Peter Branscombe: 7 December 1929-31 December 2008

Abstract

From its planning stage in 1963–64, and most actively during the last fifteen years of his life, Peter Branscombe was an enthusiastic supporter of Forum for Modern Language Studies, ever willing to assess and copy-edit articles, review books on a wide span of subjects, and contribute wise counsel to the Editorial Board. Born in Sittingbourne, Kent, he was educated at Dulwich College, where he conceived both his love of German and his abiding passion for cricket. National Service soon after the end of the Second World War took him (after a literal crash-course as motor-cycle despatch rider) into Military Intelligence in Third Man Vienna. The interrogation of a resplendently uniformed, putative Soviet general might have launched him on a career as spymaster, except that the high-level defector turned out to be a mere Hungarian station-master. However, Vienna became and remained his intellectual and spiritual home. At Worcester College, Oxford, Peter read languages and developed his consuming interests in music performance and musicology. In London he began work on a PhD thesis on what was to be the central theme of his scholarly life, the Viennese popular musical theatre. In 1959 he was appointed to a post as lecturer in German in St Andrews where he spent the rest of his long academic career. In 1979 the University created for him a chair of Austrian Studies. In the German Department he lectured on his beloved Austrian writers, Grillparzer and Hofmannsthal, Raimund and Nestroy. For many years his courses on the Viennese comedy theatre won him enthusiastic and affectionate students and generated postgraduate research. More widely afield, he collaborated fruitfully with the Austrian Cultural Institute and gained himself a high reputation in Vienna as an authority on the city's culture.