2 - A Personal Portrait of Charles Mackerras

Summary

No other colleagues worked more closely with Charles for over forty years than I did, so much so that we also became great family friends. It was thanks to him that at least three important steps in my career took place. I first remember him when I was a schoolboy in London, regularly attending opera performances at Sadler's Wells in the early 1950s: after a performance, this strikingly gaunt, pale, hollow-eyed and red-haired young maestro would come on for the curtain calls. I met him next at auditions for Cedric Messina's 1965 BBC studio production of La Bohème, for which I was the associate conductor. We hit it off immediately, and I performed the same task for him on three other occasions. It was Charles who got me my first job conducting for Sadler's Wells Opera and who, soon after, appointed me his Associate Conductor at ENO. Among other things, this involved my sitting behind him at orchestral and stage rehearsals and eventually taking over from him (with no rehearsal). He was partly influential in my being asked to found English National Opera North in 1978. Inevitably, the distance between London and Leeds made our meetings less frequent, but we still remained in close contact, and I attended his performances as often as I could. Coincidentally, we were fellow Scorpios: Charles's birthday was on 17 November, mine on the 19th, with the result that we and our wives used to meet up whenever possible for a meal on the 18th.

Opera was Charles's first love, and I very much doubt if there has ever been a person who has conducted such an enormous number of them over so wide a range of nationalities, periods and styles. It was virtually impossible to name an opera that he had not conducted, often in a variety of productions in countries all over the world.