Gerald Moore

Moore was born in Watford, Hertfordshire, the eldest of four children of David Frank Moore, owner of a men's outfitting company, and his wife Chestina, née Jones. He was educated at Watford Grammar School, and took piano lessons from a local teacher Though innately musical, with perfect pitch, Moore was a reluctant piano student: he later said that his mother had to drag him to the piano, "an unwilling, snivelling child – I did not absorb music into my being until my middle twenties."

He died at home in the village of Penn, Buckinghamshire in 1987.

Moore retired from public performances in 1967, with a farewell concert in which he accompanied three of the singers with whom he was long associated: Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Victoria de los Ángeles and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. This famed concert at London's Royal Festival Hall - recorded by EMI and reissued in 1987 as CDC 749238 - concluded with Moore playing alone—an arrangement for solo piano of Schubert's An die Musik . He made his last studio recording in 1975.

It is debatable, however, whether he succeeded in convincing the British Establishment of his time, of the uplifted status of his art. Whereas prominent conductors and singers, for example, in the British musical theatre tended to be awarded knighthoods, in 1954 Moore was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE), a lower ranked award.

Moore contributed a chapter on "The Accompanist" to A Career in Music (1950, OCLC 3411544) edited by Robert Elkin, with chapters by Harriet Cohen, George Baker and nine others.

By the end of the 1930s Moore was so well known as an accompanist that Myra Hess invited him to give a talk about his profession at one of her of lunchtime concerts at the National Gallery. The pianist Joseph Cooper wrote of this, and later similar talks, "He revealed a sense of verbal timing of which any professional comic would be proud. His unique blend of wit and wisdom not only pleased the cognoscenti but also won over ordinary people who had no idea that classical music could be fun." Moore's first book, The Unashamed Accompanist (1943), had its origins in these talks.

In 1921 Moore made his first gramophone recording, accompanying the violinist Renée Chemet for His Master's Voice (HMV). They made several more recordings together, but Moore's preference was for accompanying singers rather than instrumentalists. He recorded frequently with Peter Dawson in the early 1920s, and went on a recital tour of Britain with him; it was Dawson who recommended him to the tenor John Coates, who became an important influence on Moore's career.

When Moore was 13 the family emigrated to Toronto, Ontario, Canada, where he studied with the pianist Michael Hambourg, a former pupil of Anton Rubinstein. Moore was distracted from his musical studies by a strong attraction to Anglo-Catholicism; he thought for some time that he had a vocation to become a priest. In 1915 Hambourg died, after which his son, the cellist Boris Hambourg, took Moore as his accompanist on a tour of forty engagements in western Canada.

Gerald Moore was born on July 30, 1899 in Watford, Hertfordshire, England.