![]() So what went wrong for the child prodigy organist and composer who also happened to be my father? How could he have died with hardly a note of his music known to the world? In attempting to unravel the mystery we must go back to the beginning.īorn into a poor London family at the outbreak of the first world war, William Lloyd Webber was the son of a self-employed plumber. The composer Malcolm Arnold once told me that in the two weeks my father had deputised for Arnold's regular composition professor at the Royal College of Music, "I learnt more in those two lessons than I had in the previous two years." But our one-time family lodger, the concert pianist John Lill, remembers him as "one of the six or seven finest musicians I have ever known" - no mean compliment when he can number Barbirolli, Rattle, Shostakovich and Boult amongst his associates. Can the much-abused word "genius" really be applied to my father? Given that I spent the best part of two years tracking down manuscripts he had either given away or mislaid in various cupboards around London, I am surely the last person to answer that question impartially. The Radio Times blurb for the programme tells of "a story of the genius who spawned a musical dynasty". Today there are five complete CDs of his music and, next week, Radio 4 will broadcast a documentary about his life and work In the Name of the Father is an appropriate title for a programme devoted to a musician whose life was intricately connected to the church, and whose family name has been "hijacked" by his two offspring. ![]() Yet, when my father died in October 1982, not one of his compositions had been recorded and virtually none were published. 'Music as sensuous as any you will find by a British composer." So wrote Edward Greenfield, reviewing my father's orchestral tone poem Aurora - the first recording of any of his music - in this newspaper in 1986.
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