Sir Edward Downes: A memory

It’s been a bad, no a dreadful twelve months as far as conductors are concerned; ‘Tod’ Handley, Richard Hickox and now Ted Downes have all left life’s podium. While the first two are a particular loss to the music of our own country, it is the opera world, and in particular the music of Verdi and the Russian schools of the 19th and 20th century which will feel the loss of Downes. The obituaries in the press have filled in the biographical detail, and will also cover his choice of death, in a way which one hopes that sadness mingled with admiration will be the driving force of emotion rather than any intrusive interest. There follows just a handful of my memories to sprinkle around.

I met Ted Downes very infrequently but was always glad to be in his company. In conversation he was straight-talking, witty, cultured, interesting and interested. As a young lad I was part of a Croydon-based orchestra which met on a Sunday afternoon for a couple of hours, never performed in public, and was run by a wonderfully dotty lady with an even dottier name, Dorothy Crump. She became my musical ‘granny’ because in the 1960s I formed an orchestra at the age of 16, much the same as she had done after the First World War. She was immensely proud of the ‘professionals’ as we were called, those who went in to the music profession as conductors or players; Norman Del Mar was one, bassoonist William Waterhouse another. I can remember Del Mar guiding me through the wonders of Beethoven’s ninth one Sunday afternoon after Mrs Crump had rung me during the week and asked me to come and conduct the first three movements. Ted Downes also went to the ‘Crumpery’ as it was called, when he was a student at the RCM.

Many years later we met at Heathrow airport and travelled on the bus back to Victoria bus station; I had returned from a conducting engagement in Germany, he from further afield. I never forgot the interest he took in me, my career, our musical tastes, views of the business and general gossip. After we had shared our memories of our respectively different eras at the ‘Crumpery’ the subject turned to his great passion and love, Verdi; I was then Director of Music at University College London (Bloomsbury Theatre) and responsible for the annual outing of an operatic rarity (among which was the British staged premiere of Verdi’s Oberto in 1982, some time before Opera North did it). I loved the early and middle period Verdi operas and went on to conduct Giovanna D’Arco, Il Corsaro and Un giorno di regno. We discussed the non-standard repertoire works of Verdi at length (Jérusalem, the French version of I Lombardi was planned but eventually thwarted by the unavailability of the orchestral parts), and having an encyclopaedic knowledge of them all, he gave me a wonderful insight.

Back in 1993 he conducted Verdi’s Aroldo for Chelsea Opera Group, and was heard to say to the orchestra at the end of the morning dress rehearsal, ‘Enjoy yourselves this evening; don’t sit there scrubbing away like bank clerks’. As chorus master for the Group for several years I again met up with Ted in 2000 when he conducted our 50th anniversary concert. As it happens, the four items he conducted did not involve the chorus, but during the morning rehearsal on the South Bank, after they had sung ‘Patria oppressa’ from Verdi’s Macbeth under another conductor, he warned the chorus that it was singing a particular Italian word just wrong enough to turn it from something poetic into something lewd. He spared no-one’s sensitivity, ‘suona a morto ognor la squilla’ means ‘a bell always tolls for the dead’, but if you sing ‘suona a morto ognor la squillo’, it means ‘a call girl always rings for the dead’. One sensed that in fact they were not getting it wrong, but Ted wanted to get his funny, and I suspect oft-told, story in, come what may.

He will be sorely missed, probably more by us musicians than the general public. As no seeker of the limelight, he kept a far lower profile than some of his podium peacock colleagues, but those who mattered, his players and his singers, knew his worth as a man and musician.

Christopher Fifield 

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