John Whitworth

John Anthony Whitworth (27 December 192111 July 2013) was an English countertenor, organist, and teacher of music. He was a lay vicar at Westminster Abbey and a professor at the Guildhall School of Music.

Early life

Whitworth was born on 27 December 1921 in Ely, Cambridgeshire, the son of Horace Whitworth, a potato merchant, and his wife Mary Anne, and educated at Kimbolton School. While still at school, Whitworth became organist at the Sutton-in-the-Isle parish church. With the outbreak of the Second World War, he deferred his education and joined the Royal Air Force. Becoming a flight mechanic, in 1941 he was posted to Canada, but returned to Europe and was in Paris for VE Day.

Whitworth was demobilized in 1946 and took up a place at King's College, Cambridge, as a choral scholar of King's College Chapel, under the direction of Boris Ord.

Soon after his arrival at Westminster Abbey, Whitworth met the organist Michael Howard, founder of the Renaissance Singers, whose aim was to promote a liturgical revival of the great music of the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Restoration. The two worked closely together,

Whitworth gave up all his London positions in 1971 to become a music adviser to Leicestershire County Council, a post he held until his retirement at age 65 in 1986.

Whitworth was the second most prominent countertenor in England after Alfred Deller during the countertenor revival of the 1940s and 1950s, and they sang together in duets by John Blow and Henry Purcell. The critic Richard Lawrence considered Whitworth a better singer than Deller, writing in Gramophone in 2005:

Private life In 1963 Whitworth married Patricia Fitzgerald, and they had three daughters, Alexandra, Juliet and Victoria. From 1971, the family lived in Leicester. In addition to his musical career, Whitworth was an avid car collector, owning some thirty models, including vintage Rolls-Royce cars. He died in Leicester on 11 July 2013.

Honours Honorary degree, Loughborough University, 1998

Selected publications