The Stage

Charles Mackerras

Published Monday 19 July 2010 at 15:29 by Michael Quinn

Few conductors ranged so widely or so wisely across the repertoire as Sir Charles Mackerras, whose death from cancer at the age of 84 has silenced one of the most inquisitive, intelligent and imaginative musical voices of the last half century.

The first of seven children, he was born on 17 November 1925 in Schenectady, New York to Australian parents, who moved back to Sydney when he was two. There, he claimed lineage from Isaac Nathan, the “father of Australian music”, who championed Western classical music in the vast continent in the mid-19th century.

Mackerras seems to have inherited a similar pioneering urge, single-handedly returning the operas of Janacek to the repertoire, and lending Arthur Sullivan’s music critical credence with his 1951 arrangement of Pineapple Poll for Sadler’s Wells Ballet. He was also an acknowledged master of Mozart, and French and bel canto opera.

Mackerras studied oboe, piano and composition at the New South Wales Conservatory before joining the ABC Sydney Symphony Orchestra as its principal oboe. In 1947, he emigrated to London and was engaged as a staff conductor at Sadler’s Wells Opera. With a British Council scholarship, he studied in Prague with Vaclav Talich and immersed himself in what was to be a lifelong pre-occupation: Czech music. His breakthrough came in 1951, when he conducted the first British production of Janacek’s Katya Kabanova. He quickly became associated with the English Opera Group and the BBC Concert Orchestra, spending three years as principal conductor of the latter.

Mackerras’s Covent Garden debut in 1963 was a landmark production of Shostakovich’s Katerina Ismailova. He followed this in 1965 with a Marriage of Figaro for Sadler’s Wells that championed historically-informed playing long before HIP became hip. (As far back as 1959, he recorded Handel’s Fireworks Music with ground-breaking period-instrument fidelity.) Following a spell as chief conductor with the Hamburg State Opera, in 1970 he returned to Sadler’s Wells Opera, recently re-housed in the London Coliseum, for a seven-year term as its music director, seeing it through its transformation into English National Opera in 1974.

In 1973 Mackerras conducted the opening concert at the Sydney Opera House, and returned to the UK after three years leading the Sydney Symphony in 1980 to become the first non-British conductor to lead the Last Night of the Proms. Notable associations with a large number of orchestras, the Edinburgh Festival and the Metropolitan Opera in New York were followed by an era-defining tenure as music director with Welsh National Opera, from 1987 to 1992. He conducted in all the major opera houses of the world, developing strong relationships with San Francisco Opera and Glyndebourne, and with the Czech Philharmonic, for whom he was principal guest conductor for six years from 1997.

Mackerras conducted well into his 80s with the same appetite for performance and boundless reserves of energy, encouraging the orchestra to do more than just play the notes. A Mackerras performance was a guarantee of fresh ideas, vital playing and conducting that seemed to x-ray the music with a clarity that brought it to unforgettable life.

Beginning in the era of 78s, he recorded extensively: his cycle of Janacek operas, two Beethoven symphony cycles and an ‘authentic’ Lucia di Lammermoor are still cornerstones of the catalogue. Last year, his coupling of Mozart symphonies numbers 38-41 with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra secured BBC Music magazine’s Disc of the Year award.

His knighthood in 1979 was one of dozens of awards and citations Mackerras received. He died on July 14 and is survived by his wife of 63 years and a daughter.