When Wilfrid Mellers, who has died aged 94, wrote late in life that Percy Grainger's music reminds us that "the Happy Tribes of Folk sang and danced that they might have life more abundantly," he might have been supplying his own epitaph: An Abundant Life. As small in build as Grainger himself, he "sang and danced" his way through an enviably packed life: a charismatic teacher and communicator; the author of some 20 books of music commentary and analysis and a huge number of articles and reviews; and an ardent composer. With his death the world of music has lost what a colleague called one of its most exciting and exuberant personalities.
Mellers used to find it hard to explain where his evident talents came from. Apparently not from his parents who, although intelligent and perceptive, were not particularly interested in music or literature. His father, who was gassed during the first world war and then became a teacher, was dedicated to silence and his pipe. But with his remarkable and romantic mother, Mellers had "a very close and meaningful relationship" and he was her only child. Nonetheless, his parents would have found it hard to believe that one day their son would be appointed an OBE (1982) and an honorary DPhil by City University (1981).
Born in Leamington, Warwickshire, Mellers was educated at Leamington college, from where he won a scholarship to read English at Downing College, Cambridge, and study with FR Leavis. He duly took a first and felt liberated intellectually; a genuinely creative person, he began drawing and painting. He wrote reams of poetry and, above all, he composed music. Moreover, he formed a friendship with the Leavises and lived in their family for three years while studying for a further degree, in music.
During this period, he began contributing to the Leavises' journal Scrutiny - he joined the editorial board in 1942 - producing articles notable for their range, from medieval European to contemporary American music, and for the enthusiasm with which he would come up, each quarter, with yet another new composer. He championed Mahler, for example, long before he became generally recognised. Indeed, a charismatic enthusiasm was the quality that his students remembered years later when describing his teaching. Mercurial, gnome-like, perched cross-legged on a table or even on the grand piano, his lectures were a flow of seeming improvisation, punctuated by screams of delight at the sheer sound of the music.
In 1945 Mellers was appointed to teach English and music at Downing College; and in 1949, after a precarious but romantic year composing incidental music for provincial theatres in the midlands, he settled down at Birmingham University as extra-mural tutor in music. At this time, he was awarded a Birmingham doctorate of music for his thesis on François Couperin, which subsequently became a book. In 1960-62 he moved to the University of Pittsburgh as Andrew Mellon visiting professor of music, a very significant experience out of which came what some consider to be his undoubted masterpiece, Music in a New Found Land, a pioneering study of American 20th-century music.
This half of Mellers' life culminated triumphantly at the new University of York, where, in 1964, he accepted an appointment to teach in the English department and to encourage music; very quickly, however, he converted the post into a full professorship of music and set up a quite distinctive school. He had a talent for finding outstanding staff, all composers, and their students were required to create music as a living art. For Mellers, the classics - Bach and Beethoven, above all - and in the last century Debussy and Stravinsky, were a "living art", along with folk music and jazz.
In this centre of creative activity he communicated in his exuberant way a sense of musical and cultural liberation. Rising habitually at 5.30am, he would sit each day for a few hours at his typewriter, translating his lectures into books. In the process there was both gain and loss, for while one misses his effervescent performance, one gains a much fuller treatment of the historical and social setting of the work under discussion.
In his major studies, Bach and the Dance of God (1981) and Beethoven and the Voice of God (1983), Mellers sought "to relate the musical events to their physiological and psychological consequences", for these two composers "never doubted that their music had 'meanings' discussible in terms simultaneously musical, theological and philosophical". He would even venture further, into terms mythical, metaphysical, and at times indulgently fanciful (eg "the holy trumpets of Tibetan priests are gigantic versions of amorously phallic flutes"). Moreover, though an avowedly secular person, Mellers would often, when discussing religious music, write as if he shared the composer's Christian commitment.
Mellers felt that, while his study François Couperin and the French Classical Tradition (1950) was his scholarly claim to fame, his books on Bach and Beethoven were at the heart of his achievement as a writer. However, in virtually all his books, as in the structure of his academic courses, his method was to concentrate on a comparatively few key examples; a critical method which was characteristic of Leavis and his Scrutiny associates. In the lecture hall, Mellers carried all before him, because his musical analyses arose directly out of the musical examples he played on cassette or with apoplectic gusto on the piano. But many of his readers were unlikely to be able to translate written quotations into sound, let alone arm themselves, as he seemed to expect, with full scores. And so he would have recourse to a florid adjectival prose to help convey the feeling of the music: for instance, "the gradual release of those passion-laden sobs in an ecstatic metamorphosis of (chromatic) harmonious Experience into (pentatonic) melodic Innocence, as the wordless chorus wings us to the peopleless peaks" - this apropos Delius's A Song of the High Hills.
Thus for most readers the strength and originality of Mellers' innumerable books, be they on Couperin and the great polyphonists or contemporary American composers and Grainger, lay in his exploration of the links between a great variety of music and European history and civilisation.
Significantly, his first book, written while still a student, was Music and Society (1946); and one of his last was on Vaughan Williams and the Vision of Albion (1989). Mellers evidently felt a close affinity with Vaughan Williams, and admitted that this book had a strong autobiographical element, "since it is a rediscovery of my own roots and a tribute to 'the Mind of England' ".
For so exuberant a person, whose mission was to communicate joy in and through music, Mellers could now and then be unexpectedly sombre. He wondered, when in his sprightly 70s, if any of his books would still be in print on the day his obituary appeared (in fact, at least two have been reprinted). Most of all he wished that he had composed more, and that more of his music had been heard outside York.
Though Rose of May was commissioned in 1964 for the Cheltenham festival and Yeibichai, scored for large forces - including coloratura soprano, improvising scat singer, and jazz group - for the 1969 Proms, he felt, sadly, that he had not become a significant composer. Yet a close friend and critic once remarked that if he had not been a composer he would not have been the creative figure he was. Mellers, at any rate, believed that once every seven years, "I write a piece that is a real piece," and that invariably it turns out to be based in the Garden of Eden, a theme about innocence and childhood with which he was obsessed.
In fact, he was still writing into his late 80s, publishing his two last books, Singing in the Wilderness (2001) about music and ecology in the 20th century, and Celestial Music? Some Masterpieces of European Religious Music (2002). The 2004 York Late Music Festival opened with a weekend tribute to Mellers, and that October a 90th birthday tribute concert was held in his honour at Downing College, where he was by now an honorary fellow, featuring music by Mellers himself as well as new pieces written for the occasion by Stephen Dodgson, David Matthews and Howard Skempton, among others. During the celebrations, he gave a spirited lecture on Shakespeare and music entitled Fear No More.
Mellers was married three times: first to Vera; then to Peggy, with whom he had two daughters, Caroline and Judy, and a granddaughter Helen; and in, 1987, to Robin, who already had five children. He also had a third daughter, Sarah, by a previous relationship.
· Wilfrid Howard Mellers, composer, critic and teacher, born April 26 1914; died May 17 2008
Ivan Hewett writes: As he got older, the inimitable Mellers tone of voice as revealed in the books became ever more richly distinctive. It was a compound of formidable learning, an exuberantly metaphorical turn of phrase, and an evangelical fervour that revealed itself in hymn-like cadences (as in his Musical Times review of Roger Scruton's Aesthetics of Music, 1997, which ends "a beacon to our bleakness, its value should endure").
The combination recalls Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Mellers does sometimes sound like him (in his collection of essays Between Old Worlds and New, 1997, he describes Brahms as having had a stranglehold on "our native woodnotes wild", ie English music). In the effort to plumb the heights and depths of his subject, Mellers does sometimes ride roughshod over the detail; but at his best, he can persuade us that a shrewdly observed detail really does glow with the, at first, sight implausibly deep import he discerns there.
For example, most writers describe the descending chains of thirds in Brahms's B flat minor Intermezzo for piano in terms of nostalgia and regret. Mellers has quite a different take on this piece: "In the suspended polytonality the interlaced thirds create, it is as though human dust were dissolving into air and rain; Brahms's pantheism is as natural as it is beautiful". Like Leavis, Mellers wanted to praise and celebrate the "felt life" in art, and he abhorred anything that smacked of narrowness, system, or cant.
He dismissed academically fashionable systems of musical analysis for their "pre-ordained" insights, and once castigated the head of new music at the BBC, Hans Keller, for his narrowness.
But despite his enthusiasm for the blues, the Beatles and fringe figures like Grainger, Mellers always insisted that Bach and Beethoven were for him the greatest composers. Beethoven's superiority to Wagner was, for Mellers, a matter of moral and spiritual value; the idea of a purely musical judgment would have been a nonsense to him. "Beethoven did not command us to submit to his wilful will-lessness in order to be saved; he created artefacts which, if we have ears to hear, afford redemption. The difference, if subtle, is sublime."
· Boris Ford's contribution to this notice has been revised since his death in 1998
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