Denis Stevens (1922-2004)

We lament the death, on 1 April 2004, of Denis Stevens, scholar, editor, performer and impresario, enthusiastic champion of music and in particular of early music. Born at High Wycombe in 1922, he studied the violin from an early age, but after attending the Royal Grammar School went on to Jesus College, Oxford, to read languages. In 1941 he joined the Royal Air Force, serving as intelligence officer in India and Burma. When not engaged in deciphering Japanese codes, he was energetically involved fiddling with the Calcutta Symphony Orchestra or ruminating on the palaeographical revelations ofWilli Apel's newly published Notation of polyphonic music.

Figure 1.

Yehudi Menuhin, Robert Masters, Kinloch Anderson and Denis Stevens rehearsing for the City of Bath Festival, 4 June 1961. This was the inaugural concert of the Accademia Monteverdiana.

At the end of the war he returned to Oxford, enrolling now in the newly established Faculty of Music. The first fruit of his new musicological studies with Hugh Allen, R.O. Morris and Egon Wellesz was the first modern edition of the Mulliner Book, a 16th-century manuscript anthology of keyboard music, which inaugurated the monumental series Musica Britannica in 1952. But although he subsequently worked on further scholarly editions and studies of instrumental music, his major performing interest evolved increasingly towards a repertory that involved voices or combined voices and instruments. Thus he founded and directed the Ambrosian Singers and, later (in 1961), the Accademia Monteverdiana, a vocal and instrumental ensemble of variable geometry and dimension, which performed at innumerable concerts and festivals, and made many memorable recordings and radio broadcasts. At the same time his enthusiasm for early music and his skill as an impresario were revealed in his productions for the BBC ThirdProgramme (1949-54 and intermittently thereafter) which introduced a wide and eager public to a mostly new repertory of works by masters ranging from Machaut and Dufay to Charpentier and Vivaldi.

Between 1955 and 1995 he divided his activities between the USA and Europe, teaching at a number of American universities including Cornell, Columbia, Berkeley, Pennsylvania, Washington, Michigan and San Diego, broadcasting at the BBC,introducing the first course in musicology at the Royal Academy of Music (1960), succeeding EricBlom as editor of Grove's dictionary (1959-63), conducting and organizing performances of Monteverdi; the latter included his new edition ofthe Vespers at Westminster Abbey (in 1961) andatthe Proms (celebrating the composer's quatercentenary in 1967). Although he continued toproduce books, articles and editions of Englishmusic, including Fayrfax, Tallis, Tomkins (1957), Tudor church music (1966) and a History of song, his beloved Monteverdi came to dominate hisenergies: thus he published new editions of the Vespers (1962), L'Orfeo (1967), the Combattimento (1967), the Magnificat (1969), and most notably amagisterial annotated translation of the composer's letters (1980). Appropriately at the height ofhis career in 1984, he received a CBE for his services to music and musical scholarship. Despite a long illness, which limited his mobility and vision, his musicological efforts continued to the end of his life, with new editions of Monteverdi's Selva e morale (2000), Cavalli's Pompeo Magno and a chapter on Musica Deo sacra for A. Boden's forthcoming book on Thomas Tomkins. In 1995 he was appointed visiting professor at Goldsmiths' College, whose library houses his extensive Monteverdi collection.

Stevens's concern for historical re-creation and authentic interpretation was never sacrificed to the cause of amateurish experimentation with original instruments or old playing techniques that had not yet been mastered by contemporary exponents. His insistence on just intonation, technical precision and symphonic balance, and his quest for performing perfection, inspired by his admiration for elder contemporaries or colleagues like Beecham and Menuhin, led in his later years to some disputation with a younger generation of scholar-performers who were struggling to master 'authentic' manners of sound reproduction. Convinced by his long and diligent experience in the medieval, Renaissance andBaroque repertory, faithful to his own early experiments and collaborators, he remained resistant to some of the musicological propositions and organological revivals that burgeoned during the 1970s and 80s.