Duncan Druce, who has died aged 76, was an exceptional musician whose gifts as composer, string player, musicologist, teacher and writer fed into each other and ran deep. He was of a naturally quiet demeanour, but is likely to be remembered for a big project: his imaginative reconstruction and completion of the Requiem Mass left unfinished by Mozart when he died in 1791.
As a violinist in the early concerts of the Yorkshire Baroque Soloists, the period instrument ensemble founded by Peter Seymour, Duncan was invited to undertake the project for the 1984 York festival. Attempting a completed Requiem using the fragments and instructions that Mozart had reportedly bequeathed to Franz Süssmayr, his not greatly gifted pupil, was a challenging task because it required passages of new composition as if looking through Mozart’s eyes. Yet when Roger Norrington and the London Classical Players took it to the BBC Promenade Concerts in 1991, the performance and subsequent recording were acclaimed. Stanley Sadie in Gramophone found Duncan’s version “substantial and pretty convincing, without going outside Mozart’s normal language ... The shaping of the movements is impressive, done by someone who is clearly a composer himself.” In 1993 the publisher Novello included Duncan’s completion of Mozart’s noble torso as part of a critical edition that he made of the whole work.
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