5 - The Lion: Charles Mackerras

Summary

The one excellent thing that can be learned from a lion is that whatever a man intends doing should be done by him with a whole-hearted and strenuous effort.

(Chanakya, 370–283 BC)

That Sir Charles Mackerras was one of the great renaissance men of classical music is now, thankfully, well known. Charles had a rare gift in an art that tends towards narcissism: one inevitably left a Mackerras performance feeling ‘what a great opera or symphony’, rather than ‘what a great conductor’. This was how he purposefully and precisely lived his life and tirelessly shaped his career. Music and everything that moulded it was his total focus. His curiosity and industry never diminished, even when age forced him to conserve his physical resources. He was a lion whose winter was uniquely rich: that his career reached its apogee after the age of 60 was at odds with the youth-obsession of the era, but it was perfectly logical to him for an art that demands a lifetime of knowledge, experience and confidence.

I'd like to record some impressions of him that might reveal his character. He was proudly and fully a musician, and as a man he was, more than anyone I have ever known, inseparable from music. It was his greatest passion and deepest interest. Much as he loved his family and his small circle of close friends, music was what came first in his life, and everyone who knew him accepted the fact. These reflections will be – as memory so often is – brief glimpses of a person. He was a complex man, a fact somewhat belied by his professorial exterior. He was inevitably dressed in a colourful Coogi sweater accessorized only with various toolboxes of batons, pencils, erasers and Post-it notes.

His wide range of interests and tastes form a great part of his story, since his active repertoire and knowledge were the broadest of nearly any conductor in history.