Conductor Michael Graubart dies aged 93

Austrian-born conductor, composer and educator Michael Graubart has died. The former director of music at Morley College died on 10 June at the age of 93,

Born in Vienna in 1930, Graubart came to the UK as a refugee in 1938. He studied physics at Manchester University and spent time composing and playing the flute alongside his studies.

Recalling his first introduction to the flute in a 2019 interview with Royal College of Music research fellow and repertoire professor Norbert Meyn FRCM, Graubart said: ‘I took up the flute, oddly enough, through my physics teacher at school. He showed us how to make bamboo pipes out of old Victorian curtain rails and I made myself a bamboo pipe, then I made myself a bamboo cross flute. Then I got dissatisfied with both of them and my parents bought me a recorder and then a flute. I was entirely self-taught, but I must have been quite a good self-teacher because by the time I got to university I became the first flute of the university orchestra straight away.’

After studying composition with Mátyás Seiber, flute with Geoffrey Gilbert and conducting with Lawrence Leonard, Graubart became a tutor and conductor in 1966, and from 1969 to 1991 led the music department at London’s Morley College. As director of music, he developed the performance of 20th century music, taught electronic music composition and conducted premières of works including Elisabeth Lutyens’s last opera Isis and Osiris and the first British production of Viktor Ullmann’s The Emperor of Atlantis.

From 1962 to 1972 Graubart was musical director of Focus Opera Group, conducting British premières of modern operas and music-theatre works, then in 1991 became a senior lecturer at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester and director of contemporary music ensemble Akanthos.

Graubart’s compositions have been performed and broadcast in Britain, the US, Canada, Austria and Italy. He also edited early music from original sources, including Monteverdi’s La favola d’Orfeo and Pergolesi’s Livietta e Tracollo