Fritz Spiegl, musician, joker; Guardian obit
Hyfler/Rosner
Witty musical polymath and broadcaster
Dennis Barker
Tuesday March 25, 2003
The Guardian
Fritz Spiegl, who has died aged 77, was a professional flautist, an
archivist of obscure music and an enthusiastic agent provocateur and tease.
A lighthearted and unpredictable musical polymath, he wrote more than 20
books, on mainly jokey themes, and secured the adoption of the traditional
Liverpool song Johnny Todd as the signature tune for the 1960s television
series, Z Cars.
Spiegl was also a frequent BBC broadcaster, especially for earlier
incarnations of Radio 4's Start The Week, and shows like Up To The Hour,
Words, A To Z Of Musical Curios, Fritz On Friday and Mainly For Pleasure. He
wrote widely, including for the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, the
Independent and BBC Music Magazine.
His breadth of musicality and humour, and his interest in controversy, could
have its dangers, as when, in 1977, he suggested in this newspaper that pop
music was beneath criticism. He argued that it was produced for purely
commercial reasons, and that artists like Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell
offered "instant bliss without mental effort".
The correspondence columns were filled with solemn denunciations, one
letterwriter maintaining that anyone who could exploit such a "mindlessly
banal tune" as the Z Cars theme had no right to criticise others. Spiegl was
not, in fact, its composer, but did not seek to justify himself by appealing
to its folk roots; the way he brought it to prominence represented a
characteristic mixture of research and enterprise. He had come across it
while compiling his Liverpool Music Book, and his first wife, the composer
and harpsichordist Bridget Fry, had made an arrangement, which was
eventually recorded by the Liverpool Music Group - conducted by Spiegl
himself.
At about the same time, his own publishing firm, Liverpool Music Press,
produced a facsimile reprint of Mozart's contribution to the effortless
production of music, based on a simple mathematical formula. The composer's
original book, published two years after his death in 1791, was called
"Instruction to compose without the least knowledge of Music, so much German
Walzer or Schleifer as one pleases, by throwing a certain Number with two
Dice".
From 1948 to 1963, Spiegl was principal flute with the Royal Liverpool
Philharmonic Orchestra; he also played for the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra,
the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, the Hallé Orchestra and the BBC
Northern Symphony Orchestra. But it was to Liverpool that he gave most of
his loyalty. In 1949, he was the founder, as well as conductor, of the
Liverpool Music Group and the Liverpool Wind Ensemble; he created a group
called the Spieglers and the Scouse Press, and was a columnist for the
Liverpool Daily Post.
Even his Liverpool home, a large mansion overlooking Princes park, had been
a bit of a musical joke. There were spare parts for a 1924 Rolls-Royce in
the hall (vintage motoring was a hobby); a Jacobean four-poster bed on the
landing; a walking-stick flute, an early concertina and a plaster hand in
the music room; books by the satirist Sydney Smith and James Thurber in the
lavatory; and two barrel organs in the sitting-room. Outside, he kept a
vintage Rolls, his old, bull-nosed Morris - and a brougham, in which, after
borrowing the milkman's horse, he used to take his wife and three daughters
for rides.
Spiegl was born in Austria, and was a distant relative of Gustav Mahler.
After the country's annexation by the Nazis, he arrived in Harwich with his
family as a refugee in 1939. He attended Magdalen College school, Oxford,
and later studied at the Royal Academy of Music, while working as a
typographer and designer for the advertising agency Colman, Prentis and
Varley from 1941 to 1946.
Though friends often tried to persuade him to become a solo flautist, he
revealingly replied that it would not leave time for everything else. There
was a great deal of "everything else", including his work as an antiquary of
music. In a Salzburg bookshop within 200 yards of the Mozarteum, for
example, he discovered an example of the earliest biography of Mozart - of
which the Mozarteum had only a copy. A great student of both English and
Scouse, he collected linguistic curiosities and pitfalls in books, such as
the collection due to appear later this year, Contradictionary: An A-Z Of
Confusibles, Lookalikes And Soundalikes.
Spiegl is survived by his second wife, Ingrid, whom he married in 1976, and
by the daughters of his first marriage.
· Fritz Spiegl, musician, antiquarian, broadcaster and joker, born January
27 1926; died March 23 2003