Relationship | with Living
|
| Birth |
5 Nov 1935 |
Grantham, , Lincolnshire, England  [2] |
- First name(s) John N
Last name Maw
Birth quarter 4
Birth year 1935
Mother's maiden name Chambers
District Grantham
County Lincolnshire
Country England
Volume 7A
Page 630
Record set England & Wales Births 1837-2006
Category Birth, Marriage & Death (Parish Registers)
Subcategory Civil Births
Collections from United Kingdom, England
© brightsolid online publishing ltd
|
| Gender |
Male |
| Census |
29 Sep 1939 (3 years) |
Meadow View, Chislehurst, , Kent, England [3] |
- First name(s) Last name(s) DOB Sex Occupation Marital status Schedule Schedule Sub Number
Clarence F Maw 02 Jan 1913 Male Manager (Radio Dealer) Married 398 1
Hilda E Maw 21 Jul 1905 Female Unpaid Domestic Duties Married 398 2
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George F Maw 08 May 1904 Male Central School Headmaster Widowed 398 6
Ethel D Maw 04 Dec 1893 Female Unpaid Domestic Duties Married 398 7
Ref: RG101/1249K/007/41 Letter Code: CJSJ
© Findmypast Ltd
|
| Alt. Birth |
District of Columbia |
- Social Security Number: 577-17-4602
The state listed in the birth locality field
is where the Social Security Number was issued.
The zip code listed in the death locality field
is the last place of residence.
Death Residence Localities
ZIP Code: 20012
Washington, Washington, District of Columbia
|
| Obituary |
- Birth: Nov. 5, 1935 Grantham, England
Death: May 19, 2009 Washington District of Columbia District Of Columbia, USA
Composer. In an age of modernist atonality, he continued, in the face critical barbs, to create music in the Romantic tradition. Raised in England, he developed an early love for music while a student at the Wennington School, Wetherby; in spite of his father's urging that he study piano, he took-up the clarinet, and went for training at the Royal Academy of Music. Success there led to a scholarship to study composition in Paris with Nadia Boulanger. The two did not get along; still, Madame Boulanger submitted some of his work for the 1958 Lili Boulanger Prize, which he won. Maw returned from Paris in 1959 broke, but with good prospects; he was soon much in demand, and in 1962 produced his first major work, "Scenes and Arias". Premiered on the BBC with Heather Harper, Josephine Veasey, and Janet Baker, it led to commissions for further compositions such as "String Quartet", "Sinfonia for Small Orchestra", and "Sonata for Strings and Two Horns". In 1970, he wrote the comic opera "The Rising of the Moon" for Glyndebourne; mixed res were to lead to extensive revision before it became a success. Thru the 1970s, such compositions as "Concert Music" (1972) received increased exposure from British orchestras, though his "Odyssey", a commission from the London Symphony, took 17 years to receive its first full performance (in 1989). In 1984, Maw moved to the United States, first as a professor at Yale, later at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore. His works were to increase in frequency and critical acceptance, soon attracting audiences on both sides of the Atlantic: "Little Concert" (1987), "The World in the Evening" (1988), and "Memory of Music" (1989) were all well received. His 1993 "Violin Concerto", written for Joshua Bell, won much critical acclaim. Maw will probably be best remembered for his 2002 opera "Spohie's Choice", based on a William Styron novel about the continuing problems of a Holocaust survivor. The work had its world premiere at Covent Garden; it was demeaned by professional critics, but embraced warmly by audiences, and continues to be performed in Europe and America. Maestro Maw died of heart disease; numerous of his works are available on CD. (bio by: Bob Hufford)
Burial: Unknown
Maintained by: Find A Grave Record added: May 19, 2009 Find A Grave Memorial# 37268450
|
| Obituary |
19 May 2009 (73 years) [4] |
| The TeleGraph |
- Nicholas Maw
Nicholas Maw, the composer, who died on May 19 aged 73, refused to subscribe to the demands of modernist atonality, preferring to emphasise clear, harmonic organisation, lyricism and melody; as a result he was greatly admired by concertgoers, but less popular with the more avant garde critics.
Last Updated: 6:06PM BST 19 May 2009
Photo: LEBRECHT
The Grove Dictionary of Music described Maw's music as "an attempt to reconnect with the Romantic tradition that was broken with the onset of Modernism". At a time when Boulez and Stockhausen were in the ascendant, and the sort of big Romantic pieces Maw was writing were deeply unfashionable, he refused to change or abandon his idiom. Critical opinion remained sharply divided. One notice dismissed Maw's oeuvre as "pastiche music, echoing every late-twentieth-century tonalist you care to name"; but others praised the Straussian exuberance of his orchestration and his "Brittenesque" melodic writing.
Maw won the greatest critical acclaim for his orchestral music, his reputation being established when, aged 26, he produced Scenes and Arias (1962), a work for orchestra and three female voices, for a BBC Prom. His extensive and varied catalogue included chamber music, vocal and choral music, operas, solo instrumental works, and music for children.
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It was unfortunate for Maw, however, that he became best-known for his opera Sophie's Choice, a work based on William Styron's novel about a Holocaust survivor whose struggle with life and loves is overshadowed by the memory of the day a concentration camp guard made her choose which of her two children should escape the gas chamber. Commissioned by Radio 3 and the Royal Opera, conducted by Sir Simon Rattle, directed by Sir Trevor Nunn and with the Austrian mezzo soprano Angelika Kirchschlager as Sophie, its premiere at Covent Garden in 2002 was heralded in advance as the arts event of the season.
Sadly for Maw, the piece received a drubbing from the critics, mainly on account of the libretto, which Maw had written himself and which was described by one critic as "chunks of Styron's dialogue – minus the literary expertise to give it balance, shape or structure".
John Nicholas Maw was born on November 5 1935 at Grantham, Lincolnshire, where his father, a pianist, owned a music shop. During the war he and his sister Janet were sent to live with relatives after their parents contracted tuberculosis; his mother died of the disease when Nicholas was 14.
Both children were sent to Wennington School, Wetherby, a co-educational Quaker boarding school, and it was here that Nicholas developed a love of music, inspired by a music mistress who introduced him to Bartók, Stravinsky and Ravel and encouraged him to compose.
Maw's father wanted his son to become a pianist, but Maw took up the clarinet instead and went on to study the instrument, along with composition, at the Royal Academy of Music. His composition teachers were Paul Steinitz and Lennox Berkeley.
He arrived at the Academy in the heyday of continental avant garde modernism. His contemporary, Richard Rodney Bennett, who later became an admirer, recalled that "at the time there was only one acceptable way of writing music, and we were a bit sniffy about people who didn't toe the line".
But in 1958 Maw won a French government scholarship to study composition privately in Paris with Nadia Boulanger. The two did not get on, though she submitted some of his scores for a prize judged by Aaron Copland and Stravinsky, which Maw won. Later he attended classes given by Max Deutsch, a former pupil of Schoenberg.
In Paris, Maw had dabbled in 12-tone modernism, but he felt no affinity with the music and soon decided to forge a different path. When Scenes and Arias was broadcast in 1962, Richard Rodney Bennett was so impressed that he wrote to Maw saying: "This is the music we should all be writing."
The critics, however, almost ignored it, and Maw got only one (lukewarm) review, in The Daily Telegraph. It was not the breakthrough he had been hoping for. It was only later that critics woke up to the beauties of its lush harmonies.
Although Maw was rarely without a commission and was admired by many musicians and musicologists, the fact that in the 1960s and 1970s he was outside the mainstream meant that he continued to suffer from critical neglect and had to do other things to make ends meet. He wrote and reviewed for magazines and newspapers and taught part-time at the Royal Academy and later at the University of Exeter.
In 1960 an early orchestral song-cycle entitled Nocturne, suggesting the influence of Bartók and Britten, was favourably received at the Cheltenham Festival, though critics complained of its insular spirit compared with the revolutionary innovations of the continental avant-garde. In 1964 his first opera, One Man Show, premiered at the Jeannetta Cochrane Theatre in London.
In 1966 he became the first artist-in-residence at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he stayed for four years and developed his second opera, The Rising of the Moon, a romantic comedy about British solders stationed in 19th-century Ireland at the time of the famines.
The opera was premiered at Glyndebourne in 1970, but the fact that it coincided with a resurgence of the Troubles was felt to be tactless, and the critics were snooty about his "old-fashioned" style.
Only in the 1980s, as the stars of Stockhausen and Boulez began to wane, did Maw come to be regarded as a central figure of British music. In 1987 Odyssey, a work which had been in gestation since 1973, was premiered at the BBC Proms. A single, unbroken 96-minute span of symphonic music (it claimed to be the longest continuous piece of orchestral music ever written), Odyssey was immediately recognised as a masterpiece, even though the BBC was heavily criticised for not allowing the orchestra enough rehearsal time.
An EMI recording by Simon Rattle and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra was nominated for a Grammy Award in 1992 and cited by Classic CD as the best recording out of 100 recommended releases in the decade.
Other important orchestral works were his lively Spring Music (1983) and his Violin Concerto (1993) premiered by Joshua Bell. His Ghost Dances, Roman Canticel, La Vita Nuova, and his Flute Quartet and Piano Trio are all available on disc, the last piece being nominated for a Gramophone Award, and given both Gramophone's Editor's and Critic's Choice.
From the mid-1980s Maw spent much of his time in America, where his music was taken up by a number of major orchestras and where the warmth of the critical reception contrasted strongly with the cool response of British critics.
Nicholas Maw married, in 1969, Karen Graham, with whom he had a daughter and a son. The marriage was dissolved in 1976, and he is survived by his partner Maija Hay, a ceramic artist.
Published May 19 2009
|
| Death |
19 May 2009 |
Washington, District of Columbia, District of Columbia, USA [5] |
- Nicholas Maw, composer, was born on November 5, 1935. He died of heart failure on May 19, 2009, aged 73
|
| Obituary |
20 May 2009 (73 years) |
| The Times |
- http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article6321616.ece
It might be thought that someone capable of composing an unbroken 95-minute span of music — Nicholas Maw's Odyssey — must be by nature fluent and assured. But that was certainly not the case with Maw until — if then — relatively late in his creative life. Thoughtful and deliberate in manner, apparently rather aloof, he generally knew what was "wrong" with his music and he would sometimes withdraw, often rewrite, a particular piece.
Maw's family was musical and, as a boy, he took up the clarinet. He began to compose in his mid-teens and, on leaving school, he went to the Royal Academy of Music, "the archetypal provincial boy coming up to the big city" (his own words), where he was knocked sideways by, on the one hand, the Second Viennese School and, on the other, by the technical facility of his contemporaries, who included Richard Rodney Bennett.
He studied with Lennox Berkeley and made such headway that in 1958, with the help of a French government scholarship, he went to work with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. Boulanger tried to insist he study solfège (the Tonic Sol-fa), but Maw was already his own man, and refused.
Despite this rebuff Boulanger helped him generously and secured for him the Lili Boulanger Prize, which enabled him to extend his stay in Paris and, incidentally, to attend the classes of Max Deutsch, a Schönberg pupil. From Deutsch's analyses of large-scale works by Mahler, among others, he learnt invaluable lessons in orchestration and form.
Maw returned from Paris in 1959, so penurious that he had to sell his clarinets. He had only four acknowledged works to his credit (a requiem had been withdrawn) and none called for a full symphonic orchestra. So it was perceptive of William Glock, the BBC's Controller, Music, to commission a work for solo voices and large orchestra. Scenes and Arias, dedicated to his wife, Karen, was first heard at the 1962 Proms. Set for three female voices — the God-given soloists were Heather Harper, Josephine Veasey and Janet Baker — its sheer passion and the demanding lyricism of its vocal lines (recalling, but not imitating, Strauss) brought Maw overnight success. He was in demand — and he had discovered an idiom, in part derived from the Second Viennese School (particularly Berg), in which he felt at home. Seeking to refine it, he produced a String Quartet, the
Sinfonia for Small Orchestra and the Sonata for Strings and Two Horns; he also searchingly revised Scenes and Arias — striking evidence of his own stringent standards. This was done in 1966.
Meanwhile, Glyndebourne had offered him a commission and, with Beverley Cross as librettist, he set to work on The Rising of the Moon, a romantic comedy. The opera was delayed for two years by a serious bout of tuberculosis but it was finally produced in 1970 and was enjoyed by an audience largely unaccustomed to hearing contemporary music. It was obvious, though, that it was too heavily scored (perhaps Maw had misjudged Glyndebourne's then rather strident acoustics) and the composer did some serious rescoring before it was revived the following year.
Out of The Rising of the Moon grew his Concert Music (1972) and, perhaps, the Five Irish Songs, which appeared in 1973, the same year in which Maw embarked upon Life Studies, for 15 solo strings, a work much leaner in idiom than any earlier composition. But an altogether more substantial undertaking was beginning to take shape in his mind. Odyssey was initially a commission from the London Symphony Orchestra, and Maw's imagination took him, willy-nilly, way beyond the time-span called for. When Odyssey finally emerged (in a partial performance at the 1987 Proms) the piece had become a BBC commission and Maw, dropped by Boosey & Hawkes, had found a more sympathetic home with Faber Music. Odyssey received its first complete performance, 17 years after its inception, in April 1989. It earned the highest critical praise and was soon recorded by Sir Simon Rattle.
In 1984, in response to an invitation from Yale University, Maw went to live in the US, where he met Maija Hay, a distinguished potter, Finnish by birth, who was to become an
important source of loving encouragement. He began to write more easily. Personae, an occasional series of piano pieces begun in 1973, continued to grow; the Sonata Notturna appeared in 1985, the Little Concert in 1987, The World in the Evening (for the orchestra of the Royal Opera House) the following year. The Nash Ensemble, to whom he was devoted, commissioned Ghost Dances in 1988. And, in America, orchestral managements began to take notice: Spring Music (1983) and The World in the Evening had important performances in New York and Boston. American Games — for wind band — appeared in 1991 and the richly lyrical Violin Concerto written for the American virtuoso Joshua Bell, in 1993.
Two years later, for the Philharmonia's 50th birthday, Maw produced the brilliant Dance Scenes. The Variations in Old Style, a BBC commission for the Royal Concert in November 1995, commemorated the 300th anniversary of Purcell's death. Both works were suitably occasional, though neither had the weight of the finest of his earlier pieces.
Perhaps this was because a massive undertaking was slowly germinating in Maw's imagination. A seed had been planted in about 1991 when he had read William Styron's novel Sophie's Choice and been deeply moved by it. The composing of the opera — "a very private experience" — took six years and it was eventually commissioned by BBC Radio 3 in association with the Royal Opera House, which engaged Simon Rattle to conduct, Trevor Nunn to direct and the brilliant Angelika Kirchschlager to sing the title role — a dream team indeed. And the performances (five of them in December 2002) were memorably polished and committed. So Maw must have been disappointed when some prominent critics declared that, at just over four hours, the opera was a good deal too long — a reaction by and large not shared with the paying public who, on the last night, gave him a vociferous ovation.
Whatever its future, Sophie's Choice, soon heard in Berlin, Vienna and Washington, epitomised a powerful creative personality which had absorbed and transmuted what was needed from Strauss, Berg, Stravinsky, Bartók and Britten, had eschewed Darmstadt and had emerged with a polytonal idiom distinctly personal. The opera was also the thematic source of Melodies from Drama, a substantial string sextet given its premiere in New York in April 2007 and heard at Aldeburgh the following June. Both performances were very warmly received. Also widely welcomed was a CD of the composer's hitherto neglected choral music.
Maw's 70th birthday, in 2005, had been marked by a chamber music concert at the Wigmore Hall and a performance, by Tasmin Little, of the Violin Concerto in the Cadogan Hall. Andrew Litton conducted Odyssey in London and Berlin and there were other manifestations in America.
Nicholas Maw's death deprives the compositional scene of a nonconformist, often unfashionable by received perceptions, but a master of lyrical melody, a virtuoso orchestrator and a richly creative personality surely destined to survive in the capricious annals of posterity.
Maw is survived by his partner of many years, Maija Hay, and by a son and daughter from his marriage to Karen Graham, which ended in 1976.
Nicholas Maw, composer, was born on November 5, 1935. He died of heart failure on May 19, 2009, aged 73
|
| Name |
Nicholas Maw |
| Occupation |
Composer |
| _UID |
394508BC45E44EFEB16D9D862E76D350BF78 |
Origins |
|
| Patriarch & Matriarch |
Maw, John
b. Abt 1755, Northorpe,, Lincolnshire, England
d. Apr 1824, Laughton,, Lincolnshire, England (Age 69 years) (4 x Great Grandfather) 
Chambers, Hilda E.
b. 21 Jul 1905
d. Between Oct and Dec 1949, District Grantham (Mother) |
| Headstones |
 Submit Headstone Photo |
| Person ID |
I13611 |
The Family Maw |
| Last Modified |
5 Aug 2021 |
English
1935 - 2009 (73 years) 
Has 24 ancestors and 2 descendants in this family tree.
Set As Default Person 
1905 - 1949
Maw, Clarence Frederick
