Obituary: Stefans Grové - Composer of many fine works was not easy to live with

Stefans Grové, who has died in Pretoria at the age of 91, was an extraordinarily prolific South African classical music composer and one of the first to incorporate "African" music in his compositions.

1922-2014

Scholars and academics rated him as one of South Africa's greatest composers, but few people heard his major works performed because they were considered by local orchestras and conductors to be too difficult, inaccessible and not readily entertaining.

His violin concerto and symphony, which some scholars regard as among the greatest achievements in South African art of the 20th century, were premiered in the 1960s by the national symphony orchestra of the SABC and never performed again, either in South Africa or anywhere else.

His major ballet composition, Waratah (after the steam ship that went down between Durban and Cape Town in 1909), which was performed in the 1970s, was considered by the legendary conductor of the national symphony orchestra, Edgar Cree, to be the best ballet score to come out of South Africa.

Mainly because none of the orchestras would play his major works, Grové began to concentrate on smaller pieces, but even these demanded fairly serious attention from the listener. They did not contain the kind of melodies one could hum or whistle. "Why doesn't Papa write pretty music?" his 12-year-old daughter asked.

Grové was born in Bethlehem in the Free State on July 23 1922. He grew up in Bloemfontein, receiving his first music lessons from his mother, who was a music teacher, and his uncle, the then well-known musician DJ Roode.

During his school years, he spent every minute he could listening to classical music on the radio - "in those days the radio was still very civilised", he said in an interview. By the time he matriculated, he knew all the major symphonies and much chamber music. His first instruments were the piano and organ, but he also mastered the flute and viola.

He was told that he could be a concert pianist if he wanted, but although he gave recitals and worked briefly as an accompanist for the SABC, he did not have the temperament to practise for six hours a day.

Anyway, by the age of about nine, when he wrote his first short piece, he had already decided that he wanted to be a composer.

He was a formidably good sight reader and as a schoolchild would devour music scores as effortlessly as his friends read books.

In 1945, he went to study at the South African College of Music in Cape Town. He became the first South African, in 1953, to be awarded a Fulbright scholarship to Harvard University, where he studied musicology and composition.

He remained in the US for 18 years. He studied composition with Aaron Copland and in 1957 became a lecturer in music theory and composition at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore. While there, he started his own chamber orchestra called Pro Musica Rara.

He returned to South Africa in 1972 and took up a post as composer-in-residence at the University of Pretoria, which he held until shortly before his death.

Grové was a workaholic. Composing came easily to him and he was never really at peace unless he was composing. A week before he died, he was composing a piece for the viola on commission.

He made music out of his daily experiences. When he came home to his smallholding outside Pretoria one evening to find that the windows had been shattered by hail and there was water and glass all over his couch, he quickly wrote a piece for flute and harpsichord, The Night of 3 April, to capture "that feeling of misery".

Quietly spoken, understated and a bit of an introvert, Grové had an artistic temperament that did not make him entirely easy to live with. Apart from anything else, he hated to be interrupted while composing - and he was seldom not composing.

He had five marriages, four of them (to three Americans and a German) short and stormy affairs that ended in divorce after between two and five years.

His fifth marriage, to a South African woman 28 years his junior, lasted 37 years and was still going strong when he died of pneumonia.

He is survived by his wife, Alison whose great-uncle Leo Marquard was the founder of the Liberal Party, and six children.