Richard Meale

Richard Graham Meale, AM MBE FAHA (24 August 193223 November 2009) was a highly regarded Australian composer of instrumental works and operas, and an influential music educator. Life and works Sydney 1932–1970 Meale was born in Sydney in 1932. At the time the Meale family lived in Marrickville, an inner suburb of Sydney. Meale’s father Oliver was an engineer, and his mother Lilla Adeline was the daughter of Benjamin Richards, a former mayor of Marrickville. His elder brother, Colin Meale, was a high school principal. Meale was a prodigious teenager who left school because he hated exams. Burston had him at 14 reading Gertrude Stein and the whole of Marcel Proust. He was also borrowing modern scores from the collection of the City of Sydney Library. He studied clarinet, harp, music history and theory, but as a composer he was entirely self-taught. Meale’s reputation as a pianist grew exponentially with each premiere of new works by Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen and other post-war European giants, especially the music of Olivier Messiaen. “To hear Meale play Messiaen is like hearing a sermon by John the Baptist,” Melbourne critic Kenneth Hince wrote. Meale left the Conservator