Lady Natasha Spender

Presenter0:00

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. The programme was originally broadcast in two thousand seven.

Presenter0:27

My castaway this week is Natasha Spender. Her life has been a remarkable one, not least because, where most of us hope to be capable of doing justice to one profession, she has succeeded in three, as a highly accomplished concert pianist, an academic specialising in the cognitive psychology of music, and as the executor of the considerable estate of her late husband, the renowned poet Stephen Spender. Hers has been a life rich with experience, from her beginnings being brought up by a working-class foster mother, to her place at the very heart of a vigorous and highly creative community embodying many of the twentieth century's greatest writers, musicians, composers, and thinkers. Despite her own undoubted accomplishments and insights, she is steadfastly self-effacing, saying, I think there's one's inner life and one's outer life. One's inner life is not to be talked about because it's so largely music.

Presenter1:22

Well, hopefully through the music that you've chosen, Lady Spender, we'll understand and maybe even talk a little about your inner life today. Do you have any sense yourself that to date you have lived a remarkable an untypically eventful life? Oh, yes, it was certainly very varied and one was forever dovetailing the different parts of one's life, one's home life, one's professional life. And right now I'm uh editing journals and uh it doesn't stop. I'm hoping to go on.

Presenter1:56

I'm sure you will. T tell me about the three identities. Is there one of them that you

Speaker 31:56

I'm sure you will.

Lady Natasha Spender1:57

Yeah.

Presenter2:00

You wear more comfortably than any of the others. Do you feel mostly the wife of this famous poet? Do you feel mostly the concert pianist, or do you mostly associate with your academic work?

Presenter2:11

Oh no, but the concert pianist stopped forty-five years ago. I don't feel a concert pianist now, although I love playing at home. Family life and also uh remembering one's life, remembering all those years of marriage, of bringing up the children and now being a great-grandmother. We will talk about that. You're a mother of two children too.

Lady Natasha Spender2:36

I'm forward.

Lady Natasha Spender2:39

You're a mother of two children.

Presenter2:41

This question of the inner life, the inner life being music.

Presenter2:46

Explain that a little bit more. What did you mean when you said that? Well, I think that where a lot of people have an inner life that's religion.

Presenter2:55

If you're a musician, you're striving all the time to express something.

Presenter3:02

Really spiritual.

Presenter3:04

And your whole, as it were, spiritual life goes into.

Presenter3:09

Producing in the most selfless way.

Presenter3:14

The beauty of the music.

Presenter3:17

So tell us then about your first piece of music.

Presenter3:19

Well, I was born at the end of the First World War to a Sh Shakespearean actress, and I really didn't have any music in my early life because I was not living at home, so I had no tuition. And on the rare occasions when I heard, for instance, Bach, I loved it for its joie de vive, and I remember how, as a five year old, I used to hum a piece which I'd heard once, stomping out its rhythms as I was walking or skipping along. And my choice, my first choice, is the gig from the B flat partita, and that's because that's exactly the sort of music I loved as a very early child.

Presenter5:06

The Gig from Bach's Partita No. One in B-flat major, played by Andrus Schiff. So it wasn't a very young childhood filled with music then, when you were a little tot? No, except when I made excursions to the booths. The people I knew was Aunt Marjorie and Uncle George, then I heard a lot of music, but at home not. And the life that I had when I visited them for holidays or or weekends was like being an adoptive niece.

Presenter5:38

And it was quite different from my home life in that I heard great music and sometimes met great musician house guests, like uh Yeli Daranier and the Bush Quartet, and Rudy Serkin used to stay in the house. And the house was a constant uh quartet playing of amateurs and professionals mixed in together. So you said that your mother was a Shakespearean actress, a classical actress, but uh your early childhood was not mostly spent with her. What happened? Well, she was an actress at the old Vic Company, and when she uh was deserted by my father, she was compelled to have me fostered while she earned our living. She told me about the existence of my father when I was twelve years old. Before that I'd been led to believe that he was dead. So those early years then, when your mother fostered you to a lady called was it Mrs Busby? Mrs Busby. Mrs. Busby was wonderful. I only saw my mother quite rarely. She would come whisking down and she was always rather anxious. And mother, as I knew her, that was my foster mother was affectionate, very steady, and totally Dependable. What did you make of your mother at that at that point? Of of your mother the actress?

Presenter7:02

I I always had this feeling of that there was an appeal there, that she wanted me to love her, and I always wanted to please her. So whatever uh she brought as a present, or whatever treat she arranged, I I sort of acted out, being wonderfully thrilled by it.

Presenter7:23

You mentioned that your mother had said to you as a young girl that your father was in fact dead. Yes. Tell us about that. Did she explain any more than that? No, I just accepted that he was dead. And then I went. And that was a very world-shaking time. I'd been living at Maidenhead for nine years, and suddenly staying with her one weekend alone, uh she told me

Presenter7:49

that after Christmas I was never going back to live with Mrs Busbay with mother, and she was very offended that I burst into tears, because I adored her.

Presenter8:01

And also she told me that after all my father was not dead but alive, and to morrow morning I'd got to go and ask him for some money. And she bought me a sort of idiotic little yellow

Presenter8:13

a handbag in order to look nice for this occasion. Th there's plenty more there to talk about, and we will in just a few moments. But tell me what your next piece of music is. Oh, my next piece of music.

Lady Natasha Spender8:20

Yeah.

Lady Natasha Spender8:21

Yeah.

Presenter8:24

Is really reflecting the wonderful chamber music playing at Funtington, which was the Booths country house. And so I've chosen the Mozart string quintet in G minor. Funnily enough, I think the extra violist is Cecil Aronowitz, and I was a student at the Royal College of Music with Cecil. I love his playing.

Presenter9:45

Part of the first movement of Mozart's string quintet in G minor, played by the Amadeus Quartet with Cecil Aronowitz. You saw yourself, Natasha Spender, musical keys in colours as a little girl. No, they're like colours, but they're never confused with colours. Explain that to me. Well, people who have absolute pitch, they may feel that F-sharp is like purple and so on, but it there's no consistence between people. It's much more that they're almost like tastes. And you don't ever confuse them. I mean, to confuse a key would be like tasting salt chocolate or, I don't know, seeing purple grass. It just wouldn't work. So the resonance is so strong and so acute. Yes. Let's talk then a little bit about you as a musical child. You were saying that your mother bought you a Canary Yellow handbag and packed you off to see your father. Oh, it was a terrible day. It really was. What happened when you went to see him? Well, she'd sort of build him up as a sort of wonderful figure and somebody I should not only respect and emulate. And when the door was opened, there was this huge bearded man in crumpled clothes and carpet slippers, and we just stood staring at each other. We wouldn't say a word. In fact, what happened was that he persuaded me to play the piano to improvise. And that was the first moment in which I felt I had some communication with him. It was the only conversation we had, really. He was an eminent music critic. Very eminent, yes. And he said at the end of that, you're very talented and you should be a composer, and I'll get you lessons. And he did take me to a very nice man I loved called Arthur Benjamin, who was a composer.

Speaker 39:58

Okay.

Lady Natasha Spender9:58

Oh

Speaker 310:35

So

Presenter11:44

So meanwhile, life at home. You'd moved from life with Mrs. Busby to life with Mummy, as you called her, in London. What was life like with Mummy in London? Well, she'd had a a great tragedy, which was to be uh struck deaf with typhoid fever, so she couldn't go on with her stage career. She unfortunately was rather bad at lip reading or any of the things that exist now. She wasn't able to do.

Lady Natasha Spender11:48

Mummy, as he called her.

Presenter12:11

Sometimes one would mouth words at her. I remember saying.

Presenter12:18

Will you pass the butter, please? And my mother said, Natasha, how can you say those dreadful words?

Presenter12:27

So that it it did have its problems. It sounds, all in all, given the difficulties with your father, given that your mother seems this rather mercurial, unpredictable character.

Lady Natasha Spender12:36

Yeah.

Presenter12:37

It's a lot to land at the door of a little girl who's not even quite twelve. Did it seem like a lot at the time? It was just such a complete difference from uh from a steady household to a rather unpredictable one. And uh and I just got on with it. Tell me about your next piece of music.

Presenter12:57

Well, now, staying with the Booths, I knew a lot of chamber music, but I didn't hear uh singing. You know, I reached the age of sixteen without ever having heard an opera, but in fact, a voice I knew really only from records.

Presenter13:15

was that of Tiana Le Lemnitz, and I was absolutely passionate for her. Used to play her endlessly.

Speaker 313:48

I am a reference to the family.

Presenter14:09

Tiana Lemnitz singing an Obe der Volke sier Weihul and Whether the Cloud Envelops Her from Weber's Der Frei Schutz. When you were sixteen then, Natasha Spender, you won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music. Yes, I was there for five years, all scholarships and and uh di you know, won all the prizes and did all the things. That was in nineteen thirty five that you started at the Royal College of Music. What was your mother's attitude of your burgeoning talent?

Speaker 314:30

Blue.

Lady Natasha Spender14:30

College of Music.

Presenter14:35

Oh, I think she was very proud of me.

Presenter14:39

But of course there must have been some tension that here was I embarking on a performing career when she no longer had one, and she used to make concert dresses for me.

Presenter14:52

That you invariably left a pin in a crucial place which I sat on as I was about to play in a concert. You don't think that was deliberate?

Lady Natasha Spender15:01

You don't

Presenter15:02

No.

Lady Natasha Spender15:03

Uh

Presenter15:04

So she was involuntary, I think. She was on the one hand supportive, but but looking back as an adult, you can't help but wonder if there were maybe pangs of the menu.

Lady Natasha Spender15:05

She was

Lady Natasha Spender15:11

Yes.

Lady Natasha Spender15:12

Yeah.

Presenter15:16

Right. Um when I was nursing her in her final illness, I mean, it it really came out. It went.

Presenter15:25

Tell us about your fourth record. Which is? It is the Prisoner's Chorus.

Presenter15:30

Oh, well now the war.

Presenter15:32

Um right at the end of the war I was doing a tour of Malcolm clubs, RAF Malcolm Clubs, in Germany, and uh I was asked to give a concert at Belsen.

Presenter15:47

And it was one of the most extraordinary days of my whole life.

Presenter15:52

It was mostly full of Polish survivors, and there was a tremendous.

Presenter15:58

Response from

Presenter16:00

I mean, almost too much. They stamped their feet and so on. And they liked assertive music. They weren't interested in romantic music. And in a way, you can understand it, because did they have any romance in their future lives to go back to? They didn't know whether their families had survived in Poland. But they you felt that the music was helping them reassert their feeling that they were potent, that they could do something, that they had a willpower.

Lady Natasha Spender16:37

I think poets for re

Lady Natasha Spender16:41

You see

Speaker 317:05

I'm so real.

Speaker 317:19

Here's it, where thou'st before creatures night, send replies, and revise

Lady Natasha Spender17:23

Musical

Speaker 317:28

There are hires of

Presenter17:32

The prisoner's chorus from Beethoven's Fidelio with the NBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Arturo Toscanini. Memories there of playing at Belson just months after the war had ended for you, Natasha. You had been married at that stage then to Stephen Spender for five years by the time you were playing at Belson. Let's go back, let's rewind a little, though, to those first days of your romance. You went and had lunch. He was hosting it in his flat. Yes. You stayed to help him wash up the dishes. Yes. And I used to practise the piano every day at a friend's house. And one day somebody came in and said, We're all invited to lunch at Horizon tomorrow. I anyway thought I wasn't included in the conversation. Why should I be? Anyway, I was so ignorant I thought that Horizon was a pub. So Horizon, of course, was the literary. When I looked doubtful, this young man said, Oh, come on, Ducky, you'll enjoy it. So I went to Horizon and in fact met Stephen for the first time as he was the host. And I remember raking along his shelf of gramophone records, seventy-eight records, and they were all exactly my musical taste. And I thought, this is a kindred spirit, you know.

Lady Natasha Spender17:48

Yeah.

Lady Natasha Spender17:51

Yeah.

Lady Natasha Spender17:52

Stays of the

Lady Natasha Spender18:21

Uh

Speaker 318:21

That

Lady Natasha Spender18:21

That's right.

Presenter18:50

Did you find him attractive?

Lady Natasha Spender18:50

Did you f

Presenter18:51

Yes, very attractive. He was very tall and very beautiful. I don't know what he made made of me. I was ve I looked very old fashioned, with plaits round my head and so on. But everybody appe disappeared very sharply after lunch, and there he was facing all the w dishes, and so I stayed and helped him wash up, and then we took a a walk round Mecklenburg Square, and then we dined, and we couldn't stop talking. It was love at first sight, and from then on we just saw each other every day. You married then eight months after you met?

Lady Natasha Spender19:29

Yeah.

Presenter19:32

Yes, and I didn't know his circumstances enough. I mean, I think that in fact he was divorcing from his first wife. One day in Oxford I'd given a concert, and a student came up to me and said, Congratulations and I said, Well, did you enjoy it? and he said, Well, I'm congratulating you on your engagement. Well, I thought, Is this a student prank? And if so, who's been teasing me about it? So I felt very embarrassed when I met Stephen in London the following week and said about this curious event. And he said, Oh, darling, didn't I tell you I told everybody else?

Speaker 320:16

Yeah.

Presenter20:18

What was your wedding like?

Presenter20:20

Oh, that was also it was rather marvellous.

Speaker 320:22

Who is

Presenter20:24

I'm so lucky. I mean, when one thinks I've had fifty five years with that glorious man.

Presenter20:33

Tell me about your fifth record now, Natasha. In nineteen forty seven I played at the last night of the Proms, and it was the first concert in the world to be televised. I remember that I was I had a very nice florally

Presenter20:49

printed dress, and the the television crew came and made me up before the a concert. And then at the interval the the uh television crew came

Presenter21:02

bouncing round and they said It was absolutely wonderful and I said well it's a lovely concerto and they said Every single flower on your dress came out in the picture.

Lady Natasha Spender21:14

Hey ma'am.

Presenter21:16

These shallow television people, nothing changes.

Lady Natasha Spender21:17

People nothing changes.

Presenter21:19

So the recording then is not the recording of that first per performed performance, because we don't have that. No, I don't have that. But I do have one of a subsequent one when I I played

Lady Natasha Spender21:22

Performance.

Lady Natasha Spender21:25

But no, I don't

Presenter21:31

Beethoven and beef that.

Presenter22:31

Beethoven's second piano concerto featuring My Castaway playing under your professional name, Natasha Litvin, it was recorded at the Royal Albert Hall in nineteen fifty seven. So after that last night of the proms that was televised that we spoke about earlier, you then went off to America with Stephen.

Lady Natasha Spender22:36

Pause at the roof.

Presenter22:45

Yes. Well, not with Stephen. He'd gone on ahead, and I'd stayed in order to do the last night of the proms. But what was nice was that uh we our year near near New York was full of new friendships, and not only with poets and writers, but also with musicians, and particularly with Sam Barber. And when you were in America you met a particular musical hero of yours. You met Schnabel then? Oh, yes, I did. I spent a day playing to him. I expected him to be very technical and say you did this or that wrongly, instead of which he said, You're an artist. Don't ever enter into the pupil relationship again. If you have a difficulty, ask a colleague. Ask me. I'll tell you what anything I know.

Presenter23:33

And he valued your performance to say trust in yourself as an artist.

Presenter23:38

Stephen had established then or managed to establish a long and very fruitful relationship with America professionally. He spent a lot of time there over the years. How did you manage to negotiate that as a couple?

Presenter23:50

Well, it was difficult because we did think children's education was important and shouldn't be interrupted. And so, right at the end of his life, when somebody said, What are you proud of most proud of? He said, Bringing up my family in the same house because it was steady, you know. I read a fabulous thing that you're reported to have said, which is I know young people who behave as though they bought their husbands at selfrides. Tell me what you mean by that.

Lady Natasha Spender24:16

Mean by that.

Presenter24:17

The

Presenter24:18

Oh, it's difficult to say, but it's perfectly true. But husbands are not possessions, and I've never felt possessive about Stephen. I've never

Presenter24:28

Raised any shout about, for instance, about anything that he wrote. He's totally free to write what he likes. And I don't want the sort of uh love that is uh demanded at pistol point, as it were. I don't want to own my husband. I want to be devoted to him. In 1951, he wrote his autobiography, World Within World. He was very frank in that about his earlier homosexual experiences, and you encouraged him to be frank. You never had a problem with that.

Lady Natasha Spender24:54

Yeah.

Lady Natasha Spender24:56

Never had a fat one with the

Presenter24:58

No. I thought he was so courageous. I mean, if you think nowadays when people make a great song and dance about about the troubles of being outed and so on

Presenter25:10

Stephen could have been put in prison.

Presenter25:14

He could have been put in prison for um illicit relationships and also for writing about them.

Presenter25:21

He fell very deeply in love with you. You had a, as you say, a very devoted

Speaker 325:26

Mm.

Presenter25:26

And a particular sort of marriage where your love endured times apart.

Speaker 325:28

Manage we

Presenter25:30

Were there any times in in the marriage when you had to deal with the homosexual side of his nature? No, not really.

Presenter25:38

No, I didn't.

Presenter25:40

What's your next piece of music? Oh, well, one of the new friendships were with uh Lenny Bernstein, who was wonderful, in that he was very loyal, very funny, but he could be outrageous, and I do remember a time when uh Ted Heath was at the height of his powers at the beginning of his premiership, and he gave a party at Ten Downing Street for Lenny, and Lenny sailed in, gave Ted a smacking kiss on both cheeks, which rather disconcerted Ted, and then said, And how's your tottering government?

Presenter26:22

And all the Conservatives there, of course, were furious.

Speaker 226:28

Dear kindly Sergeant Krubkey, you gotta understand. It's just our bringing up, Gee, that gets us out of hand. Our mothers all are junkies, our fathers all are drunks. Golly Moses, naturally we're punks. Gee, Officer Krubkey, we're very upset. We never had the love that every child ought to get. We ain't no delinquents, we're misunderstood. Deep down inside us, there is good.

Presenter26:56

The original Broadway cast recording of G. Officer Krupke from Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story. I mentioned in the introduction, Natasha, that.

Presenter27:06

You had a second career as an academic. In a sense, that second career was forced upon you. You had to give up your career as a concert pianist. Yes.

Lady Natasha Spender27:11

As a concert pianist. In fact,

Presenter27:16

When was it? It must have been nineteen

Presenter27:20

sixty three, I think. I suddenly felt frightfully tired, so I decided to take a sabbatical. What it turned out to be was that uh I was so phenomenally tired because I had cancer. So I had b various operations, and since I had extremely radical surgery, a concert a career was out for ever.

Presenter27:45

I remember um the physiotherapist came into my hospital room on the first day and said, I've had what you have, and there's nothing I can't do and then she said rather doubtfully

Presenter27:55

Well, there's one thing I can't do, and that's cut bread, and this movement back and forth, you see, could no longer be accurate.

Presenter28:03

Given how central music was to your life, and given how accomplished you were as a performer, how difficult was that to deal with? It was very difficult, but I in one way, but I was prudent also in one day. Any work that I'd learnt but not yet performed for instance, I'd learnt the Brahm second concerto with Clifford Curson, but had not yet had a date for it. So if that was on the wireless, I turned it off. But otherwhi otherwise I simply got on with the next thing. What's your next record? It's the seventh track.

Presenter28:39

What is that? Let me go. I think that's the Samuel Barber. It's just on your own. Oh, yes. I learnt his piano sonata and enga indeed gave the first performance of it in London.

Presenter28:51

And this was in'47, of course, before I was ill. He recorded it with Horowitz, and I remember his playing a tape to me of it, and their Horowitz getting something wrong, and they both collapsed with laughing. And I thought, how can those two distinguished people just laugh when things go wrong?

Presenter30:04

Part of the last movement of Samuel Barber's sonata played by Vladimir Horowitz. There was something that occurred to you during that music that you wanted to chat about, Natasha. What was it? Yes, it was that, in fact, almost the last work that I played before I was ill was the Stravinsky Capriccio. And we've become great friends with the Stravinskis. And we introduced him to T. S. Eliot. And those two adored each other because they were complete opposites in character. I mean

Lady Natasha Spender30:12

Uh

Presenter30:38

Elliott was very deliberate and reflective and old possum, and Stravinsky was very quick and very lively, and was very funny about Elliot in an affectionate way. He said to me, Your Mr Elliot is not an exuberant man.

Presenter31:00

The life that you have described, as I've been speaking to you, Natasha, and the the names and the lives that you've shared, as I as I said right at the beginning, some of the most eminent composers and artists and thinkers of the twentieth century

Presenter31:13

Do you think it is a life, an intellectual life and a lifestyle that still exists today, or is it something that we've lost?

Presenter31:22

I think it's much more uh what shall I say episodic. If you think going back to Stravinsky and Eliot, Elliott used to have lunch every Tuesday of his life with Herbert Reed and Frank Morley, and there was steadiness in friendships, and the same thing with Stravinsky. Now we have to snatch at seeing our friends.

Presenter31:46

You were married to Stephen Spender for fifty-four years. You're now dealing with his archive.

Presenter31:52

Tell me then, are there things that you find out, are there times when you discover? Like you're discovering something else. Well, I did think it extraordinary that you're married for fifty-five years and you don't hear one of these really super anecdotes.

Lady Natasha Spender31:57

Yeah.

Presenter32:19

Tell me what your last piece of music is, your eighth record. Ah now. It's really to do with family life, because our family is very musical. Lizzie was a very good leader singer. Matthew has always played the clarinet.

Presenter32:37

And I particularly love when he plays either the Brahms or the Mozart clarinet quintet. And I thought let's end with Mozart.

Presenter33:48

The opening movement of Mozart's clarinet quintet in A major, played by the members of the Mellos Ensemble of London, with Gervais de Payer.

Presenter33:56

So we come to our final discussion, Natasha, which is of course you know you're allowed the Bible, the complete works of Shakespeare. What would be your third book to take to the island?

Presenter34:06

Well, there's a very amusing anthology called Desert Islands by Walter Delamare, with i illustrations by Whistler. And it tells of at least forty desert islands, of Daniel Deffo, of Robinson Crusoe, and many more. And I'd really enjoy the fellow feeling with all those inhabitants that I'd joined some kind of club of enthusiasts. And what would your luxury be? Well, may I have my grand piano? Yes, you may. Oh, good. Then I shall also take um copies of uh some Bach. In fact, I should be learning the um Goldberg. You can certainly do that. And if the waves were to crash onto the shore and threaten to wash away your eight discs, which one would you attempt to save from the surf? Oh, I think the Mozart string quintet, because it was the beginning of a real love, and I've never ceased to love it. Natasha Spender, Lady Spender, thank you very much for letting us hear your Desert Island discs.

Presenter35:18

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