by David Smith. 25th September 2014
We were all saddened to hear last night of the death of British conductor and early music pioneer Christopher Hogwood at the age of 73, following a period of illness. A prominent figure on the period music scene for many decades, he is primarily associated with the Academy of Ancient Music - an ensemble he founded in 1973, and with which he recorded many landmark discs, including the first ever Mozart symphony cycle on period instruments, and a 1980 Messiah that still ranks for many people as the finest on record.
Hogwood was an "early" musician from the very outset of his career, beginning under Sir Neville Marriner at St Martin in the Fields as a keyboardist, but was also an active academic - lecturing in music and musicology at Cambridge, Harvard and Cornell, and influencing other prominent early music experts such as Roger Norrington, John Eliot Gardiner and Trevor Pinnock. Indeed it is not an exaggeration to regard him as one of the fathers of the early music community as a whole: even mainstream groups with little or no claim to "authenticism" have been influenced by his thinking.
As well as spearheading the British early music movement, Hogwood's approach to managing the ensemble was itself groundbreaking - though he was once famously described as 'the von Karajan of early music', Hogwood adopted the role not of the dictatorial maestro but of a kind of "umpire", in recognition of the fact that his musicians would themselves have scholarly and valid input into the process of making a performance or recording. This highly successful approach has been imitated by many groups both within and beyond the early music world.
A meticulous researcher, Hogwood prepared his own new editions of scores for many of his recordings, removing editorial additions and publishing errors which might obscure the composer's original intentions and restoring additional material, alternative versions and performing-order to established core repertoire (as with that legendary 1980 Messiah). He was also a prolific writer on music, both in terms of monographs and contributions to anthologies and companions: his extensive publications include several books on Handel and Music at Court (1977), a survey of patronage in Europe spanning several centuries.
From the mid-80s onwards, Hogwood became in increasing demand internationally: he was appointed Artistic Director of Boston's venerable Handel and Haydn Society in 1986, and extensive appearances throughout Europe and the US (both in concert repertoire and opera) would continue until just a few years before his death. Later in his career, he turned his attention to later Romantic and even twentieth-century repertoire, with projects including a new edition of Elgar's Enigma Variations and explorations of Brahms, Stravinsky and Martinů, among others. He was made a CBE in 1989.
Ultimately it is as a learned and thoughtful scholar, a distinguished performer and conductor, and a man who transformed our understanding of performance practice, that Christopher Hogwood will be remembered.
