Guy Woolfenden obituary

If music is now seen as an integral part of modern Shakespeare productions, the credit belongs to Guy Woolfenden, who has died aged 78. He was head of music with the Royal Shakespeare Company for 37 years, composed more than 150 scores for the company, and not only made the band visible but often used rarely heard, or specially invented, instruments. Adrian Noble, one of the many directors with whom he worked at Stratford, said: “Guy believed that music should be at the heart of a classical company, as it was for Shakespeare.”

Like Trevor Nunn, with whom he came to work closely, Guy was born in Ipswich, the son of Kathleen (nee Groom) and Harold (“Woolfy”), founder of the Cambridge Music Shop in the early 1960s. Guy was educated initially at Westminster Abbey choir school and sang at the wedding of Princess Elizabeth, as she then was, to the Duke of Edinburgh in 1947. From Whitgift school, Croydon, he went on to study music at Christ’s College, Cambridge, and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London.

In 1961, he joined Peter Hall’s newly founded RSC and soon became head of music. It was a good time to join, since Hall himself was not only a keen musician but was also about to embark, with John Barton, on a production of The Wars of the Roses that defined the company’s style and ambition.

Woolfenden’s contribution to the success of this nine-hour project in 1963 was incalculable. He claimed that when Hall told him he wanted the music to be “medieval fascist” he knew instantly what he meant. Although Woolfenden had only six weeks in which to write the music for three plays, he came up with a brilliantly distinctive score played by seven on-stage musicians. He created special instruments for the production, such as a curving bronze horn to be played in duet with a long coach horn. Along with the harpsichordist and RSC music adviser Raymond Leppard, he invented an oblong box fitted with tautened piano strings across which the edge of a dagger was drawn. When the sound of cannon and explosions was needed, Woolfenden enlisted 10 people, including Hall, to blow up empty crisp packets and burst them in quick succession: the recordings were then played back at half speed with the gaps edited out.

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Woolfenden proved just as inventive when it came to modern drama. In 1964 the RSC presented at the Aldwych Roger Vitrac’s surrealist play Victor (1928), in which a female character persistently and noisily farts. Censorship was still in operation and the Lord Chamberlain strongly objected to audible flatulence: the composer’s solution was to substitute the sound of a wind instrument – the tuba, in a trio with piccolo and clarinet – and the critic Barry Norman, in reference to a famous public inquiry of the time, wittily dubbed the result “the Woolfenden reports”.

But it was with Shakespeare that Woolfenden was most at home. In 1976 he wrote the score for Nunn’s musical version of The Comedy of Errors. At first the music, with its mock-Theodorakis numbers and Zorba-like dances, seemed to impede the farcical momentum. But by the time the production reached the Aldwych in 1977, text and music were perfectly integrated and the climactic moment when the cast sang “Now let’s go hand in hand, not one before another” was one of the most joyous I have ever seen in a theatre. The production went on to win the Ivor Novello award and Society of West End Theatre award (now the Olivier award) for best British musical and, reputedly, inspired Cameron Mackintosh to recruit Nunn to direct Cats four years later.

In 1991 Woolfenden completed the Shakespeare canon with his score for The Two Gentlemen of Verona. But his influence extended far beyond his own compositions. He worked closely with directors and, on one occasion, suggested Ian Charleson and Alan Rickman swap roles in The Tempest because of the beauty of the former’s singing voice. Woolfenden was also tireless in nurturing new talent and, in his time at the RSC, was instrumental in engaging a whole new generation of composers including Stephen Oliver, Ilona Sekacz, Nigel Hess, Shaun Davey, Gary Yershon and Jason Carr.

Although Shakespeare was his abiding passion, Woolfenden had a wide-ranging career as composer, conductor and festival director outside the RSC. In collaboration with the choreographer Andre Prokovsky he composed and arranged scores for two three-act works, Anna Karenina and The Three Musketeers, for Australian Ballet. As a conductor, he worked with many British symphony orchestras as well as Scottish Opera and the Chelsea Opera Group. His ability to compose wind music also led to commissions from all over the world. Among his many original works were Gallimaufry, reworked from the music he wrote for Trevor Nunn’s production of the Henry IV plays for the opening of the Barbican in 1982, French Impressions, inspired by the paintings of Seurat, Bohemian Dances, Claremont Canonza and Divertimento for Band, given its first performance in Killarney in 2007. He was also the first artistic director of the Cambridge festival (1986-91) and a frequent broadcaster on Radio 3. He was appointed OBE in 2007.

Woolfenden was a kindly and generous man and had a richly diverse career, but his lasting achievement was to transform music in Shakespearean theatre from a decorative afterthought to something vitally central to the production. For that he will long be remembered.

He met Jane Aldrick, an oboist who was to become his publisher, at the Guildhall, and they were married in 1962. She survives him, as do their three sons, Richard, Stephen and James.