Stephen Oliver (composer)

English composer (1950–1992)

Stephen Michael Harding Oliver (10 March 1950 – 29 April 1992) was an English composer, best known for his operas.

Oliver was born on 10 March 1950 in Chester, the son of (Charlotte Hester) (née Girdlestone, born 1911), a religious education adviser, and Osborne George Oliver (born 1903), an electricity board official. His maternal great grandfather was William Boyd Carpenter, a Bishop of Ripon and a court chaplain to Queen Victoria. Oliver was educated at St Paul's Cathedral School, Ardingly College and at Worcester College, Oxford, where he read music under Kenneth Leighton and Robert Sherlaw Johnson. His first opera, The Duchess of Malfi (1971), was staged while he was still at Oxford.

Later works include incidental music for the Royal Shakespeare Company (including The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby), a musical, Blondel (1983; with Tim Rice), and over forty operas, including Tom Jones (1975), Beauty and the Beast (1984) and Timon of Athens (1991). Oliver also wrote music for television, including several of the BBC's Shakespeare productions (Timon among those), the soundtrack to the 1986 film Lady Jane, and some chamber and instrumental music. He was a good friend of Simon Callow who commissioned the piece Ricercare No. 4 for vocal quartet Cantabile. He also composed the score for the thirteen hour radio dramatisation of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 1981. The work combined a main theme with many sub themes, all composed within the English pastoral tradition. In Tony Palmer's film Wagner (1982–83), Oliver can be seen playing the part of conductor Hans Richter and conducting in the pit of Richard Wagner's theatre at Bayreuth.

Oliver was a frequent guest on BBC Radio 4's light discussion programme Stop the Week.

He died in London on 29 April 1992, aged 42, of AIDS related complications. In 2006, Oliver's archive of original scores and papers was presented to the British Library by his family. His nephew is comedian and TV host John Oliver.