Margaret Rizza

Margaret Lensky was born on 19 August 1929 into a musical English family: her mother played the piano and her father was organist at his local parish church. A 2003 interview recalled a shy childhood in Rhyl, North Wales, where prayer and music were already a personal language. Precise public sources do not settle a single birth town beyond England; Wikipedia confirms the 1929 date but not a Staffordshire birthplace sometimes circulated without citation. She entered the Royal College of Music at seventeen.

At the Royal College of Music she began on piano, then switched to singing. She continued at the National School of Opera in London and completed opera training in Siena and Rome. That Italian finish prepared a mid-century stage career under the name Margaret Lensky and later informed the Latin and chant textures of her composing life. She had no formal academic training as a composer when she began writing in the 1990s and often said she discovered the difficulties of craft as she went.

For roughly twenty-five years she sang professionally as Margaret Lensky at leading venues, working with Britten, Stravinsky, and Bernstein and giving premieres by Tavener, Musgrave, and Richard Rodney Bennett. From 1977 to 1994 she taught singing at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, while directing outreach into prisons, hospitals, hospices, and schools and leading school and church ensembles including the St Thomas Music Group (from 1989) and later the Gaudete Ensemble. Composition began in 1997 with Kevin Mayhew publications after Sister Pamela Hayes pressed her to write music for prayer. Harry Christophers commissioned Ave Generosa for The Sixteen in 2007 (Queen Elizabeth Hall premiere 2008). Faber and the RSCM became major publishers; Naxos issued Mysterium Amoris in 2012; Officium Divinum followed with the RSCM in 2013. She led international workshops until late in life and remained closely tied to the RSCM from 2009.

She married George Rizza in Rome in 1967. He was a countertenor who had sung at Westminster Cathedral and later a leading British music publisher (Chester Music; managing director of Novello from 1973). After their daughter was born she curtailed heavy travel. Wikipedia, citing a Church Times interview, records one son and one daughter. George Rizza died aged 94; the Church Times published his obituary on 31 December 2020. Friends and profiles describe a home life shaped by hospitality, prayer, and shared musical publishing culture.

Rizza formally embraced institutional Christianity in Rome in 1967, then described a deeper 'conversion of the heart' in 1983 after encountering Christian meditation linked to John Main and the World Community for Christian Meditation. She wrote that music could heal and tell people they are precious and infinitely lovable. Her compositions grew from Gregorian chant, Taize practice, Celtic spirituality, and silence. She wanted beautiful music available to singers of modest means as well as professionals, and she hoped instrumental and wordless pieces might reach listeners for whom institutional religion felt foreign. Composition, she said, was a way of sharing her prayer time.

Across Kevin Mayhew, Faber, GIA, and RSCM catalogues, her chants and anthems entered parish repertoire on several continents. Classic FM exposure in 2006 widened secular radio hearing of her Taize-style arrangements. The Sixteen's Ave Generosa and Naxos and RSCM recordings placed her among contemporary British sacred composers known beyond specialist church circles. The RSCM's 2026 tribute stressed that her music was meant to help people pray and to keep stillness available to choirs of every ability. Community music work from the Guildhall years remains part of how colleagues remember her priorities.

In 2001 the Royal School of Church Music awarded her an ARSCM as a liturgical composer. BBC Radio Kent gave her an award in 2003 for the best interview on prayer and music. In 2004 she received an Andrew Cross Award for religious journalism. The 2007 Christophers/The Sixteen commission and subsequent international performances were major artistic markers rather than prize-list items. Her lasting institutional honour was sustained partnership with the RSCM from 2009 onward.

Major recorded collections include Fountain of Life and later Kevin Mayhew discs; Ave Generosa with The Sixteen; Mysterium Amoris (Naxos, Gaudete Ensemble / Eamonn Dougan, 2012); Officium Divinum (RSCM / Convivium Singers, 2013); and Ave Generosa: A Musical Journey with the Mystics with the Gaudete Ensemble on Convivium Records. She conducted many of her own recording sessions. Broadcast and print interviews include Church Times (2013), BBC Wales material reproduced on her site, and the 2003 For A Change profile. Her official site margaretrizzamusic.com remains a catalogue and listening hub.

Margaret Rizza died on 9 September 2026 at the age of 97. Wikipedia cites the Royal School of Church Music tribute published on 15 September 2026. The RSCM announcement did not state a place or cause of death; those details were not made public in the principal sources used here. The Society remembered her as a friend whose music continues to open space for stillness, reflection, and prayer.