Klaus G. Roy
Composer

If Klaus G. Roy had never composed a note of music, he would still be a prominent name in Cleveland music and cultural circles. On top of his other accomplishments in a long and public career as the Cleveland Orchestra’s program annotator, he has produced a distinctive body of original music that has been widely performed and critically praised, not to mention loved by audiences and other musicians.

His catalog includes more than 140 compositions, including two chamber operas and some 60 songs, that have been presented in Boston, New York, San Francisco, and many other U.S. cities, and in London, Paris, Amsterdam, Lisbon, Madrid, Rome, Berlin, Warsaw, Vienna, Jerusalem, Rio de Janeiro, and Cape Town. Choral and organ works by Roy, as well as much chamber and piano music, are in the catalogs of 11 publishers and have been recorded on the CRI, Crystal, Advent, Dimension, and TrueMedia labels.

In addition to the two chamber operas-the first of which premiered on WGBH-TV in Boston in 1957, with Sarah Caldwell conducting and directing; the second at the Cleveland Zoo-Roy has composed incidental music for three of Shakespeare’s plays, presented by Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival in 1973, 1975, and 1979.

Born in Vienna in 1924, Roy left Austria with his family in 1939, a year after the Anschluss, eventually settling in Boston, where he studied music at Boston University (BU) with musicologist Karl Geiringer. After an absence, during which he served with the U.S. Armed Forces in post-war Tokyo, he graduated from BU and began graduate studies at Harvard University under the distinguished American composer Walter Piston.

Roy discovered that he had a gift not only for writing music, but for writing about music. From 1950 to 1957, while teaching elementary composition and music criticism at BU, he was a regular contributing music critic for The Christian Science Monitor, in whose pages George Szell became acquainted with Roy’s work. At Szell’s request, Roy and his young family moved to Cleveland, where he was to spend the next 30 years as the annotator and editor of the Cleveland Orchestra’s program book. (A collection of his invariably thoughtful and often entertaining pieces was published in 1993 by the Musical Arts Association as part of the Orchestra’s 75th anniversary celebration.) He would also give more than 700 pre-concert lectures, serve as intermission host-interviewer for the orchestra’s nationally syndicated broadcasts, teach at the Cleveland Institute of Art and the Cleveland Institute of Music, and appear widely as a lecturer and concert narrator-all the time continuing to compose and oversee performances of his own works.

Indeed, it was in the course of a lecture series organized by the Women’s City Club of Cleveland in 1960 to consider the health of the arts in Cleveland, that Roy suggested what would become an annual tradition, the Cleveland Arts Prize (see “History of the Prize” in this site’s “About Us” section). Somewhat self-consciously, in 1965 Roy became the fifth composer to receive the Cleveland Arts Prize in Music. Subsequently, as the longtime chair of the Arts Prize music jury, he was to find one of his greatest delights: bringing recognition and tangible encouragement to a long list of deserving composers.

text by
Dennis Dooley
1986 Winner of the Cleveland Arts Prize for Literature