Composer of film music;
Born: December 4, 1940; Died: November 7, 2012.
Richard Robbins, who has died of Parkinson's disease aged 71, was the man responsible for the music in some of British cinema's most celebrated and evocative period dramas of recent times.
He was the regular composer and musical arranger for the Merchant Ivory films throughout their golden period in the 1980s and 1990s and was nominated for Oscars for Howards End (1992) and for the gently lilting soundtrack of The Remains of the Day (1993).
His elegant compositions helped transport audiences back into the drawing rooms of an earlier, more seemingly genteel period in English history. Yet, like the other key players in the Merchant-Ivory team, Robbins was a foreigner.
Producer Ismail Merchant was Indian, director James Ivory was American, their regular writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala was born in Cologne, and Robbins was from Massachusetts.
He got involved with the Merchant Ivory team almost by chance – he was working as director of a New York music school where Jhabvala's daughter was a student and she introduced him to Ismail Merchant. They made a short film about the school together and one thing led to another.
Born in Rockland, Massachusetts, in 1940, Richard Stephen Robbins showed an early talent for music, studied at the New England Conservatory and on a fellowship in Vienna and was director of the Mannes College of Music when he met Jhabvala and Merchant.
Merchant helped him make Sweet Sounds (1976), a 30-minute film about the college. It marked the beginning of a relationship that would last 30 years.
The following year Robbins served as Merchant's assistant on Roseland, a drama set in the eponymous Manhattan ballroom, and he graduated to composer on Merchant Ivory's 1979 adaptation of Henry James's The Europeans.
As well as composing new music for The Europeans, he included arrangements of music from Stephen Foster and Clara Schumann. The combination of existing music, appropriate to the time and place of a film, and new music, specifically composed for it, became a defining feature of Robbins's work.
His use of Puccini's music in A Room with a View (1985) – which was set partly in Edwardian England and partly in Tuscany – transformed O Mio Babbino Caro into one of the most popular and widely recognised arias among the general public.
Robbins's music ranged from American jazz to the ethnic sounds of India, which he employed so effectively in Heat and Dust (1983). Other credits include Mr and Mrs Bridge (1990), The Ballad of the Sad Café (1991), Surviving Picasso (1996) and The White Countess (2005), his final film.
Robbins is survived by his partner Michael Schell, an artist who worked with him on Via Crucis, a "mystical work" based on the Stations of the Cross, which was performed on stage in New York in 1994 and was later released on CD.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article