Public man, private passions

“I’d know that voice anywhere,” said the man standing behind Michael Berkeley in the queue at Cardiff station. Berkeley’s is one of the few voices – deep, lilting, seductive – that could make asking for a ticket to Ludlow so striking. But would the man, who confessed to being an amateur singer, have known Berkeley’s music? Probably not: it is the conundrum at the heart of Michael Berkeley’s life.

Berkeley is a composer of, for want of a better term, serious contemporary music. He has written more than 50 orchestral and chamber scores, and next Friday will unveil his second opera, Jane Eyre. His first, Baa Baa Black Sheep, was staged in 1993. His output is diverse; his reputation is growing; he considers himself a “late developer” and says the best is yet to come. Yet, despite his protestations, he is still better known as a broadcaster and administrator than as a composer; many of his works have not been recorded and too many of those that were put on disc have been deleted.

His music, especially his vocal music, is very accessible; melodies come readily to him (sometimes too readily, he says) and lodge in the listener’s head; yet he is lazily lumped together with avant-gardists and minimalists by audiences who write off new music in its entirety as unlistenable. Talking a couple of years ago about Private Passions, the Desert Island Discs-style programme he presents on Radio 3, he said: “It has disconcerted me that we’ve still got such a long way to go with really intelligent people in terms of contemporary music.” That gap, despite his efforts as composer and communicator, is still huge, the residual fear of the new and dissonant palpable.

“The problem with contemporary music – and its magic – is that it’s as if it came from another planet,” Berkeley once said. He went on to make a clever point about Bernard Herrmann’s music in Hitchcock’s Psycho: that in the concert hall, audiences would find it jarring and difficult, but because it comes clothed with images its demands are accepted. “If only people could approach music with a completely open mind and allow it to build a landscape in the mind with dramatic and visual images, then it becomes a much more enriching experience.”

Berkeley is best known for presenting Private Passions and for having been thrust into the role of spokesman for the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, when it faced financial and administrative meltdown in 1998 (“I joined the board expecting to go to eight or nine meetings a year and ended up in there every other day, trying to hold everything together,” he recalls ruefully). Whenever a major job in the small, hothouse classical-music world comes up, Berkeley’s name is put in the frame. He was tipped to take over from Nicholas Kenyon as controller of Radio 3 in 1998, and will no doubt be mooted as a possible successor to Michael Kaiser when he steps down next year as chief executive of the Opera House. There is just one problem: despite public perceptions, he doesn’t want to be a bureaucrat.

“There’s no way I would give up the daytime of my life to be an administrator,” he says. “It’s ridiculous. It’s like saying to David Hockney ‘you should be running BBC2’. It’s not compatible with being a creative artist. Composing occupies by far the largest part of my life and anything else I do has to fit around it.”

What if Covent Garden, which has managed to get through four chief executives in as many years, came calling? “There are moments of temptation, but if you want to be a serious composer you have to eschew them. It’s not just the money that is tempting; you could do a lot if you were head of Radio 3 or the Opera House, you could do a lot about the things that you believe in. But I want to be an artist rather than a mandarin. All my life I’ve fought to retain large pockets of time in which to compose.

“Michael Kaiser and I got on very well because he is utterly committed to both opera and ballet, and I’m sorry to see him go. He leaves the place in very good working order. We are financially more stable now than at any time since I joined the board in 1996, the rebuilding of the house has been completed and the artistic direction of both companies is very happily in place. There is an exciting job for a new chief executive, but that person won’t be me. I am pleased to be able to help on the artistic side, but I am, and always will be, a composer.”

Composing is in the blood. He is the son of Sir Lennox Berkeley, a composer of great economy and elegance, whose music has fallen out of favour; he is also the godson of Benjamin Britten, one of the commanding figures of 20th- century British music. Berkeley junior knew from the age of six that he wanted to be a composer, and his determination has never wavered. He worked at London Weekend Television in the mid-70s and then joined the staff of Radio 3, but the media always played second fiddle to his artistic impulse.

He has shown an admirable commitment to the muse, but some critics are less than convinced that the muse has kept her side of the bargain. “Because of his father there was an expectation that he would be a creative person,” says one. “He is a brilliant communicator, broadcaster and festival organiser, but his music never really attains that level of excellence. It’s an example of the Sullivan syndrome: just as Sir Arthur was dissatisfied with all the Gilbert and Sullivan stuff and wanted to write grand opera, so Michael is dissatisfied with being a great communicator and wants to be a great composer. “His misfortune is to be one of a generation of prodigious talents – Oliver Knussen, Colin Matthews, George Benjamin. He just doesn’t have the same individuality of voice as them.”

That verdict might have held true a decade ago, but is unfair now. In the 80s, Berkeley was striving to find a voice, and was locked into an English lyrical tradition that seemed passé and derivative. In the past 10 years, he has discovered a harder edge and a more personal style that combines rawness and dissonance with his natural lyricism.

He is not fazed by criticism of his music, because he is his own severest critic. “I’m a late developer like my father,” he says. “I’ve only written a handful of pieces that I really like. I think Baa Baa Black Sheep works, though I can write opera better now and Jane Eyre is a much more organic and taut piece. There was a time when I wanted to take quite a lot of stuff out of the catalogue, but my publisher dissuaded me. Some of the pieces, while technically weak, are quite touching in their naivety. In any case, it’s hard to say what will survive: time will sort it all out.”

“His early music was rather middle of the road and there was a sense of him following in his father’s footsteps,” says the composer Colin Matthews. But his music has become much tougher and tauter.” Matthews suggests that the death of Berkeley’s father in 1989 might have been a musical liberation: a chance to break out of the restrained, polished English style and embrace something rawer and more dangerous.

Roger Wright, controller of Radio 3, says Berkeley is by no means the first composer to have taken some time to discover his true voice. “Very few composers find their voice early and stick with it,” says Wright. “I suppose you might single out Walton and Messiaen as two who, when you hear their very early music, you think ‘that’s them’ straight away. But there are hundreds of examples of composers who did it the other way around, and it must be even harder if you have a composer father.”

Berkeley, who was born in 1948, describes his childhood as “charmed”, but hints that some of the darkness that now articulates itself in his music can be ascribed to his adolescence. His father had been gay in his early years and had lived with Britten. Sir Lennox married in his mid-40s – “people were very surprised”, says Berkeley – and his wife, Elizabeth Bernstein, who was his secretary during the second world war, was 20 years his junior. Berkeley’s mother is now 77 and lives close to him in London. He was the eldest of three brothers: all had a musical education but he is the only professional musician among them. One brother is a photographer, the other runs a burglar alarm business, and after a rough patch he is now on good terms with both.

“My father was quite introverted and locked into his own world,” says Berkeley. “He was a rather saintly character in some ways, very sweet and gentle on the whole. He was incapable of coming back from an opera or a concert without getting the score out and saying ‘look, isn’t this wonderful?’. We were surrounded by a lot of people who were gay [Auden, Poulenc and Britten were family friends] and there was surprise that my parents entrusted me to some people with rather dubious reputations. But it was a very emancipated upbringing, and meant that one was curious about contemporary art and literature as well as music.”

That was the upside. The downside was that, being brought up in such intellectual circles, he was never allowed to be a child. “He once said that he never felt he could be a young person,” says one close friend. While he admired his father, the relationship became a little distant, and it is tempting to read into his thoughts on the repressiveness of Sir Lennox’s music a critique of his rarefied upbringing. “I loved his music very much and I learned a lot from it, but I also got a little frustrated by it,” says Berkeley. “I was a more naturally extrovert character, and I longed for it sometimes to seize me and shake me.”

“He had an interesting childhood,” says another friend. “He was in a privileged position but it was also a burden, and he understands the pain of getting through life. It is interesting that both his operas are about people wrenched from their environments and placed in threatening situations.”

Berkeley was educated at the Oratory School near Reading and at Westminster Cathedral Choir School, going on to study piano, composition and singing at the Royal Academy at the age of 17. Though he does not say so explicitly, he evidently feels that his years at the academy lacked focus. “I went there too early,” he says. “I was quite lazy and needed someone to really push me. I learned quite a lot about opera but not much about composition.”

He did, though, play keyboard in a band, called Seeds of Discord, with a friend from school and two doctors from Bart’s. Despite a certain King’s Road cachet, they never quite made Top Of The Pops, but Berkeley says the experience stood him in good stead and he still proudly lists “rock musician” as an early accomplishment in Who’s Who. He also had a druggy spell – all part of a rebellion against the constraints of that aesthetically charged childhood.

He intended to become a singer to support his work as a composer, but that plan was scotched when he became seriously ill with renal tuberculosis at the age of 20. “I’d been through a difficult relationship and my emotional state was rather jagged and vulnerable,” he recalls. “No one knew what it was for a while, and I got very thin and anaemic.”

The illness did, however, concentrate the mind. “At that age you think you will live for ever, and it was salutary to realise that I couldn’t make a living from singing any more and that if I wanted to write I’d better start.” He went to study with the composer Richard Rodney Bennett, now best known for his film scores but at that point regarded as a rising avant-garde talent, who started to temper Berkeley’s natural lyricism with greater rigour.

“He didn’t want me to change my style. He didn’t want me to change my language. He didn’t want me to ape him or ape anyone else. He just saw that I had something to say, but I didn’t have much idea about how to develop musical ideas. He made me study aspects of serialism, not to write atonal music but because it’s a wonderful way of looking at a cell of notes, turning it upside down, running it backwards, using it so that all the harmony follows from it. You can then still write music which is patently melodic but which has an organic feel to it.”

In many ways 1979 proved the seminal year in Berkeley’s life. As well as leaving Broadcasting House for the uncertain life of a freelance (he felt his music would never get a fair hearing on the station if he remained on the staff), he also got married – to Deborah Rogers, now one of the UK’s leading literary agents – and bought (for £5,000) a farmhouse in Powys, just a few miles across the border from Hereford but very isolated, tranquil and beautiful – a bolt-hole, a place to compose. Over the past 20 years, the house and grounds have grown along with Berkeley’s career as a composer: as adjoining fields have come up for sale he has bought them. He met a local farm labourer, Steven Morgan, and they went into partnership, rearing cattle and sheep. Berkeley now owns 350 acres – modest in farming terms – on which Morgan tends 600 ewes and 60 cattle. The crisis in farming has made the past few years difficult, but their enthusiasm is undimmed.

“We’ll never get rich by it, but it’s a richness of another sort, an aesthetic richness,” says Berkeley. “I’ve loved learning about farming. It has given me an understanding of how the countryside works and a less romantic view of it. The arrangement was always that because this was my workplace, Steven would assume that I would do nothing, but in fact I loved coming and doing hay-making and lambing.”

Berkeley splits his time between the farm in Wales and his home in west London, where he lives with his wife and their 13-year-old daughter Jessica, whom the couple adopted from the US when she was just four days old. They pay family visits to the farm at weekends and in the holidays, and Jessica rides and plays with Morgan’s three children. Berkeley says the farm, where he loves to work and walk, is his “spiritual home”; London is the base for that more public part of his life (his house there has a studio where Private Passions is recorded, always in the evening to leave the mornings free for composition). “I have a slightly schizophrenic personality and I thrive on having this duality in my life,” he says. “I realised that to make my composing work I had to have somewhere where, once I was there, it was pretty difficult to get me out.”

There are very few CDs in the farmhouse, and he apologises for his non-state-of-the-art CD system. “I don’t want to listen to very much music when I’m composing,” he says. “You need to enter your own world. I find this with every composer. Michael Tippett used to watch soap operas. He just wanted to shut off completely.”

Jane Eyre, which has its premiere on Friday at the Cheltenham International Festival of Music, has had a dramatic and protracted birth. In May last year the original – and only – copy of the score was stolen from Berkeley’s doorstep as he was unloading his car outside his London home. The event hit the headlines; he was interviewed on the Today programme; appeals were made; rewards offered; but the briefcase containing the manuscript was never found. (It is ironic that an artist’s work should only be of widespread press and public interest when it disappears.)

Berkeley was devastated. “He went through torment. He was in despair,” says his friend, the critic and broadcaster Robert Sandall. “He had struggled to get it going and then he lost it. He suffered a terrific crisis of confidence.”

“I was completely shell-shocked at first,” recalls Berkeley. “There were 60 pages of full score, plus sketches and the piano reduction – the template of the whole opera. It was hopeless trying to reconstruct it; it had to be redone altogether. I was so sickened by it that I didn’t feel I could go back to the beginning immediately. What I felt I could do was pick it up from the point I had got to dramatically. I did eventually go back to the beginning, and I thought in the end it was tighter and stronger as a result.”

Berkeley had a year in which to re-compose the work, and finally finished it three weeks ago. He has spent the past fortnight attending rehearsals in Cardiff, pacing around the hall like an expectant father and making the occasional suggestion, but being careful not to issue orders. This is artistic collaboration, not a stage for a composer’s self-esteem.

The fact that Berkeley the composer of Jane Eyre is also the artistic director of the Cheltenham festival has led to accusations of self-promotion. “I have heard a lot of muttering about the fact that a festival director should spend so much money on his own opera,” says one music critic. Colin Matthews says that it is by no means unprecedented and cites the example of Britten at Aldeburgh, but doubts whether he would do it himself.

Berkeley, who has been generous in encouraging and commissioning other composers in his five years in charge of Cheltenham, is unrepentant. “It’s the only piece that has been commissioned from me while I’ve been there. We sorted this out very early on: I was going as a composer and I think it’s a strength to have a practising composer running a festival and contributing pieces every now and again, just as Michael Tippett did at Bath. I didn’t go there as an administrator; I went as a composer. You have to be careful not to abuse it, but I’ve put on 25 or so new pieces every year and I don’t feel I’ve shortchanged anybody.”

It is to be hoped that the controversy does not overshadow the reception of Jane Eyre, because the opera promises much. As with Baa Baa Black Sheep, his Kipling-based opera which won considerable acclaim when it was produced in 1993, the libretto has been written by the Australian author David Malouf, whose restraint complements Berkeley’s more gothic imagination. The production will be staged by Music Theatre Wales, which specialises in contemporary opera, and after Cheltenham it will go on tour, reaching Covent Garden’s Linbury Studio in early November. It is a chamber piece for five voices and small orchestra, similar in mood to Britten’s Turn Of The Screw and combining lyrical expressiveness with brooding menace.

Berkeley and Malouf have stripped the book down to its essentials. “What I like about Jane Eyre is the Bluebeardian aspect,” says Berkeley. “You have to get rid of everything that is superfluous – the childhood, St John Rivers, even Grace Poole. You have to do that in opera: you cut it down to what you really need, and end up with something which is quite lean. Ultimately a libretto has to be something that needs music to breathe; if it’s all there in the libretto as a satisfactory literary experience, then why bother to put music to it? The libretto that David produced clearly does need music; he once said that a libretto in itself is a poor thing. The libretto must take second place to the music.”

He is intrigued by the different displays of female sexuality in the novel: “the frightening sexuality of Mrs Rochester, the flirtatious Jane, the homely Mrs Fairfax, and the young but knowing Adele, all with Rochester in the middle. The whole concept of a madwoman upstairs ululating is very operatic. Also the concept of a story which is predicated on telepathic voices – that’s music, that’s the thing that music can do which nothing else can do. Literature can tell you about the idea of hearing voices, but in music you can do it.”

Berkeley, a romantic writing in an unromantic age, hopes that Jane Eyre will be a happy marriage of lyricism and emotional intensity. “There is a romantic side and a melodic element to the opera, but there is always something turbulent underneath. You can’t do an opera about Jane Eyre and deny the romantic side of it, but there is also a dark side, and I like the friction between the two.

“I like the idea of something in which you can allow yourself to be melodically expressive, and yet there is a friction, so the audience is on the one hand seduced by the romantic-ness but on the other hand is disturbed by those things which are probably in all of us but which we don’t entirely understand – to what extent is Jane being manipulative, to what extent is Rochester being truthful? I remember one or two people I trust saying to me, your language is developing but don’t forsake the natural lyricism. I find lyricism in a lot of quite complex music.”

Michael McCarthy, director of Jane Eyre, says he is a welcome presence in rehearsals. “His ego has never got in the way, and he lets us question the work and ask how and why. He knows what he is doing and where he is going, what depths he is plumbing emotionally. His music can take him into darker places than you might imagine or that he could ever describe in words. In Baa Baa Black Sheep, for example, there are powerful undercurrents about the way in which children are treated. He is a vulnerable, sensitive soul, and that’s all there in his work, especially in his operas where emotions are undisguised.”

Berkeley is aware of the disparity between his smooth public persona and his darker musical personality, but is unable or unwilling to account for it. “We all have a dark side,” he says. “Just as people assume that because you broadcast you must be socially incredibly at ease, so they assume that because you sound comfortable interviewing people that everything is at a certain level, but there are different layers. For many years I felt rather socially inept, and some of the frustrations that I felt in my relationships with people led to violent outbursts in the music as a form of release. Music gives me an outlet for things I find it difficult to articulate verbally, socially or perhaps even emotionally.”

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