Obituary Michael Elliott

Michael Elliott, the Gwent musician and composer who has died at 91, always struck me as ageless, a man who had decided against music as a career but who continued to be creative throughout his life.

Essex-born, he came to Wales as a ‘Bevin boy’ in January 1945, working underground at a coal mine at Maesteg. Later he arrived in Newport as a librarian, making his home there and finally becoming chief librarian at the old borough library in Dock Street. But his immediate background was astonishing. He’d had piano lessons, and worked through the grades. Six months after his wartime stint at Maesteg, he won entry to the Royal Academy of Music in London, where he studied composition under the eminent British composer Lennox Berkeley.

Although composing full time might not have been considered possible, he soon became a fixture in Newport’s musical circles. He sang with the (now defunct) Newport Choral Society, the Dorothy Adams Singers, and the Newport Philharmonic Choir. In the last two he was joined by his daughter, Helen. He organised the music section of Newport U3A [the local branch of the Welsh University of the Third Age], and he organised other musical events or was a keen supporter of them.

Much later in life – and he was writing music all the time – came commissions from the international piano duo, the Cann Twins - Claire and Antoinette (Toni).¹ At 89, he had reached the 17th of a projected set of 24 Epilogues for piano. His keyboard writing was Gallic and sophisticated. He was certainly modest about his abilities. In 2010 the Priory Singers and others gave the world premiere of his Newport Elegy, written to commemorate those who died in a Newport Docks disaster a century before.

In an article for the Lennox Berkeley Society Journal of 2014, he recalled: ‘When I was leaving the Academy, Lennox asked me to keep in touch and let him know what I was writing. That was typical of his generous spirit and interest in those he had previously helped and motivated. I was not gifted enough to earn my living through music and so I trained as a librarian. I certainly could not have provided for a family as a piano teacher but I found a satisfying (if not exciting) way of life with books’.

In a pointer to what might have been, Lennox asked Michael to write some music that he himself didn’t have time for, and to submit the results to the composer’s publisher, Chester. It was the first and only music he ever had published.

Toni Cann commented: ‘It’s such sad news. Michael was a wonderful person. We met him after a recital in Newport in 1995. He asked if we would like him to write a two-piano piece for us, and two weeks later the delightful work Geminae arrived in the post. The theme was based on our initials CAC. Since then he has written so many beautiful works for us.’

Michael Elliott survived his wife Mary, and is himself survived by a son, Maurice, daughters Helen, Catherine, and Margaret, and six grandchildren.

The Cann Twins gave a memorial concert for Michael Elliott at the Riverfront, Newport, in November, when their programme included a Sonatina which he had written a few months earlier.