Thomas Wood

A century or so ago, Haydn Wood’s name was quite well-known in Britain. The youngest of the four composers here, he was born in Yorkshire in 1882 but raised on the Isle of Man. He enrolled as a scholarship student at Royal College of Music in London at the age of 15 and progressed so swiftly that soon thereafter his abilities as a violinist impressed such visiting luminary virtuosi as Pablo de Sarasate and Joseph Joachim. He also studied composition with Charles Villiers Stanford, as did Ralph Vaughan Williams and Gustav Holst. Wood composed large-scale orchestral and chamber works, but switched focus to lighter fare following his marriage to the soprano Dorothy Court in 1909. He and Court toured music halls together – she’d already established her reputation singing Gilbert and Sullivan roles with the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company at the Savoy – and Wood composed sentimental ballads for their performances. Songs such as Roses of Picardy became enormously successful and made the Woods a small fortune. Today, Wood is remembered primarily as one of the foremost composers of a genre known as “British Light Music” (alongside Eric Coates, Albert Ketèlbey, Robert Farnon and Ronald Binge), and his orchestral miniatures such as Joyousness, Serenade to Youth and Sketch of a Dandy are as finely wrought as they are breezily tuneful.