He’s remembered now chiefly for a novel more often talked about than read and for the film based on it which disappeared from public view for decades after its director’s decision to withdraw and effectively disown it. Think Anthony Burgess and most people think A Clockwork Orange, about which they will have strong views, usually unsupported by actual viewing or reading.

Burgess’s centenary finds his reputation in a rather tattered state, with the greater part of his work neglected and unrevived. He predicted that he would die “in the Mediterranean lands, with an inaccurate obituary in the Nice-Matin, unmourned, soon forgotten”. He was right in all but the place of death, for he actually succumbed to lung cancer in grimy London, though he arranged to be buried in Monaco, where he had made his home for some years.

Burgess wrote over 50 books and several screenplays. Photo by Jacques Lange/Paris Match/Getty Images. Burgess’s centenary finds his reputation in a rather tattered state, with the greater part of his work neglected and unrevived

Now, though, the Manchester International Festival is looking to redress the balance with two events dedicated to the Manchester-born author and composer. No End to Enderby is an audio-visual art installation based on a Burgess novel, while The World Was Once All Miracle is a concert celebrating Burgess the writer of music.

For all his once-high public profile in the United Kingdom as a journalist and broadcaster, and more academic reputation in the United States, he is now surprisingly undervalued as a writer and virtually unknown as a composer.

Only the American novelist and short story writer Paul Bowles managed to sustain parallel literary and musical careers, but where Bowles largely abandoned composition, Burgess returned to his first love late in life and regularly expressed the hope that his musical reputation would grow in his native country.

Perhaps inevitably, music played a significant role in his writing, not just as a theme but as a structural device. His 1974 novel Napoleon Symphony deploys that overworked fictional analogy with more than usual success, a work divided into four distinct “movements”, each with their defining signatures and keys.

A very dominant musical strain runs through Stanley Kubrick’s film version of A Clockwork Orange, but it’s often forgotten that the macaronic Nadsat language of the text – a blend of English and Russian argot – has something of the improvisatory quality of Burgess’s beloved jazz.

Arguably his major fictional achievement, the sprawling Earthly Powers is also organised symphonically, or perhaps operatically, with frequent use of leitmotif (like the almost obsessive rendering of “venerean strabismus”), transitions of mood and large-scale resolutions.

For all his shambolic public persona, which was as much a self-creation as “Anthony Burgess” which were the middle names of the plainer Lancashire Catholic born as John Wilson, he was a man of enormous general culture, pleasurably addicted to long words (a venerean strabismus is a sexy squint to you and me), but more effortfully cosmopolitan (since Abroad often made him sick, or think he was).