Name Noel Mewton-Wood Role Pianist | ||
 | ||
Died December 5, 1953, London, United Kingdom Similar People | ||
Noel mewton wood plays liszt petrarch sonnet 104
Noel Mewton-Wood (20 November 1922 – 5 December 1953) was an Australian-born concert pianist who achieved international fame on the basis of many distinguished concerto recordings during his short life.
Contents
Life and career
Born in Melbourne, he studied with Waldemar Seidel at the Melbourne Conservatorium until the age of fourteen. After further study at London's Royal Academy of Music, he took private lessons from Artur Schnabel in Italy.
In March 1940, he returned to London for his debut performance at Queen's Hall, performing Beethoven's third piano concerto with the London Philharmonic Orchestra under Sir Thomas Beecham. He then went on tour in the UK as assisting artist accompanying Viennese tenor Richard Tauber, and later performed in France, Germany, South Africa, Poland, Turkey and Australia.
Mewton-Wood's The Times obituary of 7 December 1953 described his debut performance:
Mewton-Wood was a close friend of Benjamin Britten. In 1952-53, while Britten was busy composing his opera Gloriana, he deputized Mewton-Wood to accompany tenor Peter Pears, his partner.
When only 31, Mewton-Wood committed suicide by drinking prussic acid (hydrogen cyanide), apparently blaming himself for the death from a ruptured appendix of William Fedrick, whom he lived with, feeling he had overlooked the early symptoms. The notes written by a friend of Mewton-Wood, John Amis, for the reissue of the Bliss Concerto recording, confirm that Mewton-Wood was gay and was distraught at his lover's tragic death.
Benjamin Britten wrote Canticle III: Still falls the rain for a concert in Mewton-Wood's memory.
In 1962, his old teacher Waldemar Seidel auditioned the 7-year-old Geoffrey Tozer and declared "Noel has come back". Noel Mewton-Wood had died eleven months before Tozer was born.
Repertoire
In addition to Beethoven, Mewton-Wood's repertoire included:
He also composed chamber music, a piano concerto, ballet music, and music for the films Tawny Pipit (1944) and Chance of a Lifetime (1950).
Books
Noel Mewton-Wood features in Sonia Orchard's 2009 novel, The Virtuoso, which is narrated by a fictional obsessive admirer and sometime lover of Noel. The novel is informed by the author's own background as a pianist, and her interviews with many of Noel Mewton-Wood's friends and contemporaries.