Simon Rattle once said that “there’s probably a point, somewhere around 70, when conductors start getting competent.” Sometimes, though, it feels like it takes at least that long to appreciate how competent a conductor has always been.
Such may well have been the case with Charles Mackerras. Born 100 years ago, Mackerras brought fresh insight to Mozart and did as much as anyone to secure a place in the canon for Janacek. He was one of the first truly international conductors, bouncing from concert podiums to opera pits so briskly that a 1966 documentary on him was called “Allegro Vivace.” He had range, and he had talent. “A Mackerras reading is never dull,” the critic Rodney Milnes wrote in 1978, and “is always imbued with powerful theatrical thrust.”
Yet although Mackerras held music directorships at institutions such as the English National Opera, the Welsh National Opera and the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, he ascended no further on the conductorial ladder. Instead, he specialized in being a principal guest, at the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, the Philharmonia Orchestra and elsewhere. Scarcely was a description written of him that failed to dwell on the same basic traits: that he was a pragmatic musician of wide tastes and common sense, full of ideas drawn from serious research, but not all that dogmatic about any of them. Nancy Phelan, his biographer, noted that even his mother was concerned that he was too versatile for his own good.
These are not the kinds of words on which celebrity is easily built. Thankfully, that doesn’t matter when it comes to considering Mackerras’s exemplary recorded legacy. If his breadth ever set him back professionally, it now seems like a virtue.
Warner recently marked his centennial with a set that compiles releases from innumerable old labels, but its 63 discs offer barely a sketch for the fuller portrait that becomes possible by consulting many more. A laughably incomplete list of the composers in his discography would mention not only Handel, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms and Dvorak, but also Arriaga, Brian, Cavalieri, Coates, Delibes, Donizetti, Elgar, Herbert, Martinu, Purcell, Suk, Voricek and Wagner. Mozart comes in big-band, period-instrument and chamber-orchestra fashions, and includes all the symphonies — several repeatedly but differently — plus all the major operas, sparklingly done. There is Gilbert and Sullivan, folk music from across Britain and, may God preserve us, an Elizabeth Schwarzkopf Christmas album.
More remarkable still, almost all of it is solid at worst, excellent more often and sometimes quite stunning. Mackerras was rarely a visionary or a metaphysical musician, but his interpretations had spirit and life, and they had a fundamental, consistent quality to them. “I aim to make everything I do sound like a first performance,” he said. Even in recordings, he usually did.
Mackerras grew up a practical, scholarly musician almost by necessity. His Australian parents were in Schenectady, N.Y., when he was born, and he was still a toddler when they all returned to Sydney. Both were musical, if skeptical of music as a suitable career for their children, and they loved Gilbert and Sullivan so much that the operas were “a private family language,” as Phelan describes it; in his 20s, Mackerras arranged Sullivan tunes into a ballet, “Pineapple Poll.”
Obsessed with recordings, Charles was in elementary school when he resolved to be a conductor, and he was barely a teenager when he led a Mozart opera for the first time, in an orchestration he created himself from a vocal score of “Bastien und Bastienne.” Sydney was short of oboists, so he became one to make sure he could play in an orchestra. By the time he sailed for England, in 1947, he had taught the instrument at the conservatory, become the principal of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and conducted his colleagues in public.
Not long after Mackerras arrived in London, a moment of chance created a career. As the story goes, a Czech stranger struck up a conversation about a Dvorak score he was reading and told him about an exchange program. Mackerras applied, won a place and spent a year studying in Prague. Early on, he heard the Czech conductor Vaclav Talich, who was later his teacher, conduct Janacek’s “Kat’a Kabanova.” Mackerras found it enthralling. By 1951, he had led the British premiere of the opera, and a life’s work was begun.
“In a way I brought him to the Western world,” Mackerras said of Janacek near the end of his life, and if that comment unnecessarily diminished the advocacy of Rafael Kubelik and others, he could be forgiven the pride. It is almost impossible to conceive of Janacek today without Mackerras’s influence, especially the impact of the recordings he made over more than four decades. His survey of the major operas and other works with the Vienna Philharmonic, from “Kat’a” in 1976 to “Jenufa” in 1981, remains an indispensable introduction, though later collaborations with the Czech Philharmonic have a distinct, special atmosphere — especially a second, still more poignant “Kat’a,” an essential “Glagolitic” Mass and a gorgeous “Taras Bulba.”
Janacek struck Mackerras for two reasons. There was the music; “Everything about Janacek is different, new and original,” he wrote. But there were also thorny editorial issues to deal with, the kinds of disparities between intentions and results that had intrigued him since he was a boy. “In order to perform Janacek properly one has to do almost as much editing as for a work by Handel or any baroque composer,” he explained. In a tribute edited by Nigel Simeone and John Tyrrell, Tyrrell and other scholars who toiled with Mackerras on critical editions of Janacek note his concern for how the most arcane details would come across in the opera house.
Janacek aside, it was this willingness to question tradition that brought Mackerras to prominence in post-World War II England, as one of many musicians trying to recover a more “authentic” style than the norm in early music. One essay by him defended the honor of the forgotten appoggiatura, while another, tied to a run of “Le Nozze di Figaro” in 1965, was rather boldly entitled “What Mozart Really Meant.” Decades of period instrument innovations have since deadened the effect of some of Mackerras’s experiments, though little could dim the majestic grandeur of his “Music for the Royal Fireworks,” made with a band including 26 oboes to recreate the 1749 premiere.
Mackerras never lost the impulse to unearth — Brahms symphonies with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra later came “in the style of the original Meiningen performances” — but he did temper it with realism. “I’m not a dry-as-dust musicologist,” he told The New York Times in 1974. “I believe in translating scholarly findings into lively performances. If musicology doesn’t achieve that end, it’s not good musicology.” He came to see authenticity as “a subjective not an objective concept” and knew that no musician could escape the present. “Interpretation means how you feel about a work,” he said in 2009. “You do your research, of course, but all musical performance is to do with feeling, and the ways of feeling music tend to change through the generations.”
Even if you know the background labor that went into a Mackerras recording, it’s how the music feels that tends to linger. He had to do what he called “a big adaptation job” on Handel’s opera “Giulio Cesare” so that Janet Baker could perform its title role in English in 1979, and academic bickering inevitably followed. It’s less the intellectual credentials of the subsequent recording that strike now, though, than its emotional complexity — from the stately dignity that he insists on as the outer face of inner grief in Cornelia and Sextus’s Act I duet, to the ostentatiously alluring flights of ornamentation he wrote for Valerie Masterson’s Cleopatra to seduce Caesar in Act II.
Examples are legion, especially in opera. In “The Walk to the Paradise Garden,” from Delius’s “A Village Romeo and Juliet,” Mackerras resists the temptation to simply make everything sound as pretty as possible and makes grimly clear that in the sweetness of passion lies tragedy to come. He treasured Humperdinck’s “Hansel and Gretel,” and it sounds like he smiled his way through his adorable recording with the Philharmonia Orchestra. As angels gather to protect the sleeping children in the “Dream Pantomime,” he blesses them with five minutes of the giddiest conducting you could wish to hear. His “Salome,” another Philharmonia triumph, is brilliantly disgusting.
Even in the most commonplace orchestral music, Mackerras could be equally exquisite. The critic Richard Osborne described a Beethoven survey with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra as “a set I would happily put into the hands of any aspiring young music lover, and quite a few older ones too,” and it certainly has ample strength of character. Hear any of Mackerras’s Dvorak, and you will want to hear it again: A Sixth Symphony with the Czech Philharmonic is a master class, and his “Slavonic Dances” with the same ensemble sing with warm affection. His Suk, Martinu and Smetana all but recommend themselves. “We saw him as belonging to the Czech Philharmonic,” one of that orchestra’s musicians reflected; another simply called him “the last great Czech conductor.”
Mackerras knew that he made his most indelible mark with Janacek, and that is as it should be. Surely there are few more admirable things that conductors can do than to put a composer on their shoulders and carry them into the future. A few months after Mackerras died, in July 2010, the Philharmonia played the rejuvenating final scene of “The Cunning Little Vixen” at a memorial concert. Musicians in Brno had done much the same for its composer, too.
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