I am reading the actor Christopher Lee's urbane memoirs, and thought the
following reminiscence worth sharing:

   In the year after the [Second World] war there was a great surge of
   popular interest in classical music.  Some of this may have been due
   to returning servicemen whose ideas had been shaken up by their life
   abroad.  Whatever the reason, it was a generation which queued all
   night for places in the gods at Covent Garden and the Albert Hall.
   Before the war, my sister had had to drag me to opera and ballet.
   Now, most nights, I was there on the little stools.  We could see
   that we'd been born too late for the golden age of composers, but
   we sensed a golden age of conductors and soloists.

   The country itself was drab, but music opened another world of colour
   and beauty, excitement and romance.  I'd seen Tito Gobbi in a couple
   of operas in Naples, and now I wanted to see everything that had ever
   been written.  The sounds of Verdi's Otello overwhelmed me like an
   avalanche.  I was enchanted in turn by Mendelssohn, Berlioz, Wagner,
   Rossini, Puccini, Tchaikovsky, Sibelius.  I haunted the second-hand
   record shops of the Charing Cross Road, and spent all my money on a
   towering heap of 78s.  In my bedsitter I cranked a hand gramophone
   into the small hours.

   I never did get to understand music back into the time of Palestrina
   and Monteverdi.  I never did come forward to enjoy atonal compositions.
   My bracket opened with the death of Haydn and closed with the best
   of Stravinsky, Richard Strauss and Sibelius.  Beethoven, to me, was
   the voice of God.  And rather like the Lord's butcher boy, I committed
   every one of his nine symphonies to memory, movement by movement,
   without being able to read a note, and whistled them.  I developed
   a kind of Beethoven whistlelogue which identified me before I came
   round the corner.  My passion for listening to majestic performances
   was so devouring that there was no part of me left for any other
   passion to take hold.  Indeed, even the frail argosies of new
   relationships often foundered right there and then in the concert
   hall, when I found that the girl I'd treated to a ticket was not in
   tune with my enthusiasm for whatever we were hearing.

James Kearney
[log in to unmask]