A pianist, composer, thinker, writer, and educator, Ronald Stevenson (1928-2015) had a profound thirst for knowledge and never stopped to learn, explore, and innovate, creating wonderful works that are a testament to his musical genius. He had a magnetic personality, fierce intellect, sharp wit, poise and elegance, and was a great communicator.

Born into a working-class family, he was Scottish on his father’s side and Welsh on his mother’s. His father was a gifted singer, and Ronald was exposed to songs and singing from an early age, first by listening, then by accompanying his father. In fact, this connection to voice and melody is strongly present in his own work, from his earliest compositions—songs—to his transcriptions from such operatic masterpieces as Britten’s Peter Grimes and Paderewski’s Manru. His musical gifts were prodigious, and when he turned seventeen, he won a scholarship to study at the Royal Northern College of Music, from which he graduated with distinction in 1947.

Stevenson was a committed pacifist, hugely influenced in his thinking by the writing of William Blake and Albert Schweitzer, and when he was called for National Service in 1947, he chose to go to prison instead. He was considered to be too young to vote, but deemed old enough to be trained to kill—something he found abhorrent. Even in prison, in harsh conditions, he composed and read voraciously.

Already in his teens he became fascinated with the music of Busoni, sharing his views on the art of transcription: that it is, in fact, an art of composition in itself. Having written his literary magnum opus on Busoni in the 1950s and 60s (still unpublished), he became an authority on Busoni in the English-speaking world. So great was his interest in this towering musical figure, that he even sold most of his books and records, and organised a piano recital to raise money for his trip to meet Busoni’s widow in Stockholm. Their friendship and correspondence lasted until Gerda Busoni’s death in 1956. He transmitted his enthusiasm for Busoni’s music to one of his close friends, pianist John Ogdon, who gave the UK premiere of Stevenson’s magnum opus for piano Passacaglia on DSCH in 1966 at the Aldeburgh Festival.

Stevenson’s musical interests were wide-ranging: since his college days, he studied counterpoint, and was interested in the music of Purcell and early masters. He also admired the grand virtuoso tradition of Chopin and Liszt, Medtner and Rachmaninoff, Paderewski, Godowski, Sorabji, and others. Not only did Stevenson study them all and played their works on the piano, but each of these figures found an honoured place in his musical temple. He also belongs to a distinguished line of masters of transcription, which goes as far back as the early 1600s, and culminates in Liszt, whom Stevenson called a ‘prolific transcriber’ who, by virtue of his transcriptions, preserved the best of the nineteenth-century musical tradition. Stevenson has been credited with reviving the art of piano transcription, a tradition which died out with the advent of recordings, and approximately a quarter of his output is made up of piano transcriptions.

Stevenson left a huge corpus of work, writing almost in every major and minor genre, which includes chamber music, orchestral works, two piano concerti, a violin, and cello concerto, works for solo instruments, choral music, songs, transcriptions, arrangements, miniatures, cadenzas, and two unfinished operas. His Celtic heritage was an integral part of his musical thinking, preserved in many musical works for piano and other instruments, and over 230 songs. A book on Stevenson published in 2005 by Toccata Press contains 78 pages listing his compositions, which took the editor Martin Anderson three years to compile. Many compositions remain unpublished, existing only in Ronald’s exquisite handwriting.

A brilliant pianist himself, he is perhaps best known for his monumental 80-minute-long Passacaglia on DSCH, a tribute to Shostakovich composed in 1962, and for his Peter Grimes Fantasy, both works for solo piano. His second piano concerto The Continents was premiered at the Proms in 1972, and described by Tom Service as ‘a hugely ambitious attempt to create a journey around the world’s musical traditions with the piano the voyager at the heart of this 35-minute odyssey’ in his obituary of the composer published in The Guardian on 5 May 2015.

(C) Anastasia Belina