by Bryan Magee
One of the most useful things he taught me was how to get in to public events that were full up, or at any rate sold out. ‘If you’re turned away at the door, find another door – there has to be one, like a stage door or a players’ entrance, that people use who work there. There’ll probably be a bloke on duty there. Talk to him nicely, and tell him you’ve tried to buy a ticket, and give him a couple of bob. Usually he’ll let you in, and show you where you can stand. Often he’ll show you to an empty seat. If there’s no one at that door, walk through it as if it’s normal for you to be there – as if you’re somebody’s son who works there, say, and you’re used to coming. You won’t be challenged, normally. If you are, just pretend you’ve made a mistake. But be nice about it, as if you really have made a mistake. Don’t bluster. Half the time they’ll say: “Oh, all right then, go on through.” And you’re in.’ I did these things many times, for a long while only with him, but later, when I had gained confidence, by myself. He never encouraged me to try to get in to things for nothing. It was a point of honour with him to try first to buy tickets. But if he could not get them, it became equally a point of honour to get in regardless of that fact. He would always tip whoever helped him, and was prepared to pay as much as he would have paid for tickets. I never knew him fail. This goes a long way to explain how it is that so many of the outstanding events of those years in London, by way of championships and star performances, were part of my experience of growing up.
The first Promenade concerts he took me to were still being conducted by Sir Henry Wood, their founder – and incidentally the conductor on my recording of Schubert’s ‘Unfinished’ Symphony. Nearly all the works I heard at any concert then, I was hearing for the first time. This is an aspect of my life during those years whose magic is unrecapturable, the fact that I was doing so many of the most enjoyable things in life for the first time – hearing the symphonies of Beethoven, Brahms, Sibelius, and other great symphonists; seeing the plays of Shakespeare, Ibsen and the rest. If I could live one period again it would be that, the discovery of all those incredible things within such a short space of time. The world was astounding, the discovery of it thrilling. The first time I heard the Brahms Violin Concerto, played at a Prom by Ida Haendel, I was enraptured beyond the power of speech to describe. I had been hearing the violin all my life, but I had never known it could sound like that. When I first heard Brahms’s Third Symphony I was chilled with gooseflesh from the first bars, my hair prickling up all over my scalp. Performance after performance was a seismic shift in my being. And then, always to come, was the excitement of hearing these works for a second time. As for the third, that was in some ways the best of all, because you knew the work well enough by now to get more out of it, yet it was not familiar. Often it was during that third performance that a work became familiar, was ingested. With many of them – the Eroica is an example – it was the third performance that was the blockbusting experience, and remains the memory.
One of the great things about the Proms was the breadth of repertoire, ideal for a newcomer like me. It seemed I could hear everything. Outside the Proms, concert life was narrow. What had been London’s only concert hall, the Queen’s Hall, had been destroyed in the Blitz, so symphony concerts had to take place in ad hoc venues, the chief being the Albert Hall and two of the West End’s theatres, the Cambridge and the Phoenix. Because rehearsal time was expensive, and in order to bring in audiences, the same popular classics were played over and over again – by the same artists, too. No foreign artists were able to come to Britain during the war, so we heard the same handful of conductors and instrumentalists. Since both Beecham and Barbirolli were in the USA, the only ‘great’ conductor on the London scene was Adrian Boult. Luckily, he was a good all-rounder, trained to be so by working as the BBC’s all-purpose conductor – though as good at Brahms as anyone; and Brahms was my favourite symphonic composer. The outstanding pianists were Solomon and Moiseiwitsch: I first heard most of the popular piano concertos played by one or the other. I became a particular fan of Moiseiwitsch. He excelled not only in the classical repertoire but also, indeed especially, in the big romantic concertos. Rachmaninov himself had said that Moiseiwitsch played his piano music better than anyone else. He had a sourpuss demeanour at the keyboard, but his playing was huge in romantic expression. This was true also of Rachmaninov, incidentally, who I used to see on cinema newsreels.
A surprising number of individual concerts remain in my memory. At one, the programme consisted of Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet overture, Liszt’s First Piano Concerto and Sibelius’s First Symphony. I had never heard any of these before, and the first and last made indelible impressions, though in different ways. The Tchaikovsky contained one of the most sumptuously beautiful tunes I had ever heard; yet it was the Sibelius which, as it were, changed my life. It started quietly, as if groping for a tune, but then suddenly pulled the cord tight and started to pour out intense, compelling musical utterance, as if addressing me personally. It was as if I had suddenly discovered my own musical voice. If I had been a great composer, I thought, this was how I would compose. From that day I became an addicted lover of Sibelius’s music. He seems to me among the greatest of composers, and his music has talked to me in this way ever since.
It was at the Proms that I heard most of the core repertoire for the first time – and then again for the second, and the third. There were rarities at the Proms too, and a great many first performances. I saw several of the leading British composers conduct their own music, for instance Vaughan Williams, William Walton and E.J. Moeran (whose neglected G minor Symphony is a beautiful work). Monday night, by tradition, was Wagner night, when bleeding chunks were torn from the carcasses of Wagner’s operas (which were not themselves staged in Britain during the war) and served up as concert items, sometimes for a whole programme, though more often for half of it. I knew by heart those excerpts that my father had recordings of, but the others I had never heard at all. One such concert ended with Eva Turner singing the closing scene of Götterdämmerung. I stood enraptured, and afterwards remembered every moment of the performance, hyper-vividly, yet I never knew what happened between the end of the music and finding myself, more than half an hour later, in Piccadilly Circus, nearly two miles away. I must have walked out of that concert in a complete daze: gone, sent, zonked: and instead of getting on the tube at Knightsbridge gone on walking – past, unnoticing, additional tube stations at Hyde Park Corner and Green Park. When my awareness of myself returned I was in Piccadilly Circus, gaping round like a man torn from a dream, with no idea why I was there or how I had got there.
Once the Proms had come into my life they never left it. One year my father gave me a season ticket for the second half of the Proms, and a season ticket for the tube, so that I could go every night. Later, during the forty years when I lived within walking distance of the Albert Hall, not a summer went by without my going to some of the Proms. By the late 1990s I was taking a teenage granddaughter to them.
London’s concert life was transfigured by the ending of the war. It meant that foreign artists could again visit Britain. Beecham returned from the USA and founded the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. I saw conductors such as Furtwängler and de Sabata (whom I still think of as the most exciting to watch of all conductors), and legendary pianists and violinists. Claudio Arrau’s playing of Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto came as a revelation to me, not only of the work itself but of what piano-playing could be. Life in Britain crawled out of the imposed provincialism of wartime on to an international scene. I had been more than happy with concert-going as it had been before, but now I was introduced to standards I had never experienced, and a new kind of excitement came into my life. For years past the supreme thrill had been to hear the greatest works for the first time, but now that I had heard most of the central repertoire I was experiencing the quite different thrill of hearing those works played better than before, sometimes better than I would have imagined possible. In some w
ays it was like hearing them again for the first time.
As the years went by, London established the richest, most extensive concert life of any of the world’s great cities. This went on for most of my adult life, and I lived through the development as one of its most avid beneficiaries: the whole experience, from the beginning, was part of the inner framework of my life. London was also, during the same period, the city of the world that was most richly endowed with theatre. For someone whose greatest passions were music and theatre it was an incomparable place to live in during the second half of the twentieth century. I became a Londoner in a special sense, in that the life I lived there could not have been lived anywhere else, not even in New York, which was the city that came closest to it. When I emerged from the education system, I would not have considered living anywhere else. Whatever the career advantages, I would never have taken a job that involved living out of central London. Nothing mattered more to me than music and theatre. The deep foundations of all this were laid in the 1940s.
If I were asked to single out one especially formative set of theatre experiences it would be the run of seasons by the Old Vic Company between 1944 and 1947. Laurence Olivier had just returned from the United States,1 and ran the company in harness with Ralph Richardson. Its own theatre had been bombed, so the seasons were played at the New Theatre (now the Noël Coward). They launched themselves in the late summer of 1944 with three plays in repertoire: Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, Shaw’s Arms and the Man, and Shakespeare’s Richard III. The supporting company consisted of people who were major actors in their own right. Richardson’s Peer and Olivier’s Richard were among the supreme theatrical experiences of anyone who saw them. Audiences reacted with something akin to shock. There had never, not even before the war, been theatre like this. We had seen stellar performances – Valk’s Othello, Wolfit’s Lear, Gielgud’s Hamlet – but not two performers of that standard in one play with the entire production at a comparable level – and then two or more such productions running together in repertoire. It was as if every aspect of them was of the highest quality. For instance, Tyrone Guthrie as director brought a kind of genius to Peer Gynt, and even the tiny part of the Button Moulder in its last act was played by Laurence Olivier.
The following year the same company achieved the same levels in both parts of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, Sheridan’s The Critic, and Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. If anything, Richardson’s Falstaff and Olivier’s Oedipus out-topped their Peer and Richard. And again there were twenty-four-carat performances in supporting roles – Justice Shallow in Henry IV, Part 2 was played by Olivier. For years afterwards I thought of this Oedipus Rex as the best production of any play I had seen. It was with this run of performances that Olivier became, in most people’s estimation, the supreme actor of the age – a position that had been occupied hitherto by John Gielgud – and he continued to be thought so for the rest of his life. The following year, 1946, he played King Lear, with Alec Guinness as the Fool, while Ralph Richardson starred in Cyrano de Bergerac; and only a couple of months after that, in January 1947, Richardson and Guinness gave us Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist. It was pure magic, all of it. Richardson’s performances were to my mind as good as Olivier’s, though he was less charismatic. He was great, but in a different way, full of inwardness, while with Olivier everything was externalised. Each was a perfect foil for the other. For me the experience ran parallel to the one I was having at concerts: here were supremely great works being performed better than they could have been even in my imagination, unpossessed as that was of the combined genius of, shall we say, Ralph Richardson and Tyrone Guthrie.
There has been nothing like it since. I have seen single productions which are as good, but not year after year of whole seasons of them in repertory. And there have not been better actors since. It caught me at just the right age. It is all sixty years ago now, but it provided me with a touchstone of theatrical excellence throughout my life. I have found that others who lived through those seasons are at one with me on this – Kenneth Tynan once said that whenever two such people meet they start reminiscing like First World War veterans who shared a trench on the Somme.
The same theatre was used by the Sadler’s Wells opera and ballet companies for their London seasons (they spent most of their time touring), so going to the New became the high point of my life in most respects. We as a family always bought the cheapest seats, those in the gallery, price one shilling and sixpence, unreserved. To save enthusiasts from having to queue all day, this theatre and some others operated a system of marking places in the queue with little camp-stools. At the New Theatre this was run by a wily old dear called Winnie. On the morning of the performance you found Winnie somewhere near the theatre (possibly in a pub), showed her your tickets, and she sold you numbered slips for your places in the queue, sixpence a time, first come, first served. A couple of hours before the performance she set out as many camp-stools as there were seats in the gallery, each with a slip number attached, several abreast in a long queue up against the theatre wall. If you did not claim yours by a certain time you forfeited it, and with it your place in the queue, which would be allowed to go into the theatre half an hour before the performance. For an hour or more, then, there would be this queue of hundreds of people squatting on little camp-stools in the open air alongside the theatre – chattering to one another, reading newspapers and books, eating food out of paper bags – while the normal occupants of the street walked past them. If it rained they sat on their diminutive stools holding up umbrellas, a sight that was touchingly English. They were a captive audience for buskers, who performed there one after another. These could be musicians, dancers, jugglers, acrobats. One young man declaimed speeches from whatever play we were about to see. He did it rather well, I thought, and I assumed he was an aspiring actor, but I never heard of him in any other connection.
That queue was a world in itself, with a life of its own. Many of the people in it were the same all the year round. Friendships formed, love affairs began, marriages ensued. News would pass up and down the queue. ‘Have you heard? The So-and-so’s are going to have a baby.’ It was where one picked up theatrical gossip, too, and news about forthcoming events in the performing arts generally. In the way she manipulated us all, Winnie combined fairness with corruptibility in proportions that were just right for the regulars who knew her and understood how she operated.
My sister Joan was more a part of all this than I was – she was in London all the year round, and during the ballet seasons she would go almost every night – but when I was at home during school holidays I was the only member of the family whose time was free, so it was my job to go up to the New Theatre in the morning and find Winnie, so that with luck we might be in the front row of the gallery. After that I would be on the loose in the West End for the rest of the day, until the performance in the evening.
These were the circumstances in which I started on a way of life that was to be mine, in essence, for most of my adulthood. In subsequent decades I would book my tickets in advance and sit in better seats in the theatre, eat in better restaurants, travel there perhaps by taxi instead of tube; but all those things are mere outer wrapping. The point of it all, the essential experience, remained the same: the same performances at the same times in the same venues as I would have gone to in any case, however little money I might have had.
Since that was how a whole way of life began, I think of myself as having received the most worthwhile part of my introduction to it in wartime. When I now see photographs of London as it was then, I am taken aback by the greyness and drabness of it, the run-downness, the in-your-face poverty. That is not how I saw it at the time. My life in wartime London was the most exciting and enjoyable I could imagine for myself, and this made it a glamorous place to be. I was responding to the inwardness of it, and it is the inner experience I remember. Although, for example, I made hundreds of journeys late at night on crowded tube trains in the blackout, I can find w
ithin myself only the most generalised memory of them. I must, I suppose, have been lost in thought about what I had just been seeing and listening to.
I carried on spending most of my mornings at home, usually playing records. Only four months after I had acquired the ‘Unfinished’ Symphony, my father made me a birthday present of Grieg’s Piano Concerto. This gave me the idea of asking for records as presents. From then on, whenever anyone asked me what I wanted for my birthday or Christmas, I would ask them to give me money so that I could put it together with money from other people to buy a whole symphony or concerto. That way, I could expect to acquire two such works a year. One after another, I bought Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto and Eighth Symphony, Mozart’s Fortieth Symphony, Brahms’s Third, Tchaikovsky’s Sixth, Sibelius’s Second and Seventh, together with a host of shorter works. Because Sibelius’s Seventh occupied only three discs, I was able to buy that and the so-called ‘love duet’ from Tristan and Isolde with money I got for my fourteenth birthday. Deep into Wagner, I acquired several excerpts from his operas, and became specially hooked on Isolde’s Narration and the closing scene from Götterdämmerung, both sung by Kirsten Flagstad. Goodness knows how many times I played these. Once, sitting alone listening to the historic Lauritz Melchior–Frida Leider duet from Tristan for the goodness-knows-how-manyeth time, I burst into tears, overwhelmed by the marvellousness of it and of being conscious and able to hear it, of being in such a world at all. Any description of this will sound squudgy and sentimental, but the experience itself was unselfconscious and profound. Even so, the recording that I played most often – the only one I actually wore out – was not of Wagner, it was Sibelius’s Seventh Symphony. There was a period of about two years when I played it at least once every day I was at home.