Cooke, Deryck (Victor)

Extract

(Victor)

(b Leicester, Sept 14, 1919; d Thornton Heath, Oct 26, 1976). English writer on music. He studied the piano privately, and music with Patrick Hadley and Robin Orr at Selwyn College, Cambridge (1938–40, 1946–7; MA, MusB), and worked for the BBC as a music presentation assistant (1947–56), music producer (1956–7), music presentation writer (1957–9) and music presentation editor (from 1965); in the intervening years (1959–65) he was a freelance writer on music. His main areas of research were 19th-century music, especially that of Wagner, Mahler, Bruckner and Delius, and musical semantics.

In 1960 Cooke made a ‘performing version’ of Mahler’s Tenth Symphony, which was first performed at the Proms on 13 August 1964 and subsequently revised in the light of this and other performances; Cooke was always at pains to emphasize that this text did not represent a putative reconstruction of the symphony as Mahler might have completed it but rather a text that carefully followed precedents established in the sketches and thus allowed Mahler’s music to be heard at least in a form not foreign to the composer. His version has won considerable praise; it has been much performed and recorded, and was published in ...