Richard Addinsell

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Richard Addinsell (January 13, 1904 - November 14, 1977) was a British composer, best known for film music, primarily his Warsaw Concerto, composed for the film Dangerous Moonlight (also known under the later re-title Suicide Squadron).

He didn't attend school, being taught at home. Later, after studying at Hertford College, Oxford, he made incomplete attempts at studying Law, and then Music (at the Royal College of Music, spending time in Berlin and Vienna) were both abandoned without formal qualifications. His style is very much what might be called "English Light Music."[1]

The Warsaw Concerto was written for the 1941 film, Dangerous Moonlight, and continues to be a popular piano piece. The film-makers wanted something in the style of Sergei Rachmaninoff, but were unable to persuade Rachmaninoff himself to write a piece. Although Addinsell created the melodic material, the job of producing a concerto in the style of Rachmaninoff fell to Roy Douglas. The piece has been recorded over one hundred times and has sold in excess of three million copies.

Addinsell also wrote the short orchestral piece Southern Rhapsody, which was played every morning at the start of TV broadcasts by the former Southern Television company in south of England from 1958 to 1981. Like much of his film music, it has been heard by millions of people who do not know either its title or the composer's name, and is still fondly remembered even today.

Addinsell was known for his Christmas parties and was part of a social circle that included many British show business and Royal celebrities of the 1930s and 40s. He collaborated from 1942 with Joyce Grenfell, for both West End revues (including Tuppence Colored and Penny Plain) and Grenfell's one-woman shows.

In 1932 he wrote, with Clemence Dane, the incidental music for the Broadway adaptation of Alice in Wonderland by Eva LeGallienne, starring Josephine Hutchinson (prod. 1933). In 1947 it was revived, starring Bambi Linn.

Addinsell retired from public life in the 1960s, gradually becoming estranged from his close friends. He was for many years companion of fashion designer Victor Stiebel who died a year before Addinsell in 1976.

As was common with film music until the 1950s, many of Addinsell's scores were destroyed by the studios as it was assumed there would be no further interest in them. However recordings of his film music have been issued since his death, reconstructed by musicologist and composer Philip Lane from the soundtracks of the films themselves.