‘First and foremost he saw himself as a composer,’ says Julian. Yet this was of lesser import to Lloyd Webber than one central ambition. He taught me things I’ve never ceased to believe in.’ Despite being an apparent musical opposite, he insists that ‘I couldn’t have done what I went on to do without him. We sat on the edges of our seats wondering what magnificent chord was coming.’Īs a teacher at the Royal College of Music (one of the best music colleges and conservatoires in the world), he was more shy and reserved than charismatic, but Lloyd Webber cared for his students. ‘The organ was an extension of his body and personality. ‘It was magic,’ his friend and colleague John Chapman once said of his improvisation skills. Lloyd Webber was to move on to prestigious London organist posts at All Saints, Margaret Street (1939) and the Methodist Central Hall, Westminster (1958), attracted by the organs at which he could thunder away. His eyes always seemed “twinkly” with pleasure.’ His horn-rimmed glasses kept slipping down his nose. ‘He was tall, with dark wavy hair and dark eyebrows. Actor Peter Hughes, now in his 90s, sang in the 1930s as treble soloist in Lloyd Webber’s choir at St Cyprian’s Church in London. The 1930s were days of optimism for the young musician. Lloyd Webber dazzled at the Royal College of Music, where he studied composition with Vaughan Williams and made the transition from being a student to a musical theory teacher. ‘Absolutely faultless’ was how the late music writer Felix Aprahamian once described to me his playing at this time. By early teenage years his organ-playing skills and schedule of recitals had captured the attention of the BBC. Dragged round the capital’s churches and cathedrals, the youngster didn’t stand a chance. William Webber (the ‘Lloyd’ was added to differentiate himself from a musical namesake) was the son of a London plumber who lived for the sound of organ pipes. William Lloyd Webber’s wife, Jean (a musician herself) pushed him to push himself, to no avail. The ‘shy, withdrawn person’ who squirmed at the idea of promoting himself couldn’t bear the thought that the musical fruits of his sensitive nature would be ‘rubbished’, as Julian Lloyd Webber puts it, by fashion-minded critics.Īndrew Lloyd Webber – now Lord Lloyd Webber – has said he’s ‘101 per cent sure’ his father’s character was what stopped him being an achiever as a composer. This passionate man could do no other than express his feelings in a warm, romantic, even voluptuous style (flavoured by the likes of Puccini and Rachmaninov, Sibelius and Franck) which he could see was losing favour with the British musical elite – rapidly so, as avant-garde adventurism held sway in the post-war world. ‘He was a very shy and withdrawn person who nonetheless showed through his music that he was a passionate man.’ The Lloyd Webber family’s one-time lodger, Sir Tim Rice, sums up his former landlord’s predicament. Why the weeping over Aurora in those early hours? It’s hard not to see the work as a touchstone for its composer’s deep sense of perceived failure as a composer, its status as a one-off work a rebuke, not least to the person he was. Lovers of Tintagel will adore it.’ And legendary film director Ken Russell reportedly declared it ‘about the most sexual piece of music I’ve heard in my life.’ Record producer Andrew Keener, who has overseen two CDs-worth of Lloyd Webber’s music, sees Aurora as ‘hugely opulent in an almost Baxian way. He describes it as ‘a lovely piece, well crafted and showing great sensitivity’. It stands virtually on its own in his output, yet is accomplished enough for conductor Lorin Maazel to have recorded it. ‘I was woken in the middle of the night by the sound of my father playing a recording of his symphonic poem, Aurora, and sobbing while he listened.’Īurora is the great ‘what might have been’ work – a sensuous, richly scored hymn to the Roman goddess of the dawn. One childhood memory perhaps spurred him on. Julian Lloyd Webber has laboured long ‘to help make my father’s music available for people to take up if they wish’.
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