A GRATEFUL FAREWELL

A Personal Tribute to Sir Charles Mackerras, (1925 – 2010)
By Patrick Summers, Music Director of Houston Grand Opera

This past summer, the music world lost one of its conducting titans, Sir Charles Mackerras, the last of his kind, a lion whose winter was uniquely rich and industrious. For me, it was both a professional and private loss, as he was a close personal friend and the major musical mentor of my life. Though he conducted only twice at Houston Grand Opera — The Barber of Seville in 1976 and Arabella in 1977 — he exerted an influence on the company for many years into its future, in ways about which I will happily reminisce. I met Charles in the autumn of 1986, during my formative years at the San Francisco Opera, where he became Principal Guest Conductor in the 1990s, a title I now hold. We quickly developed a musical friendship that lasted until his recent death.

He did what musicians are supposed to do: he never stopped learning, and he got better as he aged. He felt it a great privilege to make music. The amazing versatility for which he was so criticized early in his career became the very quality for which he was so justifiably praised as he aged. While other conductors of his generation were concentrating on their profiles or their “specialties,” a concept Charles found very dubious indeed, he simply kept learning about music and got on with conducting. In the process, he became the most probing and diverse conductor of the last 50 years.

Charles was instrumental in convincing me to take the position of Music Director here in Houston, as I was actually leaning in another direction. His reasons for convincing me, which I didn’t fully understand at the time, have proven him right about the city and company, as well as about the position I turned down. It was Charles who first suggested to Anthony Freud that I conduct at the Welsh National Opera, which is where Anthony and I first worked together, and where the seeds were planted for the relationship that would bring Anthony to HGO upon David Gockley’s move to San Francisco. Charles kept in touch with the musical workings of HGO through our radio broadcasts, after each one of which I would usually receive a detailed fax, the most advanced form of technology he ever mastered. As much as I was grateful for the critical response to last season’s Lohengrin, and happy for the recognition it brought to the company, nothing will ever match the approbation I received from Charles, words and thoughts I will forever privately cherish. Charles was the last living musical link to composer Benjamin Britten, whom he consistently called the greatest musician he ever met, and he was helpful about and excited for the Britten series at HGO.

What separated Charles from nearly every other conductor was simple: one inevitably left his performances thinking “What a great symphony,” or “What a magnificent opera,” not, “What a great conductor.” His style was electric and elegant, but not histrionic or attention-seeking. He valued music and its boundless challenges much more than he valued fame; curtain calls were often the hardest part of the night for him. He enjoyed his own talents, more than most musicians, but he didn’t feel the need to identify them for anyone else. If his own longevity and recorded legacy occasionally amazed him, he didn’t dwell on it, as he was always looking delightedly forward to the next project.

He was a proud Australian, delighted that within his lifetime he had witnessed the building of two of his country’s icons: he could remember both the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge in the late 1930s and the Sydney Opera House in the 1970s, the opening concert of which he was thrilled to conduct: an all-Wagner evening with soprano Birgit Nilsson and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. He loved his trips to the United States, where he enjoyed a long relationship with San Francisco Opera and the Metropolitan Opera. He liked his work in Mozart’s old haunts, Prague, Vienna, and Salzburg, and his relationships with the Czech and Vienna Philharmonics were of paramount importance to him. As his health waned his foreign travel slowed down, allowing him to pick up the pace in London and around the UK in his recent years, something he embraced with incredible energy. He adored London more than any place in the world, with its dozens of orchestras and the unparalleled virtuosity of the playing, something that never ceased to amaze him.

He gave advice to many conductors, though his busy performance schedule meant that he mentored only a few. He could sometimes be musically, but never personally, brutal with singers, and he didn’t suffer egos or faulty intelligence with much grace. He deplored what he described as “modern” stage direction, yet he also knew a good abstract idea when he saw it, and some of his best performances were created out of the tension between the tradition he longed for and the new interpretation that challenged him. But, if ideas went too far out from a director, Charles would not, to phrase it gently, suffer in silence.

There is no doubt that Charles is the reason the Janácek operas are known to the world now as the masterpieces they are. Another Czech composer played an important role in Charles’ life: walking together in London’s Regent’s Park one unseasonably balmy Christmas afternoon in the early 1990s, I captured him humming the first movement of the Sixth Symphony of Dvorák; his adored Dvorák provided the soundtrack to much of Charles’s life. But Mozart was his ideal. He was never happier than when conducting a Mozart opera or symphony, and he never tired of studying and learning more about the practicalities of Mozartian performance practice. Charles was a practicing musicologist who held career musicologists in very high esteem. Charles played an important pioneering role in the “original instrument” movement, and loved what it taught the musical world about performance practice, but he also felt that many of the early music specialists, by rarely performing other types of music, consigned themselves to eccentricity.

Charles did not romanticize getting older; he disliked feeling betrayed by his own body. But even in his final months, when he was enduring a brutal treatment regimen, he kept a heroically hefty schedule right up to the end. I treasure the days I spent with him just a few months ago. I was able to attend his opening night of Janácek’s The Cunning Little Vixen at London’s Royal Opera House, and we had lunch the next day. In 1951, an astounding fifty-nine years before, Charles had conducted the British premiere of the same composer’s Katya Kabanová. We had a typically lively conversation about a number of topics, as his mind was strong and clear, but he was physically frail and tired, so I took him home in a taxi. I walked him to the door, vowing to visit him again soon. He turned to me, grabbed my arm and said in the thick Aussie brogue that appeared when his defenses were down, “Goodbye, my boy.”As I walked away, I heard his tired body humming a tune, one of the Dvorák Symphonies, of course.

Patrick Summers
September 7, 2010
Houston, Texas