Arthur Benjamin

He is best known as the composer of Jamaican Rumba (1938) and of the Storm Clouds Cantata, featured in both versions of the Alfred Hitchcock film The Man who Knew Too Much, in 1934 and 1956.

In 1911, Benjamin won a scholarship from Brisbane Grammar School to the Royal College of Music (RCM), where he studied composition with Charles Villiers Stanford, harmony and counterpoint with Thomas Dunhill, and piano with Frederic Cliffe.

His better-known students from that era include Muir Mathieson, Peggy Glanville-Hicks, Miriam Hyde, Joan Trimble, Stanley Bate, Bernard Stevens, Lamar Crowson, Alun Hoddinott, Dorian Le Gallienne, Natasha Litvin (later Stephen Spender's wife and a prominent concert pianist), William Blezard[4] and Benjamin Britten, whose Holiday Diary suite for solo piano is dedicated to Benjamin and mimics many of his teacher's mannerisms.

Benjamin was also an adjudicator and examiner for the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music, which led him to places such as Australia, Canada and the West Indies.

He was also resident lecturer at Reed College, Portland, Oregon between 1944 and 1945, where notable students include composer Pamela Harrison and John Carmichael.

An alternative explanation of the immediate cause of death is hepatitis, contracted while Benjamin and his partner, Jack Henderson,[7][8] a Canadian who worked in the music publishing business,[9] were holidaying with the Australian painter Donald Friend in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka).

The work was first performed in 1914, and ends with an heraldic march movement entitled "Benjee", saluting Arthur Benjamin, who the previous year had given the premiere of Howells' Piano Concerto No.

[10] As Howells observed, Benjamin was often dismissed by serious critics due to the widespread popularity of his brief novelty piece Jamaican Rumba, and also because he was "an unabashed Romantic", which made him appear an anachronistic figure.

The Violin Concerto (1932) was premiered by Antonio Brosa, with Benjamin conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and was praised by Constant Lambert and Ernest Newman.

The Elegiac Mazurka of 1941 was commissioned as part of the memorial volume "Homage to Paderewski" in honour of the Polish pianist who had died that year.

It was dedicated to Vaughan Williams and is "the most weighty and extended of all his orchestral compositions, and one which reveals him as a considerable musical thinker and master of form".

The manuscript of the unpublished violin sonata in E minor bears the date 1918, the only surviving work of that year and one of very few to be written by Benjamin during the first war.

The one-act opera The Devil Take Her, to a libretto by Alan Collard and John B. Gordon, was first produced at the RCM on 1 December 1931, conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham.

First produced by Dennis Arundell during the Festival of Britain in 1951, it won a gold medal and was later broadcast in a live performance by BBC Radio 3 on 17 April 1953.