Maurice J. E. Brown

Maurice John Edwin Brown (3 August 1906 – 27 August 1975) was a British musicologist and a noted authority on Franz Schubert.[1]

Brown was born in London and attended the University of London from 1927 to 1929, where he studied physics. He taught for some years as a music master before his war service in RAF telecommunications.[2] From 1945 until his retirement in 1966 he was head of science at the Marlborough Royal Free Grammar School, where he also encouraged the school orchestra, in which he played violin.[3]

Brown's book Schubert: A Critical Biography (1958) became the standard work on the composer for many years, establishing him as an international authority.[4] According to William Mann, the pianist Paul Badura-Skoda declared him to be the world's greatest authority on Schubert.[5] His identification of manuscripts in the Otto Taussig collection at Lund University led to the first publication of Schubert's String Quartet No 2 in C Major.[6] Brown was particularly interested in the lied tradition, also becoming an authority on Emilie Zumsteeg and Carl Loewe.[2] He also produced the standard thematic catalogue of Chopin's music.[7]

Illness affected his work towards the end of his life and a planned book on Schubert's operas remained unfinished. One of the last pieces he wrote was the Schubert biography for the New Grove Dictionary of Music (1980), published posthumously in the dictionary and later also in book form, with worklists and revisions by his friend Eric Sams.[8] He died of a heart attack in Marlborough. His papers, including 750 letters from his close friend and fellow Schubert researcher Otto Erich Deutsch, are now at the Schubert Institute Research Centre (SIRC), University of Leeds.[9]

  1. ^ 'Brown, Maurice John Edwin', in The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music (1980)
  2. ^ a b Obituary, The Musical Times, Vol. 116, No. 1593 (November 1975), p. 998
  3. ^ Tower & Town, September 2017
  4. ^ Obituary, in Belgisch tijdschrift voor Muziekwetenschap, Vol. 28–30 (1975), p. 265
  5. ^ William Mann. 'How many Schubert piano sonatas?', in The Times, 22 December 1967, p. 5
  6. ^ Maurice J E Brown. New, Old and Rediscovered Schubert Manuscripts, in Music & Letters, Vol. 38, No. 4 (October 1957), pp. 359–368
  7. ^ Maurice J E Brown. 'The Chopin Index', in The Musical Times, Vol. 106, No. 1463 (January 1965), pp. 28–30
  8. ^ as The New Grove Schubert (1982). Brown also wrote the article on Schubert in the fifth edition of Grove's Dictionary (1954)
  9. ^ 'About SIUK', The Schubert Institute UK