Obituary, Carl Davis (1936-2023)

The composer and conductor Carl Davis has died aged 86.

Born in the USA and brought up in Brooklyn, Davis studied with a number of composers of a somewhat serialist inclination - among them Hugo Kauder and later Per Nørgård - but never really seems to have imbibed the same Modernist spirit. Rather, it was his early conducting experience - in choral music, musicals and opera - that provided the initial direction to his musical career.

It was through musicals, via a successful trip to the Edinburgh Festival in 1961, that Davis’s lifelong relationship with film music began - one that would see him set down roots in the UK and become a stalwart of the country’s film and television music scene. Like any good composer of scores, he was able to adapt his music to any mood, be it the saucy comedy of 1971’s Up Pompeii, the time-travelling science-fiction horror of Frankenstein Unbound from 1990, or the sweeping romance of 1981’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman, which scooped him a BAFTA.

He was active on the small screen as well as the large, scoring series such as Upstairs Downstairs and the highly successful 1995 television adaptation of Pride and Prejudice with Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth. Perhaps Davis’s most memorable and widely-recognised title music of all was for the landmark documentary series The World at War, in which his opening theme - at once foreboding, impassioned and unsettled, but never tipping over into melodrama - was key to establishing the series’s mood of seriousness and authenticity.

Midway through his career, Davis also acquired a reputation as a skilful composer of new music for silent films - re-scoring a number of significant films from the early years of cinema, including 1916’s Intolerance (an apparent volte-face from the very same director who had, just one year previously, stirred up a storm of violent controversy that persists to this day with the deeply controversial The Birth of a Nation) and versions of Ben-Hur and The Phantom of the Opera dating from 1925, and re-working the 1931 Chaplin classic City Lights (originally co-composed by Chaplin himself and Arthur Johnston). Here as elsewhere, Davis did double duty as both composer and conductor, conducting his work on the soundtrack recordings.

Although it’s undeniable that Davis’s familiarity to most listeners comes overwhelmingly from his contributions to screen works, he also composed plenty of off-screen music, including four ballets and two musicals. Away from the stage he also worked with Paul McCartney on the collaborative Liverpool Oratorio, as well as composing a clarinet concerto, a twenty-minute concertante Ballade for cello and orchestra inspired by Fauré’s Poème d’un jour, and Last Train to Tomorrow, a moving choral work based on the Kindertransport that saw approximately ten thousand Jewish children evacuated from Nazi-controlled Europe, mostly to the UK. The commercial release of Last Train, performed by the Czech National Symphony Orchestra and Children’s Opera Prague, concluded with arrangements by Davis of the Marseillaise, Rule, Britannia!, and the Israeli national anthem Hatikvah.

Davis is survived by his wife, actress Jean Boht (most famous as Nellie Boswell in the Liverpudlian-set sitcom Bread), and their two daughters Hannah Louise and Jessie Jo.

A selection of recordings of Carl Davis's music

You can also browse Davis's full discography here, and his published sheet music here.