John Eliot Gardiner

John Eliot Gardiner interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 16th June 2015

0:05:06 Born in Fontmell Magna, North Dorset in 1943 into a family that was quite eccentric; my mother was brought up as a Quaker; my father had a strange ethnic background; his mother was Swedish-Finnish on one side and Austro-Hungarian Jewish on the other; their interests were wide-ranging; in my mother's case it included painting, drama, music, in my father's, what we would now call sustainability; he was an eco-warrior in many ways, a pioneering organic farmer; he really did pioneer the interface between sylviculture and agriculture; how trees can raise the water-table and provide protection to livestock in an agricultural situation; he was very conscious of geography and landfall, and how easy it is for man to manipulate it in a violent or unsympathetic way; he was curiously prescient as many of the ideas that he was formulating as a young man, and as a founder member of the soil association after the war, have become common currency now; he foresaw the shortage of fossil fuels and our dependence on them being far too great; he tried hard to push the ideas of sustainable agriculture and silviculture onto his neighbours and to the farming community with very mixed results; he were perceived as a very oddball; another thing that I admired but is much misunderstood - he was born in 1901 and having gone to a conventional prep school and then to Rugby, which he loathed, he ran away to Bedales because he was in love with a girl there; he then came to St John's, Cambridge, and after the war was over he then went and worked in the Southern Tyrol to help rebuild villages which had been destroyed in the First World War; his great argument was that the Peace Treaty of Versailles had set Europe back and therein lay the seeds of future problems, particularly for Germany; his particular solution was to try and forge alliances between the youth of Britain, Germany, the Baltic States and Scandinavia; the way that he thought of doing was through the things that were closest to his heart - a capella polyphony singing, and dancing - morris dancing, sword dancing, mixed also with this eco-warrior side of him; he did forge all sorts of very productive relationships; he wrote a book North-Sea and Baltic which anticipated quite a few problems which were going to arise when nationalism started to take hold, particularly in Germany in the late 20s and 30s; he retained his friendship with a lot of German contemporaries of his who resisted being swallowed up into the Hitler Youth of the day, but it got him into trouble with MI5 and later historians who see him as a Nazi sympathiser, which he wasn't in the slightest; it meant that I was growing up in a household which had quite strong European connections - through my mother's side with Italy and France where she had studied in her late teens and thought my father with Austria and Germany and the Baltic States and Holland; so there were lots of visits, and then it became even more exotic as my father became involved with a tea estate in Nyasaland and he organised a young farmers' exchange between Dorset and Nyasaland; so there were these splendid African farmers visiting us in my early childhood; my father was a farmer and forester, but I think he would have put forestry ahead of farming; he became dependant on and associated with his uncle, Henry Balfour Gardiner, who was a composer who belonged to the so-called Frankfurt Gang; these were English composers born in the 1870s who went to Frankfurt to study with Ivan Knorr who was a celebrated teacher of Russian-German extraction; among others the Frankfurt Gang included Percy Grainger, Cyril Scot and Roger Quilter; Henry Balfour Gardiner was very much under the influence of German-Wagnerian school of the late nineteenth, early twentieth century, which was then kicked into touch during the First World War; after that he found that his musical sympathies were so foreign to the second Viennese school - Schoenberg, Berg, Webern - that he gave up composing altogether, burnt a lot of his manuscripts, and took up afforestation; in 1924 or 5 he inveigled my father to start to rehabilitate a little corner of North Dorset on the edge of Cranborne Chase, and together they started this reafforestation project on about 2000 acres; they planted between 3,500,000 and 4,000,000 trees between 1927 and 1951 when Balfour died; it was an extraordinary activity; they employed a lot of local labour but also unemployed miners from North Yorkshire and Durham who came on a temporary basis; in very unprepossessing conditions they managed to establish a mixed forest - deciduous and coniferous - which I am fortunate enough to be the custodian of today; it has had quite a chequered family history but it is still there; I am intensely proud of it but also fearful; in a time when there are so many more diseases affecting trees which are coming through our imports of foreign timber, that I hope I can hand it on to my children and grandchildren in the way that my father and great-uncle were able to pass it on to me; with forestry far more than farming you have to think one or two generations ahead, particularly in the British climate where the growth of trees is slow, and the soils are incredibly thin where we are farming and growing in North Dorset

9:26:12 My forename is John Eliot which I have inherited from my mother's side; my mother was born Mariabella Hodgkin in Reading, and on marrying my father in 1931 discovered when they came to Dorset and started this estate together, that her ancestors had actually lived in the neighbouring village of Ashmore; on the boundary stones is JEH which stands for John Eliot Howard; she was a distant cousin of Dorothy Hodgkin, the Nobel prize winner; my maternal grandfather, a Quaker businessman in Reading, was charming although I did not know him well; his wife was a very eccentric lady called Florence, and she was the 14th child of the 14th child, a red-haired Irish lady; I imagine she had been brought up a Catholic; my mother had an elder brother, Eliot, who worked for ICI; Eliot's son is Howard Hodgkin, the painter; on my father's side, my grandfather was Sir Alan Gardiner who was an Egyptologist and part of Carnarvon and Carter's expedition to Tutankhamun in the 20s; he was the grammarian and code breaker of the entrance into the tomb; he lived in iffley near Oxford; his wife, Heddie, was as already describe of mixed European background; her father, Max von Rosen, was an actor, diplomat, but also a violinist who IS SAID TO HAVE played in the Vienna Philharmonic; the first time I conducted that orchestra in the early 90s I discovered that my German was almost instinctively Viennese in its inflection and dialect; unconsciously I must have picked up some of my grandmother's speech, accent and so on
12:58:16 My childhood was idyllic; I was incredibly privileged because even though my parents were not wealthy they lived in an old mill house with a garden, with springs flowing into a lake; my mother spent a lot of energy creating a very beautiful garden which had a wonderful mixture of the wild and the domesticated; as children it was a paradise to grow up there and experience the mysterious corners of the garden; thanks to her also one got a different type of experience from the conventional education one might have had because she was very heavily into mime and drama - dramatiSing Icelandic sagas, Tanglewood Tales, Greek myths of one sort or another - and doing it with the local school children; she would have us make our own props and improvise our own dialogue; the plays or masques she put on would embrace the whole garden, requiring the audience to shift all through the garden, so it had a kind of magic to it; even though I went to the local school my mother taught me through the PNEU system which was marvellous; there was always music going on in the house; my mother had a trained singing voice, my father sang but not particularly well, but lustily on his tractor or on his horse; there were always musicians around; all through the war they would sing on a Sunday the Byrd Four Part Mass to keep up their spirits; they would mark the passage of the seasons either with plays - Nativity, Resurrection or even pagan plays, went on in the garden; my mother was conventionally Christian even though brought up as a Quaker; my father was much more a pantheist and a follower of D.H. Lawrence with a bit of Rudolph Steiner in the background; the main thing for me was the way that music and dance and, to some extent, drama were rooted in the environment, in the soil, in the cycle of the seasons; it made a huge impact on me as a little boy and it never occurred to me that it was anything unusual until trauma kicked in and they sent me away to a very conventional prep school called Pinewood near Shrivenham, Berkshire, which I loathed, though I loved the sports; my contemporaries weren't into the same things at all; and to me it was a bit strange that they didn't share my enthusiasm for music, or drama, or painting; it was a conventional military school so they were the sons of colonels etc.

17:16:09 My uncle, Eliot, who was also my Godfather, gave me every birthday another Kipling volume, and I still treasure them, and Puck of Pook's Hill is my favourite; Thomas Hardy was also a favourite - I would even speculate that Tess of the D'Urbervilles was raped in our woods, on the edge of Cranborne Chase; another was William Barnes, a great Dorset poet and a tremendous figure in my childhood because the farm workers who I grew up with, learning to drive a tractor, drive cart horses, and learning about sheep and shepherding, they could all recite Barnes' poems off the cuff; I was introduced quite early on to the ecological gurus that my father knew - H.J. Massingham, Arthur Bryant, who wrote 'Our Island Story', he was a visitor, Adrian Bell was a great friend of my father's, father of Martin Bell who became a politician and was an undergraduate with me at king's and Anthea Bell who is a wonderful translator

20:12:17 I had my own gang in the village and we got up to all sorts of mischief and it was terrific fun; that was the thing that wrenched my heart when I was sent away to boarding school; I grew up almost bilingual because I spoke Dorset dialect and "proper" at home, and I loved that contrast; the farm and its activities which I was very much involved with, in the dairy, at harvest, with the cart horses, learning to drive a tractor, that was my main hobby really, that and getting into mischief, and music, dancing and painting, because my mother was a good painter and encouraged me to paint; I even got an art scholarship from my prep school to Bryanston, my next school; my prep school was horrendous, a hot-bed of nasty forms of pederasty, extremely snobbish, a lot of bullying, and a disdain from some of the staff towards the children; there were exceptions, a good art teacher and a good music teacher; Bryanston was a different thing altogether; it had the virtue of being not at all snobbish, of being very arty; there were a lot of film makers' children there and artists; even though I got in on an art scholarship I felt a bit out of sync because the really good painters there were all abstract painters, and I was very much into portraits, still life, and landscapes, so that wasn't my thing and I gravitated then towards music; I wasn't particularly well taught musically at Bryanston as it was quite pedestrian, but I had a very good violin teacher, Peter Chamberlain; the thing that really grabbed my interest at Bryanston was history; I had the most inspirational history teacher, John Royds, who later became Headmaster of Uppingham; I am sure it was thanks to him that I got a scholarship here to King's as a historian, not at all as a musician; it is so crucial that you meet an inspirational teacher at that time, fifteen to seventeen, and you never forget the lessons that you had and the directions that fanned open, the possibilities that came from and inspirational teacher

23:22:24 I had an awful accident during the holidays between leaving Pinewood and arriving at Bryanston when I was thirteen; I fell 45 feet off the top of a thatched roof at home; our house was being re-thatched and I had made a corn dolly out of straw and went up the ladder, which slipped and I fell all the way down the thatched roof and then onto flag stones; I spent the next six weeks in hospital; I was told I would never run or walk properly again; in fact I had a wonderful orthopaedic surgeon who got me going, but it meant my passion for football, rugby and cricket were somewhat compromised, also I had been a sprinter at school; I took up rowing at Bryanston and also rowed in the first eight here at King's; I wasn't fast enough for my favourite sports, and even in cricket I had been a fast bowler; I also enjoyed debating and drama; the Headmaster at Bryanston was an amazing man called Thorold Coade, and I was fortunate to act in several plays under him including T.S.Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral; early on at Bryanston I played either Regan or Goneril as an inderstudy in King Lear under his tuition, and he was inspirational; Bryanston was different from many public schools at the time because it was semi-coeducational; it wasn't quite like Bedales or Dartington but under the Kurt Hahn system it was much more liberal, and there was Cranborne Chase School which was run in parallel to Bryanston, and the opportunity to do drama and make music with the sister school; another good thing from my point of view was that it was only eight miles away from home so I could bicycle back to the farm which was crucially important to me; I was boarding; when I was about fifteen I started conducting; I still had no idea what direction my life was going to go, that took years to determine; there were competing interests - farming and the environment, music of one sort or the other, I sang a great deal first as a treble then a tenor, conducting, but probably after singing at that stage, playing the violin or viola later on; I applied for the National Youth Orchestra and only got in at the second attempt, but I couldn't take up my place because the telegram telling me I had been accepted and would I please come to Russia, was delivered to me by a Bedouin on a camel four months after the tour had taken place; at that time I was working in Petra in the Jordan Valley; increasingly my interest was in oriental things, in particular in Middle Eastern studies; I had a Godfather, Christopher Scaife, who was a wonderful man, a friend of Dadie Rylands here, in fact I got the two of them together when I was running K.C.M.S. to do a Shakespearian reading; Scaife was Professor of English Literature at the American University of Beirut; my parents took me out there when I was very little and in my gap year after leaving Bryanston I went to Beirut and got a series of jobs in the Middle East; he was a big influence on me and introduced me to a number of different Arabists and it was through him that I met Kim Philby who was just about to come out as a turn-coat and go to Russia; I met Edward Said who became a great friend, and Katy Antonius, the widow of George Antonius the great Arabist there; I learnt to speak Arabic there; I had three jobs in a short period of time; one was in the World Council of Churches Refugee Camp outside Bethlehem where we were building a wing of a Lutheran school; the second one was six weeks spent just outside Petra where I went to work for an archaeologist called Diana Kirkbride; the third experience which was in a way the most enriching was working for UNRWA for the Palestinian refugees; I worked in Beirut but was given an assignment to write a film script on refugee conditions, and then went all through Jericho, Gaza, Bethlehem etc. and I learnt a huge amount about the plight of the Palestinian refugees and the tensions; this was in 1961, and I met John Saltmarsh, who became one of my history tutors at King's, in Beirut; he was there looking at Crusader castles; I remember a very strange conversation with him in my second year at King's because I was trying to organise a tour of the Oxford and Cambridge Singers to Lebanon, Jordan and Syria; there was one of those regular border incidents between Jordan and Syria and the frontier was suddenly shut, and I had to get back for the beginning of term; I showed my old United Nations pass which I had had the year before, but had expired, and they waved me through; what I didn't realise was that by the time I got to Damascus they had rung my old boss AT UNRWA and she had said that he doesn't work for us any more; so I was cast into gaol for two or three nights, into a cell which I shared with an existentialist Frenchman who was a journalist from Le Monde; I still do not know why I was let out, but I came back to King's a week late; I knocked on John Saltmarsh's door, mentioned I had seen him in Beirut a fortnight ago, apologised for returning late but had been in prison; he just said that was not a problem

31:22:21 I was confirmed as a member of the Anglican Church at fourteen, but my religious upbringing was always qualified by my parents' humanism and the wider context they would establish for religious belief; it was not straight down the middle at all; I think that music has always been incredibly linked in my mind with religious belief, and even in my twenties and thirties and progressively I lost my conventional religious beliefs I re-found them in the moment of making music; I don't think for a moment that you need to be a Christian in order to understand or appreciate the music of Bach or any other religious composer, but I think that it helps if you can understand a little of the theology that informed it; I think if you can penetrate the membrane of the package which surrounds the music and get to the heart of it you can find there is a core of human belief systems that transcend the parochial and denominational side of religion; I think that has been a big part of my life that in rejecting standard belief I can reconnect with it through music; I think also studying other religions - in my third year at King's I was reading CLASSICAL Arabic and studied the Koran very closely, that also provides a different context for one's past or current Christian beliefs in a wider, more ecumenical context

34:20:22 I took the exam for King's in the Chetwynd Room in November 1961; a very cold day, and I remember being presented with a ream of foolscap paper, and John Saltmarsh walking in and writing one word on the board - Circuses - and then walking out; four hours later one had done one's stab at writing about circuses, then a very penetrating interview with John Raven, who was then the Senior Tutor, and John Broadbent; the reason I applied for King's was again thanks to my father because he was a close friend of Dadie Rylands who said I had to come to King's, and if I was musical I would find a home for myself here; I won a minor history scholarship to King's but I didn't apply for and didn't particularly want to become a choral scholar; as soon as I arrived here I found that I was really out of step with the musical traditions of the College as they were then exemplified by David Willcocks; it clashed with my own musical upbringing which had not been associated with the liturgy or a cathedral, certainly not one with such a distinctive acoustic or sound world as that of King's; the music that I knew as a child and was still passionately in love with, English music of Tallis and Byrd but also of Purcell, Schütz the German seventeenth century composer, Bach, Italian music - Palestrina but also Monteverdi; in so far as it was performed at all in the Chapel it was done in a homogeneous, all-purpose style, which I felt in a way trivialiSed the music delivered in a rather saccharine style of singing; to me it lacked guts and fire and a visceral contact with the composers; I felt very out of place and even at my freshers' concert, as I adored singing, I sang some Schubert and Mahler songs; the King's choral scholars of the day thought this was A bit odd that a non-choral scholar should sing on their hallowed turf and that i chose TO sing Schubert and Mahler; why wasn't I singing Roger Quilter and Ivor Gurney, the English pastoral style which was what they were keen on?; having missed out on playing in the National Youth Orchestra I didn't know the instrumentalists of the day; Cambridge was then curiously full of coteries, of little clans of musical sympathies; on the one hand there were the King's choral scholars who were in deep competition with the St John's choral scholars; there was the National Youth Orchestra lot who were brilliant musicians - among my contemporaries there was Chris Van Kampen, a wonderful cellist, Andrew Davis who became a great pal of mine and a distinguished conductor, Christopher Seaman, a fine conductor; then there were the Early Music lot, mostly at Pembroke - Christopher Hogwood and David Munrow - all beards and sandals, recorders and raffia shoes - again a little clique on its own which met at the music club; I didn't know where to fit in at all; with individual musicians I struck up an alliance and played in the CUMS 2 orchestra, led it actually, and it took me a while to get into the CUMS 1 orchestra; I was playing the violin initially but later went on to the viola because my arms were too long; with Andrew Davis we started the Cambridge University String Players and formed our own little ensemble which was quite adventurous, with very talented string players from all round the University; the thing that was agitating inside me and I had to find a release for it was this impulse to dedicate my life to music; it was in fierce competition with all the other interests that I had; as a historian I was enormously stimulated by the varied teaching that I had here in the College; you couldn't choose four more radically different history dons than Christopher Morris with his very old-school approach towards the Tudors, John Saltmarsh with his wonderful antiquarianism and his passionate love of the College and Chapel and of its architecture, he was such a great enthusiast and would deliver these magnificent sermon-like disquisitions on Gothic architecture, Jasper Rose who was a real eccentric, and Arthur Hibbert whom I was much the closest to, and very fond of; they each had varying styles of teaching and of running tutorials, and also their approach to history was so different; with Christopher Morris you would come in with your essay and he would read it silently, puffing on his pipe, and would make no comment until the end; with John Saltmarsh you had to hand it in the day before and then he would give this marvellously elegant poetic discourse on how you had got it wrong, and really it should have been formulated in this way; with Arthur you read it out to him and he would chortle away in the background, but it always lead to an extraordinarily broad-ranging conversation and stimulating exchanges; in a way the most intimidating was Jasper because he would read your essay out loud to you, getting the inflection and punctuation wrong; you sat there thinking that that was not what I meant at all; it was all hugely stimulating, and also the lecturers; one of my special subjects was the Scottish Enlightenment, and its chief exponent was Duncan Forbes, a brilliant lecturer at Clare; the other thing that really became more and more dominant in my time at King's was the whole Western mythology about the Middle East; I read a paper to the Ten Club of which I was a member called 'Western Myths about the Arab World'; that had grown out of my gap year experiences and several visits to the Middle East, and learning colloquial Arabic and trying to learn classical Arabic here in my third year, and feeling in my bones that there was something desperately wrong in british foreign policy ever since the Sykes-Picot Agreement and the Balfour Declaration in the course of the First World War and in the Suez crisis in 1956, in our Western approach towards the Muslim and Christian Arab world, and how it had its antecedents in the Crusades; in that sweet-sour relationship that the West has had with the Middle East, on the one hand seeing it as a glamorous, oriental paradise, on the other hand taking the high ground of disdain towards the Arabs as being no better than being souk merchants; it all comes to a head in Said's book on Orientalism; it troubled me a great deal, and I really was tempted in my time at King's to say that when I had done here I would like to go on and research that and pursue it in a political environment; but other things took precedence; I suppose this is the time to pay tribute to Edmund Leach because he was my director of studies; he and Celia, his wife, became close friends and I used to visit their house frequently; Edmund loved music as did Celia, and Edmund took me aside and told me I should make up my mind about which direction to take; he thought I could be a historian but that my flirtation with the Arab world could burn itself out, I also had the background in farming and silviculture which I was keen on; Edmund was extraordinarily compassionate and understanding but he would not let me get away with giving inadequate answers and thought I should really focus on what to do; we went through the various options; I thought I needed to test myself to see if I really had it in me to be a musician or not; I was outside the conventional system, I was not a pianist or organist, I didn't sing in the College choir, but I did have an enormous residual love of music from childhood which could consume me; he suggested I took a year off to find out whether i had the goods to become a serious musician and a conductor; he asked whether I wanted to leave, to go to the Royal College of Music, and I said no; did I want to switch to the music faculty, no as I felt the curriculum was foreign to what I wanted to do at the time; I said I thought I should set myself a particular assignment, a work that has huge challenges to it and to see if I can bring it off; that is when I suggested to him that I should perform and conduct the Monteverdi Vespers which was then a work that had scarcely ever been performed in Cambridge; I think Boris Ord may have done in once in King's, but it was not at all mainstream, it was everything that the tradition it King's was not - it was Italian, multi-coloured, very passionate music-making that was required to bring it off, and it was right outside the comfort zone of most musicians who were of my generation; so, I set about setting up that performance, and I was currently the secretary of the King's College Music Society; I went to speak to David Willcocks about it and he was very interested and sympathetic to the idea; he said I should do it in the Chapel but would have to get together a choir and an orchestra, but there was no money so how could I do it; I had to set about applying to different trusts to raise money, including the Vaughan Williams Trust who gave us £250 which was quite a lot then; I then went to see Thurston Dart who was Professor of Music here; he was absolutely wonderful; he didn't even mention that I wasn't even reading music but I think he knew a bit about me already; he said it was clear what I should do; I would need to make my own edition from the original part books which were in the Pendlebury Library which were on microfilm; I would have to transcribe it and make an edition which he agreed to scrutinise; I was in an incredibly privileged position in the sense of having some expert encouragement, but at that stage very little skill or technique; I then thought about forming a choir to do this incredibly challenging and demanding music; I spoke to one or two of the choral scholars in king's, John's and Trinity and so on, I even had the temerity to audition some of them; they had never heard of Monteverdi's Vespers; some of them had sung a few madrigals under Raymond Leppard in a punt on the Cam, but a piece of those dimensions was totally outside their ken; so we started rehearsing and I had quite a lot of rehearsal; I remember rehearsing in King's Hall and Thurston Dart coming and sitting at the back, and correcting our Latin pronunciation; I was trying to get this heterogeneous bunch of choral scholars and a few enthusiastic amateurs in Cambridge, including sopranos and altos from the women's colleges, and some who came down specially from the Royal College of Music, to sing in an extravagantly passionate way with lots of different vowel colour contrasts so that the drama and theatricality of the music would come through and the incredible imagination of Monteverdi's mind would impinge on our performance; we had on the one hand the physical properties of the Chapel against us in the sense that it's a wonderful long Gothic shoe-box, not a basilica with lots of galleries in it, and on the other hand WE had the bonus of the presence of this magnificent tableau by Rubens that had just been acquired by Michael Jaffé for the College which had not yet been put in its current position, something I think is a mistake because it is dwarfed by that wonderful stained glass window; it was on an easel just in front of the rood screen and looked magnificent there; of course it is in honour of the Blessed Virgin and so are Monteverdi Vespers; Rubens and Monteverdi were contemporaries in Mantua; so I took a great deal of heart and encouragement from the presence of that painting; on 5th March 1964 we performed this piece for good or evil in the Chapel; I am glad there is no recording of it because I would probably be appalled by the results, but it caused quite a stir and it was attended by a lot of very distinguished musicians, including Thurston Dart, Ray Leppard, David Willcocks, and George Malcolm who had come down from Westminster Cathedral to listen, and it got national press coverage and that was quite exciting; I suppose it was the epiphany that I was looking for that encouraged me to say that is the way my life is going from now on; that was the moment I said that I would study to be a professional musician; SO I went on and did Part II of the history Tripos the following year, and then I followed Thurston Dart who had left Cambridge to set up a new music faculty at King's College, London, and became one of his first postgraduate students; I had a fascinating year doing musicology, musicological detective work with him, and doing the chore of learning harmony and counterpoint; after a year with him he told me to go abroad, to go to Prague or Budapest as that was where he thought i would learn the most conducting technique about; I said that I was going to Paris because I wanted to study with Nadia Boulanger who was the doyen of musical teachers; she was eighty at the time and I won a French Government scholarship to study with her in 1967; I had met her a couple of times earlier; she had come to teach at the Bryanston Summer School long before I went there, when I was six or seven years old; my parents had taken me and I had heard her lecture and it was my first experience of hearing Monteverdi, so she had really implanted the seed of Monteverdi in my musical brain; I then heard her again when she came over to the Royal College of Music when I was fifteen or sixteen; I heard her lecture on Schubert and Brahms and was completely enchanted; when i went to study with her in 1967, and i had two years studying with her in PARIS, it was like being back at kindergarten; after the liberal arts education I had had at King's it was such a shock; this was the French system and she took no prisoners at all, it was a very rigorous system and one was enormously in awe of this lady; her pupils were nearly all American or British, she hardly had any French pupils; she was eighty and semi-blind; she had been a pupil of Fauré and had taught Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Elliot Carter, Virgil Thomson, all the American composers of the day, Lennox Berkeley, and who was a great friend of Stravinsky's, whose musical ear was sharper, more acute and more discerning than any other musician I had ever come across, and that is still the case today; I think only Pierre Boulez approaches her in the ability to hear wrong notes and to dissect harmonies; she put me back right to square one, and she would mock me really cruelly; it was tough going but exactly what I really needed; I had to do harmony but not the way it is taught here or in the conservatoires in Britain, keyboard harmony as they call it; this was writing harmony exercises on four different staves, four different clefs; in effect you were writing counterpoint because what she was interested in was not just the vertical alignment of the chord progressions but the intersection of the lines, the weaving in, and how beautiful and honed and distinctive you could make those lines; so it was an extraordinarily elaborate process that required a very discerning self-critical ear to get it right; it wasn't easy because she insisted on teaching all her American and British pupils in English, and her English was eccentric; then you wrote your harmony exercise and brought it to her and very often she would write 'B'; I thought that because she spoke English to me that must be for 'Bad'; it took me about three months to discover it meant 'Bon'; meanwhile I'd had to redo the exercise and she obliged one to do it with a little insert that you had to paste on with sellotape over your correction but on a hinge so that she could see what your error had been the last time; my harmony books became like archaeological digs with all sorts of undulations of corrections and super corrections, often unnecessary because I had misread the 'B'; that was the least of my worries; the thing for me was that I was learning to catch up and to train my ear as I was a late starter; I was an intuitive, instinctive musician and had had some experience of conducting, I had had this wonderful opportunity of doing the Monteverdi Vespers here, I had taken a choir to the Middle East and performed in Syria, Jordan and Lebanon, I had started the Monteverdi Choir on my move from Cambridge to London in 1966, we had done our first Wigmore Hall concert, the BBC were already starting to commission me to do programmes for them, I became apparently the youngest in the history of the Proms when in 1968 I did the Vespers in the Royal Albert Hall, but meanwhile I was playing catchup in learning to give some technical underpinning to my music-making; under her scrutiny and beady eye she didn't let you off the hook at all.

1:00:14:20 In the summer months all of her pupils would decamp to Fontainebleau outside Paris, a grand palace where Hitler had also occupied a couple of the grand rooms in the Second World War; we were then joined by the crème de la crème of the American conservatoires like Juilliard School and Eastman School; it was highly competitive, and above all to get into her Solfege class, Solfege being the French way of ear training, its not just Tonic Sol-Fa but something much more sophisticated, also more debilitating as taught by most French music teachers, but Boulanger taught it brilliantly; it was a wonderful all encompassing way of educating the ear but it was regimented and extremely severe; you were chastised publicly and brought down a peg; it was a test of your nerve and resilience, pretty different from the four years that I spent at King's where there was this wonderful collegiate atmosphere, convivial for the most part, particularly with the tutorial system; this was quite traumatic for me; she would haul me up in class and get me to do some pretty difficult exercises while the rest of the students would clamour to be allowed to show me how I had got it wrong; she would just say no, that I had to suffer, and I did suffer; in a way it toughened me up and was an extremely useful training to weather the harsh daylight of professional music-making; after two year of studying with Boulanger, and much to her annoyance, I applied and got the job as apprentice conductor to the BBC Northern Orchestra in Manchester; it was a very hard-bitten orchestra in those days, heavy drinking, heavy smoking, brilliant sight readers but took no prisoners at all; in my first year there I would get to conduct the overture of a three piece concert, and if the overture lasted fifteen minutes I would be given twelve minutes rehearsal time only; so the only time I could play through the whole overture was when the red light was on and we were recording which meant that in your rehearsal you had to be incredibly clear both in your gestures but also when you stopped the orchestra to say anything, and which bits you could take on trust that they could manage to do and which bits you really needed to focus on if you were to have any influence on the outcome; that was a different type of test; I suppose the thing that sustained me in all that was that despite this rigorous training I had been receiving, first of all from Thurston Dart in musicology then from Nadia Boulanger in harmony, counterpoint and interpretation, and to some extent conducting technique that I had received on summer courses from George Hurst, I was putting that into practice with a professional orchestra and later with other professional orchestras in London and France, I had my home base which was the Monteverdi Choir, founded here at King's then taken to London; it had then taken on a life of its own and become a mixture of young professional singers, such as the King's Singers who had been founder members of my choir, who NOW had to be paid, and very talented amateurs who were willing to give their services; we were becoming busier and busier and it brought all the musical strands of my life together because it enabled me to pursue and deepen my love of Renaissance and Baroque music, to explore it with much greater intensity and to a far higher standard, and to become a part of this burgeoning movement of radical reappraisal of early music which was taking wing then in the late 60s and 70s; even now, looking back on it, there has been an absolute topsy-turvy change in the way that musicians and audiences have come to terms with music of the past - much more historically attuned, much more nuanced according to epoch, nationality, and character of different composers - instead of the wishy-washy approach where everything WAS done in the same style on the same instruments; your approach to it as a historian or musician now can be in a variety of different ways; some people will just say it is nostalgia, revisionism, or a substitute for the absence of really gripping contemporary music; I don't think it is that at all.

1:06:50:12 [sound of tapping outside] As a little aside I have to tell you this; at a Founder's Feast I think in 1964 the Chetwynd Society, of which I was not a member, managed to do something wonderfully dramatic; they released the heifers that were grazing on the other bank of the Cam, drove them across the bridge and under the arch of the Gibb's Building at the moment when Noel Annan, the Provost, and all the Fellows were coming out of Hall; the heifers raced round the fountain and the Founder's statue, tails in the air, excrement flying; I witnessed it all; I thought Noel Annan dealt with it brilliantly; he just wrote a short note to the secretary of the Chetwynd Society saying that all traces of excrement had to be removed by five o'clock the next morning, and it was

1:08:03:07 Some people have criticised the whole of the historically informed performance; in essence, the whole movement was a bringing to bear on the music of the past a much more historically informed scrutiny of the source material, the instruments that were used at the time of any given composer, the tuning of those instruments, the different musical temperaments, the pitch of the pieces concerned, whether they were anything like modern pitch, higher, lower, the numbers of performers, not just on the instruments, but how they performed, the spaces in which they were performing; in a sense it was a labour of antiquarianism, of reconstruction, but it was also - which I think was much more interesting - it was a way of testing pertinence, relevance, and the currency of music of the past to our contemporary situation; has it stood the test of time or is it simply an anachronism; the conclusions that many of us came to, and they weren't always coordinated, was that the music of the past if it is performed with that type of scrutiny and attention to detail could provide a far greater currency now than it did thirty, forty years prior to that where it was done in a slightly condescending fashion; it lead to a whole rash of different experiments and pioneering groups who would come to radically different conclusions but it was never less than stimulating; depending on your personality or tendencies and your aesthetic tastes it either became an exercise in antiquarianism or it became a type of incredibly passionate and engaged reconstructionism of bringing to life something that had lain shrouded; the analogy that is frequently used is like taking a layer of varnish off a painting; but it is different; the crucial difference between music and drama with painting and sculpture is that you can't alter the latter, but with music (and drama) it is one thing to be on the page but another thing to be translated into sounds; those sounds will vary from one interpreter to another, one day to another, depending on all sorts of different circumstances and impulses; it is a continually evolving process, one that never stops; to have been a part of that movement and to have witnessed what it has produced over the last fifty years has been a huge privilege and rich experience, not always a comfortable one; as so often pioneers tend to exaggerate being so passionate in their espousal of a particular view on music of the past so that their results may emerge very mannered; there is some duplication and some antipathy; it has been a question of constant self-criticism and self-appraisal of how one approaches the music of the past and what its relevance might be in our society today, how it can change peoples' lives because it does change peoples' lives; it can change their belief system, be a substitute for belief, it can be a palliative, a means of coming to terms with bereavement, grief, psychological breakdown, or it can be simply just wonderful entertainment; it can be taken at so many different levels; but I think it hugely pertinent and means that music-making is not just an arcane process that is restricted to an elite group of performers or cognoscenti who appreciate it; it has the capacity to transcend and to leap over boundaries; one example is Bach, who is very dear to my heart, the bulk of his music was written for a very narrow sectarian version of orthodox Lutherism at a mid-point in the eighteenth century before it became subsumed in the Enlightenment; he wrote a cantata for every single Sunday in the church year and maintained his cycles over two or three years, we don't know how many have gone missing but we have certainly got 200 of them; they are extraordinarily powerful pieces lasting anything between fifteen to thirty minutes each; because he wrote them at speed, a bit like Charles Dickens writing his novels IN monthly instalments, he didn't have much time to edit, so he lets his critical guard down in the cantatas much more than in the Passions or the B minor Mass or Christmas Oratorio; so you get a sense that his own personality is grinning through the fabric of the music, and there are certain things that irritate him or are particularly close to his heart; for example, he doesn't pull any punches when it comes to hypocrites or to self-serving Lutherans whom he thinks are there just paying lip service; he will send down this musical bombardment from the gallery of the St Thomas Church in Leipzig where I have just come back from now, to the unsuspecting congregation, just as often as he will provide music of the most ineffable peace and consolation to those who are going through periods of disbelief or bereavement; I am a passionate advocate of the currency that music making can have ON society at large and on the individual within society, without distorting it and creating a pretension for it which I believe would be unfortunate; I do believe it is a force for good and social cohesion and a way of binding a community together, both in the act of music-making through singing and playing, but also in the way that an audience gets drawn into the process; as a conductor, somebody who is responsible for getting the spark going, that you can find yourself both highly involved in the performance but also distanced from it, where you can almost step aside and observe what's happening and how people are receiving it; that is a fascinating process and it has never lost its force or charm for me
1:17:43:13 Beethoven did certainly revere Handel, but for him Bach was an ocean; I adore Handel and was for ten years the director of the Handel Festival in Göttingen; I don't want to compare him with Bach too directly, for they are on about different things; it is an extraordinary thing that they were born within a few miles of each other in the same year, and they never met despite effort, certainly on Bach's side, to meet; their careers were so diametrically opposed; Handel was a man of the world, a cosmopolitan, he went to Italy, Ireland, and came to England to live, Bach always lived within the German-speaking lands; both were absolutely au fait with all the currents of music-making of their day and would have had fascinating conversations had they met; both composers have stood the test of time and Beethoven was deeply influenced by both of them; Beethoven tangled with politics and got bruised; you think of him in the early 1800s totally under the spell of the French Revolution and Napoleon, and even thinking of moving to Paris, then getting so disillusioned when Napoleon crowned himself Emperor; then he went through a bad patch at the time of the writing of Fidelio, when his writing became very nationalistic, almost crypto-facist - a couple of pieces, Germania and Der glorreiche Augenblick which are quite nasty in their proto-Nazi triviality; then he comes through all that and you get the Promethean power of the last quartets, the Missa Solemnis, which to me is his greatest work of all, and the Ninth Symphony; on Wagner, I don't have a great sympathy towards the man or his music; I find him as an individual quite off-putting, not so much on his personal live or his statements, but in the fact that he seemed to arrogate to himself the right to have composed music that he never composed; he seemed to think that he had composed the music of Weber, even of Beethoven, Schubert and Schumann; his writings about music of the past almost suggest that it was his inspiration which created it, which is preposterous; more than that I find Wagner difficult to stomach because of the preponderant influences he had on music-making of his day to the detriment of other composers, particularly Brahms, and to the long shadow that his music cast right up until the First World War, and even till today, on French composers as varied as Fauré and Debussy, English composers like Elgar; it was a kind of harmonic exaggeration, distortion, of the classical language of music which is very powerful and attractive in its way, but it is tainting to me; apart from the fact that I don't think I have got anything to contribute, my fear is that if I conducted a whole Wagner opera, let alone a Ring cycle, that it would be impossible for me having done so ever to take a step back to conducting Handel, Bach and Mozart, or even the great nineteenth century composers that I adore, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Verdi....the list is immense; I would find that it would be a contaminating influence; it is a very subjective judgement, and I know I am in a minority; another thing that gets me about Wagner is the way in which he seems to demand compliance, and that you should bend the knee to him, you are either a card-carrying Wagnerite or not, and I don't like being manipulated in that way

1:24:19:15 Before giving a performance, at a banal level you have to know the score inside out; you need to commit it to memory as much as possible; you need to know all its component parts in terms of orchestration, voicing, its harmonic structure, rhythmic structure and so on; that goes without saying; you need also to establish an empathy with the composer with a pretty good familiarity with the terms and conditions under which each work was created, how it came into existence, for what audience, in what space, for what occasion, how was the orchestra composed, how was the choir composed, what type of voices it had, what type of preoccupations any composer had at the time of composing it; that to me as a King's-trained historian it is terribly important to establish the context; then it is a matter of being very still and quiet and listening to the music and reconstructing it in one's head, in one's inner ear; a lot of my colleagues as conductors are brilliant keyboard players and they can do it that way; I can't, I am a very poor keyboard player; I have trained myself, and thanks to Nadia Boulanger, to learn a score sitting in a chair silently reconstructing it in my mind, and going back over it again and again; then it comes to the question of rehearsing it; that is a matter of practicality because rehearsals are expensive and time-consuming, and an orchestra or choir's patience is taxed by too much rehearsal or too little rehearsal; if you have too little then you are asking a heck of a lot of the performers, their sight-reading skill and attentiveness at the moment of performance; you have got to get that balance right; as a conductor a lot is associated with empathising with the performers' problems, whether technical - on a wind instrument or to do with embouchure, or the point of contact between a string and the bow, or the difficulties of breathing, the opportunities of expressing yourself through the music, not in an egotistical way but in a way that is serving the music; you have to know what the technical problems are, but also the psychology of the performer; perhaps the most important thing of all it is best if you can create in the minds of your performing apparatus, the ensembles that you are conducting, the sense that it is actually their interpretation not yours, or at least that they have got room and flexibility to express themselves; it is not like in the bad old days when you had a dictatorial conductor, a despot, who says this is how it is going to be played or you will be fired; nowadays there is far more collaboration and consensus; it is more than a consensus, it is also a psychological trick of being able, in so far AS circumstances will allow, to get a singer or player to feel that his or her contribution is absolutely critical to the success of the performance; that takes a lifetime to master and one still makes mistakes, but that is the goal

1:29:02:15 I was the youngest of three children; I am close to my sister who is four and a half years older; my older brother is very different to me; he became a Muslim and we had a very different trajectory to our lives; we are now reconciled and I am very glad that that is so; I have had a very rich family life, I owe a huge amount to both my parents even though I fought with them in my teens; my father did not want me to become a professional musician; he thought that music should belong to the land; my mother was wonderfully supportive and gave me the opportunity, the impulse, and above all the belief that I could do it, which she sustained right to her death; I have been married three times; my first wife is still a good friend and we parted because I would like to have had a family and she didn't want to; my second wife, Liz, is the mother of my three daughters; she is a very strong and powerful personality who is a quite exceptional music therapist, and she lead my orchestra for a while; the things that made us separate in the end were to do with different life-style expectations; I think she would have preferred not to have been a conductor's wife, and when I was working in Lyon as the head of the Opera House, it took me away when the family was beginning to be born and come into existence; she would have liked me to have been around a lot more and that caused friction between us; my third wife, Isabella, is an exceptional person in every way; of musical pedigree, her grandfather was the famous Victor de Sabata, brilliantly distinguished Italian conductor, artistic director of La Scala, Milan, after Toscanini; she is a record producer and extremely good musician herself, wonderfully supportive of my music activities, but also loves the countryside in the same way that I do, and she is empathetic and in tune with my three daughters too, so I feel very fortunate