Edward Downes

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This download is the only extract the BBC has of this edition of Desert Island Discs. The presenter was Roy Plumley.

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mister Downs, how well do you think you could adjust yourself to loneliness?

Edward Downes0:12

Uh

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Well, I would miss

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Certain people a few people, very much indeed.

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But uh the vast maj majority of people I think I could

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gets along quite happily without.

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As a musician, would you prefer to have scores rather than discs? I would rather have scores. You have discs? So I gather. What would you want music to do for you on your desert island?

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But are you looking back?

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No, I don't think so. Um

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I would like music to remind me of uh of certain

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cultures, certain countries

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for which I have a great affection.

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And um

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Well, certainly not in in any um nostalgic way would it be looking back to the past. Quite the contrary, I rather look forward to the future.

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What part of the country? Pretty compromise. I come from Birmingham.

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You were, I believe

Edward Downes1:03

Yeah.

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I think it's a good idea. You started performing at a very early age.

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Well, my sister, who is four years older than I am, started to have piano lessons when she was seven.

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and I copied her at home, and I think when I was five I also started to have lessons on the piano and on the fiddle. I was also singing. I was a choir boy from a very early age. My father was um very well, both my parents were very religious, and um

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I he was a chorister and I was a a choir boy.

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Yes.

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And you became a choir master while you were still at school? Oh, indeed, yes. My I was a choir boy until my voice broke, which is when I was thirteen, and um I had been learning the organ as well whi during my boyhood. And when I was thirteen, the next Sunday, in fact, I was a an organist and choir master at another church. What did you do when you left school?

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I left school when I was just fifteen.

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Um I got matriculation, my but my parents were very poor, and uh I had to leave to earn some money, and I worked in various factories and uh offices, and I ended up in the City of Birmingham Gas Department, where I earned the princely sum of sixteen and tenpence a week. Had you already ambitions to make music your career?

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Yes, I had. Um how did you set about it?

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Well, I set about it by studying every lunch hour in the City of Birmingham library. I I used to eat a pennyworth of roast potatoes. You could get three potato three hot potatoes for a penny then, and I would eat them in the library and read all the books on music I could find. I got a scholarship, an open scholarship, to study music at Birmingham University.

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And um this upset my parents sufficiently for them to kick me out.

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Because they thought they didn't want to be a musician, they thought it was rather immoral to be a musician.

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And so I had to find somewhere to live, um so I joined the fire service and I was a fire watcher every night for three years.

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Living in the fire district. Living in the fire department, yes, in the fire watchers' room. Yes. And, um.

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I worked at weekends three or four days every week in factories and bus conducting and things like that.

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You took an honours musical degree, then what?

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Then I um

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While I was at university I had been studying the horn, the French horn.

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And um I got a scholarship to the Royal College of Music as a horn player. So I came to London and studied composition and horn playing at the Royal College of Music.

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Um

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The second week I was there, in fact, my professor of the horn, a man called Frank Probin, a distinguished horn player, um

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sent me as his deputy to the London Symphony Orchestra on a tour.

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And from then on I played the horn in most of the London orchestras while I was still at the Royal College. Yes. And when you left the college? When I left the college, um after about three years, I um decided that the orchestral world was not for me, at least the playing side of it, and I left London altogether for a while. I I felt I needed to clear my thoughts and get out of the orchestral rat race somewhat, and I took a job as a as a university lecturer at at Aberdeen University.

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Uh

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How did the airplane? Academic life appeal to you? Not at all. The uh teaching, the actual fact of teaching, enthusiastic students I find I enjoy very much, I still do.

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But the the sedentary life, the quiet back quarter of a of a university, particularly a Scottish university, albeit a very beautiful place and a very charming place, was not for me. I've it was much too uh sleepy for me. Yes. So where did you move on to? Well, um

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While I was in Aberdeen I had um put on a performance some performances of The Marriage of Figaro of Mozart, the last Mozart I've ever conducted, I might tell you um and as a result

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I got a a Carnegie scholarship to go and study conducting with a man whom inquiries had led me to believe was the best teacher of conducting in the world, a man called Hermann Scherchen, who lived in Zurich.

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I also um went to to study Italian, before I went to Schechen, in Peruggio University. I got a scholarship there too. Why, uh, Italian opera? No, no, no, Italian language, and Italian archaeology, particularly the Etruscans, the Etroscologia.

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I've always been interested in that. Um in the event the Italian language uh turned out to be very, very useful for me in in opera.

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I went to Schechen.

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in Zurich. Um I had five hundred and fifty pounds, I think, of the scholarship, and he told me that he wanted one hundred Swiss francs per lesson. That in those days

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Happy Days, was um about ten pounds a lesson.

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Well, I thought we might last couple of months on this money, so I went gaily on, and at the end of the first week or so he asked me how much money I had.

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and I told him, and he said,'Well, give me half of it' so I did.

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And he never asked for any more money at all, although I was with him for nearly two years.

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And when you came back to England? When I came back to England I joined the Karl Rosa Opera Company as a repertoire, and indeed I learnt

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most of what I know basically about opera from the Carl Rosa. Indeed, most of the people who worked there did learn an enormous amount. Yes. Then, when that closed, unfortunately, uh I went to Covent Garden as a repetiteur and prompter. Which year was it?

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This was nineteen fifty two.

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Yeah.

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So you joined the Royal Opera House and you were

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acting as repetitur. The b

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Very best way I should think to learn the repertoire. Indeed And I was acting also as a prompter, which is an even better way.

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My first one of my first assignments, for example, was to prompt Maria Kallas in her debut. Yes. Uh where Italian came in very useful. Then I prompted Sylvia Fischer in her first Isolde with Barbarolly, and I prompted um Wocek with Kleiber and and Meisterzing with Clemens Krauss and such things as this. When did you have your first opportunity to conduct at Koppelgarden? My first opportunity to conduct came in of all unlikely uh havens of culture, Bulawayo.

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Yeah.

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when we where we went for the centenary of Cecil Rhodes. And Barbara Ollie was conducting Boheme and he couldn't do all the performances because he's also doing some Aidas. And so I did several of the performances that he couldn't do. That is my first thing. And then when we came back to Coven Garden afterwards I began to do more and more conducting. What was your first new production? My first new production was De Freischutz, a Weber.

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But after that, very shortly after that, I had uh an another new production, so to speak, by default, which was more than a new production, it was the opening of a season. It was the Tales of Hoffmann, when we had we had a very distinguished conductor.

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to um to conduct it, but he had to withdraw after the um the general rehearsal, and I was thrown into the deep end to to open the season with this new production.

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In the last seventeen years you must have conducted pretty well all the operas in the repertoire.

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Well, most of the most of the normal ones certainly is. And many of the abnormal ones, I might say. You were the first British conductor for very, many years to conduct the complete cycle of of the ring. Yes, I think Beecham was the last one in nineteen thirty seven or something like that.

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You've told us of your fascination with with foreign cultures and w with with languages. Um I'm told you learned Russian so that you could coach the company for a Russian opera.

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Well, uh when Rafael Kubelik was the musical director, he wanted to do Buris of Mussorgsky in the original version, but in English. But the only Buris that he could think of, the only uh protagonist he could think of, was Boris Christoph.

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And we asked him to do it, but he wouldn't do it. He would either do it in Russian or in Italian, but certainly not in English.

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And uh eventually the the impasse was uh resolved by Coffeearten deciding to do the opera in Russian.

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Kublik sent for me and said, Ted, you must learn Russian.

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So Ted learned Russian, and uh I spent, I suppose, a good many hours per day for about four months, and I m made a a transliteration of the entire text.

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and coached the singers and the chorus, and we produced a performance which um there was a certain amount of

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Shall we say Welsh Russian on occasions, but in s uh in many instances it was very good Russian indeed, and in subsequent revivals some of the Russian has has been sufficiently good for some of the characters to be chosen to to record on commercial discs in complete operas in Russian. Yes. Well since then you've adapted several Russian operas for performance in English. Oh yes, I translated Khovanschina. Um

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Whether we did that at Coven Garden, and I also translated.

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Katerina is Mylova of Shostakovich. Yes. Shostakovich was here for rehearsals, wasn't he? Oh, yes, he was indeed. He came over, uh

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for the first orchestra rehearsals and stayed here for something like three weeks. He was it was very terrifying at first, because he was the first Russian I had ever spoken to in Russian. He was he was a very dour gentleman, far from appealing in aspect at first.

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And when he appeared at this first orchestra rehearsal with a metronome and a very dour expression, I was somewhat taken aback. But uh

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At the first interval of the first rehearsal he was obviously much relieved at what was going to happen to his baby, and everything went fine from then. He was a very agreeable man indeed.