Earl of Harewood

Earl of Harewood0:00

Hello, I'm Kirstie 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 nineteen eighty one, and the presenter was Roy Plumley.

Presenter0:29

On our Desert Island this week is a man who has done a great deal for music both as administrator and as a writer, the Earl of Harwood.

Earl of Harewood0:36

How

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Laura, you spent your life organising music, presenting music. How do you rate as a performer? Me? You.

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I would have thought a candidate for the world's most silent performer.

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On instruments I rarely never perform at all. My friends, of course, um prevent that. They say I do quite enough by the act of speaking. But I'm I'm a non-performer. You did learn the piano. You didn't learn the pressure. I learned the piano as a kid and I was hopeless at it. I was sorry I gave it up, but I was pleased to give it up.

Earl of Harewood1:01

Who designed the piano?

Presenter1:06

And I tried to learn the clarinet when I was in prison. That went all right. Because it's an easy instrument. But we had an influx of new blood, shall we say, in the prison camp I was in, and I stopped. There wasn't enough space to play it in, without other people listening. I know you have a very big collection of records. When did you start collecting? How early? Well, I think I started when I was really, very young. I think I bought with my pocket money records and asked for records for Christmas and birthdays and so on. And I was quite a serious collector when I was at school. By the time I was about 15, 16, I was looking in record catalogues and in the gramophone and so on and buying records that were advertised for sale. I was a collector. This big collection of records which you have, are they catalogued and tidy? Oh, yes. Oh, yes, meticulously. By yourself? By me. Nobody else knows their way about it. Nobody else can find the records. My wife says she can't find any records. She's in despair unless they're records waiting to be catalogued or waiting to be put into the shelves. Then she can find them because I don't mind the order they're in then. Did you find it very hard narrowing down your collection to just eight for a desert island? I found it almost impossible. What's the first record you have there?

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Well, I wanted to start with something very kind of straight and classical and optimistic, and as

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Possibly my favorite musical form is the string quartet, and as I think the greatest composer of string quartets was Haydn, I chose a Haydn quartet, and it's the first movement from his G major quartet in Op seventy six.

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Wonderful simplicity I find, and I love the way the piece bounces away with the kind of confidence that I think one would need on a desert island.

Speaker 43:21

Uh

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The opening of Haydn's string quartet number seventy five in G major, opus seventy six number one,

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By the Amadeirs Quartet.

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Now, you were brought up in the family home, Howard House in Yorkshire, one of the great show houses. When was it built?

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It started in seventeen fifty nine the foundation stone was laid, and it was first inhabited in I think either seventeen seventy one or seventy two.

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And treasures have been added to the family collection for all those years. What does the house contain now of special beauty and interest? Well, it was mostly furnished by Chippendale, and I suppose that is the most distinguishing feature of it. My father bought a lot of Italian pictures, inherited a lot of family pictures,

Earl of Harewood4:20

Inhibit.

Presenter4:22

which are still there. And in the early part of the 19th century, an ancestor bought a lot of save China, a lot of China from France, and that's a nice feature of it. So you were brought up as a country boy, were you? And you went to Eton. Had you resigned yourself to a life as a landowner looking after the estate? Yes, up to a point. But I think it was too early, really, when the war came. I was sixteen when the war came too early in my life for that kind of decision to appear decisive, if you know what I mean. I don't think I'd

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taking that kind of decision.

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You left Eton and went straight into the Grenadier Girls Are you? That was your father's regiment. Yes. And then you were commissioned and served in North Africa?

Earl of Harewood5:01

I'm in view.

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Then the Italian campaign.

Presenter5:08

And some opera, of course, in Italy. A lot of opera in Italy. The first time, in fact, I'd heard Italians, except on gramophone records, singing opera, at the San Carlo in Naples in early 1944 when I went to Italy. And that was a lovely discovery. It was much as I'd expected it to be, but it was satisfactory and exciting, and those wonderful, healthy sounds that Italian voices make. Yeah, I enjoyed that. So that was another major influence on your life. At which point we'll break off your second record. Well, my second record, after we've just said, is perhaps not logical. It really is going back to childhood and one of my first enthusiasms, which is Wagner. And it remains, as Wagner remains, obviously, a great enthusiasm. The record is from master singers.

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I'm used now to thinking of these things with their English titles. And it's the great quintet from the third act sung in, I think, one of the finest records in a way ever made, made over 50 years ago, with Elizabeth Schumann as the soprano soloist, Laritz Melcure as the tenor, Friedrich Shaw as the bass, as the Hansachs, and two fine English singers whom I later knew, Ben Williams, the tenor, and Gladys Parr. I knew those singers in the war and afterwards with Saddler's Wells from the English Opera Group. I think this is one of those wonderful, slow tunes that becomes almost timeless, and the singing is as clean and as exciting almost as the music.

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The quintet from Wagner's The Meistersingers of Nuremberg

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which was an opera you probably didn't see in Italy.

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and it was sung by Elizabeth Schumann and four other distinguished singers.

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Now you saw a fair amount of action in Italy. Then you were wounded and captured on June the 15th, 1944. There was a strange family coincidence about that date. June the 18th, because that was the date of the Battle of Waterloo, and my father was wounded in the First War in 1915 on June the 18th. And we had an answer, both of us, who was wounded at Waterloo itself. So June the 18th was a tricky day for the Lassells family. Extraordinary. And as I suppose we were the only three.

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Lord Howward's

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Who actually saw action in the 19th or 20th centuries? We have a big record of failure. We all survived, though. There were wounds.

Presenter8:09

That's encouraging. Anyway, off to hospital and then a prison camp, where?

Presenter8:14

Well, various places in Germany and for the most of the time at at Kolditz, the famous Kolditz, which I think you could say was an education in itself.

Presenter8:25

He was singled out as one of the prominenten.

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As a grandson of King George the Fifth and the nephew of the reigning King, you had considerable bargaining value, they thought.

Presenter8:35

Well, they thought so. We thought this was all very ridiculous, that there were about half a dozen of us with well-known connections, and we would have absolutely

Presenter8:45

No importance whatsoever ourselves. We were all, let's call it, relatively junior officers from 30-something downwards. And we our fear was that somebody would rumble that the bargaining power was a great deal less than they'd at first thought it was. They'd calculate in one way and would find out another, and we would then become expendable. That was our fear. And if once the Wehrmacht, the army, lost interest in us, we were frightened of becoming prisoners of the Gestapo or something like that, which would have been very disagreeable. We just avoided it. We spent the last night of our time, not at Kölitz, but in actually in Austria by then, with the guns of the guards pointing outwards against the Gestapo who might come in rather than inwards against us, who might try to get out.

Presenter9:29

Was there any music in in the prison camp? Did you have a gramophone? We had lots of records.

Earl of Harewood9:31

We have a grammar.

Presenter9:33

We had a wind up gramophone. We didn't have a nice electric gramophone or anything. We had wind up gramophone, but a lot of records. And I heard quite an amount of of chamber music that I didn't know before and which was good and which I enjoyed.

Presenter9:46

Not least, late Beethoven, string quartets, things of that kind. You had a project to read the whole of Grove's vast dictionary of music. How far did you get? Well, I did quite well. I got letter S, and then I was moved to Kolditz. That was before I was in Kolditz, and they hadn't got a copy of Grove, so there I had to stop. So, of course, my knowledge of music and musicians from S onwards is limited. Have you picked it up since? I've tried. Right. Now, record number three. You were talking about Beethoven, and this is a Beethoven disc, isn't it? Yes. The Ghost Trio.

Presenter10:18

D Major Trio, Opera 70, by Beethoven and the First Movement. And I have a particular interest in the performers because the cellist, Jacqueline Dupre, became my goddaughter. She was born right at the end of the war, and her father, who was a friend of mine from an early period in the war, we joined the army almost together, he was in touch with me when I got back from the prisoner of war camp and said, I've had a daughter, will you be a godfather? And I carried Jackie to the font in autumn 1945 and had little idea that this was to become one of the great British instrumentalists of our time. And she's in this.

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this recording with her husband, Daniel Baronroim, and Pinker Stuckerman as the violinist. She of course is the cellist. And very wonderfully I think she plays the beautiful tune right at the beginning of the movement.

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And it's an excitement, always to hijack he play.

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And I think I would like that excitement on my desert island.

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The opening of Beethoven's piano trio, number four, The Ghost, opus seventy number one, played by Daniel Baremboim, Pintras Zuckermann, and Jacqueline Dupre.

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So the war was over. Thankfully you came back to England. You went off to Canada for a while. I was very lucky because my uncle, Lord Athlone, who was the Governor General, asked me to be an A D C, and that meant a life of of relative ease instead of military hard work.

Presenter12:31

And I enjoyed it vastly. It was my first, let's call it, complete peacetime existence as a grown up, because there weren't there was no kind of rationing or anything like that in Canada really then. And it was a very enjoyable experience. How long did it last?

Presenter12:45

Um, it must have been about six or eight months. Rather shorter than the time I had spent as a prisoner of war. Yes. And then Cambridge, what did you read?

Presenter12:54

I read English. I thought it was about the only thing I was qualified to read. I think I wanted to go to university very much. There were, of course, a lot of rather elderly undergraduates in their mid-twenties. I was one of them.

Presenter13:04

You began doing some musical journalism. That led to you starting a magazine. Yes. I started opera in nineteen fifty, I suppose it was, having worked with Richard Buckle on ballet and opera for a year before.

Presenter13:19

Which was also fun. And I enjoyed writing about it. I loved going to performances. And opera is still going strong. Yes.

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You undertook the revision of a long standard work on opera. A long standard work which you made longer. Yes, I'm afraid I did make it longer. Cobay. Um Cobbeg's complete opera book, which of course starts by being a uh an unfulfillable claim. That was great fun because I

Presenter13:42

found out quite a lot about operas I didn't know about and pretended that I did know about and in fact did know a good deal more about by the time I wrote about them. Um I've revised it once in a big way since, which was also exciting,'cause again I added a lot of other pieces. That was another educative process. It carried on where Prison left off, shall we say.

Speaker 413:57

Uh

Earl of Harewood13:57

Uh

Presenter14:00

I suppose one of your first administrative musical projects was to arrange the presentation of Benjamin Britton's opera Gloriana at the time of Her Majesty's coronation.

Presenter14:11

Yes, that was less of an administrative project than a kind of inspiration which came to several of us at the same time. And I beaved away behind the scenes and suggested to Buckingham Palace that it would be an excitement to have something of this kind in connection with the coronation a year hence. And the idea was accepted, and I got Cobb Garden to accept it. None of them things were very difficult to do, but it was quite an excitement. And the failure of Gloriana was a tremendous disappointment to many of us, and it still remains a source of some surprise to me. I think it's a very good opera. It's a very accessible opera. It's a very good theme. It's a serious one. It doesn't show anyone in a poor light, least of all the monarch, Queen Elizabeth I, and that people wrote about it as if it was a form of

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almost treasonable.

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Les Majeste, I still don't understand. I think it was a tremendously poor reflection on the audience which heard it, that they enjoyed it so little.

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Record number four.

Presenter15:11

Well, one of the big

Presenter15:14

influences, and I have been an opera person for a lot of my life. One of the big performing influences on me was the first meeting with Maria Carlas and the hearing her throughout her career.

Presenter15:28

I think she was wonderful. I think she was an example to performers, particularly singers, that should be constantly kept before them. And the record I've chosen is from Puritani, Quila Voce, the mad scene of the heroine, which she only sang once in England, not very often in the opera at all, but only once in England at the Gala at Covent Garden in 1958.

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And this performance of hers is to me the

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the essence of what we

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That overworked word, that overworked expression, Bel Canto, the perfect harnessing of means to ends, with the ends always involving a beautiful sound, which I think she has here, as well as a tremendous intensity of expression. I don't think Bel Canto can be better defined than in this record of colors.

Speaker 416:26

Leave your heart.

Speaker 416:31

The coldest family

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Maria Callas singing an aria from Bellini's I poritani qui la vocce

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You'd spent a great deal of time travelling all over the place to see opera. It became a professional occupation in 1953, I believe, when you joined the Royal Opera House. Immediately after the premiere of Gloriana, about a week after, I think. Marvelous to be paid for doing what you'd be doing in any case. Yes, I don't think that's bad either. Because it does involve other things than simply listening to performances. Of course. I know what you mean. What were the highlights of that seven years from 1953 to 1960 when you were on the cotton garden staff?

Presenter17:53

The first all virtually complete performance of the Trojans I think was a highlight. Rings, Performances of the Ring of Wagner. A new production of the magic flute with Rafael Kubelik in nineteen fifty six on Mozart's, what, two hundredth birthday, that was exciting.

Earl of Harewood17:57

Yeah.

Presenter18:10

The new production of Don Carlos at the time of the 100th anniversary of the building of Cobb Garden. That was a great excitement.

Earl of Harewood18:18

Yeah, that

Presenter18:20

What were the bad moments? Can you remember any disasters?

Presenter18:24

I don't know that I can. We had one or two people cancel and we were

Presenter18:29

Successful in bringing in replacements, we didn't have to change the opera, and we didn't really have a a very sound system of understudying then.

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Glorionovas was one of the bad moments. It was a great disappointment that it didn't come off.

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The public didn't like it. One can never, when you work in something like a a performing organization, you can never say the public and the critics are wrong, we are right. You may feel it. Yes. But the demo you've demonstrated the opposite. You've got it wrong.

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Record number five we got to. Well, that is appropriately from Don Carlos, which I was talking about just now, and it's conducted by Giulini, who conducted that great revival in 1958 at Cobb Garden. The singers of the piece I've chosen are different.

Presenter19:12

Both of them Spanish, by the way. Cabae is Spanish, the soprano, and Place do Domingo, the tenor, also Spanish. And it's a bit of the last actuet. It's a very long opera, but it's one that has come gradually, I think, to become my favorite Verdi opera.

Speaker 320:04

Jesus We

Presenter20:26

A duet from the last act of Verdi's Don Carlos, sung by Placido Domingo and Montserrat Caballe.

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Now, as a change of scene, you took over the direction of the Edinburgh Festival. This was really before the days of the Friends.

Presenter20:41

No, the fringe was quite successful by the time I went there in 1960. It wasn't officially liked by the festival. I used to try and persuade them that it provided nothing but credit for the festival. Its existence, when it was good, it reflected well on the festival. They used to think it took away potential seatbelts. You were accused of godlessness and dirt. What had you been up to?

Presenter21:03

I think we must have put on uh some play or possibly an exhibition that certain members of the press didn't approve of. I don't think we were at all godless and we weren't specially dirty.

Presenter21:16

I'm not certain that I necessarily wholly disapprove of either condition, although perhaps both together is pushing it rather. But, um I don't know what we've done. They kept it going for two or three weeks at one festival. And you'd been in charge of the Leeds Festival for quite a while. That was fairly plain sailing.

Presenter21:34

Yes, it was, in a way. It was less of an international festival, of course, than than Edinburgh. It was great fun. I ran it from Harvard. It wasn't at all a full time job, unlike Edinburgh.

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It was based on a great Yorkshire chorus, and inasmuch as we could find one and train it, and get great people to conduct it, it was very successful. When that basis started to flag a little, it was less successful.

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Because Leeds fond as I am of it, it's really my home town.

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hasn't got the festival attributes of Salzburg or or Aix or Edinburgh.

Presenter22:08

That's sadly true. At seventy two you took over at the Coliseum as boss of the English National Opera. Yes. Um opera's really been my profession for much of my life, more than half of it.

Presenter22:24

And it was very exciting at the age of forty nine to be asked to take charge of a great opera company. I was very lucky. The company's been going from strength to strength. What do you look back on as the major achievements of your term of office so far?

Presenter22:38

Oh, I suppose the ring in English, the first rings in English for very many years, which we we produced at the Coliseum, that was a a major source of excitement and satisfaction. We have done difficult pieces like War and Peace and people liked them.

Earl of Harewood22:50

Can save

Presenter22:57

We've done

Presenter22:59

Also difficult pieces to

Presenter23:01

could argue it pioneered. Janacek, for instance, in this country, a composer I'm very fond of and fortunately the music director when I arrived, Charles McKeris, is also fond of. In fact he's the, I would say, the major exponent of of Jana Czech anywhere in the world, including Czechoslovakia now. And to do Janacek satisfactorily to good audiences, not always full houses, but good audiences.

Presenter23:24

Has been very worthwhile as an experience. Well, now you've chosen a disc of Janacek's music. This seems the place to put it in. Can you tell us about it? It is, yes. It's the prelude to the first act of Katya Kabanova, one of Janacek's late works. I think it's I love Janacek, and I'm always fascinated by the rapid contrasts of texture and of mood that he gets into his music, and these great.

Earl of Harewood23:32

Play with the

Presenter23:52

lyrical, yearning tunes that he makes. He's to me a a wonderful composer. I couldn't be without him on a on a desert island, and this would certainly be one of my top choices. In fact, it is my choice, the prelude to Katya.

Presenter24:58

Part of the Overture of Kacza Kabanova by Janicek, Charles Maquetta is conducting the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra.

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You've just published a very entertaining autobiography, The Tongues and the Bones, and you'll say nothing about your years at the Coliseum.

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I described it as as work in progress, and I thought it was probably foolish to

Presenter25:18

attempt any kind of evaluation or estimate of what we'd done or tried to do, least of all of the personalities concerned, while one was still at it. I don't know how much longer I should be allowed to stay there, but I certainly hadn't anticipated stopping yet. And I didn't want to say good or bad things about anyone.

Earl of Harewood25:35

Yeah.

Presenter25:39

In it, really?

Presenter25:40

Because I thought it was too early to do so. And if you just simply go through with a with a kind of layer of

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chocolate coated praise over everything. You write a rather dull

Presenter25:52

and rather useless.

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Well, you're saving it all for volume two.

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The Tongs and the Bones is is a very intriguing title. It's a quotation, of course. It's Bottom the Weaver from Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream. I have a reasonable Goodyear in music, says Bottom when talking to Titania. Let's have the Tongs and the Bones. I thought the reasonable Goodyear in music was probably pushing it, so I didn't want to claim that. But I couldn't see why I couldn't lay claim to the...

Presenter26:18

The tongues and the bones.

Presenter26:19

Now your lighter pastimes. You're a football fan. Yes. I don't know why you should say lighter. Somebody's sad. Less serious than opera, surely.

Earl of Harewood26:26

There sir.

Presenter26:28

Yes. When Bill Shankley, the great Liverpool manager, was asked

Presenter26:32

Whether he regarded football as a matter of life and death, he said, No, sir, it's much more serious than that.

Presenter26:38

And I guess he was right. I'm I'm keen about football. I like watching football. It does make a a contrast. It possibly makes a relaxation. But not if you're winning things. That's a very worrying business. If you're losing them, that you can take in a more relaxed way.

Presenter26:51

But when you're about to win something, it's very, very knife edge affair. How's Leeds of Righteous doing? Well, it's doing better. Peter cautiously. He started very badly at the beginning of the season.

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Record number seven.

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Well, you talked about the title of the book and this the record comes from Benjamin Britton's Midsummer Night's Dream. Britton and I were were friends for many years and I valued that friendship very much and I love his music.

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More than most people's. Certainly, I think he's the contemporary composer who's spoken most closely and most immediately to me as a as a composer.

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And I chose the very end of his Midsummer Night's Dream

Presenter27:32

I find it a wonderful finale to a very exciting and satisfactory opera.

Presenter28:32

Part of the closing scene of Benjamin Britton's Midsummer Night's Dream, the soloists were Elizabeth Harwood and Alfred Deller.

Presenter28:41

As a prisoner of war, Lord Howard, you learned well, not what loneliness means, but what isolation means. Do you think you could endure complete loneliness for a long time?

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I don't think I should be keen on it.

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Uh I think I'm a gregarious person, which means that I very much like being alone occasionally.

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for a short time, a day or two or something of the kind, but not much more.

Presenter29:04

I don't think it would be my best thing. In a material sense, could you look after yourself? Could you rig up a shelter of some sort?

Presenter29:11

I hope so. I should say to try. What about food and drink?

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I'm no kind of cook.

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I'm good with eggs.

Presenter29:19

But not much more. With reasonable luck you'll have eggs. Would I have a frying pan? No. No, that's hot stones. Yeah, hot stones. I don't mind raw eggs. Would you try to escape? Um I don't think I would. I don't think I swim well enough. I'm sure I couldn't make a waterproof boat.

Presenter29:36

I don't think I could make a raft, but I should preserve the spirit of optimism. I must tell you that. Could. Wouldn't lose that. What's your last record?

Earl of Harewood29:40

Cool.

Presenter29:43

It's Schubert, and it would be I like the late sonatas, the late piano sonatas, I think above everything of his.

Presenter29:52

These very long, not desolate,'cause I find them infinitely beautiful and therefore infinitely consoling.

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Pieces. This is the slow movement of the A major piano sonatraction movement in F sharp minor.

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And I would have it.

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In the recording, by what I think is certainly one of the two pianists who've.

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most completely realized Schubert for me. It's Alfred Brendel. The other would be Clifford Curzon. But this is the reasonably new recording of Alfred Brendel's.

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Part of the slow movement of Schubert's piano sonata in A major, played by Alfred Brendel.

Presenter31:14

If you could take only one disk out of the eight you've chosen, which would it be?

Presenter31:19

I should hesitate between the Anarchek and the Schubert, I think, and I would in the end plump for the Schubert.

Presenter31:25

And one luxury to take with you to the island nothing of any use, any practical use, purely for the senses.

Presenter31:32

Nothing of any practical use. Do you mean I couldn't use it at all? No.

Presenter31:36

Oh, Lord, I was going to say a typewriter.

Presenter31:39

I've always used a typewriter, and I would want that, provided I could have the

Presenter31:45

The thing that I discovered when I was trying to write this wretched book.

Presenter31:48

Which is that magic substance called Tip X, with which you can white out the mistakes you make so that the paper looks pristine and you go over the top. If you go over too fast, your typewriter clogs up. I admire this. I mean, I'm one of those people who just X out and doesn't bother about whiting out. I got fed up with that, and I found this wonderful toy.

Earl of Harewood32:04

And there's a filter button

Presenter32:09

I enjoy that very much. I like typing. Right. Well, the typewriter will even give you a a small table and a lot of paper and...

Presenter32:17

Three or four pounds of tip eggs.

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And one book.

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Apart from the Bible and Shakespeare, which we've already.

Earl of Harewood32:24

Do I really know?

Presenter32:28

The times I've tried to read poetry I've enjoyed it very much. But I'm a an idle reader. I'm a listener, you see. I listen to music.

Presenter32:37

And I would like to be better.

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involved in purchase. I would choose the largest

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BEST Anthology of Poetry. And I don't know which it is. Is it the Oxford Book? Well, there are two, aren't there? Yes, at least. You had better do some research about this before you go.

Earl of Harewood32:52

Bip.

Earl of Harewood32:54

I have this research for you.

Presenter32:56

And, well, that's it. Thank you, Lord Howard, for letting us hear your Desert Island discs. Well, thank you very much. Goodbye, everyone.

Earl of Harewood33:10

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