Christian Darntons biography, net worth, fact, career, awards and life story

Philip Christian Darnton (30 October 1905 – 14 April 1981), also known as Baron von Schunck, was a British composer who wrote the 1945 book You and Music and various modernistic scores to a few feature films and short films for the Canadian Army.

Early life and family

He was born in Leeds as Philip Christian von Schunck, the son of Mary Illingsworth and John Edward, Baron von Schunk (1869–1940), a landowner who renounced his title before the First World War. Christian’s paternal grandfather, Edward, Baron von Schunck, had been born in Leipzig, part of an old German family that had, since 1715, held a Barony in the Holy Roman Empire (Freiherr). He settled in Britain and married Kate Lupton, who had been born into the progressive, land-owning and political Lupton family and educated at the school of her relative Rachel Martineau. Edward died in 1889. Kate survived him until 1913, the eve of the First World War, and insisted in her will that their only son – John Edward, Baron von Schunck – change his surname to that of her father, Darnton Lupton, the former Mayor of Leeds. Thus he and his children acquired by Royal Licence the surname Darnton.

Christian Darnton’s father, John Edward, had two sisters; one of whom – Florence von Schunck – had married Albert Kitson, 2nd Baron Airedale of Gledhow Hall, near Leeds in 1890. Baroness von Schunck (née Kate Lupton, d. 1913), lived at the adjacent Gledhow Wood Estate which was where she hosted the wedding breakfast of her daughter and son-in-law.

The family was extremely well-off and he was educated at home by a governess until he was nine, when he began composing; his musical talents being “obvious” by the time he went up to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge in 1924.

Career

Darnton composed the overture Stalingrad during the Second World War, and works for different combinations. He had joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1941. His Communist views may have later hurt his popularity and led to his becoming relatively obscure. He also criticized the term “English Musical Renaissance”, feeling England produced no “composer of international consequence” in that period.

Selected works

• Concertino for Piano and Chamber Orchestra, 1926
• 1. Symphony, 1929–31
• Piano concert, 1933
• Concert for Viola and Strings, 1933–35
• Harp concert, 1934
• Suite concertante for Violin and Chamber Orchestra, 1936
• 2. Symphony (Anagram), 1939–40
• Ballad of Freedom, Cantata, 1941–52
• Stalingrad, Overture, 1943
• 3. Symphony D-dur, 1944–45, rev. 1961
• Fantasy Fair, Opera, 1949–51
• Jet Pilot, Cantata, 1952
• Concerto for Orchestra, 1970–73
• 4. Symphony, 1975–79

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