Peter Heyworth

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.

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]

• Kennedy, Michael (1989). Portrait of Walton. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-816705-1.