Thoughts on Mahler’s 9th Symphony, Donald Runnicles and me

As I sat with tears pouring down my cheeks in the Usher Hall today, listening to the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra playing that most emotional of symphonies, Gustav Mahler’s Ninth, conducted by my old school friend, Sir Donald Runnicles, I found myself musing on the extraordinary way in which this composer has affected both our lives, over a period of more than fifty years. 

When we were in our teens at George Watson’s College in Edinburgh, Donald and I, and several other like-minded schoolboys, with some of whom I am still in close contact, discovered the music of Gustav Mahler, through the influence of an enlightened music teacher, Richard Telfer. He had had a marvellously colourful life, featuring such highlights as being a tour guide in Paris, and playing the Mighty Wurlitzer organ in the New Victoria, later Odeon, Cinema in Clerk Street (between the Festival Theatre and the Queen’s Hall), and had been one of the founders of Scottish Opera in 1962. His music classes were always fascinating, and I particularly loved the fact that he didn’t mind whether boys were studying music or not to receive his wisdom. Despite going on to be professional opera singer, travelling the world and singing in the most famous theatres in the world, over a period of over forty years, I have never studied music as a subject, and hold no qualifications of any sort in Music. For Dick, this mattered not a jot, as long as one was interested in listening properly and coherently. As manager of the Assembly Hall at the Mound during the Edinburgh Festival, he gave us jobs as programme sellers, which allowed us to see many famous productions, and found us tickets for many concerts at the Usher Hall. He took us to Glasgow to see the first ever Scottish production of Wagner’s ‘Der Ring des Nibelungen’ in the early 1970s, a life changing experience both for Donald and me, and encouraged us to listen to the great late Romantic works of Wagner, Bruckner and Mahler, many of which were played at Edinburgh Festivals of the time, conducted by such towering figures as Giulini, Abbado, Haitink and Bernstein. My voice had recently broken and I had discovered that I had a potentially fine bass voice, and Dick Telfer encouraged me from the start. He introduced me to David Ward, the great Dumbarton-born bass, who was singing Wotan in ‘Der Ring’ at the time, and got me a job as a spear carrier and extra when the Palermo Opera brought their production of Verdi’s ‘Attila’ to the Festival, with Ruggiero Raimondi, the fine Italian bass, as Attila. In fact, I was one of the extras who brought Raimondi on to the stage perched on a huge shield, carried by me and five other lads, a terrifying experience for him and also a huge responsibility for us. One slip and his career would have been over! Health and Safety were less prevalent at the time. Dick encouraged me to learn arias and songs from the beginning, and it was him who first awarded me the Moonie Memorial Prize for Singing at Watson’s, against the advice of the head music master who disliked someone not studying Music winning anything. I won, singing King Philip’s great aria from Verdi’s ‘Don Carlo’, which must have sounded ridiculous sung by a 15 year old boy, and I remember singing Iago’s Credo from Verdi’s ‘Otello’ at a Literary Club Event at George Watson’s Ladies College in George Square, an even more ludicrous venture, but one which alerted me to the sudden interest shown in me by members of the fairer sex, a hitherto unknown perk of my nascent singing career! 

All this time, Donald Runnicles had actually been studying music, and it was clear that here was an uncommon talent, initially as a pianist, but soon to be revealed as a conductor. He founded an orchestra, connected to the school but not directly organised by it, called Caritas (part of the school motto – Ex Corde Caritas (Love from the Heart)) and proved at an early age that he had the charisma and ability to go far. 

Around this time, Donald, another school chum, David Moncur, and I (among others) had begun to go to concerts in the Usher Hall, either in the Scottish National Orchestra’s annual season, or during the Edinburgh Festival, all encouraged by Richard Telfer. Perhaps the most seminal event was a performance of Gustav Mahler’s 2nd Symphony, with the London Symphony Orchestra, the Edinburgh Festival Chorus, Sheila Armstrong (soprano) and Janet Baker (mezzo), conducted by the American conductor, Leonard Bernstein. Bernstein was a Renaissance man, conductor, educationalist and composer (he composed ‘West Side Story’), and one of the finest Mahler conductors of all time. His Mahler 2 was unbelievably exciting and emotionally charged, and the performance blew us away. I knew then that I wanted to make a career in singing and Donald knew that he wanted to conduct, and to conduct BIG pieces like this! 

I met up with Donald the day before his Usher Hall concert, and we got talking about Mahler. I recalled that Bernard Haitink, in the excellent documentary about the great Dutch conductor just before he died, aged 92, said that he could not play Mahler any more in old age, and that he found the composer too neurotic, or some similar word. I found this an extraordinary statement from someone who had been at the forefront of the Mahler revival of the 1960s, but I think he was looking for simplicity in very old age, and Mahler is anything but simple. Donald agreed that he was surprised by what Haitink had said, and that he himself, in his late sixties, is discovering new things about Mahler every time he conducts his work. We both agreed, however, that maybe by the time we are 91, Mahler will be too complicated for us! 

Gustav Mahler was born in 1860 in Bohemia, the son of a poor German-speaking Jewish family. His father was the son of a pedlar but climbed into the petit-bourgeoisie by becoming a coachman and an innkeeper. The year Gustav was born, the family moved to Jihlava (Iglau in German), where his father built up a successful distillery and tavern business. Iglau was a garrison town in the Austrian Empire, and the young Gustav would have grown up surrounded by soldiers, with their marching bands of drums and trumpets. That sound would linger in his mind throughout his life, and his work is peppered with the sounds of military music. I visited Jihlava 25 years ago, when still in Communist Czechoslovakia, and discovered a sleepy Bohemian town, with a huge main square, presumably where the military bands played daily. His father’s prosperity allowed him to develop his musical skills, and soon he went to the Conservatoire in Vienna, where he had a classmate in Hugo Wolf, attended lectures by Anton Bruckner and discovered the music of Richard Wagner. 

He became famous as a conductor, thriving in Vienna despite his Jewishness, which was not popular in the anti-Semitic atmosphere of the Austrian capital. Soon he was world famous as a conductor, conducting Wagner, Richard Strauss and Tchaikovsky, who admired his conducting but knew nothing of his composition. Indeed for most of his lifetime, Mahler’s compositions were largely ignored, and his fame was almost exclusively as a star conductor. 

This brings me back to my friend, the star conductor, Sir Donald Runnicles, and I think it is no coincidence that Donald is famous for his Mahler performances. His insights into the mind of the great composer, sparked way back in the 1970s by our shared experiences, particularly at the Edinburgh Festival, of the finest conductors of the time playing Mahler, have surely contributed to his mastery of the composer’s music. My colleague at the EMR, Donal Hurley, has already splendidly reviewed Donald’s and the BBCSSO’s performance in Glasgow of Mahler 9, so there is no need for me to write anything about the performance I attended on Sunday afternoon, other than to say that it was the finest interpretation of that great valedictory symphony that I have ever heard, and it is a pleasure and a joy to see how my old friend has developed into one of the world’s great conductors. That he is not better known in the UK, particularly in London, where he has never conducted at Covent Garden, despite having been Musical Director of the San Francisco Opera and the Deutsche Oper, Berlin, is a complete mystery to me. Hopefully, he will come back to Edinburgh again soon, and I gather he will, so that we can acclaim him again in his hometown. 

Readers may be interested in looking up the interview I did with Donald in the Edinburgh Music Review a couple of years ago on the occasion of his Knighthood.