Richard Addinsell

Richard Addinsell was a film composer who wrote one piece and rather resented it. Born in London in 1904, he trained briefly at the Royal College of Music, learned more in Berlin and Vienna, and spent the 1930s and 1940s supplying scores for British cinema and the theatre. For Dangerous Moonlight in 1941 he was asked for something Rachmaninoff-like and produced the Warsaw Concerto, ten minutes of concerto in miniature that sold millions of records and founded a whole genre of short romantic concert pieces for film. He went on writing — Gaslight, Blithe Spirit, Scrooge — and died in 1977. Before music he read Law at Hertford College, Oxford, leaving after eighteen months; his early theatre work was with Noel Gay in an André Charlot revue, with Clemence Dane on Adam's Opera at the Old Vic in 1928, and on the incidental music for Eva Le Gallienne's Broadway Alice in Wonderland. Roy Douglas orchestrated the Warsaw Concerto. His Southern Rhapsody opened each morning's broadcasts on Southern Television from 1958 to 1981.