Austrian-born conductor, composer, and educator Michael Graubart has passed away. The former director of music at Morley College died on June 10 at the age of 93.
Born in Vienna in 1930, Graubart fled to the UK as a refugee in 1938. He pursued physics at Manchester University while also dedicating time to composing and playing the flute.
In a 2019 interview with Norbert Meyn FRCM, a research fellow and repertoire professor at the Royal College of Music, Graubart recounted his initial encounter with the flute: “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.”
Graubart studied composition with Mátyás Seiber, flute with Geoffrey Gilbert, and conducting with Lawrence Leonard. He began his career as a tutor and conductor in 1966 and led the music department at London’s Morley College from 1969 to 1991. During his tenure, he promoted the performance of 20th-century music, taught electronic music composition, and conducted premières, 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 served as the musical director of Focus Opera Group, conducting British premières of modern operas and music-theatre works. In 1991, he became a senior lecturer at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester and directed the contemporary music ensemble Akanthos.
Graubart’s compositions have been performed and broadcast in Britain, the US, Canada, Austria, and Italy. Additionally, he edited early music from original sources, including Monteverdi’s La favola d’Orfeo and Pergolesi’s Livietta e Tracollo.
