Ben Luxon: An Obituary
Ben Luxon (1937-2024)– an Obituary
The Cornish baritone, Benjamin Luxon, has died at the age of 87. I first met Ben in the late 1970s, when he came to the Guildhall School of Music to teach the art of Lieder singing. His own teacher at Guildhall, Walther Gruner, had been the German song teacher there since 1945 and when Gruner became ill and then died in 1980, Ben took a number of classes himself. His easy manner and obvious mastery of the genre made him a fantastic teacher himself, and we considered ourselves particularly lucky to learn from a singer at the peak of his career. I had enjoyed working with Gruner, but I learned a lot more from Ben.
When I joined Scottish Opera as a principal singer in 1982, I worked several times with Ben, notably in Jonathan Miller’s clever production of Mozart’s ‘The Magic Flute’. This slightly cerebral reading of Mozart’s masterpiece was set in an Enlightenment Library, with Sarastro and his court a Masonic brotherhood. It worked splendidly, but it meant that the only humour was around Papageno, and that character had to be immensely charismatic to carry the whole burden of comedy on his shoulders. Ben rose wonderfully to the challenge, his bemused Cornishman (it was sung in English) struggling to understand the high-flown rhetoric of the court and clearly preferring a good drink and a pretty girl to wisdom, knowledge and inner enlightenment! I was variously an armed man, a priest and the Speaker of the temple, a young singer with a good voice and little idea about acting. Ben was marvellously patient with me and always willing to help me become a better actor. When he set up the inaugural Walther Gruner Lieder Prize in memory of his teacher in 1983, he encouraged me to go in for it, as he recognised a young singer for whom Lieder singing was a very important thing. When I was pipped to the prize by the fantastic German baritone, Olaf Bär, Ben was brilliant in explaining firstly that winning is not everything, and also that a native German speaker was always going to have an advantage in a Lieder competition. He let me down very gently and continued to encourage me and give me coaching sessions occasionally over the next ten years or so. We met again on stage at ENO when, in the early 90s, he was engaged to sing Falstaff in Verdi’s eponymous opera, and I was constantly around understudying Falstaff’s henchman, Pistol. This was a sad period, as the hearing problems which ended his singing career became manifest. He acted a fabulous Falstaff, but could not hear the music correctly, and began to sing out of tune in an extremely wayward manner. As the 1990s proceeded, the problems became worse, and he was forced to give up his fabulous career. However, he was not one to be beaten, and forged out a new career, mainly in the United States, as a narrator and poetry reader as well as giving masterclasses and directing operas. Latterly, he lived in Massachusetts.
Benjamin Luxon was born in Redruth in Cornwall on March 4th , 1937 and was a proud Cornishman all his life. When he came to London to study with Walther Gruner, he was also working as a PE teacher at an East London school. In 1961, he won Third Prize in the ARD International Music Competition in Munich, and this success launched his career. The competition was open to all instruments, not just voices, and therefore even a 3rd prize was a major achievement, and soon he came to the attention of Benjamin Britten. He joined Britten’s English Opera Group, and in 1963, he toured to the Soviet Union with the Group, singing Sid in ‘Albert Herring’ and Tarquinius in ‘The Rape of Lucretia.’ In 1970, Luxon sang Tarquinius on the still definitive Decca recording conducted by the composer of ‘The Rape of Lucretia’ with the wonderful Janet Baker as Lucretia, and in 1971, Britten composed his television opera. ‘Owen Wingrave’ with Luxon in the title role. Debuts at Covent Garden and Glyndebourne followed, and Ben was soon established as one of the finest baritones of his day, singing at La Scala, Milan, the Metropolitan Opera, New York and the Vienna Staatsoper. His stand out roles were Don Giovanni, Eugene Onegin, Papageno, and Wozzeck, which he notably sang with Scottish Opera when I was a member of the company, conducted by Simon Rattle.
Ben had a parallel career as a recitalist, being a notable interpreter of Schubert and Schumann, and devoting a large part of his work to English composers, especially Britten, Butterworth, Finzi, Vaughan Williams and Roger Quilter, usually accompanied by the excellent David Willison. I think their recording of Vaughan Williams’ Songs of Travel is the definitive one. When I recorded the cycle for Birnam CD in 2021, I sent a CD to Ben in America for his thoughts. He came back with some very interesting comments, and expressed amazement that the cycle worked, even transposed lower for my bass voice. He did say he missed the mellifluous sound of the baritone voice, but he would say that, wouldn’t he?
He also became famous in the 1960s and 70s for his partnership with the tenor, Robert Tear, singing Victorian parlour songs, gaining much popularity for appearances on the BBC’s ‘The Good Old Days’, a sort of nostalgic evocation of the Victorian/Edwardian Music Hall Variety Show. It was tongue in cheek, but Ben and Bob brought the full character of their voices and technique to the performances.
He lived his later years in the States and kept busy till the end. He was a marvellous singer and a lovely man.
