James Wilson: The composer James (Jim) Wilson, who has died in Dublin at the age of 82, was the doyen of Irish music, with an output that included seven operas, three symphonies, 12 concertos and many vocal, chamber and instrumental pieces.
"I am going to be a composer. I don't know how, but I am." This resolve in his 20s, when he was on wartime service with the Royal Navy, informed his life thereafter. With characteristic quiet determination he pursued his craft of composition right to the point of his death.
Born in London into a family with little interest in music, Jim was the youngest of three boys. His pharmacist father, Edgar, died when he was four and his mother, Margaret Eldridge, courageously salvaged the family business and brought the boys up alone, instilling in them independence and, in Jim's case, fostering his interest in the arts with Saturday outings to London's great museums. Weekly visits to the nearby Sadler's Wells theatre in the 1930s left him hooked on opera for life.
A posting to the ciphers section of the admiralty at the start of the war proved stimulating if stressful, until his call-up took him into the navy's radar division in 1942. Wartime service included several close shaves in a destroyer on convoy duty north of the Arctic Circle.
Back at a desk in the admiralty, his modest post-war gratuity financed composition lessons with Alec Rowley at Trinity College of Music in London. This was his only formal training.
"I never took an exam in my life and I'm not going to," he said recently. "I have no letters after my name of any kind."
He moved to Dublin in 1948 to join his friend John Campbell, a partnership that lasted until the latter's death in 1975. Two years sailing around the Mediterranean together were a formative experience following which he devoted himself full time to composition.
"You learn to compose by composing," he said. "Other people can give you a certain amount of know-how, but you do the rest by yourself."
Performances of new music were hard to achieve in Dublin in the 1950s, and it was a 1965 production of his children's opera, The Hunting of the Snark (commissioned by Lady Dorothy Mayer) which proved the breakthrough.
The experience of writing for voices led to a change from his earlier freely atonal style to the more economical style of later years which often used unusual scales. His constant preoccupation was "how not to be old-fashioned" while still preserving a melodic approach.
Works were always written with specific performers in mind and he rarely revised: nothing was committed to paper until it was clear in his head.
In any case, he was always more interested in the current work than the one last completed, while the reaction of the performers was of far more interest than that of the audience. "I write music because I have to."
He had a special understanding of writing for dance, but opera was closest to his heart. At the time of his death he was working on his eighth opera, Stuffed Raspberries (the first of the two acts was completed). Grinning at the Devil, his opera on the life of Karen Blixen, he felt was his best. This received 20 sold-out performances in Copenhagen in 1989.
Twelfth Night (1969) was performed during the Wexford Opera Festival, and Letters to Theo (1982) was produced in Dublin in 1984 and later for television. A Passionate Man (1995), on the life of Jonathan Swift, was performed in Dublin in the same year.
Apart from these, Wilson identified the Quintet for Accordion and Strings (1967), Angel One (1987) for string orchestra, and the viola concerto Menorah (1989) as among his best works, with some of the song cycles, in particular Carrion Comfort (1966), a setting of poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins.
As professor of composition at the Royal Irish Academy of Music in Dublin and as a founding director of the Ennis/IMRO Composition Summer School, his legacy is acknowledged by many pupils who are now established Irish composers.
James Walter Wilson: born September 27th, 1922; died August 6th, 2005