The teacher who changed my life

A few years ago I gave a talk in London on “100 Years of Macbeth Recordings”, Verdi that is.

The audience for the talk, mainly gents (and a few ladies) older than me, and very expert in the history of recordings and opera and singers, were not to be impressed by my knowledge of (and insights regarding) Verdi. But they understood pretty quickly that I had a good grasp of the play and of how Verdi had gone about reshaping and compressing it for the lyric stage.

It was only later that I realised that my love of Macbeth started much earlier, with GS Braddy’s production at Uppingham School in 1957. Not having any performing role in that, I studied the text privately, and knew it well by the time of the performances. I was thirteen.

Later I had the good luck to be in Gordon Braddy’s English literature class. We studied Bernard Shaw’s St Joan and Shakespeare’s Henry V. I can’t think that Braddy himself can have been very inspired by Saint Joan. (I certainly was left with no great love for Shaw’s wordy pontifications.) But Henry V stays with me, illuminated by that inspiring man. And Shakespeare since those days has been a constant presence in my life.

Many of his pupils have referred to Braddy’s treatment of boys as his equals. I feel sure that this was an illusion, but one which is at the heart of so much great teaching.

One day, under the spell of Kerouac’s On the Road in 1958 (was I the only one?), I wrote a pseudo-drug-filled pastiche which Braddy read out in full to the class in his best American-poetic voice. Although he had not himself read Kerouac, he sensed fundamentally what it was. I was overjoyed.

In due course I escaped from the cloistered, for me repressive, world of Uppingham. The piece I took with me was Gordon Braddy.

Does everyone have such an influence in their life?

(Above: Margherita Grandi as Lady Macbeth, photo by Angus McBean.)

Exploring the “founding myth”

The school that I went to had an extraordinary musical culture which went back to the earliest days of its establishment as a boarding school in the mid-nineteenth century.

In 1864, the pioneering headmaster of Uppingham, Edward Thring, was looking for a new director of music. The English composer, Sir William Sterndale Bennett, was commissioned by Thring to find him. He went to the place in Germany where he had studied, the Leipzig Conservatorium. There, amongst others, he asked the advice of the violinist leader of the Gewandhaus orchestra, Ferdinand David. David had given the premiere of Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto, and was a close friend and associate of Mendelssohn, Schumann and Brahms.

Ferdinand suggested that his own son, Paul David, would be appropriate for this new post. Paul was just 25 years old with little or no English. He travelled to England in company with one of his father's most gifted pupils, Joseph Joachim, who was by this time already one of the most famous violinists in the world. (Joachim was to give the first performance of both Brahms’s and Bruch’s first Violin Concertos.)

Paul David inspired high standards of music at the school - a tradition which persists to this day. By no means an outstanding composer, nevertheless he was a fine violinist, and he wrote much music for the school. He continued to teach at Uppingham for some 40 years.

Joachim (above, by Adolph von Menzel), who frequently made concert tours in Britain, would always go to the school deep in the English countryside to visit his friend and to do some coaching. He even played in the back row of the violins in the school’s string orchestra. He had made his debut in England in 1844 playing the Beethoven concerto under Mendelssohn - and his final performance of this same work was given at Uppingham in 1905 at the opening of the new concert hall.

Fittingly, Paul David was succeeded as head of music at Uppingham by William Sterndale Bennett’s grandson, Robert, who continued to maintain and develop musical standards for a further four decades.

Among the many distinguished musical pupils who have emerged from the school are the folklorist Cecil Sharp, the composer EJ Moeran and the violinist leader of the Lindsay String Quartet, Peter Cropper.

When I work with established organizations who wish to create change in some way, I always encourage them first to re-examine their “founding myth”. So often it has a profound influence on the current situation, usually quite subconsciously. At Uppingham, it’s not so hard to find.

Someone I never met

Although it’s in an extraordinarily beautiful part of England, Uppingham School in the late 1950s and early 1960s was mostly a stultifying experience for me.

With the aim (for him) of following my father as a General Practitioner, I was coerced into studying sciences at school, whereas all my own interests were in the arts, history and languages. In many ways I’m grateful now that I have some understanding of science and scientific method. For example, it has enabled me to spend a working life up to my armpits in the analysis of data. And to facilitate innovation meetings on leading edge subjects such as nanotechnology.

I’ve also been able to pursue my own preferred path consistently since leaving school at eighteen.

One thing that was an enormous help to me was to identify, while I was at Uppingham, a former pupil who went on to forge a brilliant career in the arts – in his case as a film director and opera producer – John Schlesinger. While I was still at school, he directed a wonderfully vital documentary about Waterloo Station, later going on to make many of the best movies on his generation – A Kind of Loving, Billy Liar, Darling, Far from the Madding Crowd, Midnight Cowboy, Sunday Bloody Sunday, Marathon Man and many more.

His example was with me both at school and thereafter. I followed everything he did. And on Wednesday, on the hundredth anniversary of the première of Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, I took time out to watch (on DVD) his timeless production of the opera at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. This is the final trio with Kiri Te Kanawa, Anne Howells and Barbara Bonney: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WIscFQy1CQ&feature=related

He’s gone now, but I owe him a great deal.

Do you have someone you never met who unknowingly helped to shape your creative life?