On the occasions that I heard John Shirley-Quirk sing, he was supposedly in the twilight of his career, being well into his fifties or sixties; but he was never less than superb, rock solid in intonation, with perfect diction and inflection. He was also charming to meet, slightly diffident perhaps, but engaging and warm. It would have been easy for me to have put him on a figurative pedestal, for his name conjured up for me the unique qualities of a lost golden era – in both concert hall and recording venue – that had only recently ended, having centred on the extraordinary figure of Benjamin Britten and a time when England really did stand at the forefront of world music-making.

Britten was notoriously mercurial at times, but he did assemble a devoted musical repertory company, all but a tiny handful of whom have now, sadly, passed on. We think of Sviatoslav Richter, Julian Bream, Peter Pears (of course), Heather Harper, Josephine Veasey, Robert Tear, Janet Baker and – always propping everything up vocally – Shirley-Quirk himself.

As a boy growing up in Liverpool, Shirley-Quirk had sung and learnt the violin, and although it was chemistry that he studied at the city’s university, he did receive favourable notices for singing some of Copland’s Old American Songs for the music society there in 1953 (the first set of these, coincidentally, had been premiered in 1950 in Aldeburgh by Pears and Britten). He went on to become a chemistry teacher at a west London college that later became part of Brunel University.

Shirley-Quirk never stopped singing, though; and he never stopped working on his technique, which he honed by taking part in numerous semi-professional performances, usually in churches and smaller halls, covering repertoire such as Bach cantatas and Mendelssohn’s St Paul. He studied with Roy Henderson (who also taught Kathleen Ferrier) and in 1961 became a lay clerk at St Paul’s Cathedral, London. In the same year, he was understudy for the role of Gregor Mittenhofer in the UK premiere run of Henze’s Elegy for Young Lovers at Glyndebourne; on July 23 he did sing the role, albeit only from the wings, while Carlos Alexander, who’d lost his voice, mimed the part on stage. In Christmas week 1961, he was still to be found singing seasonal repertoire for the Haywards Heath Music Club, but the following year was rewarded with a full role at Glyndebourne: the Doctor in Pelléas et Mélisande, which he repeated in 1963.

He always identified himself with that very specific beast the bass-baritone, and managed the expectations of conductors with characteristic fastidiousness, as he explained in a Gramophone interview (1/72): ‘My voice is firmly in between baritone and bass … I must feel that the conductor knows what sort of voice I have before he accepts me as one of his soloists. If he’s expecting a big fat bass noise and bottom Ds … even though they’re not written, then he’s going to be disappointed.’

Word of his talent rapidly spread, and when Britten attended a performance of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio in Ipswich in 1963, he knew he had heard someone with a rare gift, congratulating the singer afterwards on his performance of the D major aria. ‘I couldn’t for the life of me remember which aria had been in D,’ Shirley-Quirk confessed. He had, however, unwittingly passed a legendarily stringent audition; and the next year, at Britten’s personal invitation, he joined the English Opera Group.

Thereafter, his reputation and career rapidly blossomed, and for more than three decades he was a familiar figure in concert halls and on the opera stage, with that distinctive streak of silver in his hair. He greatly relished the recording process too, because ‘one can be completely immersed and have only the music to be concerned with … There are no extraneous forces at work.’ He duly created a series of Britten roles, performing in the premieres of the composer’s last five operas, beginning with the Ferryman in Curlew River. There followed Ananias in The Burning Fiery Furnace, the Father in The Prodigal Son, Mr Coyle in Owen Wingrave (on BBC TV in 1971 and at the Royal Opera House in 1973); and, most famously of all, the multi-character baritone part in Death in Venice.

Those seven baritone roles – portraying the leitmotif characters that haunt and taunt the foundering novelist in the piece – were written very much with Shirley-Quirk in mind, and he did full justice to them. Both the radio recording made at Snape during the premiere run and the subsequent studio recording (11/74) – both led by Steuart Bedford – reveal a singer at the very height of his powers. The technique is beyond secure, the interpretative art is of the highest quality and the sheer presence is overwhelming, the Penguin Guide later paying fulsome tribute to ‘the darkly sardonic singing of John Shirley-Quirk in a sequence of roles as the Dionysiac figure who draws Aschenbach to his destruction’. In February 1972, however, he confessed to the Liverpool Daily Post that, ‘I don’t think I have learned to act well; I’m more at home on the concert platform, simply because I’ve done more of it.’

Shirley-Quirk was one of those special artists who remained resolutely in Britten’s good books (quite an achievement) and even gave the ailing composer one of his final respites – a shared canal-boat holiday in 1975. He also flourished away from the rarefied hothouse of Suffolk, however, working with Britten’s older colleague Sir Michael Tippett. He created the role of Lev in The Ice Break (1977) and made the definitive recording of the oratorio The Vision of Saint Augustine, conducted by the composer, plus two fine recordings, with Colin Davis and later with André Previn, of A Child of our Time.

He also recorded folk song settings for the Saga label and became quite the ‘go-to’ male performer across a wide repertoire of operas, oratorios and concert pieces. He earned a standing ovation for a white-hot performance of Sir William Walton’s Belshazzar’s Feast at the Last Night of the Proms in 1974, given with the composer in attendance (available on YouTube); and, working at a high level well into his sixties, set down notable studio performances of works by Elgar, Vaughan Williams and Lutosławski. In 1975 he was made a CBE.

In autumn 1993, the Liverpool Echo ambitiously set out to list ‘Merseyside’s 100 Top Living Legends’. The newspaper chose 90 nominees of its own, then it produced an additional list of 10, all suggested by the readership. Among them was John Shirley-Quirk, ‘one of the world’s leading bass-baritones’, alongside poet Roger McGough, comedy writer Eddie Braben and former judo world champion Ann Hughes. Those failing to make the cut included actor Derek Nimmo and comedians Jimmy Tarbuck and Kenny Everett. Having grown up on Merseyside myself and met the delightful and self-effacing Shirley-Quirk on a number of occasions, I think it highly likely that of all the many marks of recognition he received, none can have meant more to him than that one.

Essential recording

Mahler Des Knaben Wunderhorn

Jessye Norman sop John Shirley-Quirk bar Concertgebouw Orchestra / Bernard Haitink

Philips (11/77)

There are so many recordings from which to choose, but the ‘Great Hyphen’ is caught in his pomp and prime, alongside a resplendent Jessye Norman, also hitting hers, in a true classic of the gramophone – Mahler’s Wunderhorn Lieder with Bernard Haitink.

Defining moments

• 1931 – Merseyside beginnings

Born in Liverpool. Duly has violin lessons and becomes choirboy at St Hilda’s Church, Hunt’s Cross

• 1961 – Becomes lay clerk at St Paul’s Cathedral, London

Having had singing lessons with Austen Carnegie in Liverpool (while studying chemistry, from 1952) then Roy Henderson in London

• 1962 – Operatic debut

As Doctor in Pelléas et Mélisande, at Glyndebourne

• 1963 – Meets Britten

Britten hears him sing. 1964: joins Britten’s English Opera Group

• 1971 – Soloist in historic Shostakovich performance

First western European performance of Symphony No 13, Babi Yar

• 1972 – Sings on Britten’s final orchestral recording

Mephistopheles in Schumann’s Scenes from Goethe’s Faust

• 1973 – Creates Britten role for Covent Garden debut

Multi-character baritone part in Death in Venice.
1974: performs same for New York Met Opera debut

• 1982 – Aldeburgh Festival appointment

After long association with festival, made Associate Artistic Director

• 1992 – Joins Peabody Conservatory voice faculty

In post for two decades; becomes known as the ‘Great Hyphen’

• 2012 – Returns to England

Settles in Bath, where dies of cancer on April 7, 2014, having been heard singing in public for last time six years earlier in Edinburgh