Giving thanks for the life and work of Lord Harewood

On Friday I went to the Thanksgiving Service for the life of Lord Harewood at All Saints Church, Harewood. Several of our greatest singers performed for us, including Sarah Connolly, Mark Padmore and Sir John Tomlinson. Moving tributes were paid to him by the conductor, Sir Mark Elder, and the footballer, Jack Charlton.

What an extraordinary achievement his working career was. Born into a family not noted for its devotion to the arts, he was first cousin to the Queen and a grandson of King George V and Queen Mary. As a young man he fought in the Second World War and was a prisoner-of-war at Colditz in Germany.

After the war he joined the staff of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, going on to direct annual music festivals in Edinburgh, Leeds, Adelaide and Buxton. Later he joined the English National Opera first as managing director and then as chairman.

His time leading the ENO was the triumphant peak of his career, and I was lucky enough to be there for many of the finest productions of that era. He brought together a brilliant and innovative artistic team, with Charles Mackerras and then Mark Elder as musical directors, and a superb company of singers.

Was he the first member of the British royal family to have a full working life, aside, that is, from joining the military or running the family business?

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?

Arts creative, science logical?

Throughout my childhood and so-called education, I had the notion that the arts were “creative” and science was “logical”. And I clung to this belief for a long time, only gradually coming to realise that some profound paradoxes were involved.

On the one hand, with the help of Karl Popper I came to understand that scientific advance comes from intuitive creative leaps (to be later explored through experimental research).

Yet most scientists (and lay people) still appear to believe that the process is the other way around, and that logical deductive thought is the driver of new knowledge. More than that, my experience is that too many scientists and engineers seem to have a belief that they are not creative beings at all.

On the other hand, most musicians and artists go through rigorous executant training that enables them to become highly skilled practitioners in their particular field. Most artists and musicians (and people generally) assume that their achievements are driven by creativity, whereas my sense is that they are usually driven by learned skills.

Put simply – science is primarily driven by creativity and the arts by skill.

Why have we come to believe that it’s the other way around? And what might be the implications for our education system?