Muir Mathieson

James Muir Mathieson, OBE (24 January 19112 August 1975) was a Scottish musician whose career was spent mainly as the musical director for British film studios.

Born in Scotland, to a musical family, Mathieson won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music in London. His teachers there included Malcolm Sargent, who recommended him to the film producer Alexander Korda, whose musical director he became in 1934. Mathieson made most of his career in the film industry. After the Second World War he was musical director to the Rank Organisation.

Among the composers from whom Mathieson commissioned film scores were Arthur Bliss, Ralph Vaughan Williams, William Walton and Benjamin Britten. Mathieson rarely wrote the music for the films on which he worked, considering himself to lack the talent for original composition, but he helped the composers who wrote for him to make their material precisely fit the action of the film, and he arranged concert suites from some of the scores he commissioned. He was responsible as musical director, arranger, conductor or occasionally composer for nearly a thousand films.

Life and career Early years Mathieson was born in Stirling, Scotland, on 24 January 1911, the elder of the two sons of John George Mathieson (1880–1955), an artist and engraver, and his wife Jessie née Davie (1884–1954), a violinist, pianist and teacher. The younger son, Dock, followed Muir into the musical profession and became a conductor and musical director in British films. Jessie ("Jen") Mathieson was a talented musician, who among other engagements foreshadowed her sons' careers by playing the piano accompaniment for silent films at the local cinema. As a teenager Mathieson formed and conducted a youth orchestra in Stirling.

After attending Stirling High School Mathieson went to the Royal College of Music in London from February 1929, winning a succession of scholarships. At the college he studied piano with Arthur Benjamin and conducting with Malcolm Sargent. As a student his talent for conducting attracted attention. The Times singled him out, commenting that in his handling of a college production of Benjamin's musical farce The Devil Take Her, Mathieson "made the points of a witty score pointedly". While still a student he undertook a range of jobs, from conducting a choir of Welsh miners, to touring Canada conducting a ballet company, and taking the baton for an amateur production of The Pirates of Penzance.

Korda Mathieson graduated from the college in 1933, and Sargent recommended him to Alexander Korda as a conductor and assistant to Kurt Schröder, musical director of Korda's new company, London Films. This was a revised version of the thus-far unstaged Der Kuhhandel. Despite good notices it was not a success.

On 21 December 1935, at the Brompton Oratory, London, Mathieson married Hermione Louise Alys Darnborough, principal ballerina of Sadler's Wells Ballet. They had one son and three daughters, among them the actress Fiona Mathieson (1951–1987) later known for her appearances in the BBC radio serial The Archers. He was dubbed the "Tsar of music for British films"; the composer James Bernard wrote, "If you wanted to write music for films at that time you had to be 'in' with Muir". Mathieson believed that music written for the screen could not only become an integral part of the film but could be an entity in itself, on a par with theatrical incidental music written by Grieg for Peer Gynt and Mendelssohn for A Midsummer Night's Dream. He admired the technical skill with which Hollywood composers fitted their music to the action, but judged British scores to have "more intrinsic musical value". He quoted with approval Vaughan Williams's comment that film "contains potentialities for the combination of all the arts such as Wagner never dreamt of."

While Mathieson was in charge of music for Korda, a range of composers provided scores, including his old teacher, Arthur Benjamin, and Richard Addinsell, Georges Auric, Miklos Rozsa, and Arthur Bliss. Benjamin wrote scores for The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934) and The Return of the Scarlet Pimpernel (1937); Addinsell wrote for Dark Journey (1937), Farewell Again (1937), South Riding (1937), and Fire Over England (1936); Auric composed the score for The Man Who Could Work Miracles (1936), Rozsa for The Four Feathers (1939) and The Thief of Baghdad (1940), and Bliss for Things to Come (1935). The last of these was regarded as a landmark in film music, and the score was quickly arranged into a concert suite, becoming a best-seller for Decca when released on record. Vaughan Williams gladly agreed to help the war effort by writing film music – a genre wholly new to him – for Powell and Pressburger's propaganda film 49th Parallel (1941). Vaughan Williams wrote a second score for Mathieson: Coastal Command (1942), made under the auspices of the Crown Film Unit.

Mathieson worked with many other composers during the war; apart from those with Vaughan Williams, his most conspicuous collaboration was with William Walton on Laurence Olivier's film of Shakespeare's Henry V (1944). Mathieson and Walton had worked together on five films before then: Escape Me Never (1935), As You Like It (1936), and three war films: The Next of Kin (1941), Went the Day Well? and The First of the Few (both 1942). In 1944, with Olivier's backing, Mathieson asked Walton to provide the music for the spectacular Technicolor adaptation of Shakespeare's play. Youdell describes the film of Henry V as "one of the greatest and most imaginative productions of the war period" and Walton's score as of "almost unparalleled beauty in its melody, orchestration, and construction". Walton conducted a recording of it in 1963, though he later told André Previn that he found the suite "rather tame" compared with the original film score. During the war Mathieson conducted frequent public concerts, sometimes programming suites from other film scores that he had commissioned. William Alwyn (Odd Man Out, 1946), Arnold Bax (Oliver Twist, 1948), Bliss (Men of Two Worlds, 1946), Walter Goehr (Great Expectations, 1946) and Walton (Hamlet, 1948).

In 1946 Mathieson extended his activities to directing, with Instruments of the Orchestra, a twenty-minute film for use in schools, showing the various instruments of the symphony orchestra playing separately and together. He commissioned a new work from Benjamin Britten: The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra, with a narration written by Britten's current librettist, Eric Crozier. Sargent conducted the LSO as well as delivering the narration to camera. and has become Britten's most widely played and popular piece.

In The Magic Box (1951), a film made to mark the Festival of Britain, Mathieson appeared as a cast member, in a cameo role as Sir Arthur Sullivan conducting a choir. During the early 1950s, Youdell writes, Mathieson continued to be "a principal force in the musical design of British feature films", commissioning music from new film composers including Malcolm Arnold (The Sound Barrier, 1952) and Larry Adler (Genevieve, 1953). |group=n In 1955 Mathieson commissioned another score from Walton, this time for Olivier's Richard III. Among Mathieson's other 1950s commissions were Arnold's score for Hobson's Choice (1954), Addinsell's for The Prince and the Showgirl (1957), In 1966 he wrote and directed a series of twenty-four short films, collectively entitled We Make Music. In addition to his work in films he conducted in the concert hall, particularly with youth orchestras. He was appointed OBE for his services to music, and was a governor of the British Film Institute.

Mathieson died at the Radcliffe Infirmary, Oxford, on 2 August 1975, aged 64, survived by his widow, who died in October 2010.

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