Malcolm Arnold

Among the foremost British composers of the twentieth century, Sir Malcolm Arnold occupies a singular position. Creator of nine symphonies, seventeen concertos, and 132 film scores, with the Academy Award-winning The Bridge on the River Kwai foremost among them, he clung to tonality and melody at a time when such choices placed him at odds with dominant trends, leaving him a perpetual subject of divided opinion—praised by supporters for his populist instincts and faulted by detractors for precisely those same qualities. Born in Northampton on October 21, 1921, he took up the violin during childhood. A Louis Armstrong performance ignited an obsession with jazz in the twelve-year-old, an influence whose vitality and character would leave an enduring imprint on his mature output. The same encounter prompted him to take up the trumpet; by sixteen his skill had secured a scholarship to the Royal College of Music in London. There he frequently performed with local ensembles while studying composition with Gordon Jacob. At twenty he enlisted for World War II service. Placed in a military band on cornet, he found the assignment so repellent that he deliberately wounded his own foot to obtain a medical discharge—an episode that foreshadowed the mental illness that shadowed his entire adult life. Soon afterward he received a diagnosis of schizophrenia and subsequently weathered repeated nervous breakdowns.

Reentering civilian life, he assumed the principal trumpet position with the London Philharmonic. In 1943 he finished his initial large-scale orchestral piece, the overture “Beckus the Dandipratt,” and shortly thereafter produced the breakthrough “Three Shanties Op. 4,” which distilled his refined, melodic, and frequently impish manner. Having received the Mendelssohn Scholarship in 1948, he devoted himself wholly to composition and completed his First Symphony the next year. At roughly the same moment he entered film scoring with Avalanche Patrol. His Second Symphony, finished in 1953, would become the most widely praised of his large works, yet his exceptional gift for melody attracted greater academic disapproval than acclaim in subsequent decades. Each of the nine symphonies differs markedly from the rest, further complicating efforts to classify his output within conventional critical categories. Nevertheless he won broad public favor, earning his first Oscar for David Lean’s 1957 epic The Bridge on the River Kwai. Additional film scores of note include the 1958 Ivor Novello Award-winning The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, 1959’s Suddenly Last Summer, and 1960’s Tunes of Glory; among the directors with whom he collaborated were Carol Reed, John Huston, and Ronald Neame.

By 1966 the strains of London existence had grown overwhelming, prompting a move to Cornwall whose landscape inspired a new pastoral lyricism in his music. Even so, his temperament remained unpredictable; in 1969 he conducted the Concerto for Group and Orchestra that Jon Lord had written for Deep Purple. The following decade brought severe personal trials, including suicide attempts, extended hospitalizations, and varied therapeutic interventions. Compositional productivity declined accordingly, though the darkly ironic “Symphony for Brass” of 1978 stands among his recognized masterpieces. In 1984 a British court ruled him incapable of living independently, after which he resided under the care of devoted attendant Anthony Day, the dedicatee of the 1986 Ninth Symphony. That poignantly powerful score, consciously recalling the valedictory gestures of Tchaikovsky and Mahler, effectively concluded his creative activity, yet a younger generation of critics gradually accorded his work greater esteem than earlier observers had granted. Knighted in 1993, he received a Fellowship of the British Academy of Composers and Songwriters in 2001 during an eightieth-birthday tribute at Wigmore Hall. Plans for further observances of his eighty-fifth birthday were under way when he died on September 23, 2006.