Brown, David (Clifford) 1929-

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BROWN, David (Clifford) 1929-

PERSONAL:

Born July 8, 1929, in Gravesend, Kent, England; son of Bertram Critchley (an industrial manager) and Constance (Nicholls) Brown; married Elizabeth Valentine (a university lecturer), 1953; children: Gabrielle Elizabeth, Hilary Ann. Education: University of Sheffield, B.A., 1950, B.Mus., 1951, M.A., 1960; University of Southampton, Ph.D., 1971.

ADDRESSES:

Home—56 Pentire Ave., Southampton, Hampshire SO1 2RS, England.

CAREER:

Private school teacher of music in Kent, England, 1954-59; University of London, London, England, music librarian, 1959-62; University of Southampton, Southampton, England, lecturer, 1962-71, senior lecturer in music, beginning 1971, became emeritus professor of musicology. Military service: Royal Air Force, 1952-54; became pilot officer.

MEMBER:

Royal Musical Association, Incorporated Society of Professional Musicians.

WRITINGS:

Thomas Weelkes: A Biographical and Critical Study, Faber (London, England), 1969, Da Capo Press (New York, NY), 1979.

Mikhail Glinka: A Biographical and Critical Study, Oxford University Press (Oxford, England), 1974, Da Capo Press (New York, NY), 1985.

John Wilbye, Oxford University Press (Oxford, England), 1974.

Tchaikovsky: A Biographical and Critical Study (four volumes), Gollancz (London, England), 1978–91.

(Editor) The New Grove Russian Masters, W. W. Norton (New York, NY), 1986.

Tchaikovsky Remembered, Timber Press (Portland, OR), 1994.

Musorgsky: His Life and Work, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2003.

Contributor to Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Encyclopaedia Britannica, and Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, and to professional journals.

SIDELIGHTS:

David Brown is professor emeritus of musicology at England's University of Southampton and a specialist in Russian music. His publications include biographical and critical studies of some of the greatest nineteenth-century Russian composers. Mikhail Glinka: A Biographical and Critical Study examines the life and work of that composer, the first of the nationalist school. Glinka's two operas, A Life for the Czar and Russlan and Ludmilla, ushered in what came to be a characteristic Russian sound and style of music, while his symphonic and incidental music was also influential.

In 1978 Brown began a four-part study of Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky. The resulting work, Tchaikovsky: A Biographical and Critical Study, completed in 1991, is the "standard biography," according to a reviewer for Publishers Weekly. A more intimate look at that Russian composer is offered in Brown's 1994 Tchaikovsky Remembered, which "owes it success," according to Library Journal 's Daniel Fermon, to Brown's "superior editing and his uncanny gift for fleshing out a portrait." Largely compiled from primary sources already published, Tchaikovsky Remembered presents a portrait of the Russian composer that flies against the usual picture of the temperamental genius; Tchaikovsky's homosexuality is also dealt with in a straightforward manner. Fermon felt that this was an "excellent" short introduction to the man and his works. John Shreffler, reviewing the same work in Booklist, wrote that this collection of firsthand reminiscences "will prove useful." Roland John Wiley, writing in Music & Letters, noted that Brown drew from eighty such reminiscences gathered and published in the Soviet Union between 1960 and 1980, providing a "chorus of lore about Tchaikovsky." Wiley went on to say that Brown's book was a "welcome addition to the literature" and that the traditional moody picture of the composer was lightened by Brown's depiction of the composer's "nobler and more human traits."

In 2002 Brown published his study of the composer Modest Musorgsky, one of the major figures of nineteenth-century Russian music. Musorgsky: His Life and Work is the first such study to appear in English since the 1950s and the most substantial to appear outside Russia. Musorgsky, largely an autodidact, broke onto the music scene with his opera Boris Godunov, "one of the most powerful and influential stage works of its time," according to a reviewer for the Economist. With the orchestral music for St. John's Night on the Bare Mountain, and his piano pieces gathered in Pictures at an Exhibition, Musorgsky proved himself to be one of the most original composers of his day. Unlike the well-disciplined Tchaikovsky, Musorgsky, who may have been bipolar, composed when the spirit moved him, and as he grew older such moments of inspiration grew fewer and fewer; alcohol abuse added to a downward spiral. Musorgsky died unemployed and nearly homeless when he was only forty-two, leaving two operas incomplete. These works, Sorochinsty Fair and Khovanshchina, were later completed by others.

Reviewing Brown's critical study in Library Journal, Larry Lipkis commented that Brown "clearly knows late 19th-century Russian music and society." Lipkis further called the volume "indispensable." Booklist's Alan Hirsch observed that the sparse details of Musorgsky's private life led Brown to explicate his subject "through an analysis of his music and song texts." A contributor for Publishers Weekly called Brown's book a "solid biography," and Stephen Press, writing in the New York Times Book Review, dubbed the work a "no-holds-barred biography." Press went on to comment that Brown "enthusiastically traces [Musorgsky's] entire output in a rich historical and social contest." For Press, this study was at once a "state-of-the art guide to the composer's life and works" as well as a "useful introduction to the history of mid-19th-century Russian music."

Brown has also authored studies of the seventeenth-century British composers Thomas Weelkes and John Wilbye, and has edited the 1986 edition of The New Grove Russian Masters.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, February 15, 1994, John Shreffler, review of Tchaikovsky Remembered, p. 105; September 15, 2002, Alan Hirsch, review of Musorgsky: His Life and Work, pp. 191-192.

Economist, October 5, 2002, review of Musorgsky, p. 103.

Library Journal, February 15, 1994, Daniel Fermon, review of Tchaikovsky Remembered, p. 161; October 15, 2002, Larry Lipkis, review of Musorgsky, pp. 73-74.

Music & Letters, November, 1992, Edward Garden, review of Tchaikovsky: A Biographical and Critical Study, pp. 619-621; February, 1995, Roland John Wiley, review of Tchaikovsky Remembered, pp. 111-113.

New York Times Book Review, February 16, 2003, Stephen Press, review of Musorgsky, p. 18.

Publishers Weekly, January 1, 1996, review of Tchaikovsky, p. 65; September 16, 2002, review of Musorgsky, p. 61.

Times Literary Supplement, January 7, 1992, S. Karlinsky, "Man or Myth?," pp. 20-21.