Sir Ernst Gombrich

Speaker 30:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

Speaker 30:08

The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen ninety two, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:30

My Castaway this week is an art historian. His most famous book, The Story of Art, was written more than forty years ago for children, but its appeal to people of all ages has made it the world's most popular introduction to great artists and their work.

Presenter0:45

Its author came to Britain in nineteen thirty six, having been brought up and educated in Vienna. He's held many important academic posts and received many honours. He lives quite modestly in Hampstead, surrounded not so much by pictures as by books. He doesn't want to own art, but to help us appreciate it, hoping always for a return to the time when he says art was a part of the mental furniture of civilized men and women. He is Sir Ernst

Presenter1:15

So much was art a part of your mental furniture, Professor Gombrich, that I think I'm right in saying you were able to write your best seller, The Story of Art, off the cuff, as it were. A secretary came to your house and you simply dictated it.

Sir Ernst Gombrich1:27

Yes, that is more or less correct. I mean, I had illustrations at home which I used, but I didn't plan very much, and I certainly didn't didn't draft what I was to dictate.

Presenter1:37

It just flowed.

Sir Ernst Gombrich1:38

It more or less flows.

Presenter1:40

So forty years on, sixteen editions, millions of copies, twenty different languages, are you do you remain surprised by its success?

Sir Ernst Gombrich1:48

I'm afraid it was fifteen editions so far. Yes, I was immensely surprised by its success.

Sir Ernst Gombrich1:55

I never expected anything like it.

Presenter1:57

I'd like to talk more about the book later, but let me go back to your your mental furniture. If if art was so much a part of it, I dare say music was also. It must have been.

Sir Ernst Gombrich2:08

Very much so, and still is. My mother was a pianist, and she was a pupil of the famous Leszeticki, and also his assistant. My sister is a violinist, who was a pupil of Adolf Bush, and we very recently still played trio together, together with my wife, who is a pianist and a pupil of my mother.

Presenter2:30

So music has been as much a part of your life as art. How how painful a business, therefore, has it been choosing simply eight pieces to take to the desert island with you?

Sir Ernst Gombrich2:40

That was very hard indeed. I have very many things I admire and I have a very large collection of gramophone records and my choice was partly limited by what would not be too mutilated when you play only a few minutes of it.

Presenter2:57

So what's the first record that you'd like us to play?

Sir Ernst Gombrich3:00

My first record, which I selected, was a gramophone record which we produced in memory of my mother, whom I have just mentioned. She used, after her 80th birthday, occasionally to make a present to my wife, who was her pupil, of some recording she played. It was always accompanied by a deprecating remark. She's sorry that it isn't better. But she was crippled with arthritis. She could hardly use the pedal anymore. But she did play, so that I thought it was worth including this little pach prelude in.

Speaker 43:08

Yeah.

Sir Ernst Gombrich3:36

Our program.

Presenter4:35

Bach's prelude in C major, played by Leonie Gombrich, the mother of my castaway, Sir Ernst Gombrich. So she was a professional pianist, and indeed she numbered some rather famous names amongst her friends and teachers, didn't she?

Sir Ernst Gombrich4:49

Yes, certainly. Well, our house was very much a center of music and musicians, and in particular it was the great violinist Adolf Busch, who was a family friend and who often rehearsed with his quartet in our house. He lived for in Vienna for a long time, and when he then moved to Berlin and to Darmstadt, when they came for concerts, they always stayed with us in our houses.

Presenter4:50

Would you tell me?

Presenter5:17

And she'd been a pupil of Bruckner, too, hadn't she?

Sir Ernst Gombrich5:17

Yeah.

Sir Ernst Gombrich5:19

My mother had taken harmony lessons with Anton Brugner when she was more or less a child still, and she knew.

Sir Ernst Gombrich5:27

Gustav Mahler extremely well she was a member of that circle. She still remembered having heard Brahms.

Presenter5:34

At home in Vienna, what was family life like? What did the family talk about? What did you do to amuse yourselves?

Sir Ernst Gombrich5:41

The family talked a good deal about music, about books, about... I had two brothers, elder brothers of my mother, who was were immensely learned and who talked a lot about the classics, about Greek and Roman literature, about Dante and other things, so that the family was certainly what one would call intellectual.

Presenter6:05

So if you were experiencing such a a rich, home grown initiation into the life of culture, your formal education, your schooling, must almost have been a kind of interruption to it, perhaps.

Sir Ernst Gombrich6:16

Yes, I was much bored at school, but on the whole I didn't mind much and I had some excellent teachers, particularly of my teacher in German literature, to whom I have just dedicated a book which I published in Austria to his memory.

Presenter6:34

And were you an excellent pupil, therefore?

Sir Ernst Gombrich6:36

I can't deny it, I walk yet.

Presenter6:40

Record number two.

Sir Ernst Gombrich6:41

Record number two, I selected a record of the Bush quartet. I just mentioned that Adolf Busch and his quartet played a great part in our life, not only in the sense of there being great musicians, but since he was very close to us, also his personality and his outlook. He was a strict classicist, if you like. He was a wonderful musician, but he didn't approve of the experiments of Dodecaphonic music. And his outlook also influenced my sister very much, since she was his pupil. So it seems appropriate that I take a recording by the Busch Quartet of one of the late Beethoven quartets. I took one of the late quartets because I shall have plenty of time to listen to it on the desert island. And since these are notoriously difficult pieces, I shall profit from my solitude there.

Presenter8:44

The Bush quartet playing part of the first movement of Beethoven's string quartet number twelve in E flat major, opus one hundred and twenty seven.

Presenter8:52

How much were you aware, during your childhood, Professor Gombrich, and then as a young adult, of the growth of anti Semitism? How much did it impinge upon you and your family as Jews?

Sir Ernst Gombrich9:04

It

Sir Ernst Gombrich9:05

only very slowly started to impinge. In artistic circles, of course, as always, nobody asked whether an artist was a Jew or not a Jew, one asked whether he was a good artist. And the issue of anti-Semitism seemed something rather vulgar, which intelligent and if one may call it refined people wouldn't even consider. But of course, gradually, as the growth of these parties was evident and the posters appeared in the street inciting violence against Jews, one became very much more aware of it.

Presenter9:46

You'd have been what in your early twenties by then?

Sir Ernst Gombrich9:48

No, I was in my I was at the university when real riots, anti-Semitic riots, started in the university, when uh stormtroopers used to rush into the library to beat up Jews and the university unhappily was considered extra-territorial. The police was not allowed to enter, so that these thugs had free reign in the university. And there, of course, one was very much aware of the dangers, particularly since I cannot say that the all the teachers were very courageous in opposing these thugs.

Presenter10:27

What did they do? They turned away.

Sir Ernst Gombrich10:28

They turned away, they ignored it.

Presenter10:30

Were you beaten up?

Sir Ernst Gombrich10:31

I wasn't beaten up directly because I when I wanted to enter the university on that particular day, um I I saw that there was no chance and I turned back.

Presenter10:43

So you went to England in nineteen thirty six?

Sir Ernst Gombrich10:46

That hype.

Presenter10:47

Uh so you were there, you were gone by the time of the Anschluss, by the time Austria was annexed by the Germans?

Sir Ernst Gombrich10:54

Yes, I was luckily here, though I had gone back to Austria for a time to finish a book.

Sir Ernst Gombrich11:00

But we came here, my wife and I

Sir Ernst Gombrich11:03

Before the Anschluss.

Sir Ernst Gombrich11:06

So we witnessed that horror from afar.

Presenter11:09

You were lucky in that sense. I mean, presumably.

Sir Ernst Gombrich11:10

Immensely lucky, yes.

Presenter11:12

Presumably you had friends who were not so lucky.

Sir Ernst Gombrich11:14

Unhappily, yes.

Sir Ernst Gombrich11:16

quite a number. And of course members of my family and of my wife's family uh perished or committed suicide and were the victims of all these horrors.

Presenter11:30

Record number three.

Sir Ernst Gombrich11:32

Record number three, because I took such a hard and difficult Beethoven, I thought I should also have the more cheerful side of Beethoven. And particularly since on the desert island I shall be out in the open air. I thought Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony, which has the first movement, is entitled, as you know, Awakening of Cheerful Feeling on Arrival in the Countryside. I hope that I have similar feelings when I arrive on the Desert Island. And so I chose a performance by Arturo Toscanini. Toscanini was much admired by Adolphe Bush and by all of us. He actually came to our house. Bush brought him to our house. And my sister incidentally played under Toscanini, both in the Israeli orchestra and later in Lucerne. And she has many stories to tell, so I almost have a feeling that I knew him better than I actually did know him.

Presenter13:36

Part of the first movement of Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony, Number six, in F major opus sixty eight, played by the B B C Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Arturo Toscanini.

Presenter13:47

You're obviously, Professor Gombrich, the product of a very specialized culture, intellectual, middle class, artistic, interwar, Viennese.

Presenter13:56

What's your view, your belief, about the nature of our cultural life today, some sixty years on? Do you think we are we are less cultured? Are we more Philistine than your generation?

Sir Ernst Gombrich14:10

There are some very cultured people, but I think that there is a certain danger of Philistinism, which is largely due, I would say, to the spread of television and similar media. I think that it is quite likely that the real enjoyment of great music or great art still exists among a minority, but there is a certain tendency, as Anin tell you, to speak of elitism and to deprecate this kind of selectivity which in which I believe.

Presenter14:47

Well, let me ask you th then something else, a very elementary question, perhaps.

Presenter14:51

What should a person going into an art gallery for the first time look for? Because if you take a child into an art gallery,

Presenter14:59

with a completely untutored eye, that child is perhaps more likely to be attracted by a sentimental Victorian picture of a puppy dog than it is by um Dura's drawing of a rabbit.

Speaker 415:08

Absolutely.

Presenter15:14

Now, how do you explain to the untouched person that one drawing is better than the other?

Sir Ernst Gombrich15:16

I think that everybody should

Sir Ernst Gombrich15:20

Look particularly children should look at what they really like.

Sir Ernst Gombrich15:25

I think the fatal error is to ram anything down anybody's throat and to make them like things. They can only become attitudinizers. They cannot become anything else.

Presenter15:36

But then they might go on liking the the sloppy sentimental pictures that end up on Christmas.

Sir Ernst Gombrich15:41

Well, I don't think that there's there's much harm if they really enjoy it. I am not one of those who think that every picture which tells a story is therefore sentimental. I am not frightened by all these bogies. So I I think children will gradually understand that there is a more subtle way of expressing emotions than in the most sentimental Victorian paintings, and they will grow into it.

Presenter16:09

Another piece of music.

Sir Ernst Gombrich16:11

Well, I couldn't very well not choose the Mozart concerto, piano concerto, because they are the greatest one of the greatest bodies of great music in our heritage. And I selected an early one, which Mozart wrote when he was twenty-one years old, which is called the Jean-Homme, though it's not for a young man, but for a young lady that it was written. And I selected the third movement because in this Rudolf Serkin, who belongs to the same group as Adolf Busch and in a way Toscanini performed it at Marlborough. Serkin was in.

Presenter16:45

So you know

Sir Ernst Gombrich16:51

lifelong friend of mine. I think I knew him for seventy years and admired him. And so naturally I wanted him to show up on this programme.

Presenter18:01

Part of the third movement of Mozart's piano concerto, number nine, in E flat major, played by Rudolph Sirkin, with the Marlborough Festival Orchestra conducted by Alexander Schneider.

Presenter18:12

Tell me about your first impressions of England. What did you think of it after your elegant Vienna?

Sir Ernst Gombrich18:17

Well, I must say that my lodgings and where I could eat and so on were pretty sordid and smelly. I didn't enjoy that part of my existence here at all. In this respect, London has changed enormously. There was, I think, a tendency to use very bad and cheap oil or fat, and the smell of these little eating places, lions or ABC or express dairy, was really pretty awful. So my enjoyment of London was more or less limited to the great museums and the parks.

Presenter18:57

What about your English? Was it any good at that stage?

Sir Ernst Gombrich18:59

No, I had had private lessons in England, in English, uh but though I could read some Shakespeare, when I arrived and wanted to ask for a second towel, I didn't know the word for towel, of course, because it doesn't occur in Shakespeare. My real initiation into English happened when I worked for the BBC during the war.

Presenter19:21

Ye yes, because you you managed to avoid internment as an alien, didn't you? How how did you do that? That was by working for the BBC, was it?

Sir Ernst Gombrich19:28

I mean, internment avoided me. I didn't try to avoid internment, but I was actually employed with the monitoring service of the BBC and in my little booklets, aliens booklets, there was a stamp exempt from internment until further notice. So I was never interned because I was listening to foreign broadcasts and translating them. I spent six years of the war, because the war lasted six years, listening to German and other broadcasts or supervising the translation into English.

Presenter19:48

See what?

Presenter20:04

And during that whole time of listening, you learned very little about your homeland. You learned very little about what was happening to Austria.

Sir Ernst Gombrich20:11

I knew I knew very little of what was actually happening in Austria, nor, as you can imagine, did the German wireless, the public German radio, ever mention the Holocaust.

Presenter20:23

So what was the first that you knew about what had actually been going on?

Sir Ernst Gombrich20:28

The first I knew was in Russian broadcasts when they uh reached the place where Auschwitz and the other death camps were. And they claimed at that time I remember that as if it were today they claimed that in this place five million people had been killed. And I remember a colleague of mine coming to me I was at the time I so can't call supervisor and asked me to check this figure because it seemed impossible. And I said, Yes, it is impossible. But it happened to be true.

Presenter21:03

Record number five.

Sir Ernst Gombrich21:05

I continued to be interested in music during and after the war, and so I would like to play one of the records of one of the works by Mozart, which I think is absolutely miraculous, both for its economy of means and the richness of its content. That is the Divertimento in E-flat for string trio, Kochel 563. And I would like to play just this part of the second movement to give an idea of the depth of this work.

Presenter22:40

The Care trio playing part of the second movement of Mozart's Divertimento in E flat for string trio.

Presenter22:47

Then the war ended, Professor Gombrich, and you took up your old job as research fellow at the Warburg Institute, and at the same time began writing the book which was to change your life, The Story of Art. Now, you used your own memory as a filter, as it were, didn't you? But but you wrote it from the heart.

Sir Ernst Gombrich23:05

Yes, I think that is quite true. You said that it was written for children. It wasn't really for children. I would say for adolescents, for people who begin to

Sir Ernst Gombrich23:15

discover the work of art.

Sir Ernst Gombrich23:18

Children cannot be interested in history and how.

Sir Ernst Gombrich23:23

mutual influences and of this kind. It was for sixteen, seventeen years old or so.

Presenter23:29

But it it was elementary.

Sir Ernst Gombrich23:30

It was elementary and is elementary.

Presenter23:33

But it was never meant by you to be a textbook, which of course is what it's become in many ways.

Sir Ernst Gombrich23:37

Yes, I I slightly regret that, though I get a lot of money from that, or at least some money.

Presenter23:41

Money

Presenter23:45

But why don't you want it to be a textbook?

Sir Ernst Gombrich23:47

Because I I want it to be read for pleasure rather than swatted up for an exam.

Presenter23:54

So that was published in in 1950, and in the same year you were invited to be Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford.

Sir Ernst Gombrich23:56

And

Sir Ernst Gombrich24:01

That's right.

Presenter24:02

Uh which was was quite an achievement. How much uh were the two events connected? Do you think the book and the post?

Sir Ernst Gombrich24:09

They were certainly connected quite intimately because one of the electors for the slate chair in Oxford was Tom Bowes, who was an art historian himself and who wrote an anonymous review in the Times Literary Supplement in which he very much praised that book. So obviously after Kenneth Clarke had finished his term, they were looking for somebody else and they may have looked for somebody who has a gift of communication. In any case, he must have proposed me as a choice. And so I became, much to my enormous surprise, they selected me slate professor in Oxford.

Presenter24:52

And then that led to other prestigious appointments and invitations. You went to the United States.

Sir Ernst Gombrich24:57

That

Presenter24:58

Uh Yeah.

Sir Ernst Gombrich24:58

Uh

Presenter24:58

Yeah.

Sir Ernst Gombrich24:58

Uh

Presenter24:58

Eventually you became of course slate professor at Cambridge as well about a a decade later, didn't you?

Sir Ernst Gombrich24:58

Uh

Sir Ernst Gombrich25:01

That is

Speaker 425:02

The Second.

Presenter25:03

So you never really, as a result of the book, if you like, had to worry about getting a job again.

Sir Ernst Gombrich25:09

No, that is entirely true. Of course, I had a job at the Warburg, and that job continued even during the time I was slate professor. The slate professorship is a guest professorship. So I just went to Oxford and gave this lecture and returned.

Presenter25:23

Record number six.

Sir Ernst Gombrich25:25

Record number six. I'm immensely fond of Haydn's, Haydn altogether, but of Haydn's chamber music and his 83 quartets are an inexhaustible wealth of invention and particularly fond of his slow movements. I always make a point of listening to any performance of a Haydn quartet on the radio if I can spare the time. But I have one favorite and that is the one I wish to play because there this slow movement is very poignantly put at the end. There is also another slow movement and that is the one I should like to play now. It is Oppos 54 number two.

Presenter27:14

The Decani Quartet playing part of the last movement of Haydn's string quartet number two in C major, opus fifty four.

Presenter27:22

Can I ask you, Professor Gombrich, about modern art, about abstract art first? I think a a lot of people who otherwise enjoy painting come to a a full stop when they come across a piece of abstract art which is say a a block of colour which is all black with maybe some maroon in it or perhaps a mixture of both. Is it their fault that they come to a full stop or or is it the artist's fault?

Sir Ernst Gombrich27:44

I think neither. Certainly I am not a great friend of abstract art. I have never quite appreciated, though I know that some of these artists are immensely serious and dedicated and are trying to find new ways of using painting and of using paint, which had become urgent in this century after photography has taken away from painting what I sometimes call the ecological niche of painting, portraits, landscapes, storytelling. So that it was almost inevitable that experiments would be made which were in a way influenced by the existence of music which doesn't tell a story and where pure sensual impressions create a work of art. I don't think that this comparison absolutely holds because music moves and you can do much more in music, as we just have heard, than you can do within the four sides of a frame. And therefore while certainly there are abstract paintings which are immensely respectable, I don't think that they will ever

Sir Ernst Gombrich29:05

occupy a similar place to great music.

Presenter29:08

And yet it has it finds its audience. It has an effect on people. I think in front of certain Rothko paintings people will sit and murmur and chant and find themselves almost

Sir Ernst Gombrich29:13

Yeah.

Sir Ernst Gombrich29:15

Chop

Sir Ernst Gombrich29:17

Moscow is the the great example of that. But there is an element of brainwashing in that too. I think you could do that with

Presenter29:25

What media hype, do you mean?

Sir Ernst Gombrich29:25

What media hi?

Presenter29:27

No.

Sir Ernst Gombrich29:27

No, I wouldn't necessarily say media hype, but critic hype.

Sir Ernst Gombrich29:31

I mean, I don't despise Roscoe by any means.

Sir Ernst Gombrich29:35

But I think that one can also induce certain states of mind by the right kind of sales talk.

Presenter29:45

Record number seven.

Sir Ernst Gombrich29:46

Record number seven, I also learned after the war to appreciate Haydn's masses very much. It was an American friend, George Boas, who first drew my attention to the wealth of invention and beauty in Haydn's masses. And I uh gradually

Presenter29:48

Yeah.

Sir Ernst Gombrich30:09

I try to get to know all of them, but what I want to play is a small part of the credo from the Nelson Mess. I am not myself a religious person, but I think as a historian of art, one must be concerned with religion and religious art, and one learns very movingly what these things mean to a believer if you listen to this music.

Presenter30:33

Mean.

Speaker 430:47

Colours where

Presenter31:38

Lisa della Casa singing et incarnatus est from Haydn's Nelson Mass with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra conducted by Jonathan Sternberg.

Presenter31:47

You've you've lived here for, what, fifty-five years or more now?

Sir Ernst Gombrich31:51

So more now. Yes, probably a little more, yes.

Presenter31:54

We presume you like the place?

Sir Ernst Gombrich31:56

Yep.

Presenter31:56

You're you're a naturalized Briton.

Sir Ernst Gombrich31:58

That's right.

Presenter31:59

Do you feel British? What what do you feel now?

Sir Ernst Gombrich32:02

I certainly don't feel English. I mean, after all, you heard my accent and I don't feel English in any way. I feel precisely as what I am. I am a

Sir Ernst Gombrich32:15

Central European intellectual who works here in England. I should say that I appreciate very much the

Presenter32:18

In

Sir Ernst Gombrich32:22

possibility of working at a place like the Warburg Institute, which is unique both for its staff and for its library. And I'm immensely grateful for the reception we foreigners received here. I'm still staggered by the fact that the Queen awarded me the Order of Merit. And so my appreciation could not be more, but I would deceive myself if I now thought that this makes me into an Englishman. I cannot be.

Presenter32:55

Last record.

Sir Ernst Gombrich32:56

Last record, I haven't yet mentioned Schuben, and so I thought there are at least two living.

Sir Ernst Gombrich33:04

performing artists who have a special affinity to Schubert. One is Alfred Brendel, who is also a friend, and one is Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, whose singing I enormously admire. Luckily, there is at least there are some records where the two have joined forces, and so I needn't decide between one or the other. And I have chosen one of the leader, which is not perhaps Schubert's greatest, but it is in praise of solitude, which would be very suitable for a desert island, and therefore I have chosen it.

Speaker 433:43

When mine agrees me on, why not touch better about me?

Speaker 433:57

And so Schmidt Vergelt and Sim Ferdinand.

Speaker 434:04

Two life on the ship, so I told the shit.

Speaker 434:15

Now the steam

Speaker 434:20

Yeah.

Presenter34:44

Dietrich Fischer Diskar singing Schubert's Lieder Der Einzamer, opus forty one with Alfred Brendel, playing the piano there.

Presenter34:52

Which one of your eight records would be most important to you on your desert island?

Sir Ernst Gombrich34:56

I agonized a long time over this question, but I would take the Mozart Divertimento Trio for once. It is, I think, the longest piece. It takes 40 minutes. It has six movements of an astounding variety of moods, and therefore I think that is the one I would take.

Presenter35:07

Long is.

Presenter35:19

And your book, as well as the Bible and Shakespeare, which is waiting for you?

Sir Ernst Gombrich35:22

Uh I would take good at collected works.

Sir Ernst Gombrich35:26

They would keep me busy. There are 40 volumes in the standard Quarter edition and though I have read a good many of them, I could always read more and learn more.

Presenter35:36

I think we have a bit of a problem with collected works, because I suppose Shakespeare is meant to be your collected works. I think I have to ask you to choose one, Goethe.

Sir Ernst Gombrich35:45

In that case I would take Gertie's poem.

Presenter35:47

And your luxury.

Sir Ernst Gombrich35:49

Uh a bathtub.

Sir Ernst Gombrich35:51

with plenty of warm water.

Presenter35:53

Endless hot water.

Sir Ernst Gombrich35:54

Endless hot water here.

Presenter35:56

Is a bath such a joy to you?

Sir Ernst Gombrich35:58

Well, I think I wrote all my books in the bath. I mean, I thought about them in the bath.

Sir Ernst Gombrich36:04

It's my way of composing something. I lie in my bath and think about it.

Presenter36:09

Uh

Presenter36:10

Right, a bath it is. Sir Ernst Gombrich, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Speaker 336:23

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Islandists archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk/slash radio form.