Gerald Moore

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Gerald Moore CBE (30 July 1899 – 13 March 1987) was an English classical pianist best known for his career as an accompanist for many famous musicians.

Among those with whom he was closely associated were Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Elisabeth Schumann, Hans Hotter, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Victoria de los Ángeles and Pablo Casals. Moore gave lectures on stage, radio and television about musical topics.

He also wrote about music, publishing volumes of memoirs and practical guides to interpretation of lieder.

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Life and career

Moore was born in Watford, Hertfordshire, the eldest of four children of David Frank Moore, the owner of a men's clothing business, and his partner Chestina, née Jones. He was educated at Watford Grammar School and studied piano lessons from a local tutor. Moore, who was naturally gifted and with a natural pitch, was a reticent piano student, who later said that his mother had to drag him to the piano, "an anxious, sniveling boy" who did not take music into my life until his middle twenties.

When Moore was 13 years old, his family immigrated to Toronto, Ontario, Canada, where he studied with pianist Michael Hambourg, a former Anton Rubinstein student. Moore was distracted from his musical studies by a strong attraction to Anglo-Catholicism; he suspected for a long time that he was on a call to be a priest. Hambourg died in 1915, after which his son, the cellist Boris Hambourg, took Moore as his accompanist on a tour of forty engagements in western Canada.

On his return to Toronto, Moore was first employed as organist at a local church and then as a cinema organist, playing a musical accompaniment to silent films. This article was remunerative, but Moore described a cinema organ as a "instrument of torture [shar[ing] national pride by the saxophone, the harmonica, and the concertina." His parents came to the conclusion that Toronto was not the place for him to begin as a pianist. He was sent back to England, to live with relatives in London, and continue his studies with Michael Hambourg's pianist son, Mark.

Moore earned money as an accompanist while studying with Mark Hambourg. Landon Ronald, the music director, heard him perform at a recital and encouraged him to pursue a career as an accompanist.

Moore's first gramophone recording was released in 1921, accompanying violinist Renée Chemet for His Master's Voice (HMV). Moore made several more albums together, but they preferred accompanying singers over instrumentalists rather than instrumentalists. He appeared often with Peter Dawson in the early 1920s and went on a recital tour of Britain with him; it was Dawson who introduced him to tenor John Coates, who was a central figure on Moore's career.

Moore attributed a large part of his early success to his five-year relationship with Coates, whom Moore credits with transforming him from an indifferent accompanist to a musician and a soloist, as well as an equal partner in appearance. The pianist Solomon, whose technique Moore admired and studied, was another factor in Moore's memoirs.

Moore was so well-known as an accompanist that Myra Hess invited him to speak about his career at one of the National Gallery's lunchtime concerts. "He demonstrated a sense of verbal timing, of which any professional comedian would be proud," the pianist Joseph Cooper wrote about this and later similar discussions. His unique blend of wit and wisdom not only delighted the intellect, but also won over ordinary people who had no idea that classical music could be amusing," he said. The Unashamed Accompanist (1943), Moore's first book, had its roots in these discussions.

Moore has been credited with helping to elevate the status of an accompanist from that of a mere servant to that of a confederate artistic partner. "There is no more of the pale shadow at the keyboard," Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau wrote in his introduction to The Unashamed Accompanist's German version, "he is still an equal partner." Moore defended this status of his art by yelling when accompanists he admired were not given credit in concert. "You must have played well today," Coenraad V Bos, an accompanist of a previous generation, said with disapproval.

It is debatable, however, if he succeeded in persuading the British Establishment of his time of the uplifted status of his art. Whereas well-known conductors and singers in the British musical theatre, for example, were given knighthoods in 1954, Moore was named a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE), a lower ranked award.

Moore retired from public performances in 1967, with a farewell concert in which he accompanied three of the singers with whom he was long affiliated: Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Victoria de los ngeles, and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. This legendary concert at London's Royal Festival Hall - recorded by EMI and reissued in 1987 as CDC 749238 — ended with Moore playing solo, a setting for Schubert's An die Musik solo piano. In 1975, he made his last studio recording.

Moore wrote in his memoirs that his services were not needed at Benjamin Britten's Aldeburgh Festival, "as the presiding genius there is the world's best accompanist." William Mann, the Times' chief music critic, claimed that the preeminence was Moore's: "the greatest accompanist of his day, and possibly of all time." The joint winners were Britten and Moore, who were invited by Gramophone magazine in 2006 to name their "professional's professional."

In 1987, he died at home in Penn, Buckinghamshire.

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