My father, Richard Macnutt, who has died aged 88 from Parkinson’s illness, was an internationally famend antiquarian music vendor and knowledgeable on Hector Berlioz and Felix Mendelssohn.
In 1958, on the age of twenty-two, Richard attended a efficiency of The Trojans at Covent Backyard; it was a pivotal second in his life. Captivated by the expertise, he returned to see the five-hour manufacturing once more the next week, and so started a lifelong curiosity in opera, and particularly Berlioz. He started to gather, together with on an early go to to Paris together with his buddy and later collaborator Hugh Macdonald.
Two years after the Berlioz opera, in 1960 he stop his job as an accountant and took over a small antiquarian music vendor’s agency, Leonard Hyman Music Ltd, often called Richard Macnutt Ltd from 1964, which he ran till his retirement in 1996. He specialised in first editions, autographed manuscripts and letters, latterly shifting into valuations of collections and libraries, and attending auctions worldwide.
In 1964 he grew to become a founding member of the editorial board of the New Berlioz Version, which sought to catalogue the composer’s total literary and musical works, a undertaking that was lastly accomplished in 2005. Richard was carefully concerned all through, usually offering supply supplies from his personal assortment, and was normal secretary till 1972 and a trustee for 30 years.
He was a member of the Berlioz Centenary Committee for the 1969 commemoration of the one centesimal anniversary of the composer’s dying and of the exhibition committee for Berlioz and the Romantic Creativeness, held on the V&A the identical 12 months.
In 2002 he offered the overwhelming majority of his private Berlioz assortment to the French authorities for a bicentennial exhibition staged on the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris. He additionally wrote and edited quite a few articles and bibliographies throughout his lifetime, inspiring a lot of his contemporaries alongside the way in which.
Born in Hove, East Sussex, Richard was the one son of Patricia Willett and Derry Macnutt, who was an insurance coverage underwriter. Evacuated to Somerset in the course of the second world struggle, he went to Eagle Home preparatory college in Surrey earlier than attending Winchester faculty from 1949 to 1954 the place he grew to become an completed cricketer, captaining the primary XI; an excellent leg-spin bowler, he as soon as took six wickets in three overs with no runs conceded.
After nationwide service with the Royal Artillery (1954-56) and a spell with ICI, he labored for a agency of chartered accountants in London earlier than turning into an antiquarian music vendor.
He primarily lived in and round Tunbridge Wells, Kent, and shall be fondly remembered as a humorous, light and clever man, a lover of opera, a incredible and beneficiant host, a loving associate, devoted household man and an especially proud grandfather.
Richard is survived by his associate, the conductor Sian Edwards; his two youngsters, Kirstie and me, from his first marriage to Mary Sutherland, which resulted in divorce; his second spouse, Janet (nee Hughes), whom he married in 1981 and from whom he was separated in 2017; and his 4 grandchildren, Daisy, Sam, Olly and Izzy.
