Joseph Horovitz

Composer Joseph Horovitz wrote music in a variety of genres: most notable were his stage works, including the 1970 children's cantata Captain Noah and His Floating Zoo, television music, and music for concert or brass band. He was also active as a conductor and was a celebrated teacher. Horovitz was born in Vienna on May 21, 1926. His family, being Jewish, escaped Austria just days after the 1938 Anschluss annexed Austria to Nazi Germany. Emigrating to England, the family spent a brief time in London before moving to Oxford during the Blitz, and there, Horovitz attended the City of Oxford High School. His father was publisher Béla Horovitz and his sister, Hannah, was a classical music promoter. Joseph attended New College, Oxford, where his teachers included Egon Wellesz and Bernard Rose, earning a music degree. He then moved to the Royal College of Music in London for composition studies with Gordon Jacob. He finished his education in Paris, studying for a year with Nadia Boulanger. Horovitz's first professional appointment came as the music director of the Bristol Old Vic, and the theater became a major influence on his compositional and conducting life. During this time, he wrote the first of his eventual 16 ballets, Les Femmes D'Algers. After two seasons with Bristol Old Vic, he moved to London as an assistant to Arthur Benjamin for the Festival of Britain. This created additional opportunities for Horovitz in London as he became the conductor of The Ballet Russes and an assistant at the Intimate Opera Company from 1952 until 1963. He found additional success as a ballet composer with Alice in Wonderland, written in 1953 for the London Festival Ballet. In 1955, Horovitz met journalist Anna Landau while coaching the Glyndebourne Festival in preparation for the Mozart Bi-Centennial celebration, and the two were married the following year. After honeymooning in Majorca, Horovitz wrote his Two Majorcan Pieces for clarinet and piano after music he heard on the trip. Horovitz earned the Commonwealth Medal for Composition in 1959, and in 1961, he took up the post of Professor of Composition at his alma mater, the Royal College of Music, where he continued to teach for the rest of his life. He wrote several concertos, including his Concerto for euphonium and brass band, a Jazz Concerto for keyboard and orchestra, and a Concerto for tuba and brass band. One of Horovitz's most important and powerful works, his String Quartet No. 5, was written in 1969. Dedicated to Austrian art historian Ernst Gombrich and premiered by the Amadeus Quartet, it contains a distorted version of the Nazi's "Horst Wessel Lied" anthem, especially moving as all involved had suffered at the hand of the Nazis. Horovitz considered this his best work. The following year, his children's "pop" cantata, Captain Noah and His Floating Zoo, was written and has been popular in schools, broadcast on television along with animation, and was even recorded by the King's Singers. Horovitz's prowess in writing ballets opened up opportunities in the television and film industry, where his credits include The Picture of Dorian Gray (1976), the theme for the series Rumpole of the Bailey (1978), and Agatha Christie's Partners in Crime (1983), among others. Horovitz's Ballet for Band (1983), along with his Euphonium Concerto, are perhaps his most important in the brass band genre, each considered major test pieces. He continued to compose and teach into the 21st century, penning his largest work, the opera Ninotchka, in 2006. Horovitz's other alma mater, New College, Oxford, awarded him an honorary fellowship in 2019 and celebrated his 95th birthday with a live-streamed concert of two of his string quartets in 2021. Horovitz died on February 9, 2022.
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