Richard Addinsell
Richard Addinsell was born in Oxford, England, on January 13, 1904. After studying law at Oxford, he attended the Royal College of Music in London and completed his music study in Berlin and Vienna between 1929 and 1932. In 1933 he visited the United States, where he wrote music for several Hollywood films and for a New York stage production of Alice in Wonderland. He has since made a specialty of writing music for the screen, his best efforts being the scores for Goodbye, Mr. Chips, Blithe Spirit, Dangerous Moonlight, Dark Journey, and Fire Over England. During World War II he wrote music for several documentary films, including Siege of Tobruk and We Sail at Midnight.
Addinsell’s most frequently played composition is the Warsaw Concerto, for piano and orchestra. He wrote it for the English movie Dangerous Moonlight (renamed in the United States Suicide Squadron). Anton Walbrook here plays the part of a renowned concert pianist who becomes an officer in the Polish air force during World War II and loses his memory after a crash. The Warsaw Concerto, basic to the plot structure, recurs several times in the film. It first became popular, however, on records, and after that with “pop” and salon orchestras. Though the composer’s indebtedness to Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto is pronounced, the Warsaw Concerto has enough of its own individuality and charm to survive. Structurally, it is not a concerto but a rhapsody. It opens with several massive chords, arpeggios, and scale passages in the piano. This dramatic opening leads to the sensitive and romantic principal melody, heard in the strings. Later on there appears a second lyric thought, but the rhapsodic character remains predominant. The composition ends with a final statement of the opening phrase of the first main melody.
Addinsell is also sometimes represented on semi-classical programs with a light-textured and tuneful composition called Prelude and Waltz, for orchestra. This also stems from a motion picture, in this case the British screen adaptation of Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit.