Two weeks ago, the Royal Albert Hall in London saw the musical resurrection. of John Foulds’s A World Requiem to mark Remembrance Sunday. The once popular piece had not been performed for 81 years.

It was composed in the aftermath of the Great War (1914-1918) to commemorate the dead of all nations and was given a warm reception at the time.

For four years in succession, from 1923 to 1926, the Requiem was the centrepiece of the Armistice Day Festival, which in those days brought Britain to a standstill every 11 November.

The Requiem needed 1,250 musicians to perform such was the scale of the work.

Then the Requiem was dropped. So too was the composer, who never heard his piece played again. Foulds died of cholera 13 years later while living in self-imposed exile in India. His pacifist views were shunned by polite society and his work quickly forgotten.

John Foulds was born in Manchester in 1880, the son of a bassoonist in the Halle Orchestra. He played as a cellist in promenade and theatre bands before joining the Halle cellos in 1900.

He had been composing since childhood. During his years as a cellist in the Halle at the beginning of the 20th century he wrote piano music, string quartets, symphonic poems and a vast 3-part concert opera for soloists, chorus and orchestra called The Vision of Dante, based on The Divine Comedy. Only a few of them were ever performed.

However, the conductor Hans Richter gave him conducting experience. Although Henry Wood presented some of Foulds’s early orchestral compositions at the Queen’s Hall Proms, he became best-known as a successful composer of light-music, such as the once-famous Keltic Lament (1911).

He is indeed a forgotten composer, who didn’t fit in with the zeitgeist of post-war Britain. The resurrection of his Requiem is a useful addition to the repertoire.