Antony Hopkins

Sir Antony Hopkins CBE (21 March 1921 – 6 May 2014) was an English composer, pianist and conductor, as well as a writer and radio broadcaster. He was widely known for his books of musical analysis and for his radio programmes Talking About Music, broadcast by the BBC from 1954 for approaching 40 years, first on the Third Programme, later Radio 3, and then on Radio 4.

Hopkins was born Ernest William Antony Reynolds in London. Following the death of Antony's father in 1925, the headmaster at Berkhamsted School, Major Thomas Hopkins, and his wife volunteered to take the five-year-old Antony under a joint guardianship agreement; seven years later they officially adopted him, and his surname was changed to Hopkins. In 1937 he went to a summer school for pianists in Schwaz on the Innthal in Austria, where, hearing a performance of Schubert's Op. 90 Impromptus, he was inspired with the desire to become a musician.

Hopkins entered the Royal College of Music (RCM) in 1939, where he studied harmony with Harold Darke and composition with Gordon Jacob. After an unsatisfactory start in his piano studies, he left his teacher for Cyril Smith. He also studied organ (though he described himself as "the world's worst organist"). He won several scholarships as well as the Chappell Gold Medal for piano and the Cobbett prize for composition. While still studying at the RCM, he became involved with the choir at Morley College, conducted by Michael Tippett who also gave Hopkins informal lessons in composition. In 1944 Tippett passed to Hopkins the job of composing incidental music for a production of Doctor Faustus at the Liverpool Playhouse; following its success, Louis MacNeice asked Hopkins to write incidental music for a radio play. For the next 15 years, Hopkins earned his living mostly from composing.

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