David Drew

Published on Monday 24 August 2009 21:22

Musicologist

Born: 19 September, 1930, in London.

Died: 25 July, in London, aged 78.

DAVID Drew was a music critic and musicologist who almost single-handedly rescued the work of Kurt Weill from neglect and promoted him to his present position as an important 20th-century composer.

Drew, a lifelong champion of under-recognised 20th-century composers, took on the cause of Weill, regarded as little more than an appendage to Bertolt Brecht, shortly after the composer's death in 1950.

Working with the singer Lotte Lenya and other members of the Brecht-Weill circle, he identified and located previously unknown stage and orchestral works, songs and choruses by Weill. Many of these had to be tracked down in scattered publishing houses around the world; some had to be reconstructed from partial scores.

By lecturing, writing, editing, staging performances and organising recordings, Drew agitated for Weill all over the world.

Drew was born in Putney, south-west London, and grew up in Campbelltown, Argyllshire. He studied English and history at Peterhouse College, Cambridge.

At Cambridge he fell under the influence of the critic F R Leavis and of Wilfrid Mellers, the music critic for Leavis's journal Scrutiny, as well as of the migr Spanish composer Roberto Gerhard, who introduced him to the world of contemporary music.

After graduating from Cambridge in 1954, Drew worked as a freelance music critic and as a publicist for Decca Records, for which he wrote liner notes and brochures. His first historical reclamation project was Olivier Messaien, an enthusiasm dating to his Cambridge days, for whom he made a case in several important articles.

As the music critic of New Statesman from 1959-67, Drew charted an idiosyncratic course, turning the spotlight on obscure composers whom he regarded as having been unfairly marginalised by mainstream historians and seeking out performances that were firmly off the beaten track.

He pursued this policy as artistic director of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation's 20th-century music project, a series of recordings made for EMI and Argo from 1961 to 1975.

At the publishing house Boosey & Hawkes, where he ran the contemporary-music department from 1975-82, he pushed composers such as H K Gruber, Henryk Gorecki and Igor Markevitch to the front of the list.

From 1971-92 he edited the journal Tempo, and from 1993-89 he was artistic director for Largo Records in Cologne, Germany.

He published the authoritative Kurt Weill: A Handbook (1987), an annotated catalogue of Weill's work, and edited two books in German that were published in 1975, ber Kurt Weill and Weill's collected writings.

Weill devotees waited in vain for Drew's proposed three-volume biography of the composer, which he put aside in the 1970s, but at his death he was well on his way to completing Weill at 25, a reworking of the material for the first volume, and several other books, including a collection of essays.

Drew is survived by his wife, Judith, and three children.