The Hilarious, Heartbreaking Life and Music of Malcolm Arnold - The New York Times

He was one of the most popular British composers of his time, but there are few celebrations of Arnold’s centenary this year.

It turned out to be the manuscript of Malcolm Arnold’s Seventh Symphony, a work that had been thought lost for 30 years, with movements dedicated to each of its composer’s three children.

But Alan Poulton, a composer, pianist and writer who is chairman of the Malcolm Arnold Society, has identified at least 18 more works that have simply vanished.

This year, the 100th anniversary of Arnold’s birth, a petition signed by Julian Lloyd Webber and other musical luminaries forced the British Ministry of Justice to reconsider a decision that threatened to destroy Arnold’s documents from the time he was under the care of the Court of Protection, in the late 1970s and early ’80s; those papers will be relocated to the National Archives.

Despite Arnold’s being one of his country’s most prominent and popular composers during his lifetime, there have been few celebrations of his centenary.

“I always write music that, if I were in the audience, I would like to hear,” Arnold said at the start of Tony Palmer’s 2004 documentary about him, “Toward the Unknown Region.” Though his music certainly possesses a hostile streak — listen to the striking volte-face in his “Peterloo Overture,” as he depicts armed yeomanry descending on amassed protesters — Arnold never gave up on the power of melody.

At his peak, Arnold wrote over 20 hours of music a year, including six films, demonstrating a maniacal creativity that, together with an unhealthy obsession with sex, periods of complete despondency and unabated alcoholism throughout his adult life, coalesced in a crippling manic-depressive tendency.

(“If a film score comes out uninfluenced by Berlioz, it’s no damn good,” Arnold once said.) The sense of Arnold’s being profoundly out of fashion extends beyond his cinema work, though.

When his Fifth Symphony — as close to a canonical masterwork as Arnold wrote — was performed this summer at the BBC Proms, it was the first time an Arnold symphony had been done at the Proms since 1994.

His music is characterized by a kind of selflessness, a high-spirited generosity, whether he was writing celebratory music for a local brass band, a lush accompaniment for a film or pieces for his mates in the orchestra.

His ability to traverse the sublime and ridiculous is captured on a recent recording by the Liepaja Symphony Orchestra of Latvia, led by John Gibbons, which pairs Arnold’s austere Ninth Symphony with a bizarre Hoffnung piece, the “Grand Concerto Gastronomique” for eater, waiter, food and orchestra.

“There’s a quality in how Arnold’s music reaches audiences,” Gibbons said in an interview.