John Julius Norwich

Speaker 10:01

BBC Sounds, Music, Radio Podcasts. Hello, I'm Lauren Laverne and this is the Desert Island Discs podcast. For rights reasons, the music is shorter than on the original broadcast. The presenter is Roy Plomley. I hope you enjoy listening.

Presenter0:34

As usual, the castaway is introduced by Roy Plumley.

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Our castaway this week is the author and maker of films for television, John Julius Noddy.

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Lord Norritch, you have done a great deal of travelling. Have you visited any desert islands?

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Well, let me think. I visited Tobago in 1948. I shouldn't think it's a desert island now, but it certainly gave me the feeling that it was a desert island then. I thought it was one of the most beautiful places I'd ever seen in my life. And it's around there that you would like your present desert island to be? Oh, I think so. Well, I don't know, I've never been to the South Seas. I think there might be some rather marvellous ones there. You'll preserve an open mind on this. I think so. I suspect that the West Indies are now probably slightly over-touristed. You know, I think probably the South Seas I better go for. Now, you've appeared on the television show Face the Music, so that means you're knowledgeable about music. Do you play an instrument?

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I play the piano extremely badly, not even quite well enough for my own enjoyment, let alone anybody else's. I play the guitar probably slightly less well than I play the piano.

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And that's about all. What's your first record? My first record is, I suppose, probably one of the two or three greatest operas ever written, which is Fidelio.

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And the little bit that I'd like to play now is that glorious quartet from Act 1, Mieristo Vunderba.

John Julius Norwich2:22

It is God's mapping.

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The quartet from the first act of Beethoven's Fidelio, Herbert von Carrion conducting it.

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Did you have any particular plan in in choosing your eight records?

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No, I thought very, very hard about it. They're not necessarily quite my favourites, but they're the ones that I think would last me longer. I mean, I'm.

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Well, admittedly, I'm 46, but I mean, I could possibly have another 30 years or so on the place. I hope so. And they mustn't cloy, must they? You know, so there's I like to think there's something sort of slightly astringent about them all.

Speaker 33:15

Sunday.

Speaker 13:17

Who knows?

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What's the second one? The second one is Schubert.

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And I thought I'd take

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The most magical bit of chamber music he ever wrote to me, which is his string quintet in C opus 163.

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Quite, quite unlike.

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equally beautiful but much more

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simple and easier things like for example the trout quintet, you know.

John Julius Norwich3:43

Mm.

Speaker 13:43

Yeah.

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much more profound, much more consoling, and I use that word also, I think, with care, because consolation is what I'm going to need quite a lot of.

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The opening of the second movement of the Schubert string quintet in C, played by the Vienna Philharmonic Quartet.

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Richard Harrant as second cello.

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Now, as the son of Sir Duff Cooper, afterwards the first Viscount Norwich, a very distinguished statesman and diplomat, your travels must have begun quite early in life.

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Well, my father used to wasn't in the diplomatic service before the war. He was a.

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Cabinet minister sitting in London. So I didn't really travel very much before the war. I mean, I went to France a couple of times. But then when war came, my parents were sent out, I think it was in nineteen forty one, to Singapore.

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And I was sent off as an evacuee to Canada, and I went to a Canadian prep school for 18 months and only got back to England in 1942.

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Whereupon you went to Eton and while still at Eton you attended the Nuremberg trials in 1946? I attended the Nuremberg Trials for 10 days. It was a pure stroke of luck. The two judges of the Nuremberg trials, Mr. Justice Lawrence and Sir Norman Burkett, passed through Paris on their way back to Nuremberg after Christmas.

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And Norman Burkitt had a son whom I didn't know, but was almost exactly my age. And they simply said, while they were in Paris, why don't you come along too for a week and see what's going on? So it was a marvelous, exciting opportunity. There were all these villains that I'd heard about and read about and had nightmares about all my life actually sort of parading in front of me. Well, then you moved on to the University of Strasbourg. Why Strasbourg?

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Because I had a passion for modern languages at the time and I thought that Strasbourg was going to be able to teach me equally good French and German because of being roughly on the borders of the two. And it had a very good Russian section, which I was also very interested in. And then the Royal Navy. And then the Navy. I worked as secretary to the Captain's Secretary in the Captain's Office of a cruiser, HMS Gleopatra, and had a simply marvellous time. Good. And then New College, Oxford, still modern language.

Presenter6:55

Still modern languages? Specializing in Russian, I mean. French and Russian, I think, yeah, yes. Was it more or less taken for granted that you would follow your father into the diplomatic zone?

Presenter7:05

No, not at all. You see,'cause my father was never really a diplomat. He joined when he was very young, but he left in nineteen seventeen to go to the first war, and when he came out of the war, he never went back into it until suddenly he found himself ambassador in Paris in nineteen forty.

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But that was merely because of sort of wartime conditions.

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He had always rather discouraged me from doing so. And I had no vocation for it at all. It's just that I I wanted to get married. I knew I had to have a job. The Foreign Service examination was one that you didn't have to prepare for.

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It cost you 10 bob to join and I thought, well that was good enough.

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So I risked my tin bulb, and to my very great surprise,

Speaker 17:43

So I just

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ultimately got through. Yes, I bet it's gone up now. It's probably two or three pounds by now. Now your mother, as Lady Diana Manners, created a sensation in Reinhardt's production of The Miracle. Some years ago she provided a memorable programme in this series. She is a very musical lady. Did she look after that side of your education? She took you, I'm sure, on frequent visits to Covent Garden. That she did, yes, that she did, yes. We had quite a lot of concerts and operas, but I was a very slow developer. I didn't really like classical music much till I was about 18 or 19. It was really the Navy, surprisingly. Was it? What? Well, because we had a rather good...

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Grammophone. It was still 78s in those days.

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But we had rather a good gramophone on board ship with rather a good library of classical music. I suppose nowadays we think it rather restricted, but it seemed wonderful to me then.

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And it was on sort of long evenings with nothing to do in Harbour, you know, that one just played these things. And suddenly I got absolutely passionately interested in it from that. What's your third record? My third record is Wagner. I thought a lot about which Wagner I take, and eventually I settled for Tristan, the Prelude and Lieberstud.

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Tristan and Isolde.

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Pierre Boulez conducting the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. Now, your foreign office career, where was your first posting? My first post was Belgrade in 1955. An interesting, fascinating and a marvellous post to me it was, yes. It was my first experience of Eastern Europe. Yes, and a chance to air your Slav languages.

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A little bit, yes. And after that, and then after that, we went straight from Belgrade to Beirut.

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Than which no greater contrast could possibly be imagined. That was as much like

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Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet. Probably a good deal more like it than Alexandri ever was.

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with a ravishingly beautiful country and a marvellous climate.

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We were enormously happy there. You took a sabbatical to write your first book. You were following both your father and mother in authorship.

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Yes. A book about the Norman invasion of Sicily, a rather remote corner of history. Well, that was one of the things that attracted me to it. I mean, if somebody else had written it already, they'd almost certainly have written it much better than I could have. As it was, I was lucky enough to find what seemed to me to be an absolutely sensational story that no one had told in English before.

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And I thought, you know, this is too good an opportunity to miss. It was worth two volumes. And it was roughly about the same time as the Norman conquest of England, was it? Almost exactly. They actually captured Palermo in ten seventy two, six years later.

Speaker 111:16

Uh

Presenter11:21

Yeah.

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And then you wrote a couple of travel books. And then I wrote a little book about Mount Athos, the all male monastic community in northern Greece. And then I subsequently wrote one about crossing the Sahara, which of course you had to do. Which I had to do, indeed, yes.

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Have you a book on the stocks at the moment? Yes, I'm trying to write one about the history of Venice. It's been going on an awful long time, but I'm fairly confident of finishing it sometime in the next decade.

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Venice is very much in your mind. You're a leading light in the Venice in Peril campaign to try and save some of the.

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buildings that are sinking into the sea.

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I'm in love with the place. It's as simple as that. I think it's the most, in fact, I know it's the most beautiful city in the world. And I think that if the most beautiful city of the world is allowed to collapse,

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disappear totally, which it might, in peacetime.

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through inactivity, inanition and apathy. Seems to me this is one of the most terrible indictments that we could ever make of the twentieth century, you know, and I'm determined to see that it doesn't happen if I have anything to say.

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Good.

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Record number four.

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Record number four, operatic again, Don Giovanni.

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And once again, it's almost impossible to choose which bit one wants to hear.

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But I think what we might play now is a bit of that glorious tenor aria, Ilmio Tesoro.

John Julius Norwich12:55

Bye-bye, by the way.

John Julius Norwich13:00

Sir, he is all.

John Julius Norwich13:07

Uh

John Julius Norwich13:08

Jacques, Jacques.

Presenter13:34

Leopold Simono singing Il Mio Tessoro from Mozart's Don Giovanni.

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You've done a number of historical documentary films for BBC television. Which was the first? The first one was, again, about the Normans in Sicily. That's really how I got into the whole television world. Yes.

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And then you moved a bit further east for the fall of Constantinople. Then we did the fall of Constantinople and then we did two in Mexico, one about Cortez and Montezuma and one about Maximilian, you remember the emperor who was shot in

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The 1860s. You were darting about a bit. A little bit, yes, but that's the fun.

John Julius Norwich14:10

Oh.

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And The Hundred Days? And The Hundred Days, Napoleon's life between Elba and Waterloo. Yes. And a six-part series about Turkey. That's right. The history of Turkey, yes, sort of seen through its ancient monuments. Yes. Some gorgeous travels and locations for all this. Oh, absolutely. Wonderful, yes.

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So grateful to have had the opportunity to do that. We were nearly dead by the end of it. We were all on our knees, but my goodness, it was worth it.

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You have an astonishing number of very varied

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Interest. We talk about your interest in Venice. There's the British Theatre Museum, there's the National Trust.

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You run a travel bureau for cultural tours.

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You've helped a London orchestra through a nasty time.

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Well, uh I

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tried to run an appeal some years back for the London Philharmonic. I managed, I regret to say, to raise remarkably little money for it, but I'm delighted to see that ever since I left the appeal thing, the London Philharmonic has gone from strength to strength.

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So I think I probably helped it by leaving, even if I didn't help in many other ways. You must have given them a push.

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Your wife is a painter. Do you work together? I know she's designed book jackets for you. Is there any other way in which you work together on the films? Not really, no. You know, she has very, very clear, firm ideas about what she wants to paint and how she wants to paint it. There aren't really very many possibilities of cooperation in that, apart from the two lovely book jackets she did for me.

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Record number five we got to

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Well, I thought that we've got to have a few jokes, haven't we, on the island? And the best joker that I've ever known, and I'm lucky enough to be able to say that I knew him very well and loved him most dearly, was Noel Coward.

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And I thought that probably it would be fun to have something.

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That

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wasn't too well known of his. He did one musical that I remember seeing I think it was the last one I ever saw of his, which was, I thought, absolutely glorious.

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And it didn't have very much success. It was called Sail Away. There's one song, which is all about those ridiculous phrases that guide books tell you how to say in various languages, phrases that you can't possibly ever want to use.

Speaker 316:27

The weather is cooler, the weather is hotter. Please hand me a spanner, unfasten my cloak. I've lost my umbrella, I'm in a great hurry, I'm going, I'm staying, do you mind if I smoke?

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This mutton is tough. There's a mouse in my bedroom. This egg is delicious. This soup is too thick. Please bring me a trout. What an excellent pudding. Pray hand me my gloves.

Speaker 316:46

I'm going to be sick.

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Now occurs useful phrases from Sailor Way. Let's go straight on to record six.

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Record six is

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The Four Last Songs by Richard Strauss.

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And the particular one that I'd like to play now is called Weim Schlaffengen, or On Going to Sleep, and it's sung by Lisa Della Casa, who sang it better than anybody's ever sung.

John Julius Norwich17:57

Yeah.

Presenter18:12

Lisa del A Casa singing On Going to Sleep.

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from Richard Strice's For Last Song.

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Now, Lord Norridge, we've talked about your cultural and intellectual interests. What about the practical side? You were in the Navy, you should be able to.

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Look after yourself practically on this island.

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I think the navy took longer to teach me to tie a bowl in.

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Than it's ever taken

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to teach anyone else to tie a bowl in.

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I've never been able to do anything at all with my hands, and I don't think that 20 or 30 years on a desert island would help.

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I don't think to the end of my days on the island I'd be any better than I was the day I arrived on it. Oh dear What are you going to live in? No hut, then? Could you have to dig a hole? I may have to dig a hole. I expect I could do that. Um or find some shelter under some tangled bracken.

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Something like that, I think.

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Ever done any fishing?

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Yes. Once again, I think I could probably just about bend a pin and tie it onto the end of a bit of string, but that's about as far as it would go. Yes.

Speaker 119:07

Uh

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Would you try to escape?

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I think that I probably wouldn't, you know. First of all, I think I'd be too frightened.

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Secondly, I think that probably after the first five or six years I might get rather fond of the island and not terribly want to escape. I'd rather hope that my friends would come and see me.

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Which ultimately, with any luck, I expect they'd find out where I was. They might come for the weekend. We'll get your travel bureau to work. We get the travel bureau on record number seven.

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Record number seven I Should Like Some Shoppa.

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Played by Dinu Lipati, who played it better than anyone Sinchopa has, the waltz in A-flat, Oppos thirty-four, number one.

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Dino Lopati, Chopin's Walsinet Flat, Opus Thirty Four, Number One.

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Which brings us now to your last disc. What's that? My last disc is a record of Verdi choruses.

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I think we've had enough.

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Solo singing now. I do want to hear quite a lot of human voices if I'm alone on my island.

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And I think now the best thing I can do is to hear about 500 voices all together singing this glorious chorus of the Hebrew slaves from Nabucco.

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Toscanini conducting Varpensiero from Verdi's Nabucco. Now if you could take only one disc out of your eight, which would it be?

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I think it would be the Fidelio.

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The Quartet

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and one luxury to take to the island with you.

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Rather boring answer to this question, but I think pencil and paper, you know, an infinite quantity of both. Yes. What literary project would you embark on with no opportunity to do research?

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I think I would try. Well, I keep a diary.

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And I would try and write some poems. I've written very few in my life, but this would perhaps be an opportunity of getting better at it. Short stories. I don't know anything, even letters to put in bottles and send off on the outgoing tide. And one book apart from the Bible, Shakespeare, and big encyclopedias.

Presenter23:01

I think the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, it will keep me going for a nice long time. It's full of facts. It's full of gloriously funny jokes.

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And when I'd finished reading it, I could start learning it.

Presenter23:13

Right. Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Gibbon. And thank you, John Julius Norwich, Lord Norwich, for letting us hear your desert island discs. Thank you for a lovely 35 years on my island. Goodbye, everyone.