Refiner's Fire E-Book

Richard Bratby

• Herausgeber: Elliott & Thompson
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 452

Beschreibung

Financial Times – BEST BOOKS OF 2023 PRESTO MUSIC – BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2023 'This superb account of how that glorious institution came into being will give you deep and abiding pleasure' Stephen Fry When harpsichordist Christopher Hogwood and record producer Peter Wadland founded the Academy of Ancient Music in 1973, their mission was to create Britain's first orchestra devoted to recording baroque and classical music on period instruments. They went on to change the musical world. Their success brought the AAM global fame – bringing historically informed performance into the mainstream and putting Vivaldi into the pop charts. But then the orchestra faced a new challenge: reinventing itself to survive and thrive in the world its own success had created. For the first time, Richard Bratby tells the story of this trailblazing orchestra and the people who shaped it: fifty years of innovation, exploration and musical adventure, from the pioneering days of the early 1970s to new directions – and new triumphs – in the 21st century. 'An uplifting, anecdote-packed account of the Academy of Ancient Music […]' Lucie Skeaping 'The Refiner's Fire of AAM still burns brightly: this book tells us why. From the Marquis of Granby to the Hollywood Bowl; an illuminating account of a musical revolution.' Catherine Bott 'Using a mass of archival material and many interviews, Refiner's Fire is a lively account of the orchestra's history, of Christopher Hogwood himself and of the other essential players (literal and figurative).' Emma Kirkby

Leseprobe

Richard Bratby’s story of a musical revolution is frank and full of insight, with illuminating comments from AAM members past and present. The refiner’s fire of AAM still burns brightly: this book tells us why. From the Marquis of Granby to the Hollywood Bowl, an illuminating account of a musical revolution.Catherine Bott

If like me you have derived deep and abiding pleasure from the Academy of Ancient Music, then this superb account of how that glorious institution came into being will give you deep and abiding pleasure too. Impossible to read without leaping for your collection or streaming platform and reminding yourself of just how magnificent the AAM was, is, and – we have good reason to believe – will continue to be.Stephen Fry

To do justice in a single volume to the first fifty years of AAM was a huge challenge, and Richard Bratby has really pulled it off. Using a mass of archival material and many interviews, Refiner’s Fire is a lively account of the orchestra’s history, of Christopher Hogwood himself and of the other essential players (literal and figurative). AAM has come a long way; for those of us who were part of the journey there is much in this story to savour, some to surprise, even to shock, but what we can clearly recognise is the enduring vigour and imagination that should take the orchestra-and-choir through the decades to come.Emma Kirkby

An uplifting, anecdote-packed account of the Academy of Ancient Music to mark the orchestra’s 50th anniversary including everything from the achievements (and occasional disputes) that ran through the years of the ‘early music revival’ to the detailed life and work of that much-admired, multi-talented father of the AAM, Christopher Hogwood.Lucie Skeaping

To my parents

CONTENTS

Introduction and Acknowledgements

  1 Ancient Music

  2 The Piper and the Lyrebird

  3 Creating a Sound

  4 Making a Name

  5 Mozart and Messiah

  6 Revolution and Counterrevolution

  7 A New-Created World

  8 Building to Last

  9 Triumvirate and Succession

10 Renaissance

11 The Triumph of Time and Truth

12 Postlude: The Past, Looking Forward

References

Interviewees

Bibliography

Index

For sixty years a gathering has been held in this city for those most devoted to music, who at that time were committed to both its theory and its practice. Their notion was to prevent old composers, who in the previous century had happily cultivated harmony, from falling into desuetude; they founded an Academy in which the works of these artists might be performed. Nor were their efforts in vain; it grew day by day such that today it easily ranks among the most celebrated.

Letter from James Mathias, President of the Academy of Ancient Music, to David Perez in Lisbon, 1774*

_________________________

* Quoted in Timothy Eggington, The Advancement of Music in Enlightenment England. Text translated from the Latin by Dr David Butterfield and the author.

INTRODUCTION AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The story of the Academy of Ancient Music (AAM) is the story of a revolution in the theory and practice of orchestral music. Founded in 1973 by a Cambridge harpsichordist and a record producer of genius, the Academy surfed the digital boom in recorded music during the 1970s and 1980s with unprecedented – and unrivalled – success, lifting period-instrument performance from the fringes of 1960s counterculture and putting baroque music into the pop charts. Then, as the classical-record industry faded and 1970s radicals became the 1990s establishment, the AAM faced a new challenge: reinventing itself to meet the artistic, social and economic conditions of a musical world transformed by its own revolutionary achievement.

As the Academy approaches its fiftieth anniversary, it has accrued a rich and complex history, though as an organisation it is still anything but middle-aged. In one sense, fifty is an awkward age for an orchestra. Many characters in this story are still involved and gloriously active; equally, vital personalities – particularly the Academy’s co-founders, Christopher Hogwood and Peter Wadland – have already left the stage forever. That a writer as elegant and engaging as Hogwood left no memoir of his career is a source of enduring regret. Meanwhile, the existing literature on historically informed performance* deals overwhelmingly (and unsurprisingly for a field that, in its modern form, is barely half a century old) with theoretical, aesthetic and technical questions, or takes a broad overview of the movement as a whole.

As far as I can establish, this is the first full-length narrative history of a British period-instrument orchestra; the first attempt at a comprehensive account of how one specific ensemble (arguably the most influential of them all) came into being, achieved global fame, and then remade itself, securing a future and a purpose beyond the retirement of its charismatic founder. The departure of the founding director is a challenge that many of the pioneering early-music ensembles have faced, or will face, and it forms one of the principal dramas in the Academy of Ancient Music’s story. In Christopher Hogwood, the AAM was fortunate to have a founder whose generosity and open-mindedness extended to planning for his own replacement, allowing a rejuvenated Academy to build freely on his legacy under the direction of two very different but equally inspirational artistic leaders, Richard Egarr and Laurence Cummings.

This is not a biography of Christopher Hogwood but of the organisation that he created, and while it goes without saying that he plays a central role, a great orchestra is always bigger than any one individual. Fifty years on, it’s almost too soon to appraise the full historical impact of the Academy of Ancient Music’s trailblazing first decades. Extensive archives and a magnificent discography await future researchers. For now, as a contribution to the Academy’s fiftieth-birthday celebrations, I have interviewed a broad selection of the individuals – artists, administrators, critics, collaborators and supporters – who played a role in the foundation and progress of the Academy of Ancient Music, using their first-hand testimony (I hope) to animate, clarify and enrich the tale the archives tell.

Inevitably, any such selection must be partial. Pressure of time made some interviews impossible, and mortality prevented others, although I managed to talk to all of the AAM’s surviving artistic leaders and most of its general managers, as well as musicians, past and present, from all sections of the orchestra. I was helped by a large number of people, first among them the AAM’s former Chief Executive Alexander Van Ingen, who invited me to write this book, and his successor John McMunn, who has been a constant source of practical support and quiet confidence, finding time to answer my questions even while he steered the AAM through the deadly waters of a global pandemic. To serve as Hogwood Fellow has been one of the greatest (and most unexpected) honours of my career, and I am intensely aware of the responsibility that its name imparts.

I also wish to thank Dr Anna Pensaert of Cambridge University Library for her assistance with archive material, and my colleagues Simon Fairclough, James Jolly, Sir Nicholas Kenyon and Norman Lebrecht for support both moral and highly practical. This book would not have been possible without the co-operation – freely and unstintingly given – of more than forty interviewees, listed at the back of the book, for whose time and insights I am deeply indebted, and whose confidence I have done my best to respect. My particular thanks also (they will know why) to Anna Ambrose, Jacob Bagby, Alexandra Coghlan, Jessica Duchen, Mahan Esfahani, Simon Funnell, Charlotte Gardner, Miles Golding, Michael Guest, Michael Haas, Thomas Hewitt Jones, Stephen Maddock, Fiona Maddocks, Ben Palmer, Tommy Pearson, Stephen Preston, Bob Shingleton and Philip Siney.

And, finally, I must acknowledge my cat Rusty, whose interventions (duly and daily) on my keyboard were almost certainly well intentioned, and my wonderful wife Annette. As a writer on ancient music, I am privileged to have a partner whose profound knowledge of eighteenth-century theatre, and passion for Handel, has (I hope) taken some of the edge off the stresses, strains and spoiled weekends that accompany a project such as this. I couldn’t write – I couldn’t do anything, really – without her unbounded patience, encouragement and love.

Lichfield, October 2022

_________________________

* The discussion over the correct term for the approach to music taken by the Academy of Ancient Music is ongoing, and has shifted repeatedly during the last half-century. Any attempt to summarise this debate is probably doomed but, in short, we are dealing with a conscious and serious attempt – through textual scholarship, research into performance style, and the use of historic or replica instruments – to perform music with a sound, and in a style and spirit, that approximates as closely as can be imagined to the style, spirit and sound with which that music would have been performed in its composer’s own era.

All language is approximate, and while I am aware of the sensitivities surrounding each term, in order to avoid monotony I have used the labels ‘early music’, ‘period performance’ and ‘historically informed performance’ more or less interchangeably. I beg the indulgence of scholarly readers and acknowledge that terms such as Alte Musik and (especially) ‘authentic performance’ (or ‘authentic instruments’) are altogether more slippery, as what follows will (I hope) make clear.

1

ANCIENT MUSIC

A Londoner leaving the church of St Clement Danes after Evensong on the evening of 7 January 1726 and turning into the Strand in the direction of Arundel Street might have heard music, and paused. Not the hymnody of the Georgian church, or the cries of the Thames watermen, but a different sort of music: male voices, clearly learned voices, intertwining in plangent song as they summoned the harmonies of another time to float on the night air. They might, if they were unusually well informed about the art of counterpoint and its history, have recognised the language as Italian; the sound as that of a madrigal from an earlier century. It’s vanishingly unlikely that they would have recognised it as Dolorosi Martir, from the Primo libro de madrigali of 1580 by the Italian renaissance master Luca Marenzio (1553–1559).

But it wouldn’t have been hard to work out that the sound was coming from the Crown and Anchor inn; and any reasonably well-connected music-lover would have been able to find out, within a few days, that they’d heard the inaugural meeting of a group of eminent music-lovers, amateur and professional, in the inn’s spacious upper room. There were thirteen founder members of this new club, including representatives of two great cathedrals. They included the composer Maurice Greene (1696–1755), organist of St Paul’s and future Professor of Music at Cambridge University. From Westminster Abbey came the bass Bernard Gates (1686–1773), much admired by Handel. Present, too, was the oboe virtuoso and composer Johann Ernst Galliard (1666–1749) from Saxony and the Prussian-born composer and organist Johann Christoph Pepusch (1667–1752) – not yet famous for his work on The Beggar’s Opera (1728), but widely admired for his virtuosity and learning.1

And so on. Each member had subscribed two shillings and sixpence, for which they enjoyed wine and bread and the musical services of ‘the Children of St Paul’s Cathedral’, fetched by coach to add the essential upper line to this all-male musical gathering. Informal gatherings of this sort had been taking place for over a decade, but now they were to be placed on a more regular footing. The first music heard – and from the outset the members of this select club participated as performers and scholars, as well as interested listeners – was Marenzio’s madrigal. The new venture had been christened in song, and an unknown member (probably Sampson Estwick, veteran chorister of St Paul’s) duly inscribed the fact in his rare manuscript copy of this 146-year-old work:

A Musick Meeting being held at ye Crown Tavern near St Clements Mr Galliard at ye head of it, & chiefly [sic] for Grave ancient Vocell Musick. Wee begann it wth ye following Song of Lucas De Marenzio Jan 7 – 1725/6.2

The group agreed to meet regularly to sing ‘Grave ancient Vocell Musick’. By the next meeting, on 21 January, they’d been joined by the distinguished composer William Croft (1678–1727) of Westminster Abbey. On 1 March the company was swelled by three of London’s pre-eminent Italian composers, Nicola Francesco Haym (1678–1729), Giovanni Bononcini (1670–1747) and Francesco Geminiani (1687–1762). Clearly, the society’s principles had currency. In 1727, inspired by ideals of scholarship as well as the great musical academies of Italy (such as the Accademia de’ Filarmonici in Bologna, of which Bononcini was a member), the club gave itself a name – the Academy of Vocal Music – and met regularly between the hours of 7 and 9 p.m. in the Crown and Anchor. By 1731, its activities had expanded beyond the merely vocal, and were attracting interest outside the music profession. From around 1731 until it faltered into silence in 1802, the society would be known as the Academy of Ancient Music.

Joseph Addison’s and Richard Steele’s magazine The Spectator was published from 1711 to 1712, but its character and quality had an influence out of all proportion to its short run. When the reformer Robert Rintoul set out to launch ‘a perfect newspaper’ in 1828 he took the title from Steele and Addison – not to pretend to any meaningful continuity, but as a salute to its enduring ethos. In the same humour, two centuries later in 1973, Christopher Hogwood would ‘revive’ the Academy of Ancient Music. To a mind like Hogwood’s, that was never more lively than when engaged with the eighteenth century, it forged a delightful (if lightly worn) bond with the intellectual and musical life of another era. In 1998, Hogwood affirmed his own artistic descent from the singers at the Crown and Anchor when he edited and published an elegant new edition of Sir John Hawkins’s An Account of the Institution and Progress of the Academy of Ancient Music (1770) – ‘published on the 25th anniversary of the recreation of The Academy of Ancient Music, 1998’.3 The historical kinship between the eighteenth-century group and its twentieth-century namesake is tenuous in the extreme. But to Hogwood, a man who understood like few twentieth-century musicians the significance of historical detail, it had meaning: ‘This new incarnation carries on many of the aspirations of its forerunners,’ he wrote, in 1996.4

Hogwood recognised from experience that many of the challenges (and rewards) of performing ancient music were unchanging, and equally valid in 1733 or 1973. There was, for a start, the question of a working definition of Ancientness. The waters would be muddied by the emergence, in the late 1770s, of the so-called Concerts of Ancient Music (or ‘Ancient Concerts’) – a rival organisation to the Academy, which would endure until 1848, and which defined as ‘Ancient’ any music that was a minimum of twenty years old. But the Academy was never quite so dogmatic. An early minute book, from May 1731, states: ‘By ye compositions of the ancients is meant of such as lived before ye end of the fifteenth sixteenth century.’

Even at the outset, then, there was uncertainty – or, to put it more cheerfully, open-mindedness. The Academy’s approach to musical history is probably best summed up by a letter of February 1731 from its secretary Hawley Bishop to the composer Antonio Lotti (1667–1740) in Vienna. It existed, he said, for

The Improvement of the Science, by searching after, examining and hearing performed the Works of the Masters who flourished before or about the Age of Palestrina: However, not entirely neglecting those who in our time have grown famous.

Haym listed, as part of the Academy’s repertoire, vocal music by Josquin, Lassus, Palestrina, Monteverdi, Marenzio, Gesualdo and Carissimi. But the members were never narrowly exclusive in their tastes.5 An appetite for the songs and theatre music of Purcell opened the way to instrumental performances, and the contemporary music of Handel was a fixture from the earliest meetings. What underlay the Academy’s activities from the outset was scholarship: a serious interest in documenting, appraising and rescuing (through performances of the highest standard) the music of an earlier age. Catalogues were written, scores prepared and education work undertaken to train young choristers in an appropriate performance style. Then, as now, there were sceptics. Scorn was hurled, like the contents of a chamber pot from a first-storey window, on the members’ enthusiasm for obsolete musical practices. An anonymous satire dating from 1734 and addressed to Handel, ridiculed

That indefatigable Society, the Gropers into Antique Musick, and Hummers of Madrigals, they swoon on the sight of any Piece modern, particularly of your Composition, excepting the performances of their venerable President [Dr Pepusch] whose Works bear such vast Resemblance to the regular Gravity of the Antients, that when dressed up in cobwebs, and powdered with Dust, the Philharmonick Spiders could dwell on them, and in them, to Eternity.6

And then, as now, the notion of authenticity in performance could lead to bitter controversy. In 1728, the Academy was shaken by an accusation that a composition by Bononcini was actually by Lotti. One of the Academy’s most distinguished members stood accused of plagiarism. Evidence was provided to support the accusation, and the members (according to one member, the future Earl of Egmont, John Perceval)

were astonished that so great a man as Bononcini should descend so low as to father another man’s works, and impose them on us as his own . . . [Bononcini] stormed and maintained the gentlemen had accused him falsely, insisting the music to be still his own; whereupon it was agreed to write to Vienna to the composer to know the truth. In the meantime Bononcini withdrew from our society and many of it, who are his professed friends, taking his part, left us also.

Lotti was consulted, sworn statements were obtained, and the accusation of plagiarism was upheld, leading to a rift in the Academy’s membership. There would be more over the next half-century.

And yet, the fascination – and the quality – of the Academy’s work generated success and public interest beyond anything anticipated by its founders. By the early 1730s, non-professional guests were being admitted, the membership had been opened to non-musicians (including the painter William Hogarth) and (an initiative of Pepusch’s) regular additional meetings of the Academy were held at which paying members of the public could enjoy ancient music for themselves. Women, too, started to attend; decades later, Laetitia-Matilda Hawkins (daughter of Sir John) recalled how concerts at the Crown and Anchor were

held in the then sufficiently capacious and humbly decorated best room of the tavern, and ladies tolerated as auditors, only by submitting to sit in a small passage-room, made warm and comfortable, but certainly no show-shop for their finery;– this restriction to a confined spot was not felt grievous by those who loved such music and only came to hear.7

A niche interest pursued in private by a handful of enthusiastic professionals began to evolve into a fashionable, even mainstream taste. Later in the century, Lord Sandwich played the kettledrums at AAM concerts. And on at least one occasion, the Academy of Ancient Music’s scholarship and professionalism started to seep back into the wider musical world, with far-reaching effects. In February 1731, the Academicians revived Handel’s 1718 masque Esther at the Crown and Anchor. According to Hawkins:

The oratorio of Esther, originally composed for the Duke of Chandos, was performed in character by the members of the Academy, and the children of the Chapel Royal, and the applause with which it was received, suggested to Mr Handel, the thought of exhibiting that species of composition at Covent-Garden theatre; and to this event it may be said to be owing, that the public have not only been delighted with the hearing, but are now in the possession of, some of the most valuable works of that great master.8

This was the first public performance in London of a Handel oratorio. It set in train a course of development in Handel’s career (and British musical life) the consequences of which are still, two centuries later, being played out. Before the end of the century, Handel’s position in British musical life was established beyond challenge – an unprecedented level of popularity for a dead composer, and a spectacular vindication of the Academy’s commitment to older music. At its peak, the Academy punched far above its weight: shaping taste, recovering a lost musical past and fuelling a demand for public concert-giving (and -going) that would, in the end, be its undoing. In the final quarter of the eighteenth century, concert societies such as the Ancient Concerts proliferated, offering levels of comfort and musical thrills far beyond anything possible in the Crown and Anchor.

In response, in 1783 the Academy rewrote its constitution and the following year, in the teeth of mounting competition, it left the old tavern behind to become a full-fledged concert-promoting society. It started subcontracting its performances to professional artists (at one point in the early 1790s, its orchestra was directed by the same Johann Salomon who was simultaneously promoting concerts with the visiting Joseph Haydn at Hanover Square). With the dissolution of the original Academy its sense of purpose was weakened and the spirit of collegiality was gone. Long-term members lamented the change and engineered a return to the Crown and Anchor but the energy of the founding fathers had evaporated. The final documented concert took place in April 1802. No subscriptions could be raised for a new season. ‘Such, then, was the rise and fall of the Academy of Ancient Music,’ writes Christopher Hogwood.

It gave way to the public concert series, the professional symphony orchestra, the music of the pleasure gardens and the opera house. But it had achieved a small musical revolution: it had established for the first time that music of the church and music of the theatre could be performed apart from their original settings, and by selecting and performing old music on a regular basis, it laid the foundations for a new (and English) concept of a ‘canon of classics’, which the wider public has embraced ever since. As a private club, it could not itself dictate public taste, but its activities paved the way for a concert scene containing the accepted medley of old and new that we know today.9

Hogwood had better reason than most to recognise the achievements of the first Academy of Ancient Music. The venerable society, it transpired, was not dead but sleeping.

2

THE PIPER AND THE LYREBIRD

The original Academy of Ancient Music was born at the Crown and Anchor on the Strand. Its reincarnation was conceived one night in 1972 in another pub, and it’s one of the quirks of memory that we now no longer know which one. The new group had two parents: both are now dead. But what Christopher Hogwood did say is that he’d met the Decca record producer Peter Wadland, more or less by chance, at a concert at Carlton House given by the clarinettist Alan Hacker. It rings true: Hacker (1938–2012) was leading the revival of the basset clarinet, and a programme of late-classical or early-romantic chamber music – such as Hacker promoted with his ensemble The Music Party – is exactly the sort of thing that would have piqued the interest of both men. They exchanged names and met again soon afterwards at a recording session conducted by Neville Marriner with the Academy of St Martin in the Fields (ASMF).1

Again, the exact date and details are uncertain. Hogwood, a man who valued precise scholarship, was self-effacingly vague about the birth of his own orchestra. Possibly it was one of the sessions for Vivaldi’s L’estro armonico, between 26 July and 26 October 1972, on which Hogwood played both organ and harpsichord continuo. Marriner’s virtuoso chamber orchestra was in high demand, recording almost monthly for EMI and Philips, as well as for Decca and its subsidiary Argo. But it’s Decca that concerns us here, and the Vivaldi sessions took place in St John’s Smith Square. ‘[Wadland] came to that, and after, we went for a drink,’ Hogwood told the musicologist Nick Wilson in 2003.2 There were various pubs in the grid of streets that makes up that particular corner of Westminster. The Marquis of Granby has been suggested. But what is certain – at least, as Hogwood recalled it – is that Wadland made the proposal.

He said, since you play with that group [the Academy of St Martin in the Fields], would it be possible to conceive of a period group of about the same size playing to anything like that standard? Rather foolishly, I said, ‘Yes!’ Not so much because I knew the English players could, but I could see that the Dutch and the Viennese had – I could see no reason why we couldn’t.3

Christopher Hogwood was given to understatement. Wadland, at twenty-six, was already a shrewd judge of artists and individuals, and in taking Hogwood out for a drink it’s unlikely that he expected the answer to be no. He’d perceived that Hogwood, who turned thirty-one during the course of those Vivaldi sessions, was uniquely placed to give him an informed and honest answer. Hogwood’s family heritage was scientific; his father had been a physicist, and when Christopher went up to Pembroke College, Cambridge, to read Classics in Michaelmas Term 1960, his ultimate ambition was to be an archaeologist.4 Within weeks, he was on a very different path. He’d learned the piano at home in Nottingham – the harpsichord had been a subject of curiosity but little more. But as early as Cambridge University Music Club’s freshers’ concert, on 29 October 1960, he’d appeared in public as a harpsichordist, playing with fellow students in a Telemann trio sonata. Three weeks later, in another CUMC concert, he was providing harpsichord continuo again – this time in what he described as the ‘first modern performance’ of a Handel sonata for two flutes.5

Already, his love of discovery – and his flair for translating that excitement into performance – was taking a recognisable shape. Christopher’s first two years at Cambridge saw him playing Stravinsky’s Sonata for Two Pianos, singing madrigals on the River Cam, directing a student wind band in Richard Strauss and Gabrieli, and conducting a production of Sullivan’s Cox and Box. And, of course, taking every possible opportunity to perform on the harpsichord, whether solo or as a continuo player. ‘Surely the Music Faculty’s harpsichord had never been so busy,’ comments the musicologist Elizabeth Roche, whose husband Jerome was a Cambridge contemporary (and, as a fellow student, a frequent musical collaborator). That Christopher was not a Music undergraduate was immaterial: at Cambridge, as at Oxford, a vigorous undergraduate musical life has always thrived entirely independently of academic supervision. That autonomy can even be an advantage. As Roche puts it, the undergraduate Hogwood was

an immensely stimulating presence, both musically and intellectually – a fine practical musician who, not being preoccupied with preparing for stiff exams in harmony and counterpoint, or producing a comprehensive folio of compositions, was able to take a broader, and often thought-provoking, approach to all sorts of musical matters. In particular his enquiring and adventurous – and where earlier music was concerned, notably forward-looking – spirit often enabled him to widen horizons by introducing his friends and acquaintances to then unusual repertory both old and new, and developing ideas spanning a wide range of interests not by any means limited to music.6

‘Anyone who did not know him to be officially a Classicist could easily have taken it for granted that he was one of the Music Faculty’s most talented – and versatile – students,’ she observes.

It was also his fortune to be an undergraduate at a time when the tone of the Music Faculty was set by Robert (‘Bob’) Thurston Dart (1921–1971), the virtuoso harpsichordist and musicologist who would become Professor of Music at the University in 1962. Hogwood took lessons with Dart, and came to see him as a mentor – James Bowman thought that Dart was a decisive influence in his decision to become a professional musician.7 The outwardly gruff Dart could be intensely supportive and inspiring to those who shared his enthusiasms, and his personal collection of historic instruments was itself a source of inspiration to those of a similar mindset. Hogwood’s friend and fellow Pembroke undergraduate David Munrow was already a superb recorder player (although, like Hogwood, he wasn’t a Music undergraduate – he was reading English). The sight of a crumhorn hanging on the wall of Dart’s study prompted him to take his next step into what was then called early music.8

But that was (and is) one of the special qualities of a collegiate university: its ability to connect the lay enthusiast and the academic expert; to jolt the curious out of their academic ruts and to provide a constant, fertilising milieu of unexpected personal relationships. Another important presence at Cambridge at that time was Raymond Leppard, the conductor, composer and harpsichordist. He lectured at Trinity College from 1958 to 1968, and was in the process of leading the post-war rediscovery of Monteverdi with a lavish and controversial new edition of L’incoronazione di Poppea, presented at Glyndebourne in 1962.

And then there was the harpsichordist Mary Potts (1905–1982), in whose capacious, welcoming home Hogwood lodged for several years. He was not alone. Munrow had digs there, the harpsichord-builder Trevor Beckerleg started out in Potts’s basement, and contemporaries recall a constant traffic of musical young people through her house at 54 Bateman Street – eager to play her historic instruments, and to absorb the experience and expertise of a woman who had learned her art in the 1920s from Arnold Dolmetsch, one of the founding figures of the early-music revival.9

Hogwood, too, was forming musical relationships that would shape his future career, and his future orchestra. Konrad Schiemann sang in the choir at Pembroke College. He recollects,

after some rather bibulous choir supper, retiring to the Dean’s room with Christopher. He wasn’t in the choir, but he was there because he came to musical events, and so he’d been invited to the supper, and afterwards we made music. I remember singing the part of the Commendatore in Don Giovanni; it was all rather jolly. But years later, Christopher said, ‘Well, the person who introduced me to Mozart opera was Konrad, who sang this part.’ And so I feel this is part of my limited contribution to the musical life of the country.

(It’s something of an understatement; Schiemann would become a long-serving director and supporter of the Academy of Ancient Music.)

In June 1963, meanwhile, Hogwood conducted a CUMC performance of Walton’s Façade. The ensemble included the future conductors Christopher Seaman and David Atherton, and the concert was presided over by a choral scholar from King’s College, Simon Standage, who was already making a name as a violinist.10 That relationship, too, would have long-term consequences. ‘I played with him a lot – well, with his orchestra at Pembroke College, anyway,’ recalls Standage. ‘And then I went abroad for about six years, and when I came back he was playing with David Munrow in the Early Music Consort.’ Another King’s chorister, the bass David Thomas, recalls singing in a performance at Pembroke of Handel’s Acis and Galatea, with Hogwood on harpsichord and Munrow on sopranino recorder, ‘which was very funny’.

Pembroke contacts would prove useful in 1964 when, after finishing his undergraduate degree, Hogwood won a British Council scholarship to study for a year at Charles University, Prague. ‘We met first in Pembroke College,’ recalls Jasper Parrott, who went on to found the HarrisonParrott artist agency in 1969.

But my father was at that stage the British Ambassador in Prague – very much a music-lover, and a good amateur pianist. And I was also becoming infatuated with music, playing the oboe not very well, but with a lot of enthusiasm. Chris was living in austere circumstances in Prague: this was still in quite tough Communist times. So my parents invited him, whenever they could, to parties – to meet people that they thought would be useful and interesting to him.

Even for a self-taught player such as Parrott, Hogwood’s determination was hard to resist. ‘While Chris was in Prague, David Munrow went out to visit him at Easter [1965]. I remember ending up playing the recorder in an impromptu musical interlude in a church service at the American Embassy: Chris, David, and myself – we played a baroque trio, or something like that.’

By now, it was clear to Hogwood that his future lay with music, and his purpose in Prague was to study with Zuzana Růžičková (1927–2017), the Czech harpsichordist who had survived imprisonment and slave labour at the hands of the Nazis in Theresienstadt, Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, and who was pursuing her post-war career under constant surveillance from the Communist authorities – who viewed the Jewish, independently minded Růžičková as doubly suspect. ‘One day in 1964 I was called to the Ministry of Culture and told I was going to teach some English students,’ she recalled, in her memoir One Hundred Miracles:

My first impression of Christopher was that he was a rather strange fellow. He immediately told me that he was only in Prague because of me and said he didn’t want to see or hear anything of a communist city. ‘I am just coming to the musicology department to have lessons, and that’s it’, he declared. Of course it didn’t take him long to fall in love with Prague . . . Dear Christopher could have been a great soloist, but he already knew that he was a Renaissance man, wanting to focus on his conducting, editing and scholarship.11

Růžičková was a peerless judge of character and artistry. Hogwood would remain a lifelong friend, and in later years she placed him at the top of her long list of harpsichord pupils. But Cambridge had opened so many avenues for exploration that any one, alone, would probably never have satisfied him. That Easter in Prague (recalls Jasper Parrott) Hogwood and Munrow were already talking about starting an early-music ensemble of their own. The impetus seems to have come from a concert that Munrow had organised at Cambridge on 19 January 1963 – as Roche recalls it, ‘CUMC’s first concert to consist entirely of “early” music’.12

The group, assembled by Munrow, was called Cambridge Pro Musica Antiqua and the programme consisted of music by Telemann, Scarlatti, Biber, Handel and Orlando Gibbons. Hogwood was only one of two continuo players (he was due to conduct a new production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience later that week, and had his hands full). But, on paper, it looks like a blueprint for what was to come: for more than a decade after his return from Prague, Hogwood’s emerging musical career would be inextricably linked with that of his younger friend, David Munrow.

The Pied Piper

David Munrow (1942–1976) was never a part of the Academy of Ancient Music, but he is an unignorable part of its story. Nearly five decades after his death, his personality is still a catalysing force. ‘He burst upon an unsuspecting world,’ remembered Nicholas Kenyon.13 ‘David Munrow did not just emerge into the field of medieval and renaissance music – he exploded into it,’ wrote his former tutor Anthony Lewis.14 His recordings still pulse with an irrepressible fantasy and verve. In his lifetime, his enthusiasm, his energy and his impact on the world of early music were so potent, and so life-affirming, that half a century after his death by his own hand at the age of thirty-three, many of those who knew or were close to him still find the subject almost too painful to discuss.

Born in Birmingham, Munrow had studied bassoon with Vaughan Allin of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra – a larger-than-life musician who carried a shotgun in his bassoon case and once composed a back-to-front version of Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on Greensleeves, passing it off as the work of a fictional Turkish composer, Enërg Essëlv.15 Munrow played in the Midland Youth Orchestra, branched out onto the recorder and, in 1960, spent a year teaching in Peru before going up to Cambridge. He was fascinated by the folk music and instruments of South America. ‘I remember him coming back from South America with a clutch of pipes which he’d gathered there,’ says Konrad Schiemann, a schoolmate of Munrow’s at King Edward VI School, Birmingham. ‘He demonstrated them with great competence.’

That same curiosity and open-mindedness – a practical, ‘have-a-go’ enthusiasm coupled to an almost theatrical urge to communicate – made Munrow a force of nature in the lively musical environment of early 1960s Cambridge. You get the impression that other, less extrovert talents were simply and happily caught up in his wake. When Hogwood went to Prague, Munrow enlisted as a postgraduate at the University of Birmingham, studying bawdy Restoration songs. In May 1965, at the Barber Institute, he assembled the largest possible band of cornetts, shawms, crumhorns, recorders and percussion, as well as modern oboes and trombones, to perform seventeenth-century Italian canzoni and a selection from Susato’s Danserye. ‘Elderly professors were practically dancing in their seats,’ remembers Lewis.16 From there, Munrow found an enthusiastic reception in the wind band of the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-upon-Avon, whose Music Director, Guy Woolfenden, was eager to utilise Munrow’s expertise with crumhorns and shawms.

In 1967, Munrow launched the Early Music Consort of London. The ideas that he’d discussed with Hogwood in Prague had developed a momentum of their own, and true to Munrow’s wide enthusiasms and free-ranging interests, the Consort was a flexible ensemble, expanding or contracting to suit the music in hand. At its core, it comprised five musicians: Munrow himself, the countertenor James Bowman, viol player Oliver Brookes, lutenist James Tyler and on keyboards, harp, percussion – and, by all accounts, whatever was required – Christopher Hogwood, now twenty-six years old and styling himself ‘Xris’ (it was the Summer of Love, after all). ‘He was quite showy,’ recalled Bowman. ‘He was very beautiful, with lots of long hair.’17

But there was nothing hippyish about the professionalism, and the determination, with which Munrow organised his new ensemble. As Bowman remembered,

I was sceptical because I wasn’t terribly keen on early music. It was usually chaotic. ‘Oh, sorry. I’ve started the wrong piece’, or ‘I’ve got the wrong instrument. Can we start that one again?’ There were early-music concerts in the sixties which sounded like something by Florence Foster Jenkins or Joyce Grenfell. But when I saw what he had on offer, I thought he was wonderful. He would start a performance with a properly planned programme, no faffing about – it was all very professional. David said, ‘It’s not like a school concert, with applause after every piece – the whole thing is properly presented. There is no messing around with music: it will all be in folders in front of you, and you’ll just turn the page.’ It was all thoroughly drilled, and Chris appreciated that.

Impressions matter. Jasper Parrott, then a junior artist agent at the firm of Ibbs and Tillett, persuaded his employers to take a chance on the new group. Two years later, when they transferred to Parrott’s own fledgling agency, the Early Music Consort’s reputation was already snowballing. Nothing quite like this had ever been seen in the English early-music movement.

Which is not to say that Munrow and Hogwood were operating in isolation. The idea of rediscovering and performing the forgotten music of a past era dates back (in the British Isles, anyway) at least as far as that original Academy in 1726. The history – or rather the many intertwining, overlapping and frequently contradictory histories – of the early-music movement has been extensively chronicled, embracing such landmarks as the Handel Commemorations of the 1780s and 1790s in London, Felix Mendelssohn’s celebrated performance of Bach’s St Matthew Passion in Berlin in March 1829, and the renewed interest in so-called Alte Musik in Germany in the first half of the twentieth century.

The European Alte Musik impulse was, in a large part, anti-romantic: at least partly, a reaction against the philosophical and aesthetic extremes of the late-romantic era and (it was implied) the disastrous consequences in which they were implicated from 1914 onwards. It’s no coincidence that a leading German modernist composer such as Paul Hindemith, in exile from the Nazis, became a significant influence on early music in the USA. Meanwhile, in Thomas Mann’s novel Doktor Faustus (1943–7) the narrator Serenus Zeitblom is a mild-mannered, viola d’amore-playing devotee of Alte Musik who is able to stand apart and observe in horrified detachment as post-romantic German music (personified by the possessed, Schoenberginspired composer Adrian Leverkühn) spirals into insanity and cataclysm.

For English readers in the post-war era, early-music revivalists had a rather less flattering fictional image: the prim middle-class bien-pensants of Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim (1957), all floral-print frocks, amateur recorder recitals and enforced jollity through the medium of compulsory madrigal-singing. To readers at the time, the characters of Amis’s satire were recognisable as disciples (at a generation’s remove) of the French-born Arnold Dolmetsch (1858–1940), who had settled in Haslemere in Surrey after the First World War, and established himself as a scholar, a performer and a maker of historic instruments. Dolmetsch made lutes and, later, at the encouragement of William Morris, harpsichords. He’s sometimes credited with the construction of the first recorder of modern times. As with Continental devotees of Alte Musik, Dolmetsch’s interest in the past was a reaction against industrial modernity, but rooted in the Fabian tradition and the very English loam of Morris’s Arts and Crafts Movement.

Dolmetsch was bearded and knickerbockered, and his circle of pupils was occasionally compared with a cult. Perhaps unfairly, early music acquired a reputation as the leftish preserve of what George Orwell described as ‘every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, “Nature Cure” quack, pacifist, and feminist in England’. Yet Dolmetsch’s legacy was fertilising, and largely benign. Nor was it as doctrinaire as some detractors liked to imply. Mary Potts, Hogwood’s teacher and sometime landlord, had studied with Dolmetsch and bought her Burkat Shudi harpsichord from him in 1929 (he suggested to her that it would serve as a stopgap until she could acquire a modern iron-framed instrument).18 Howard Mayer Brown, writing in 1988, maintained, ‘It is no exaggeration to say that even today almost everyone involved in early music in England has been touched in some way by Dolmetsch, by his students, or by his students’ students.’19

In the period after the Second World War approaches to early music were diverging along different paths in different places. The Dutch harpsichordist, conductor and musicologist Gustav Leonhardt (1928–2012) had founded his Leonhardt Ensemble while studying in Vienna. An interpreter of striking personality and rigour, he had already embraced the use of reproduction historic harpsichords and built on the scholarship and the growing pool of Alte Musik performers that he had encountered in Vienna. ‘It’s no problem getting hold of a facsimile edition of early music,’ he remarked. ‘What else is there to add?’20 Leonhardt frequently collaborated with Nikolaus and Alice Harnoncourt, string players in the Vienna Symphony Orchestra who had founded their own pioneering period-instrument orchestra, Concentus Musicus Wien, in 1953, and spent four years researching and rehearsing playing techniques before giving their first official public performance in Vienna’s Schwarzenberg Palace in May 1957. By 1962 they were making commercial recordings. (Leonhardt’s group had made its LP debut in 1954.)

In the UK, the future pioneers of period performance took a slightly less rigid approach. Roger Norrington was in the generation ahead of Hogwood and Munrow at Cambridge, and founded his first early-music group, the Schütz Choir, in 1962. ‘We knew nothing,’ he says.

It wasn’t really very historically informed. But singing music which no one had ever heard before in this country led us to using old instruments, because Schütz requires the zink and the cornetto and so on. So having done some things with modern instruments, we thought we’d really better try to use the old ones. I also met Thurston Dart at Cambridge, when I was reading English, and I was instinctively interested in his lectures about old music. Dart told me quite a lot about the influence of the Italian style on English music via the Netherlands – I remember having a long talk with him about that. But for the Schütz Choir in 1962 and for quite a while after that, I didn’t know anything about it. I used instinct. There was no scholarship in that at all.

There’s an innate British tendency to downplay the amount of effort that lies behind creative achievement, particularly when it’s of a scholarly nature. Still, it’s possible to sense that same, pragmatic spirit of open-minded exploration – of learning through doing, of trusting to instinct and of doing whatever it takes to get the show on the road – in Munrow’s approach, and also in that of the Irish scholar and conductor Michael Morrow (1929–1994). Morrow launched his ensemble Musica Reservata in 1960 with the avowed intention of breaking away from a ‘mish-mash of University Choral Society sounds’, with the strict qualification that any historically informed performance could only ever be ‘a more or less successful counterfeit’.21

The style was raucous, improvisatory and sometimes ramshackle. Both Munrow and Hogwood played with Morrow during the 1960s, and the soprano Emma Kirkby attended Musica Reservata’s concerts as a student. ‘They were immense fun, with lots of eccentric renaissance instruments and a lot of inspiration – but mainly chaotic,’ she recalls. ‘That was really the milieu in which a lot of future directors worked. I think they got the inspiration from Michael Morrow, but they also discovered how not to put on concerts.’

The traditional orchestral scene in Britain, meanwhile, was approaching the baroque revival – and the question of historical-performance practice – via its own process of evolutionary compromise. The mid-twentieth century saw a fashion for chamber orchestras: using modern instruments, but in smaller ensembles, and with a leaner, livelier approach. The London Chamber Orchestra was founded in 1921, the Goldsbrough Orchestra (1947) evolved into the English Chamber Orchestra in 1960, and the Boyd Neel Orchestra (named after its founder, but referred to by players as the ‘Boiled Veal Orchestra’) lit up the concert landscape of the 1930s and 1940s with the athleticism and bravura of its playing, making pioneering recordings of Handel and Vivaldi, and commissioning Benjamin Britten, Gordon Jacob and John Ireland.

But none of them achieved anything like the international impact of the Academy of St Martin in the Fields – launched in November 1959 by the LSO and Boyd Neel violinist Neville Marriner (1924–2016) – which selected its players from the front desks of London’s freelance symphony orchestras. Critics enthused over the freshness and crispness of the ASMF’s playing; within a decade Marriner’s ensemble was being described as Britain’s best orchestra, and its recorded catalogue increased almost by the month. For audiences who were used to Mozart and Handel on full symphonic string sections, the energy and clarity of this world-beating chamber orchestra was thrilling, though its sound still had the reassuring polish and precision of a top symphony orchestra.

In fact, the main ‘period’ colour that early ASMF listeners would have heard was the jangle of the harpsichord, often played by Thurston Dart or – increasingly, from the late 1960s – Christopher Hogwood. As Munrow’s reputation skyrocketed, Hogwood kept a foot in both worlds. It was undeniable that the energy and freewheeling spirit of the Early Music Consort – fronted by Munrow, with his youthful enthusiasm and puckish humour – had caught the spirit of the time. Medieval music was funky: Steeleye Span took plainchant into the pop charts, and in 1970 Munrow and the Consort provided the score for the BAFTA- (and later Emmy-) winning BBC TV drama series The Six Wives of Henry VIII. Members of the Consort played with folk-rock bands, and collaborated with Peter Maxwell Davies and his Fires of London on Ken Russell’s 1971 cinematic shocker The Devils (the Vatican called for it to be banned). Munrow composed the score for John Boorman’s 1974 psychedelic science-fiction blockbuster Zardoz: supplying gemshorns and notch flutes as Sean Connery roamed an apocalyptic future clad in red Y-fronts.

As the 1970s progressed, the Early Music Consort would tour Europe, the Middle East, Australia and the USA. In August 1971, the Consort made its first appearance at the Proms. ‘Filling the Albert Hall, of all vast spaces, with totally unamplified and glorious sound: David and Goliath was the general impression,’ recalled the American musicologist Robert Donnington.22 The counterculture was going mainstream. By now, Munrow was such a celebrity that he’d been offered his own radio series. Pied Piper started barely a fortnight after that Prom and ran for 655 episodes on BBC Radio 3 – twenty minutes of ‘tales and music’ aimed at younger listeners, and covering everything from prog rock to crumhorns. Space travel, string quartets, Bach and the life of Sir Thomas Beecham might all form the subject of one of Munrow’s playful, enthusiastic mini-masterclasses. Although designed for children, Munrow’s style was so accessible – and so engaging – that Pied Piper’s listeners were later found to have an average age of twenty-nine.

The Young Idea

The spirit of communication was infectious. Munrow was not alone: since 1969, Christopher Hogwood had been the voice of BBC Radio 3’s The Young Idea – a weekly Tuesday afternoon show comprising ‘music chosen by the under-twenties’. Surviving schedules suggest that much of the music involved was being chosen for the under-twenties, and from Hogwood’s earliest appearances on The Young Idea (the series had already been running for some years) his own interests and enthusiasms are obvious. Praetorius, Byrd and recordings of Frans Brüggen and Gustav Leonhardt playing Corelli jostled with Penderecki, Messiaen and William Grant Still. ‘I listened to it and so did my music-loving friends,’ recalls the soprano Catherine Bott. ‘It was compulsory listening.’23 Nicholas Kenyon recalls, ‘He had such a deft way of illuminating what he talked about, what he played – really informative without being patronising. He set a whole new style for informed broadcasting that wasn’t pompous and condescending.’

Evidently, there was more than one strong musical personality within the Early Music Consort, although for now it was Munrow’s outgoing style that shaped the artistic direction of the ensemble. For all the mainstream success that greeted the EMC, and Munrow’s remarkable media-savviness and professionalism, there was still an improvisatory quality – a certain on-the-hoofness – about the group’s activities. Munrow, recalls the violinist Catherine Mackintosh, ‘was really good fun. He was really quite driven. And just a tremendous fountain of energy.’

Mackintosh would be called in to join the core five members of the EMC whenever a programme required an additional viol or rebec, and she recalls one occasion where the spontaneous EMC spirit nearly led to a fiasco:

We were going up to do a concert with David, in quite a large group. And we went by train to Glasgow, and we had a very convivial time on the train – we had a British Railways dining-car lunch. And when we finished, we went back to our compartment and discovered to our horror that our compartment was no longer in the train. It had divided while we were having lunch, and the half which had all our instruments in it had gone off to Edinburgh. So as soon as we arrived in Glasgow, somebody had to rush off to Edinburgh and collect all these instruments – which fortunately were found. They arrived at the concert hall just in time for the concert. But there was no rehearsal that day.

What happens on tour stays on tour: there are few touring ensembles of any kind that don’t have a similar tale to tell. By the standards of the time, the EMC was a paragon of organisational discipline. But Christopher Hogwood was quietly starting to hanker for a style of historic performance that was more in keeping with his own meticulous philosophy of musical scholarship. Like Norrington and Dart, Munrow took a pragmatic approach to what would later be called ‘authenticity’. For Munrow, the needs of the live performance were paramount, and where individual musical instinct came into conflict with scholarship (or the lack of it), instinct took precedence. As Neville Marriner of the Academy of St Martin in the Fields got to know his brilliant, intellectual young harpsichordist, he became aware that he was dealing with an artist with a deep concern for scholarly rigour:

For me, he was always the fresher side of musicology. With Bob [Thurston] Dart, we always felt that he was the father of our musicological ambitions. But when Christopher came along he was different. In many ways he was more specific than Bob Dart was. Bob would always say that an ornament is played the way you feel, it’s put there for you to express yourself. Whereas Christopher, I think, was much more intent on accuracy.24

Stylistic and textual fidelity was less of an issue in medieval and other pre-baroque music, where the lack of source material more or less obliged interpreters to use their imaginations. An artist such as Munrow thrived on that sort of freedom, and Hogwood’s recorded performances with the EMC demonstrate that he, too, was more than capable of rising to its creative challenges. Indisputably, however, something in his make-up – both as an individual and as an artist – craved the precision and intellectual underpinning of historical scholarship. ‘He had certain principles that he wanted to apply. He wanted to have the most up-to-date scholarship in terms of what he was doing. And he always made sure there was a musicologist – if not himself – preparing editions,’ says the film director Anthony Fabian, Hogwood’s partner of twenty-six years. ‘But what was his absolute through-line was that he did not want to put himself in front of the music. He wanted always to let the music speak for itself, to do what he would call archaeology. His artistic imprint was to be transparent.’

It was a philosophy that had less in common with the English pioneers of early music than with Nikolaus Harnoncourt – who as early as 1954 had argued that ‘the attempt must be made today . . . with [baroque works] to hear and perform them as if they had never been interpreted before, as though they had never been formed nor distorted.’25