Obituary: Peter Branscombe (1929–2008)

Abstract

Obituary Peter Branscombe (1929-2008) Peter Branscombe, who died on the last day of 2008 after a long battle against cancer, was an active member of theAdvisory Board of Austrian Studies from the foundation of the yearbook in 1990. Born in Sittingbourne, inKent, he was educated atDulwich College, where he established himself as a fine cricketer; cricket would remain a lifelong interest.After two years' National Service he went on to Worcester College, Oxford, to readModern Languages, combining his studies with his interest inmusic, in particular with extended involvement with the Oxford University Opera Club, of which he would eventually become President; productions included in 1951 theworld premi?re of Incognita by Egon Wellesz, who had escaped continental Europe after theAnschluss and been elected to a Fellowship of Lincoln College in 1939. Peter's interest inAustria had been established before Oxford; he had the good fortune to be posted there as aNational Serviceman in the Intelligence Corps, first to Carinthia, and then toVienna (his posting was to Hietzing), where he was to enjoy not only theatre visits but, even more memorably, performances given by the State Opera company ? then in one of its finest periods ? in theTheater an derWien, where the equivalent of four old pence bought a Stehplatz in the grand circle, towhich a programme could be added for a further twopence. Peter never forgot the instructive pleasure of regularly hearing singers such as Sena Jurinac, Irmgard Seefried, Maria Reining and Julius Patzak ? occasionally with great names including JosefKrips and Karl B?hm conducting. Peter's interest inmusic and theatre inVienna would bear research fruit in a dissertation entitled 'The Connexions between Drama and Music in the Viennese Popular Theatre from the Opening of the Leopoldst?dter Theater (1781) to Nestroy's Opera Parodies (c. 1855),with Special Reference to the Forms of Parody', which was eventually submitted to theUniversity of London in 1976. Even for those times,when therewas less pressure than there is now to finish doctoral theses in three or four years, thiswas a long gestation (Peter had been lecturing in St Andrews since 1959); but he was never one to rush his work, and only this year a German musicologist wrote tome that itwas still an incomparable treasure trove for research on musical theatre of the time, and lamenting that ithad not been published in book form. Peter remained in St Andrews for the rest of his life, devoted to his happy marriage and family life, and surrounded by his impressive collection of books, music, recordings, theatre and concert programmes and other memorabilia, which reflected the catholicity of his cultural and scholarly interests. In 1979 he Austrian Studies 17 (2009), 220-22 ? Modern Humanities Research Association 2oro Obituary: Peter Branscombe 221 was appointed to a personal chair as Professor ofAustrian Studies. His scholarly publications were not confined to Austrian subjects, as users of his Penguin edition of selected Heine poems (1967), for example, will be gratefully aware. But Austria remained central. 1978 saw the appearance of a volume Austrian Life and Literature 1780-1938, edited by Peter and containing articles that had appeared the previous year in the St Andrews-based journal ForumforModern Language Studies; and in themusical field he was one of the translators ofOtto Erich Deutsch's 'documentary biography' ofMozart, firstpublished inEnglish in 1965; a volume Schubert Studies. Problems ofStyle and Chronology, co-edited with Eva Badura-Skoda, was published by theCambridge University Press in 1982, followed nine years laterby Peter's celebrated studyDie Zauberfl?te in the Cambridge Opera Handbooks series.Over and above his books and articles in journals, he contributed many entries to standard reference works (New Grove Dictionary ofMusic, New Grove Dictionary of Opera), including authoritative articles on leading composers of the nineteenth-century Viennese commercial stage. He was also a prolific reviewer. He began to review concerts and operas for the Financial Times in the late 1950s; he also reviewed gramophone records and CDs widely, in his later years especially in the InternationalRecord Review. The journals forwhich he would review works on literary and theatre history included Germanistik,Modern Language Review and Nestroyana, and formany years he contributed anonymous succinctly judicious short notices to Forumfor Modern Language Studies...