Crosse, Gordon (opera)

Extract

(b Bury, Dec 1, 1937). English composer. He studied at Oxford University with Egon Wellesz, graduating in 1961, after which he spent a further two years doing research into early 15th-century music. In 1962 he studied with Goffredo Petrassi in Rome. Returning to England, he taught in the extramural department of Birmingham University, and in 1966 became Haywood Fellow in Music, also at Birmingham. In 1969 he became Fellow in music at the University of Essex, in 1973 was composer-in-residence at King’s College, Cambridge, and in 1977 he became visiting professor in composition at the University of California.

Admired from an early stage in his career for the quality of his word-setting – his children’s piece Meet my Folks! (1964), a ‘theme and relations’ with words by Ted Hughes, is a particularly vivid example – Crosse seemed to have the potential for making a valuable contribution to the English operatic repertory. Indeed, his first work of that kind, a severely economical treatment of Yeats’s ...