Donald Swann

• 1. Introduction

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  Donald Ibrahim Swann was born on the 30th of September 1923 in Llanelli, Carmarthenshire, Wales, the son of a Russian doctor and a Turkmen-Russian nurse who had both fled the Russian Revolution. His father's family traced its origins to a draper from Lincolnshire named Alfred Trout Swan, who emigrated to Russia in 1840 and married into a family with a connection to the tsars themselves. That immigrant draper's descendants eventually added a second 'n' to the surname, and across the generations the family moved steadily westward, until Donald Swann arrived in Wales in the autumn between the two world wars. How does a child of such tangled roots become one of Britain's best-loved comic performers? And how does the same man also find time to set J. R. R. Tolkien's poems to music and write nearly two thousand songs? The answer begins at a school in London and a chance meeting that would define two careers.

• 2. Westminster and the War

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  Westminster School is where Swann first met Michael Flanders, a fellow pupil, and in July and August of 1940 the two teenagers staged a revue called Go To It. The Second World War then pulled them in different directions. Swann had been awarded an exhibition to Christ Church, Oxford in 1941, but his convictions intervened before he could settle into academic life. A Quaker and pacifist, he registered as a conscientious objector in 1942 and joined the Friends' Ambulance Unit, a Quaker relief organisation. He served with that unit in Egypt, Palestine, and Greece. After the war ended, he returned to Oxford, this time to read Russian and Modern Greek, languages that reflected the dual heritage his parents had carried out of the old Russian Empire. The uncle who wrote the first English-language biography of Alexander Scriabin was part of the same extended family that had given Swann his extraordinary background.

• 3. The Flanders Partnership

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  Swann and Flanders met again by chance in 1948, and that accidental reunion became the starting point of their professional partnership. The arrangement was precise in its division of labour: Swann wrote the music, Flanders wrote the words. Artists including Ian Wallace and Joyce Grenfell performed their songs in the early years. The partnership eventually produced two two-man revues, At the Drop of a Hat and At the Drop of Another Hat, which the pair performed all over the world. Both shows were produced on record by George Martin, who produced At the Drop of a Hat in 1960 and At the Drop of Another Hat in 1964 and later The Bestiary of Flanders and Swann in 1967. The partnership continued until 1967, when it came to an end. By then, the Flanders and Swann catalogue had grown into one of the most recognisable bodies of comic song in British entertainment.

• 4. Beyond Comedy

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  While the revues were running, Swann was pursuing an entirely different strand of musical work. He wrote the music for a full-length operatic setting of C. S. Lewis's Perelandra and composed The Road Goes Ever On, a song cycle setting J. R. R. Tolkien's poems from The Lord of the Rings. A 1967 recording of that cycle featured Tolkien himself alongside Swann and the baritone William Elvin. From 1953 to 1959 Swann also provided music for seven plays by Henry Reed on the BBC Third Programme, a series generally known as the Hilda Tablet plays. For the fictional character Hilda Tablet, described as a lady composer of avant-garde "musique concrète renforcée", Swann composed an entire opera called "Emily Butter" as well as several other complete works. A lifelong friendship with Sydney Carter produced scores of songs, among them "The Youth of the Heart", which was recorded as early as 1951 and later reappeared in At the Drop of a Hat.

• 5. Later Life and Legacy

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  After the Flanders partnership ended in 1967, Swann continued performing as a soloist and formed the Swann Singers, touring with them through the 1970s. In the later decades of his life he took up Victorian poetry and composed settings of William Blake, Emily Dickinson, Christina Rossetti, and Oscar Wilde, work his admirers regarded as some of his most profound. He also became a Sponsor of the Peace Pledge Union in the 1970s, consistent with the pacifism that had shaped his wartime choices. A jazz collaboration with trumpeter Digby Fairweather and vocalist Lisa Lincoln produced the Swann in Jazz concert series, and a CD under that title was released in 1994. In 1992 he was diagnosed with cancer. He died at Trinity Hospice in South London on the 23rd of March 1994. Estimates put his total output at close to two thousand songs written or set to music across his career. A Hyperion double CD collecting a selection of his solo songs was issued in 2017.