Richard Buckle

Speaker 10:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young and this is a download from the Desert Island Discs archive. This edition may be slightly different from what was actually broadcast, but it's the only version we have. It comes from the British Library's radio collection. It was archived without the music, so although the Castaways choices are introduced, they're not part of this recording. Full details can be found on the Castaways page on the Desert Island Discs website.

Speaker 10:26

The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen seventy nine.

Speaker 10:30

And the presenter was Roy Plumley.

Presenter0:33

This week our Castaway is the author, ballet critic and exhibition designer Richard Buckle.

Presenter0:39

Now we know that music is a major interest, or we assume it is, because it plays a large part in ballet. Have you any musical skill yourself?

Richard Buckle0:46

Absolutely none. I had a few piano lessons at school, and I gave it up because I didn't like the mistress who taught me and it's the greatest regret of my life, because I think to play the piano and to know Greek are two things I lack.

Richard Buckle1:02

Did you have any plan in choosing your miserable allowance of eight record?

Richard Buckle1:07

If I had to say what was my favorite type of music,

Richard Buckle1:10

I would say a piano concerto or chamber music, and if I was to say what my favourite kind of voice was, I should say an Italian tenor's voice. But I have no Italian tenor in my programme, I have no piano concerto, and incidentally no Chopin, who's a favourite composer.

Richard Buckle1:33

And I had to limit the chamber music to to one piece. So in a way I'm not being representative, but the things worked out like this. Right. What's the first one? The first uh piece I've chosen has words by Victor Hugo and music by Liszt, and it's au conge d'or, sung by Fischer Discount.

Presenter2:01

Dietrich Fischer Diskar singing Au conge d'our, music by Liszt, words by Victor Hugo. Why did you choose that?

Richard Buckle2:10

Well, it has a special significance for me at the moment. Apart from being one of my favourite songs, I'm very interested in the Romantic period and in Victor Hugo, and it happens that Victor Hugo's great-grandson, Jean Hugo, who's a wonderful French painter, with whom I have worked on various exhibitions, he's a great friend of mine, and so is his wife, who's English.

Richard Buckle2:32

Now, your background. You're the son of a soldier. I'm a son of a soldier, and both my grandparents were professional soldiers. What part of the country do you come from?

Richard Buckle2:41

I was born in a little village in Westminster called Warkup, which is very quiet, surrounded by fells. And my family, the Buckles, actually came from near there, but came south in the 1500s. And my grandfather only went back because he'd met my grandmother who came from there. And we've all been tied up with that part of the world ever since.

Presenter3:07

Now you were educated at Marlborough, then to Oxford, to to Balliol. What did you read?

Richard Buckle3:07

There you are.

Richard Buckle3:13

I read English, but I didn't read it studiously enough, and as I was supposed to be getting a scholarship, which I failed in, because I was doing theatricals and enjoying myself, I ran out of money and had to leave after one year. After Balliol, you wrote a novel?

Richard Buckle3:29

I wrote a silly little novel about Oxford, a sort of fantasy called John Innocent at Oxford, which is about Oxford and the future. I imagined it as a kind of paradise without traffic and all the streets grassed over, where people lived for art and beauty alone, with absolute rot. What did you want to be at that point? I thought I was a genius, you see, and I thought you could do anything you wanted without working for it.

Richard Buckle3:54

I think a lot of young people may have the same idea, but I wanted to be either the greatest actor in the world, or the greatest director, or the greatest painter in the world, and I soon found that you had to work jolly hard in order to be the mediocre one of any of these things.

Presenter4:09

How did your obsession by ballet come about?

Richard Buckle4:13

By taking the train from Liverpool Street station on the way back from school, because my mother lived in Norfolk, and uh catching this train in nineteen thirty three in December to go home for Christmas, I saw this book on the bookstore, and it was Romola Nizhinsky's Life of Her Husband. I'd never heard of Nizhinsky nor of Diyagilev, and I didn't know what ballet was. Nobody had ever mentioned it to me. I was fascinated by this photograph of Nizhinsky in Le Spec la Rose, thought it had some extraordinary sculptural quality. At the same time I had the instinct that my mother would think there was something shocking about it, so I didn't buy the book. But when I got home I found it on her table by the fire in Norfolk.

Richard Buckle4:57

And it did rather change my life. It's not a very good book. It's a romantic book. Romola wrote it with her eye on Hollywood.

Richard Buckle5:04

And of course Dyagilev had to be the villain.

Presenter5:07

When did you Yeah, yeah.

Richard Buckle5:09

A year or two later, the first ballet I ever saw was Giselle at Sadler's Wells with Markova and Robert Helpman. And I've loved that ballet ever since. Then I began to go to the De Basil Ballet at Covent Garden. Did you have any desire to dance yourself or to choreograph? Well, funnily enough not. Although I'd wanted to be an actor and realized I couldn't, I never dared to suppose that I could be a dancer. I took a few lessons later on from Vera Volkova, who was such a marvellous teacher, private lessons. I was already over thirty when I did that. And when she said now you can draw in a class, you're all right, I didn't want to expose my aging body to the view of the young and I refrained.

Presenter5:49

Yeah.

Presenter5:50

Let's have your second record. What's that to be?

Richard Buckle5:53

Well, I think that Wagner's Ring is the greatest single achievement in music ever perpetrated, and I think that Goethe Demerung, The Twilight of the Gods, is the greatest work in the series. And it's so it's so extraordinary and so varied in its splendours that I've almost arbitrarily chosen the opening to Act Three, which is The Rhine Maidens and Siegfried. And I've chosen the recording of the English national opera doing it, not just because I think George Howard, who's a great friend of mine, is one of the greatest men in Britain today, but because I think Reginald Goodall's recording is quite extraordinary and Remedios is excellent and the Three Rhine Maidens are wonderful too.

Presenter6:44

An excerpt from the third act of Twilight of the Gods, the English National Opera Company production, conducted by Reginald Goodall.

Presenter6:54

You founded the magazine Ballet. Had there been such a magazine before?

Richard Buckle6:58

Well, when I was first getting interested in ballet, there was the Dancing Times, and indeed there still is The Dancing Times. But in those days there was about two pages devoted to ballet, and about a hundred to ballroom dancing. But I thought that mine was I I had advertised it as the first magazine entirely devoted to ballet, and it was interrupted after the second number by the coming of war, because although I was rather pacifistic by nature, I was too afraid to offend my grandfather, who was a retired general, not to join up at once.

Presenter7:32

Would there have been a large enough public at that time to support a ballet magazine?

Richard Buckle7:36

Funnily enough, if if the war hadn't come, I believe that it might have uh done rather well. I have a letter from my uncle, who was a banker, uh to my mother, saying that um Dickie's absurd adventure turns out not to be quite as ridiculous as we thought. I think that he'll probably manage to make a go of it and be earning a hundred and fifty pounds a month, which was quite a lot in those days, before long. But the war came and the price of paper was greater after the war. Advertising was very hard to get, and although we struggled on for seven years, I lost a lot of my friend's money and some of my own, and we went bust in the end.

Speaker 18:01

Before la

Richard Buckle8:14

Did you serve in your father's regiment? No. My uncle, the banker, of whom I mentioned before, went back to his old regiment, which was the Scots Guards, and I thought they had such pretty hats I asked if I could join.

Presenter8:29

Right, six years in the Scots Guards, mentioned in despatches during the Italian campaign. Did you see any ballet at all during the war years?

Presenter8:38

Yeah.

Richard Buckle8:38

I think I saw a little bit of ballet in Rome. I think I saw a production of Coppellia.

Richard Buckle8:43

But uh at the end of the war we were in Trieste and there I began to hear opera. I remember hearing Tagliavini and uh I remember being enraptured by I was rather ignorant about opera, still am, but I was enraptured by h his reading the poem of Ossian in Wertha.

Presenter9:04

Uh

Richard Buckle9:04

Yeah.

Presenter9:04

To have your third record.

Richard Buckle9:06

The third record is also opera and it's Mozart, and I've chosen from Cosi Fantute the trio when uh the two men uh the sail away and the two girlfriends and the wicked plotter sing Suave sia ilvento.

Presenter9:27

A trio from Mozart's Cosifantutte, sung by Zena Jorinatz, Blanche Tebom, and Mario Boriello.

Presenter9:35

Now, after the war ballet reappeared on the bookstalls, but that didn't involve you enough in in the ballet scene. You you became a newspaper critic.

Richard Buckle9:45

It was a way of trying to earn a bit, because obviously on ballet one was losing. Yes, I even wrote a little bit for the Daily Express, and then I wrote for The Observer for several years. And then I thought I'd had enough of it in the fifties, I think, and gave up, as I thought, writing about ballet for good. Tried to write plays, but that didn't work out very well. I wrote about ten plays, two got on, they never made the West End. And I accepted, out of desperation, a job with the Sunday Times writing about ballet for what seemed to me quite a decent wage and did that for about fifteen years.

Presenter10:29

You had twenty-five years uh uh as a critic. I suppose. And some enjoyable travels, I trust.

Richard Buckle10:35

Oh yes, one went to Paris and New York and New York particularly was thrilling to go to because I felt that the sort of blast of creative genius in ballet in our time was coming from that direction and my admiration for Balanchine and for Martha Graham and for Jerome Robbins was greater than for any other choreographers. Some more music. Our next piece is again opera and it's from Verdi's Otello, which some people think put more marvellous characterization into the chief characters than even Shakespeare did.

Richard Buckle11:17

And it is Cabaguet singing Desdemona's willow song, Salce, Salce.

Presenter11:28

Montserrat Caballe singing The Willow Song from Verdi's Otello.

Presenter11:33

No

Presenter11:34

Your exhibitions. What was the first one?

Richard Buckle11:37

The exhibitions came about because of my enthusiasm for Dyagilev and for his period. In 1954, Ian Hunter, who directed the Edinburgh Festival, realized that it was the twenty-fifth anniversary of Dyagilev's death. And my old school friend Derek Hill, the painter, who had done an exhibition of Degas for the Edinburgh Festival, advised Ian that he had this friend who was a journalist who was mad about Dyagilev. And like that, I was asked to make an exhibition.

Speaker 112:01

Oh.

Presenter12:11

Which caused a sensation.

Richard Buckle12:13

evolved a new sort of presentation. I didn't of course set out to do anything new, but I did feel that an exhibition of stage designs alone was an exhibition of pictures without backgrounds or foregrounds, according to whether it was a costume design or a set design, and that something had to be supplied, and probably that that something was theatrical magic and glamour. And I was given this site, the Edinburgh College of Art, and I turned a vast sculpture court, which had a glass roof and was full of light, into a dark, mysterious baroque theatre, with the help of my painter friend Leonard Rosamond, who was teaching at the college and some of the students. And this was a place where people were supposed to sit and listen to the music of Diagilev's ballets when they'd been round looking at all the exhibits. And we even sprayed scent, Diagilev's favourite smell, Giannin's Mitsuko, and we tried to surprise people in a number of different ways. The exhibition came to London and attracted more people.

Presenter13:20

And how many exhibitions have you done since then? About twenty. One in nineteen sixty four for the Shakespeare Quater Centenary at at Stratford. That was it was another. That was the greatest slop of all.

Richard Buckle13:31

That was the greatest slop of all time and the greatest endeavour I had. It got rather out of hand financially and uh we made the tremendous mistake of opening at Stratford on Avon. You should never have done it.

Presenter13:43

Financial Emma.

Richard Buckle13:45

Yeah.

Presenter13:49

Artistic Reclaim.

Richard Buckle13:50

It would have done well, I believe, if we'd opened in London and remained there. But it never got to London. And you have a great admiration for Epstein. I was invited by his widow to write a book on him, because she said Epstein always disliked conventional art critics, and she'd seen something I'd written, and she thought that I would make a kind of book which Epstein might have approved. I only rarely set out to make a record of his work. It wasn't a critical book, but it may be a help to future scholars. And because I was doing the book, I suggested to Lord Harwood that for his first Edinburgh Festival in 1961, he should put on a big Epstein exhibition. And he found this site, the Waverley Market, and I divided it up into small and vast rooms with a lot of cheap cotton material hung on tubular scaffolding. And we had some good lighting effects. And more of Epstein's great carvings were gathered together under one roof than had ever been possible during his lifetime.

Richard Buckle14:52

A lot of people came to that.

Presenter14:54

You're in the process of starting a museum

Richard Buckle14:56

In the Dorset town, where you lived.

Richard Buckle14:59

I hope that's going to come off. We've started we've founded a trust, which is going to be called King Alfred's Trust, because Alfred built an abbey on the heights of Shaftesbury, near where I live, and the ruins of this abbey are adjacent to a church which has become redundant. My aim, which is grandiose I admit, is to strip the gallery and organ loft from this early Gothic Revival church by Gilbert Scott and to make great wall spaces on which some of our painters of today, and we have some very fine painters in England, but I should also use American, French and Greek painters, in which we can paint great murals and illustrate scenes of local history. This will be adjoining, I hope, the ruins of King Alfred's Abbey, which are being sold by a private individual, and around the whole area a beautiful garden will be made, and our neighbourhood will have a place for changing exhibitions and a concert hall.

Richard Buckle16:10

Your fifth record. What's that to be?

Richard Buckle16:13

Well, we get down to chamber music at last, and of

Richard Buckle16:17

Isn't it awful? You see, I I haven't got room for Beethoven, but we've got something of Schubert, and I want to play the slow movement from the Trout quintette with Brandel at the piano.

Presenter16:33

The slow movement of the Schubert piano quintet in A, the Trout, Alfred Brendel at the piano with members of the Cleveland Quartet.

Presenter16:42

You've played a major part in getting the Theatre Museum on its feet, of which we all have great expectations and which we've been waiting for for a very long time. How did you get involved?

Richard Buckle16:54

I suppose the story started with the Diagilev exhibition in 1954, but partly because of that it was suggested to me by an old boy called Yamantidi who lives in Switzerland, he's now an even older boy, that the whole Diagilev wardrobe and curtains, which he'd been paying storage for for many years, should be sold at Sotheby's. Sotheby's were rather imaginative about this, and I went in for it, and I catalogued them. Well, then by again an amazing chance, I'd been dreaming for years of getting it together a Diagilev collection, or founding a theatre museum, or having a Diagilev collection attached to the Victorian Albert Museum. And on the very day of the first sale, I was enabled to spend £75,000 on dresses and scenery. And there were subsequent sales, there were talks in which Lord Goodman and Lord Harwood were involved, and Lord Grade put up a lot of money, and we somehow founded the Theatre Museum, which incorporated the existing British Theatre Museum and other collections.

Presenter18:10

The new one is this is going to be in uh cotton garden.

Richard Buckle18:13

Our Theatre Museum is a branch of the Victorian Albert, just as Austerley House is, and Apsley House is a branch of the Victorian Albert. At the moment it's housed in a few rooms in the museum, but it's going to be separate and we have premises that we hope to open in in 1982 in the old flower market, Covent Garden. A splendid sight. It's the heart of the theatre world and it would break my heart if they moved us somewhere else.

Richard Buckle18:43

Record number six.

Richard Buckle18:45

The next record is Bach, and it is the cantata Herz und Mundt, which I choose because it has this divine tune in it, which we call Jesus of Joy of Man's Desiring. It's sung by King's College, Cambridge choir.

Presenter19:07

The Bach cantata number one hundred and forty seven, Herz und Munt, sung by the King's College Choir, Cambridge, conducted by David Wilcox.

Presenter19:17

Now you talked briefly about your plays. Let's deal in more detail with your books, predictably mostly about ballet.

Richard Buckle19:24

That so far has been the case. I hope now to get out of the ballet groove and to write about life in general. The last book that I wrote is The Life of Diagilev. Before that there was The Life of Nizhinski.

Presenter19:39

The Agilev book, the one which is newly out, is a monster book. It is really enormous and amazing.

Richard Buckle19:46

Well I can tell you that I cut a hundred thousand words, the ball's going to be even bigger. It's it's under a quarter of a million words.

Presenter19:49

Yeah.

Presenter19:54

A rapture.

Richard Buckle19:54

Originally

Presenter19:55

It was a third of a million.

Richard Buckle19:56

Yes. It went through very many stages and took much longer than it should have done to write. A very comprehensive book. I suppose comprehensive. People point out a lot of omissions, but I'm very conscious of them myself. Was it based on the discovery of new material?

Presenter20:12

Hello?

Richard Buckle20:13

There was material which had never been used before, and which I was lucky enough to be able to use for the first time. There are three immense collections of documents. One is Boris Cochno's collection, which was sold in 1975 to the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. One is at the Museum of Performing Arts, the Library and Museum of Performing Arts at Lincoln Center in New York. The other belongs to Parmenia Ekstrom, who founded the Stravinsky Dyagilev Foundation.

Presenter20:43

You said you were going to write more out of the ballet field. Incidentally, you have already recently done that when you stirred up once again the you and non you controversy.

Richard Buckle20:53

It was that was a bit of a giggle.

Presenter20:55

Probably.

Richard Buckle20:55

What did you call it?

Presenter20:57

You and non-you.

Richard Buckle20:57

Yeah.

Presenter20:58

Who revisited?

Richard Buckle20:58

That's right.

Presenter21:01

What are your future plans if you're not going to write about Dalle?

Richard Buckle21:04

Well, I've just finished editing Cecil Beaton's Diaries, trying to put all the best of his six volumes of diaries, plus three other books that he wrote, into one not too heavy volume. And I enjoyed that because Beaton's a great friend of mine, lives near me in the country, and I have a feeling, Touch Wood, that the Perune Darn version may be a great success.

Presenter21:33

Now let's have some more music.

Richard Buckle21:36

One of my very favourite composers is Scarlatti, and I want to play one of his sonatas for harpsichord. Vander Landowska is playing it. Djagilev, who obviously was interested in Scarlatti from his youth onwards, during the First World War in 1917, together with Miyasin, who died recently, the young choreographer, young then, put together about twenty sonatas of Scalati and had them orchestrated by Tomassini to make the ballet The Good Humoured Ladies.

Presenter22:17

Vander Londowska playing the Scarlatti sonata in F major, number four seven four, which was used in The Good Humoured Ladies.

Presenter22:26

Your practical skills as a castaway. How well could you look after yourself? I can cook.

Richard Buckle22:32

It's not enough. What else? I'm not very good at carpentry. What other skills do I need? Are you any good at cultivation?

Richard Buckle22:42

That would help? I try to work in the garden at home. I'm very good at mowing, and I'm very good at digging stones out of lawns. Can you fish? I've never tried.

Richard Buckle22:56

Would you try to escape?

Richard Buckle22:58

No, because I wouldn't abandon my manuscript that I'd been working on, my book.

Presenter23:03

You will be working on the desert island on your future book.

Richard Buckle23:07

I should be writing all that I know about life and trying to write a masterpiece.

Presenter23:11

Yes, you realize you've already chosen your luxury, your one luxury that you're allowed, because you're going to have obviously paper and pencils. Is that all right?

Richard Buckle23:20

Oh well, that'll have to be it.

Richard Buckle23:22

Right

Presenter23:23

You got your last record.

Presenter23:24

No ballet yet, with the exception no ballet music with the exception of that scarletti sonata.

Richard Buckle23:30

Well, here comes the ballet, and of course it's by Stravinsky, and I think greater than the Firebird, greater than Petrushka, greater than The Rite of Spring, and greater even than Apollo, I'm only naming the ballets he wrote during Dyagilev's lifetime, is Les Nos, the Wedding. And this is the ending of it, which I think is one of the great moments in modern music.

Presenter24:01

The closing passage of Stravinsky's Le Nos

Presenter24:04

Conducted by Pier Boules.

Presenter24:07

If you could only take one disk out of your eight, which would it be?

Richard Buckle24:11

I should take the Schubert Quintet.

Presenter24:14

The tribe And you've already chosen your luxury pencils and paper. Now, you're allowed to take one book apart from the Bible and Shakespeare, and we don't encourage big encyclopedias.

Richard Buckle24:26

I should choose a novel, and I should choose the greatest tragic novel in English, which is also connected with the countryside where I live and which I love, Dorset. I should choose Thomas Hardy's Tess of the Derbervilles.

Presenter24:39

Right. And thank you, Richard Buckle, for letting us hear your Desert Island discs.

Richard Buckle24:44

Thank you very much, too. I've tried to be sincere, and I hope I haven't been too square and predictable. I'm sure not.

Presenter24:50

Goodbye, everyone.