John Joubert, composer of the Christmas carols ‘Torches’ and ‘There is No Rose of Such Virtue’ – obituary

John Pierre Herman Joubert was born on March 20 1927 in Cape Town, South Africa. His father, an accomplished draughtsman who worked as a clerk in an office in Cape Town, was descended from Huguenots from Provence who settled in the Cape in 1698, while his mother, who studied piano with Harriet Cohen and encouraged his early musical studies, was of Dutch descent.

He was educated at the Diocesan College, Rondebosch, an Anglican establishment where he recalled being “bored by everything … except writing, art and music”. His music teacher, Claude Brown, had been assistant to Ivor Atkins at Worcester Cathedral and had known Edward Elgar, but young John’s first love was painting and he remained interested in art all his life.

His earliest musical memories included seeing a performance of Carmen in Cape Town, but it was the music of Wagner, encouraged by W H Bell at the South African College of Music, that drew him to creating works for the stage. “Bell used to play me bits of Tristan and Meistersinger, which he considered to be the greatest opera ever written,” he told Opera magazine in 2017.

During his first year at university, when his Threnody was performed by the Cape Town Municipal Orchestra, he was awarded a two-year Performing Rights Society scholarship to study with Theodore Holland, Howard Ferguson and Alan Bush at the Royal Academy of Music in London. He arrived in 1946 in the steamer Winchester Castle, which was still fitted out as a troop ship, not returning to his homeland until 1961, when he visited for the premiere of his opera Silas Marner. In 1947 he saw Richard Strauss conduct at the Royal Festival Hall.

His scholarship was extended to four years, but by then he was “in debt and a bit desperate” and, despite holding no academic ambitions, landed a job as a music lecturer at the University of Hull, living in a flat in a Victorian house that would later be occupied by Philip Larkin. His first symphony was premiered by the Hull Philharmonic Orchestra in 1956, conducted by Vilem Tausky.

After 12 years Joubert moved to the University of Birmingham, remaining there until 1986 and living in the suburb of Moseley for the rest of his life. He told the Cross-Eyed Pianist music blog that one of his “most congenial tasks as a university lecturer was to conduct the University of Birmingham motet choir”.

In 1971, 10 years after the Sharpeville massacre in his homeland, he was invited by the Royal Philharmonic Society to write an orchestral piece and responded with an offer to write a memorial to the victims of Sharpeville. “The RPS responded with ‘Oh no, nothing political, we don’t want that??, and perhaps I should have said goodbye,” he told Opera magazine. In the end he wrote a symphony (No 2) that was dedicated to the people of Sharpeville. It was effectively banned in South Africa until after the end of apartheid.

He took early retirement from academia in 1986 to devote himself to full-time composition and soon found himself busier than ever. His last major opera, Jane Eyre, was more than 10 years in the making, but also provided material for a Third Symphony. In later years he returned to church music, writing a St Mark Passion (2015) for the choir of Wells Cathedral.

Joubert’s 80th birthday was marked by a “Joubertiad”, a year-long series of events in and around Birmingham. He still had more than a decade left of composing in him, during which he produced An English Requiem in the manner of Brahms’s German Requiem; it had its premiere under Adrian Partington at Gloucester Cathedral during the Three Choirs Festival of 2010 at which Joubert was the featured composer.

In 1951 Joubert married Mary Litherland, a pianist whom he had met while at the Royal Academy of Music and to whom he dedicated his first string quartet in 1950. She survives him with their son Pierre, a violinist, and daughter Anna, a cellist.

John Joubert, born March 20 1927, died January 7 2019