Duncan Druce, who has died aged 76, was a composer, violinist and musicologist whose completion of Mozart’s Requiem drew much attention when it was first heard at the Proms in 1991 – not least when the conductor Roger Norrington brought him forward from his place among the violins to share the applause .
The son of a bacteriologist, Robert Duncan Druce was born at Nantwich, Cheshire, on May 23 1939. He was seven when the family moved to Leeds where, encouraged by a school teacher, he immersed himself in the city’s musical life. He played violin with the National Youth Orchestra and spent a year studying with Herbert Howells at the Royal College of Music. At King’s College, Cambridge, where he took a double first in Music, one of his undergraduate exercises was to compose a single movement for a string quartet in the style of Mozart; Druce instead wrote an entire quartet.
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