with equal outspokenness.[2] Both in print and in person, he had a reputation for expressing himself trenchantly. He reduced secretaries to tears,[2][4] quarrelled with Sir Malcolm Sargent[2] and Colin Davis,[6] dismissed André Previn as "mediocre",[7] provoked William Walton into writing music intended to upset him,[8] and wrote so woundingly about Elisabeth Schwarzkopf that she permanently gave up singing at Covent Garden.[2]

Heyworth's sympathies were with avant-garde music, and he objected to many new works in traditional musical form, maintaining that the Proms were "cluttered with a lot of second-rate works and a certain amount of sheer derivative drivel".[9] He praised the works of Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Harrison Birtwistle,[2][4] criticised Ralph Vaughan Williams for "heavy-handed heartiness" and being amateurish in his orchestration.[10] was dismissive of Frederick Delius's music,[2] lukewarm about Benjamin Britten's,[2] and consistently hostile to Walton's.[11]

Apart from his journalism, Heyworth was editor of a volume of Ernest Newman's writings, Berlioz, Romantic and Classic (1972),[12] and author of Conversations with Klemperer (1973) and a two-volume biography, Otto Klemperer: His Life and Times. The first volume was published in 1983; reviewing it in The New York Times, John Rockwell described it as "one of the most informative, readable musical biographies ever written".[5] The second volume was substantially complete at the time of Heyworth's death and was taken to publication in 1996 by John Lucas.[13] Reviewing it in The Sunday Times, Hugh Canning called it "essential reading, not only for the even-handed way he analyses Klemperer's complex musical personality, but also for the richly detailed picture he paints of an era in music-making in which artistic values still counted for a great deal".[14]

He was a friend of British-American poet W. H. Auden, who dedicated his book of poems City without Walls to Heyworth. The two had met in Berlin in 1964.[15]

Heyworth retired from his post at The Observer in June 1991. He died of a stroke on 2 October of that year, while on holiday in Athens. He was unmarried; his long-term partner was Jochen Voigt.[6] Heyworth was survived by a brother and three nephews.[5]

References and sources[edit]

References[edit]

  1. ^ a b "Peter Lawrence Frederick Heyworth", Ancestry.co.uk. Retrieved 10 December 2020
  2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j "An outward-looking clarity of vision", The Observer, 6 October 1991, p. 57
  3. ^ "Lawrence Ormerod Heyworth", Ancestry.co.uk. Retrieved 10 December 2020 and "Ella Stern", Ancestry.co.uk. Retrieved 10 December 2020
  4. ^ a b c d e f "Peter Heyworth", The Times, 4 October 1991, p. 18
  5. ^ a b c Kozinn, Allan. "Peter Heyworth, Music Critic, 70; A Biographer of Otto Klemperer", The New York Times, 4 October 1991, p. D15
  6. ^ a b Sutcliffe, Tom. "Peter Heyworth", The Guardian, 5 October 1991, p. 21
  7. ^ Heyworth, Peter. "Money makes the tunes go around", The Observer, 18 August 1991, p. 50
  8. ^ Kennedy, p. 208
  9. ^ Heyworth, Peter. "Best of Both Worlds", The Observer, 7 August 1960, Weekend Review, p. 18
  10. ^ Heyworth, Peter. "V.W.'s Eighth", The Observer, 6 May 1956, p. 14
  11. ^ Kennedy, pp. 119–120
  12. ^ WorldCat OCLC 600896877
  13. ^ WorldCat OCLC 1120445537 and OCLC 474954687
  14. ^ Canning, Hugh. "The life and times of an electric conductor", The Sunday Times, 7 July 1996, Books section, p. 6
  15. ^ Mendelson, Edward. Textual Notes. The Complete Works of W. H. Auden: Poems Volume II: 1940-1973, edited by Edward Mendelson, Princeton University Press, 2022, p. 1023.

Sources[edit]

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