Gerald Moore

Gerald Moore CBE (30 July 1899 – 13 March 1987) was an English classical pianist best known for his career as an accompanist for many famous musicians. Among those with whom he was closely associated were Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Elisabeth Schumann, Hans Hotter, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Victoria de los Ángeles and Pablo Casals.

Moore gave lectures on stage, radio and television about musical topics. He also wrote about music, publishing volumes of memoirs and practical guides to interpretation of lieder.

Moore was born in Watford, Hertfordshire, the eldest of four children of David Frank Moore, owner of a men's outfitting company, and his wife Chestina, née Jones. He was educated at Watford Grammar School, and took piano lessons from a local teacher Though innately musical, with perfect pitch, Moore was a reluctant piano student: he later said that his mother had to drag him to the piano, "an unwilling, snivelling child – I did not absorb music into my being until my middle twenties."

When Moore was 13 the family emigrated to Toronto, Ontario, Canada, where he studied with the pianist Michael Hambourg, a former pupil of Anton Rubinstein. Moore was distracted from his musical studies by a strong attraction to Anglo-Catholicism; he thought for some time that he had a vocation to become a priest. In 1915 Hambourg died, after which his son, the cellist Boris Hambourg, took Moore as his accompanist on a tour of forty engagements in western Canada.

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