Born 100 years ago this November, the great Australian conductor Sir Charles Mackerras (1925-2010) was the very definition of an artistic conundrum wrapped in a personal riddle. Kind individually but damning professionally, frugal privately but generous philanthropically and defensive interpretatively but open-handed artistically, Charles was a unique musical polymath who could delight and outrage in equal measure. With a probing mind that was constantly in search of musical truths, his nemeses were always those who failed to meet his very precise intellectual and technical demands. He was not unknown to bark disparagingly at a poor, unsuspecting singer, ‘Well, if you can’t do it, you can’t do it’, when he or she was unable to realise yet another tricky ornament that Charles had added overnight to an already challenging Mozart or Handel aria. But when the offending moment had passed, he would think nothing of making a quick volte-face and explain with charm, kindness and patience why that particular decoration was so central to his interpretative vision of the work in question.
I first met Charles when he returned to Australia to conduct the ‘Gala Opening Concert’ at the recently completed Sydney Opera House on 29 September 1973. As a then eighteen-year-old student at the New South Wales State Conservatorium of Music, I had already heard a great deal about him from family and friends and was intrigued to watch this Aussie legend in action. Even as a teenager, I knew and admired his work as a Handelian, but was ill-prepared for the impact that his majestic readings of Wagner’s works would have on me. Joined on stage by the great Swedish dramatic soprano, Birgit Nilsson (1918-2005), for that now-famous first performance with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, their renderings of extracts from Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Tannhäuser, Tristan und Isolde and Götterdämmerung were simply remarkable. I was quickly converted to the cause of the Bayreuth master and have been addicted to his music ever since. Encouraged by that epiphany, I then began to explore Charles’s musicianship further and soon got to know his work as a Janáček conductor. He subsequently became my ideal interpreter of Slavic music and it was for that reason that I decided to pen the essay below.
Yet, it wasn’t until I joined the staff of the Royal Academy of Music that I was able to do my small bit in helping to secure Charles’s remarkable legacy as a historical figure. During the course of his career, Charles had not only amassed a huge library of marked conducting scores and annotated orchestral parts, but had also retained with the help of his devoted wife, Judy, all his programmes, financial dealings, diaries and personal correspondence with composers and fellow performers. It was obvious that this incredible assemblage was of immense historical importance, not simply because it reflected Charles’s ever-developing approach to performance style and performance practice, but because it also offered a remarkably detailed social history of music-making during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. But for some reason known only to Charles, he felt that his collection was of only minimal value historically and would be of little interest to others in the future. After much toing and froing, I was able to convince him otherwise, and with the enthusiastic help, support and encouragement of the Academy’s Principal, Professor Jonathan Freeman-Attwood CBE, it was agreed with Charles that all his musical materials and personal papers would be transferred to the Academy where they could be inspected by scholars and performers alike. Jonathan then set himself the extremely difficult task of finding the necessary funds to furnish what is now the ‘Mackerras Room’. Opened formally by Charles shortly before his death, this splendidly appointed space rapidly became one of the Academy’s most vital pedagogic and research tools. And it is no exaggeration to say that the room and the archive now stand together as a fitting testament to one of music’s greatest interpretative minds and a truly great and good man.
‘An honorary Czech:’ Charles Mackerras and Slavic Music
One of the proudest claims that Sir Charles Mackerras made during the final years of his long and eventful life was that he was considered an ‘honorary Czech’. But with that cheeky Aussie look that overcame him from time to time, he would then say, ‘Czech, only an honorary Czech’. For him, the country and its people were two of the greatest joys of his life, and when together with his beloved wife Judy, they reflected on their long and happy years together, the one place that they would single out as most important to them was Prague: ‘their city’. They were very proud to be able to speak the local language and to be able to communicate on such personal terms with the country’s musicians and its wider citizenry. It is true to say, then, that Charles Mackerras not only had a career-long love affair with all things Czech, but with all things Czech related.
Early years and Prague
Born on 17 November 1925 at Schenectady, New York, Alan Charles MacLaurin Mackerras was part of an Australian family who did much to shape the country’s cultural, educational and political landscapes. At the time of Charles’s birth, his father, Alan, was a Quaker who was undertaking post-graduate studies as an electrical engineer in the United States. Charles’s mother, Catherine, was a devout Roman Catholic, and amongst Mackerras’s antecedents was Isaac Nathan (1790-1864), the composer of Australia’s first opera, Don John of Austria, a source of great pride for the conductor. Music fascinated Charles from his earliest days and as a teenager he could be found hanging out, smoking and drinking with musicians at all times of the night and day in the dives and concert halls of his beloved hometown, Sydney. After starting his music education with violin lessons, he soon turned to the flute, briefly had piano lessons with the great Polish pianist, Ignaz Friedman (1882-1948), and later took up the oboe. Mackerras quickly became a highly gifted arranger, composer and performer and was appointed professor of oboe at the New South Wales State Conservatorium of Music (now Sydney Conservatorium of Music) and principal oboe of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra at the age of nineteen by the venerable British conductor, Sir Eugene Goossens (1893-1962). But Charles was keen to spread his musical wings as soon as possible and was determined to explore the artistic riches that both Britain and Europe had to offer. So, like countless other young Australian musicians before and since, Mackerras decided to take the plunge and head for London. With a one-way ticket firmly tucked in his back pocket, he then set sail from Sydney to Tilbury on the RMS Rangitiki on 6 February 1947 to find fame and fortune as a conductor.
Charles was determined to hit the ground running after reaching music’s Promised Land and immediately began lessons with the doyen of British oboists, Léon Goossens (1897-1988), the brother of his former boss in Sydney. He then met Sir Adrian Boult (1889-1983) and Sir Malcolm Sargent (1895-1967), the second of whom Charles had played under as an oboist with both the Sydney and Brisbane Symphony Orchestras. In desperate need of work, Mackerras managed to be appointed second oboe and répétiteur for a thirteen-week tour of Britain with Sadler’s Wells Opera shortly after arriving. But before the tour started, he was having a cup of tea one day at a small, crowded restaurant not far from South Kensington station. His reading matter that lunchtime was a pocket score of Dvořák’s Seventh Symphony, a work that he would later be associated with closely and that he would record more than once. Intrigued by the sight of this rather under-weight, red-headed musician perusing a piece by a Czech composer, a stranger lent across and said, ‘You’re reading a work by one of my fellow countrymen’. The man was Josef Weisslitzer, an amateur cellist and member of the Anglo-Czechoslovak Friendship League. Weisslitzer had just left a meeting of the League where an exchange scheme had been discussed whereby six Czech students would come to Britain and six British students would go to Czechoslovakia. Definitely no longer a student, and hardly British, Mackerras was nevertheless intrigued by this and contacted the British Council. The Council was arranging all the details of the scholarship in the United Kingdom, and if successful, Charles would have his travel, accommodation and tuition paid for. To support his application, he cheekily gave the names of Sir Adrian Boult and Sir Malcolm Sargent (1895-1967) as referees without asking their permission.
With the application securely in the post, Charles thought no more about it and set off on tour with the Sadler’s Wells company, during which he met and fell in love with his future wife, the clarinettist Judy Wilkins. Whilst on tour, Charles heard that he was being considered for the scholarship, but was peeved to learn that the panel felt that he might not be a suitable candidate for the award because of his brash behaviour at the interview. Over the years, Charles became increasingly disgruntled by the ways in which he was perceived and received by the British establishment. He grumbled publicly on more than one occasion, and regularly in private, that he had been repeatedly overlooked as music director of the Royal Opera House because of his accent and his ‘coarse’ Aussie manner. Thankfully, the British Council’s committee managed to see past those ‘colonial failings’ in 1947 and recognised that there was more to this young antipodean than sheer bravado. He was duly offered the scholarship and was the only musician amongst the six scholars to receive the award. Afraid that his year in Prague would mean that he would lose the woman he loved, Charles quickly proposed to Judy and they were married before setting off for the Czech capital. But the British Council objected to the marriage, prompting its Prague office to send a telegram to Charles forbidding Judy from accompanying him on the trip. Not to be dissuaded, the newlyweds quickly realised that the Council could not stop her from travelling independently, so she applied to study clarinet at the Prague Academy of Music under her maiden name and was duly accepted.
Before setting off, Charles and Judy began Czech lessons and arranged to stay in the centre of Prague with the friend of a friend that they had met in Britain. They then left from London’s Victoria Station on 24 September 1947 and arrived in the Czech capital three days later. Travelling by way of Paris, Switzerland and Austria, Mackerras experienced the sights and sounds of continental Europe for the first time. These initial encounters left a deep, lifelong impact on Charles, and he would often look back on them with great nostalgia in old age. Met at Prague station by their soon-to-be new friend Eva Hustolesová, with whom they were to stay, Charles and Judy were bowled over by the friendliness and hospitality they received. Prague was a beautiful city and was unlike anything that Charles had seen before. The architecture was breathtaking, but food was scarce and life was tough for the Czechs. As an Australian, Charles had never witnessed such privations and was deeply disturbed by what he saw. He had also never encountered the type of bureaucracy that was rampant in Prague at the time, and after the Czech authorities lost his papers, he was left kicking his heels until they eventually reappeared. But when they did reappear, he quickly threw himself in at the deep end of Czech musical life.
Charles and Judy were both avid concert and opera goers and were soon drawn to Prague’s National Theatre. Founded in 1868 by Bedřich Smetana (1824-1884), the company not only performed his works, but also those of his fellow Czechs, Dvořák and Janáček. Along with these figures, the troupe had a strong commitment to the music of Mozart, a composer who enjoyed great success in the Czech capital during his lifetime. There, he had a famous triumph with his newly composed opera Le nozze di Figaro in 1786 and gave the premieres of his 38th Symphony and Don Giovanni in 1787. The Prague theatre would soon come to hold a special place in Charles’s affections and he would later perform there to critical acclaim. But it was when he heard Janáček’s Kát’a Kabanová with the company on 15 October 1947 that his life changed forever. At the time of the performance, the name Janáček meant little to Mackerras, having only ever played the composer’s wind sextet, Mládí. The harmonic and rhythmic content of the opera was a completely new sound-world to the aspiring conductor and he vowed there and then to share his new-found enthusiasm for Janáček with his fellow English-speaking musicians when he returned to Britain in the autumn of 1948.
The sole reason for Charles being in the theatre that fateful October night was to watch the great Czech conductor Václav Talich (1883-1961) in action. Mackerras was extremely keen to study with Talich, and that was one of the principal reasons why he applied for the Czech scholarship. As part of that award, Charles had been promised private lessons with the maestro, but they failed to happen, as the former music director of the Czech Philharmonic was fully occupied with his work at the National Theatre and was far too busy to teach students. Consequently, Charles joined the class of the choral conductor Metold Doležl, before approaching Rafael Kubelík (1914-1994) for help. But as Kubelík was also stretched professionally, he suggested that Charles might like to attend his rehearsals with the orchestra instead. Any opportunity to do this was also short-lived, as Kubelík soon fell out with the new Communist regime and eventually moved to the West in the summer of 1948.
Determined not to take ‘no’ for an answer, Charles eventually managed to have a word with Talich, who invited him to his rehearsals with his chamber orchestra. Impressed by the eager young Aussie, the Czech maestro finally gave in and agreed to give him private lessons. At the time of their meeting, Talich was suffering from poor health and was already at loggerheads with the new government. Charles was not deterred by any of this and took to visiting his ailing hero in hospital where their relationship flourished. The two continued to meet even after Talich recovered and they soon became firm friends. When Charles eventually returned to Britain in 1948, leaving Talich was one of the hardest things that he ever had to do. It was clear to Mackerras that the maestro was still unwell and that his relationship with the ruling communist party was going from bad to worse. But Charles’s sessions with him were nothing short of revelatory, and Talich would remain a musical god whose wisdom and kindness were beacons that guided Charles for the rest of his life.
Sadler’s Well, South Africa, and Australia
Back in Britain, Mackerras made his conducting debut with Sadler’s Wells Opera in 1948 with Johann Strauss II’s (1825-1899) Die Fledermaus, a tricky piece and a graveyard for many an unsuspecting young maestro. Charles was thrilled to be giving the work, but longed to perform Kát’a Kabanová, an opera that continued to intrigue him. Mackerras was also well aware that Janáček’s music was far from popular in the West and that it was only the great German conductor, Otto Klemperer (1885-1973), who had openly championed the Czech’s compositions before the Second World War. Ever the musical evangelist, Charles was determined to persuade the company’s director, Norman Tucker, that Janáček’s operas were worthy of performance and that Kát’a would be an ideal place to start. Armed with only a vocal score and a tape borrowed from the BBC, Mackerras sat down with Tucker and the renowned critic and Janáček scholar, Desmond Shawe-Taylor, to go through the work in detail. Impressed by what they heard, Tucker and Shawe-Taylor agreed to schedule the opera for performance in English. But there was a catch. As Charles was still a relative novice as a conductor, it was decided that the opera should be led by one of the company’s more senior artists, Michael Mudie. Disappointment quickly turned to excitement, however, when Mudie was unable to take on the opera due to failing health. Charles stepped in as his replacement and gave the British premiere of Kát’a on 10 April 1951. Inevitably, many of the singers, musicians, listeners and critics found the music challenging, but the opera remained in the company’s repertoire for the rest of 1951 and was revived by Mackerras eight years later.
Charles worked as a freelance artist from 1955, and during his first years in that capacity, he continued to be active on behalf of Czech music. After conducting Dvořák’s ever-popular ‘Carnival’ Overture with the London Philharmonic Orchestra at the Royal Festival Hall on 2 February 1958, he undertook a three-month residency with South Africa’s Cape Town Municipal Orchestra later that year. Kicking off with the overtures to Reznicek’s Donna Diana and Smetana’s The Bartered Bride shortly after arriving, he upped the ante later in the visit by conducting Janáček’s Sinfonietta for the first time on 29 January 1959. The work is notoriously challenging for both conductor and orchestra, and the extra brass players that he employed from the Simonstown Naval Base must have found the score particularly demanding. This did little to deter the local press from singing the reading’s praises, with the critics seemingly oblivious to the technical difficulties that the work clearly presented the musicians. Mackerras then concluded his visit to the Western Cape on 22 February with two performances of Dvořák’s Slavonic Dances Nos. 1 and 3.
Charles’s reading of Janáček’s Sinfonietta in Cape Town had a wider implication, as it acted as a kind of test run for his first recording of the work with London’s Pro Arte Orchestra at Walthamstow Assembly Hall for Pye in July 1959. That recording was part of an all-Janáček disc for the company, which also included the ‘Jealousy’ Overture and the preludes to The Makropulos Affair, Kát’a Kabanova and The House of the Dead. A rarity at the time, the disc was a source of great pride for Mackerras and something of a vindication. Pye had a reputation for being a populist label and Charles felt sure that by recording these works with the company they would reach a wide and curious audience. The year after that disc was made, Mackerras would again build on his South African experiences by documenting Dvořák’s Slavonic Dances Nos. 1 and 3 for EMI with the Philharmonia Orchestra. But between those early Janáček and Dvořák discs, Charles toured Australia for four months in the spring of 1960 conducting orchestras in New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia, Tasmania and Western Australia. And at his second concert with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, he was able to perform a work by Janáček for the first time before an Australian audience: the prelude to The Makropulos Affair, an opera that he would later give the United Kingdom premiere of in 1964.
New discoveries, Hamburg, and the English National Opera
After returning from Australia, and before the Philharmonia sessions, Charles travelled to Czechoslovakia in March 1961 to conduct works by Britten, Walton and Mahler with the Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra and Kát’a Kabanová for the Janáček Theatre in Brno. Memories of what he had heard at Prague’s National Theatre on that impactful night in 1947 must have come flooding back as he conducted the opera in Brno. But joy soon turned to sadness when Charles learned that Talich had died while he was in the country without being able to see him. Mackerras also undertook some research into Janáček’s manuscripts whilst in Czechoslovakia, and was astonished to discover two unknown intermezzos belonging to Kát’a. The composer had written these on the back of his Sinfoniettascore and had penned them at a time when the local theatre lacked the equipment to make quick scene changes. When it became known that a visiting Australian conductor, and not a local Janáček expert, had made the discovery, the musicological cat was well and truly set amongst the scholarly pigeons, and not for the last time did Charles manage to alienate colleagues with his quick intellect and forensic musical mind.
Keen to return to Czechoslovakia as soon as possible, Mackerras was back in the country for concerts with the Slovak Philharmonic Orchestra in Bratislava, the Janáček Philharmonic Orchestra in Ostrava and the Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra in the capital during the spring of 1962. Perhaps surprisingly, Czech music was largely missing from those concerts, and with the exception of The Old Man and the Sea, a work by the then forty-two-year-old Czech composer Jiří Jaroch, all the music heard was by Britten, Beethoven, Bartók, Debussy, Schubert, Mozart, Haydn and Stravinsky. The true novelty at those concerts was Haydn’s Cello Concerto in C major, which had just been discovered in the archive of the National Museum in Prague in 1961. But after giving the first modern performance of the work with the Czech cellist, Milos Sádlo, at the Smetana Hall with the Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra on 19 May 1962, Charles quickly lost interest in it and seems to have rarely performed it again. He then returned to Australia for a five-month tour the following year to conduct the Sydney, Queensland, Victorian (now Melbourne) and South Australian Symphony Orchestras. But with the exception of Janáček’s Sinfonietta, the only Czech music that he was able to programme was Reznicek’s overture to Donna Diana and Voříšek’s Symphony in D, a work which he recorded with the English and Scottish Chamber Orchestras in 1969 and 1995 respectively.
When Sadler’s Wells Opera toured Europe in 1965, Charles made his debut at Prague’s National Theatre with Britten’s Peter Grimes. But the mid-1960s seems to have been something of a dry patch for Mackerras when it came to Czech symphonic music, and with the exceptions of two performances with the Brno State Philharmonic in October 1963 that contained a piece by the Canadian-Czech composer, Oskar Morawetz (1917-2007), Charles’s only readings of these works were largely restricted to Janáček’s Taras Bulba and Voříšek’s Symphony with the Götesberg Symphony Orchestra that November, and the Polka from Dvořák’s ‘Czech’ Suite with the English Chamber Orchestra at Prague on 16 May 1966. Czech opera fared marginally better, however, and he gave Janáček’s The Makropulos Affair in London, Zagreb and Paris with the Sadler’s Wells company and the composer’s From the House of the Dead for the BBC from Manchester between 1964 and 1965. The principal reason for this dip was Charles’s appointment as first conductor of the Hamburg State Opera between 1966 and 1969. As second-in-command to the theatre’s chief conductor, Leopold Ludwig (1908-1979), Mackerras was not in a position to programme at will. While it is true that his Hamburg repertoire stretched from Mozart to Goehr, the only opportunities he had to perform Czech music were when he gave Smetana’sThe Bartered Bride in 1967 and Janáček’s Jenůfa in 1968. After Hamburg, Charles went on to build strong links with the San Francisco Opera from the 1969 season, but of the fifteen operas that he conducted with the company over the next thirty-one years, only three involved Czech music: Jenůfa in 1986; The Makropulos Affair in 1993, and Dvořák’s Rusalka in 1995.
With the exception of short stints leading the BBC Concert Orchestra and the English Opera Group in the mid-1950s, Charles never held a major music directorship during the first twenty-three years of his professional career, a fact that might seem surprising for a musician of his calibre. This was not only due to his notoriously intransigent musicianship, but also to a personality that didn’t suffer fools gladly. His very precise musical demands often made him far from attractive to self-governing artistic organisations who preferred something of a less-abrasive figure. But there is no denying that he was an outstanding man of theatre and that all things operatic fascinated him. It is hardly surprising, then, that when Sadler’s Wells later rebranded itself as the English National Opera, moved to the Coliseum and needed a new music director in 1970, Charles appeared to be the right man for the job. Never one to be work shy, Mackerras was in his element at the ENO and conducted no fewer than 338 performances over the next seven years with the company. He averaged thirty-eight performances per season and Janáček’s operas were heard on twenty-seven occasions, approximately 8% of all performances given. With the exception of the 1972–3 season, the composer’s works were heard annually along with Smetana’s Dalibor during his final two years with the company. Kicking off with The Makropulos Affair in 1971, Charles then introduced his Coliseum audience to his beloved Kát’a in 1973. During his tenure at St Martin’s Lane, his preference was undoubtedly for Kát’a and he even gave a concert performance of the work with the company at the Proms in 1974, a series premiere and the first of only three complete Janáček’s operas that have been given at the Royal Albert Hall festival to date.
Decca and the Welsh National Opera
Between 1976 and 1982, Charles arguably made his greatest contribution to the performance and reception of Janáček’s music when he recorded five of the composer’s operas for Decca with the Vienna Philharmonic, the chorus of the Vienna State Opera and casts of leading Czech and international singers. The recording company originally had approached Sir Georg Solti as the possible conductor of the series, but as the Hungarian maestro felt that Janáček wasn’t his cup of musical tea, he suggested Charles, who he knew had a particular penchant for the composer. Mackerras had impressed Solti with his reading of Shostakovich’s Katerina Ismailova at his 1964 Covent Garden debut, and they soon became firm friends. Solti was particularly taken with Charles’s quick wit and enquiring mind and did much to encourage him wherever and whenever possible. But if the rumours are correct, some of the younger members of the Vienna orchestra were left scratching their heads when the recording project was first mooted, as they had never heard of an Austrian conductor called Charles Mackerras: it seems that they misheard Australian for Austrian!
Fittingly, Decca’s series got underway with Kát’a Kabanová in the winter of 1976 with Elisabeth Söderström(1927-2009) in the title role. The Vienna State Opera had mounted a new production of the work in the spring of 1974 and had given seventeen performances of the opera before the recording was made, so at least the orchestra and chorus would have been familiar with Janáček’s idiom, if not Mackerras’s approach to it. The second opera documented was the composer’s The Makropulos Affair in the autumn of 1978, followed by From the House of the Dead in the spring of 1980. Neither piece had been performed by the Vienna company before the recording sessions, with the first only receiving its house premiere as late as 2015 and the second just four years earlier in 2011. During the sessions for From the House of the Dead, Charles also conducted a revival of Jenůfa at the Vienna State Opera in February 1980, a work that had entered the troupe’s repertoire as early as 1918. In fact, he gave the forty-sixth performance of their existing production and went on to conduct a further eleven readings of the staging between 1980 and 1987. As the preeminent Janáček conductor of the age, it seems strange that those twelve performances of Jenůfa were the only ones that Charles conducted of a piece by the composer with the company. His 1980 renderings were also his debut at the theatre as an opera conductor, and the first of 55 performances of nine operas that he conducted in the Austrian capital; previously, he had only given a series of ballet performances there in 1957. While the Vienna State Opera seems to have been less than enthusiastic about maximising Charles’s credentials as a Janáček interpreter, Decca was, and pressed on with its project by setting down the Sinfonietta and Taras Bulba with Mackerras and the Vienna Philharmonic at the end of March 1980. By then, the Sinfonietta had become something of a calling-card for Charles, and it was with that piece that he had made his debut with the orchestra at the Musikverein on 24 November 1979. Decca then completed the project by documenting The Cunning Little Vixen and Jenůfa with Charles in the springs of 1981 and 1982 respectively.
After leaving the English National Opera at the end of 1977, and before taking up the music directorship of the Welsh National Opera ten years later, Charles continued to champion his beloved Janáček in the theatre with performances of The Makropulos Affair at Brno in 1979 and Jenůfa in Vienna, Paris and San Francisco between 1980 and 1986. It is somewhat curious, then, that he gave only six performances of two works by the composer – The Cunning Little Vixen and Fate – as music director in Wales. But this brief diminution in activity on behalf of the Czech master was short lived, and he later went on to perform the composer’s operas as a guest conductor at four visits to New York’s Metropolitan Opera between 1991 and 2001, at three visits to the Australia Opera (later Opera Australia) between 1992 and 1998, at two visits each to the English National Opera, the Welsh National Opera and the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, between 1991 and 2010, and at one visit each to Paris’s Théâtre du Châtelet and Prague’s National Theatre between 1995 and 2003. All of these engagements involved multiple performances of Janáček’s operas, and the two productions that Mackerras conducted at the Royal Opera after being appointed to the Welsh troupe – Kát’a in 2007 and The Cunning Little Vixen in 2010 – were the culmination of an extended series of performances by him of Czech operas at the London house. Having conducted Jenůfa there first in 1972, he gave the work a further twelve times at Bow Street between 1974 and 1977, before treating the theatre’s audiences to readings of Martinů’s The Greek Passion in 2000 and 2004, Smetana’s The Bartered Bride in 2001, Dvořák’s Rusalka in 2003 and Janáček’s Kát’a in 2007.
Final years
As music director of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra from 1982, Charles became the chief conductor of a major symphony orchestra for the first time in his career. Initially thrilled to be at the helm of the band that gave him his start as a professional oboist, it soon became clear that the ensemble’s standard would never match that of any leading British, European or North American orchestra. And as Charles was also disturbed by the sheer amount of time needed get to and from Sydney, it was perhaps inevitable that he would resign from the post after only three years. But he never lost interest in Australia, and he returned there for the last time as a conductor in 2007, when he gave concerts with the Sydney and Melbourne Symphony Orchestras. Determined to combine his love of Australia with his passion for Czech culture, he performed Janáček’s Sinfonietta, Dvořák’s Seventh Symphony and Smetana’s Vltava in Sydney and Dvořák’s Serenade for Strings in Melbourne. Luckily, these breath-taking performances were recorded by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and some have since been released commercially. As Charles’s health was already failing by the time of that tour, and as the cancer that would eventually kill him was taking an ever-greater toll on his body, he feared that the visit would be his last ‘Down Under’ and that he would never see his beloved hometown again. His fears proved correct.
As a guest conductor during his later years, Charles also worked closely with many of the world’s leading orchestras and built close contacts with the Leipzig Gewandhausorchester, the Staatskapelle Dresden and the Berlin Philharmonic. And had he not died on 14 July 2010, he would have performed Dvořák’s Seventh Symphony with the Berlin orchestra later that year. He was also active with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment during the last twenty years of his career, but the two orchestras that held pride of place for him throughout that period were the Philharmonia in London and the Czech Philharmonic in Prague. Stretching back to the mid-1950s, Charles’s work with the London-based ensemble flourished during the final ten years of his life, and he gave multiple performances of pieces by Janáček and Dvořák with it. But of all the orchestras with which he worked during his final decades, it was the Czech Philharmonic that was of particular importance to him. For Mackerras, the orchestra had a special timbre that was not only due to the type and quality of the playing, but also to the unified ethnic makeup of its personnel.
But Charles’s love affair with the Czech Philharmonic began relatively late in his career, and at his first programme with the orchestra on 30 May 1979 at the Smetana Hall, he fittingly included Talich’s suite from The Cunning Little Vixen. Five years then passed before Charles was reunited with the orchestra for an all-Janáček programme at the Rudolfinum in the Czech capital on 26 and 27 January 1984. On those occasions, he was able to play one of his signature works with the Philharmonic: the composer’s ‘Glagolitic’ Mass. That concert was the first of twenty all-Czech programmes that he gave with the orchestra between 1979 and 2008, both in Prague and on tour in Vienna, London and Edinburgh. Yet, it was at the Rudolfinum that Charles felt most at home with the Czech Philharmonic, and it was there on 12 December 2008 as principal guest conductor, a post he held with great pride, that he conducted the orchestra for the last time in public. At that concert, he led another all-Czech programme that included the world premiere of Martinů’s Three Fragments from Juliette. But it was with the music of his beloved Dvořák that he made his swansong with the orchestra when they recorded the composer’s The Wild Dove together on 9 and 10 December 2009. For Mackerras, Dvořák was a sovereign artist who had few equals, and who was second only to Mozart in the pantheon of great composers.
While Prague allowed Charles to explore his love of all things Czech, it also allowed him to pursue two of his other great passions: Handel and Mozart. With the Prague Chamber Orchestra, he recorded Handel’s three ‘Water Music’ Suites in 1978 and the complete symphonies of Mozart between 1986 and 1990. Then, in 1991, Charles returned to the National Theatre to lead a new production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni for the company at the recently renovated Estates Theatre. Given during the bicentenary of the composer’s death, and at the theatre in which the work was first heard in 1787, this was one of Charles’s proudest moments as a Mozartian. But as he was always at pains to point out towards the end of his remarkable life, it wasn’t Mozart and Handel who needed his help and support, it was Janáček. The composer had largely flown under the West’s musical radar after the Second World War and was again in need of a committed and passionate supporter. Charles Mackerras was that man. And while few would doubt the impact and quality of his magisterial and innovative readings of Handel, Mozart and Beethoven, Charles’s greatest legacy as a musician must surely be his advocacy of Czech music in general and Janáček in particular. He truly was an ‘honorary Czech’.
