Toby the Tenor

Sitting in a cafe in South Kensington, studying a new full score of Dvorak’s D minor Symphony, a man turned to the 21 year-old Charles Mackerras and said “Ah, I see you are reading the music of my country.” The comment led to a conversation in which Mackerras told the new acquaintance, an amateur cellist called Josef Weisslitzer, that he was “anxious to become a conductor but that all the conductors in the UK were so busy that they didn’t have time to teach.” The gentleman told him to apply for a British Council scholarship to study in Prague. “At that time, Prague was the place where you could find great conductors who had time for you.”

In February 1947, soon after the end of the war, Mackerras travelled to London on one of the first boats from Sydney to pursue his dream of becoming a conductor. On arrival, Mackerras got a job at London’s Sadler’s Wells Theatre as rehearsal pianist and second oboe. Soon after his arrival at the theatre, he formed a relationship with Judy Wilkins, the principal clarinet in the house orchestra.

In August 1947, newly married and with his wife in tow, Mackerras travelled by train across post-war Europe. By the time he arrived in Prague he was devastated by what he had seen on the journey. He described Prague as being in a traumatised state of its own, despite the city being more-or-less spared of the destruction that had afflicted the rest of Europe. Among the few European cities where the theatres and concert halls were left intact, Prague was one of the first places to revive its musical tradition.

Commenting on the shocking food shortages, Mackerras said they “fanned the flame that enabled the communists to say, well, you know, all this poverty was produced by the capitalist system. Why not try our system?”

He was in Prague when the communists came to power in Czechoslovakia and witnessed the imprisonment of friends who had become political activists. One friend, having been in a concentration camp under the Nazis, immediately fell foul of the new regime. The friend was forced to work in a uranium mine where he developed radiation poisoning and died soon afterwards.

He forged a frieindship with the principal oboist of the Czech Philharmonic, Jiří Tancibudek. Tancibudek took Mackerras to hear Václav Talich conduct Leoš Janáček’s opera, Kat’a Kabanova. Mackerras had never heard Janáček’s music before and later described experiencing “the first opening chords swelling out of the cellos and basses. (In that moment) I fell in love with Janáček and all of his operas.”

Mackerras went on to study conducting with Talich, who schooled him in understanding Janacek’s difficult music. A year later, Mackerras returned to London with the published scores of Janáček’s operas. He said years later, “because I became such a fanatical enthusiast for the music, I brought a score of Kat’a Kabanova to Norman Tucker at Sadler’s Wells… so we put on this opera.” Sadler’s Welsh planned a production for 1951. In the event, Michael Mudie fell seriously ill and had to relinquish the role of conductor to his assistant, the 25 year-old Charles Mackerras.

Sixty years later, I had the fortune to work with Charlie on Kat’a Kabanova. During the process, I asked him about the first performances – he was reserved when it came to talking about his life and experience until he was asked about it, then he’d always be delighted to share his memories. He told me that the theatre scheduled an incredible amount of time with the orchestra because the printed parts for the players were extremely badly edited. Not only that, he felt he needed the time to teach the orchestra Janáček’s style and for the players to assimilate the difficult music. If I remember rightly, he said the theatre scheduled thirty hours of orchestral rehearsal for him to straighten out score and to get it sounding how he believed it should. For a relatively short opera like Kat’a Kabanova, it equates to twenty minutes of rehearsal for every minute of music.

The opening performances received a sensational response. Aside from a few performances of Janáček’s work in Germany, Vienna and a very unsuccessful production at the Met in New York, his music had never been heard outside Czechoslovakia. When asked by Sue Lawley on Desert Island Discs in 1999, whether it was entirely because of him that Janáček entered the mainstream repertory, he said, “In a way, I suppose you could say that that is true because… after the war nobody played Janáček’s music at all.”

At the time Sadler’s Wells was performing its sensational new production of Kat’a, it was simultaneously presenting a new ballet, called Pinapple Poll, that Charles had arranged, based on the music of Gilbert and Sullivan’s operettas. The double headed success launched Mackerras’s career as a conductor of authority that lead to him being the chief conductor of English National Opera, Welsh National Opera, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and emeritus of countless orchestras and festivals.

He produced his own editions of Janáček’s operas that remain the urtext editions today. Janáček’s manuscripts were famously difficult for his publisher to decipher. The painstaking work that must have gone into Mackerras’s editions for Universal Music is remarkable. Nothing is clear in Janáček’s hand. The self-doubt from trying to understand what the composer was hearing in his head through the scrawls, crossings out, approximations and mistakes in his manuscripts must have undermined Mackerras’s belief in his quest.

Thanks to Charlie’s “fanatical enthusiasm”, we inherit music like no other, that springs from the Moldavian folk music of Janáček’s home in Brno, the unusual speech patterns of the Czech language and Janáček’s fevered sound imagination.

In preparation for writing this post, I listened to his 1977 recording of Kat’a. In the first chords I was put in mind of the young Charles sitting in the Gods of the opera house in Prague hearing Kat’a for the first time. With him, I felt the insistent charisma of Janáček’s writing, its unique seriousness that forces the young conductor to lean in and be touched in new ways by the composer’s forever-new music. As the music continues, I can’t help but remember Sir Charles in the glow of the Royal Opera House orchestra pit in 2007, hunched over his score as the humping hamster, gaze fixed on the stage, churning his baton, his tongue twisting in concentration, giving to me and rest of his singers the Janáček he loved so much, as he had given the great composer to London and the world beyond.