Pre-Eminent Accompanist Gerald Moore Dies

Gerald Moore, for many years considered pre-eminent among the world’s piano accompanists, has died, his wife, said. He was 87.

Enid Moore reported this week that her husband died last Friday at his home in Penn village in Buckinghamshire in southern England.

When he began his career in 1921, piano accompanists were largely regarded as mere adjuncts to recitals and frequently their names did not even appear on concert programs.

But Moore was convinced that they should be regarded as artists in their own right and did more than any earlier accompanist to win recognition for the role.

His success was evident at his retirement concert at London’s Festival Hall in 1967, when three leading singers--Victoria de los Angeles, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau--appeared together to honor him.

The concert was a sell-out and a recording of it has become a prized collector’s item.

Moore was especially known as a Lieder pianist, recording virtually all the Schubert songs for male singers with Fischer-Dieskau and most of those for women with Janet Baker.

He began piano lessons at age 6 and throughout his life denied that he was “a born accompanist.”

In his autobiography, “Am I Too Loud?” he wrote that “surely it is just as fatuous to say that a man is a born diplomat, a born leader of men, or a born drunkard. It must be environment, training, experience, which, creating the opportunity, makes the man. . . . “

After studies in Canada, he returned to England in 1919 and by the mid-1920s was appearing with most leading British singers and instrumentalists.

Moore, in addition to his autobiography, also wrote several other books about music and his reminiscences, including “The Unashamed Accompanist,” published in 1943, which gave a lively and instructive account of his art.