Geoffrey Tozer's legacy

[pjme]

From : The Australian


WHEN he died last year, penniless and alone, Geoffrey Tozer left behind a mixed legacy.
His admirers, including former Labor prime minister Paul Keating, felt he never enjoyed the recognition he deserved. But even friends of the Melbourne pianist admit he was at least partly responsible for that state of affairs.

"He wasn't a self-promoter," Peter Wyllie Johnston, a composer who knew Tozer for 25 years, said yesterday. "If Geoffrey had a fault, he was modest to a fault. Much too modest, considering his phenomenal ability."

Only now, upon inspection of his archive, is a more complete picture of Tozer's achievements and talents starting to emerge.

Tozer, a child prodigy who died of liver failure in August, aged 54, amassed an extraordinary wealth of material over his career. He was mainly known as a virtuoso concert pianist, but Wyllie Johnston said Tozer's abilities as a composer were just as remarkable.


"This will enlarge Geoffrey's reputation and legacy very significantly," he said.

"We're talking about a really vast musical achievement. There are such a lot of compositions, and they're of such a musical complexity and brilliance that they demonstrate another enormous aspect of his musical ability, which at the moment is not properly understood at all."

Among the 14,000 documents in the archive are at least 125 of Tozer's original compositions, correspondence, diaries, photographs and scrapbooks. There are also more than 1000 recordings on vinyl, cassette and DVD, dating back to when Tozer was a small boy performing his compositions on the radio to major concertos performances with symphony orchestras.

The first parts of the archive are due to be delivered to the National Library of Australia within a year. The library's curator of music, Robyn Holmes, said many of the documents seemed as idiosyncratic as Tozer himself.

"What I've seen is really going to change people's understanding of Geoffrey," she said.

"He was much more articulate on paper than one would have ever imagined. So this will give a much better understanding of this prodigy, this complex artist."

At Tozer's funeral last year, Keating described his passing as a "national tragedy" and accused the nation's musical establishment of treating him with indifference, contempt and malevolence.

The slow, painstaking process of restoring Tozer's reputation began soon after his death.

Wyllie Johnston, the executor of Tozer's estate and also his biographer, has been sorting the archive. At the same time, music curator Pamela Freeman has been converting Tozer's handwritten scores into printed editions.

Among the compositions is a complex, 16-minute prelude and fugue that Tozer performed during a Tchaikovsky competition in Russia in 1978.

That work is now being studied by young Australian pianist Lachlan Redd. He is planning a tour of Australia, with pianist Tamara Anna Cislowska, performing Tozer's compositions in a tribute to the late pianist.

For Wyllie Johnston, the archive reinforces how Tozer "could do everything in music".