Geoffrey Tozer -- Tragic Pianist

Geoffrey Peter Bede Hawkshaw Tozer (5 November 1954 – 21 August 2009) was an Australian classical pianist and composer. A child prodigy, he composed an opera at the age of eight, and became the youngest recipient of a Churchill Fellowship award at 13. His career included tours of Europe, America, Australia and China, where he performed the Yellow River Concerto to an estimated audience of 80 million people. Tozer had more than 100 concertos in his repertoire, including those of Mozart, Beethoven, Liszt, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Medtner, Rachmaninoff, Bartók, Stravinsky, Prokofiev and Gerhard.

                                                              Geoffrey Tozer

Tozer recorded for the Chandos label, beginning with the works of Medtner.  He was regarded as a "superb recitalist" and had the ability to improvise, transpose "instantly" and reduce an orchestral score to a piano score at sight.  Tozer won numerous awards and much recognition worldwide but suffered comparative neglect in Australia during the last years of his life.

Death

While Tozer was undoubtedly affected by the deaths of his mother in 1996, and his long-time manager Reuben Fineberg in 1997, it is debatable whether, as some obituaries claimed, he "became unwell but carried on".  According to his medical records, his illness did not become apparent until at least seven years after the death of his mother.

On 21 August 2009, he died from liver disease at the East Malvern house in Melbourne in which he lived as a child, having been released from the Alfred Hospital the previous week. He was survived by four of five siblings.

A public memorial service was held on 1 October 2009 at St Patrick's Cathedral, Melbourne.  In a stinging address that lasted 45 minutes, the former Prime Minister, Paul Keating, said that Tozer

deserved to be remembered alongside the Australian triumvirate of Nellie Melba, Percy Grainger and Joan Sutherland, he was treated with indifference, contempt and malevolence by the Melbourne and Sydney symphony orchestras. The people who chose repertoire for those two orchestras and who had charge of the selection of artists during this period should hang their heads in shame at their neglect of him. ... If anyone needs a case example of the bitchiness and preference within the arts in Australia, here you have it.

Keating described the death of Tozer as "like Canada having lost Glenn Gould, or France, Ginette Neveu. It is a massive cultural loss, the kind of loss people felt when Germany lost Dresden."

He compared Tozer to the pianists Emil Gilels, Arthur Rubinstein, Sviatoslav Richter, Ferruccio Busoni, Artur Schnabel, and the soprano Maria Callas, who died alone in Paris in 1977. Keating said, "In the end, his liver failed. But I think I have to say we all let him down. ... We should have cared more and done more."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Tozer

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Afterword by the Blog Author

The last years of Tozer’s life were murky indeed.  The Australian published a story about them that is gripping and horrific.  It can be read at this link:

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/the-tragedy-of-the-shunning-of-genius-geoffrey-tozer/story-e6frg6nf-1225790739496