William Wordsworth

His full name was, rather delightfully, William Brocklesby Wordsworth -but the New Grove has the middle name in brackets, so it's optional and is therefore dropped in these pages. William Wordsworth the Victorian poet was an ancestor (a great-great uncle, apparently). He was born in London in 1908 and died in Scotland in 1988, having moved to Scotland before the Second World War broke out and choosing to remain there permanently thereafter. His compositional output is relatively small -but it does include eight symphonies and six string quartets. He was probably most famous for the decade or so just after World War II, but he was competing with the likes of Britten and Tippett at the time, so it is not too surprising that after a brief period in something approaching the limelight, he thereafter sank back into a degree of obscurity. It probably didn't help that he was a famously reticent man, keen to avoid making claims for -or even drawing attention to- his work.

His music is mostly tonal with a modern 'tang'. The New Grove declares his music to have 'reminders of Brahms' (but I think that's possibly a bit of a stretch!) and closes its very short article on him with the faint and damning praise that, “his music is predominantly thoughtful and unspectacular”.