Raymond Leppard
Conductor and arranger who revived interest in early Baroque music by composers such as Claudio Monteverdi and Francesco Cavalli
RAYMOND LEPPARD, who has died aged 92, was a celebrated British conductor and harpsichordist who co‑founded the English Chamber Orchestra, introduced baroque opera to Glyndebourne and championed music in country churches, notably in Norfolk; along the way he was seduced by a church organist, walked on a nudist beach with the Queen Mother and threatened to slap Kiri Te Kanawa’s bottom.
He could be found conducting anything from Bach to Bartók, but made his name in Britain as a pioneer of early music, going to great pains to realise long‑forgotten 17th‑century works by composers such as Claudio Monteverdi and Francesco Cavalli, Monteverdi’s lesser‑known contemporary.
For his troubles, Leppard drew ire from musicologists who claimed that his reconstructions traduced the original scores. During his research Leppard had found that often only the singer’s line and a bass line of the operas remained; yet, as he pointed out, account books and other records show that the theatres of the day employed other musicians. “I’m only trying to make the operas work on the stage,” he told Gramophone magazine in 1971. “In preparing scores that are often only skeletons, I have to make decisions.”
Earlier, while at Cambridge, he took piano lessons from Solomon in London; discussed the relative merits of English and Hungarian folk music with Zoltán Kodály; supped tea with Richard Strauss; and was co‑opted by Dadie Rylands to plan the opening of the Purcell Room in London.
During the 1950s he played piano and harpsichord with the Philharmonia Orchestra under conductors such as Herbert von Karajan (“While there was much to admire in the music he made, there wasn’t much to like in the man himself ”), Otto Klemperer (“The English love a ruin”) and Carl Orff (“an irritable, unsmiling composer whose conducting skills were of the bandmaster variety”).
A visit to the King’s Lynn Festival in 1963 performing Bach in a local church with the English Chamber Orchestra had led to an introduction to Ruth, Lady Fermoy, its founder, who was also a lady‑ in‑waiting to the Queen Mother. He had first met the Queen Mother when, as Queen, she toured the bomb‑damaged city of Bath, where he grew up, with George VI in 1942. He became a lunch companion at Royal Lodge in Windsor Great Park and later at Sandringham.
He recalled walking with her on a beach in Norfolk after lunch one day “when a rather straggling‑ looking couple with a young child, all stark naked, got up from amid some tall sea grasses and began to walk towards us … We proceeded on and Queen Elizabeth said: ‘Raymond, I’ve always thought people look rather better with a little something on’.”
He also enjoyed a long friendship with Princess Margaret (known as LF, or Little Friend, in a failed attempt to prevent his housekeeper telling all and sundry of their acquaintance). They first met in 1958 over a lunch with Simon Phipps, later to be Bishop of Lincoln, Leppard recalling in his memoir: “She was wonderful, but it’s true she could be wilful, contrary, bad tempered, rarely reasonable, occasionally ill‑ mannered – and often ‘difficult’.” One evening after dinner, Margaret sang the words and tune to a lament she had written and asked him to take it down and write a harmony with her; they finished at about 4.30am.
Raymond John Leppard was born in London on August 11 1927, the younger of two sons. Three kindly aunts in Hove introduced him to music and when the family moved to Bath his father acquired “a tired old Broadwood grand piano”. He recalled how his piano teacher’s wife “kept a flock of talking budgerigars who flew about the house, chattering away, favouring us occasionally with a visiting card or two”. He also took viola lessons from Mabel Wilson‑ewer, a descendant of the Novello family.
He described how his childhood in Bath was “full of good things. I fell in love with the girl who played St Joan in the school’s production of Shaw’s play; was seduced by a local church organist; swam in the Roman baths; went to The Seraglio at the Theatre Royal conducted by Beecham; sang the solo in Stanford’s Songs of the Sea; and survived Hitler’s bombing raids”. Indeed, he had a narrow escape in 1942 when his family’s home was destroyed by a Baedeker attack during the Bath Blitz.
Leppard was a near contemporary of Sir Roger Bannister at City of Bath Boys’ School, where his lust for a biology mistress led him briefly to flirt with the idea of a career in medicine.
He turned down a general scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music in favour of a choral one at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he also studied harpsichord and viola. That was put on hold for National Service with the RAF, for whom he was a radar operator in Cornwall until 1948.
At Cambridge he played viola with the University Music Society and sang with the madrigal society. His supervisor was Paddy Hadley, an eccentric composer who had lost a leg during the Great War and whose supervisions were sometimes undertaken “carelessly dressed … but that was an education in itself ”.
After graduating he stayed on to conduct the Cambridge Philharmonic Society (a town, rather than gown, organisation) and to write a thesis entitled “The Idea of Progress in Music”, but he abandoned it midway to make his own progress as a musician – causing a rift with his family. Moving to London, Leppard rented a flat from Peter Shaffer, who engaged him to orchestrate his film adaptation of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.
At Christmas 1953 he was the musical director for Alice Through the Looking Glass at the Prince’s Theatre, starring Margaret Rutherford as the White Queen. He wrote the score for Listen to the Wind at the Oxford Playhouse and, in 1960, Peter Hall brought him to the Royal Shakespeare Company, where he removed the pit orchestra (“The little café‑sounding ensemble,” noted Leppard) and integrated the musicians into the productions.
The Leppard Ensemble came into being in 1953 but, despite some well‑received concerts, lost a small fortune for its founder and soon he merged it with the Goldsbrough Orchestra to form what became the English Chamber Orchestra. He spent the summers of 1954 and 1955 as répétiteur at Glyndebourne and in 1957 returned to Cambridge as a music lecturer.
In 1958 Britten invited him to realise Monteverdi’s Il ballo delle Ingrate at the Aldeburgh festival, his first professional venture into 17th‑century opera. However, the notoriously tetchy composer felt snubbed in 1962, when Leppard agreed to Glyndebourne staging his arrangement of Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea, conducted by John Pritchard.
This first venture into early music by the East Sussex opera house turned out to be so popular with audiences that it ran for three consecutive seasons, though Leppard himself only conducted in 1964. The critics were less convinced, claiming for example that a harp glissando at one point was an anachronism. Leppard retorted that no one could prove that the harpists of 1642 did not run their fingers up and down their strings for pleasure.
There were more early music pleasures when he was on sabbatical in 1963. “I went out to Venice to look at the manuscript in the Marciana Library and it was there that I discovered some Cavalli works,” he recalled. He returned to Glyndebourne in 1967 to conduct the composer’s L’ormindo, its first known performance since 1644, directed by Peter Hall and starring Janet Baker.
Elsewhere during the 1960s there was L’orfeo at Sadler’s Wells, frequent visits to Yehudi Menuhin’s Bath Music Festival, Poppea with San Francisco Opera, and regular concerts with the Essex Youth Orchestra, of which he was permanent conductor. Eventually, having driven back from London to Cambridge on the wrong side of the road once too often, he left the university for good in 1967 to pursue orchestral life, including a tour of Japan with the ECO in 1970.
A fire at his home in 1971 destroyed the full score of Monteverdi’s Il Ritorno de Ullyse, but it brought about a reconciliation with Aldeburgh when Peter Pears, Britten’s companion, lent him an apartment in London while Britten offered a microfilmed copy of the original score from which to restart his work.
By the early 1970s Leppard was keen to move away from his association with the 17th century. He was principal conductor of the BBC Northern Symphony Orchestra, in Manchester, from 1972 to 1980, where he conducted everything from Beethoven to Shostakovich. And returning to Glyndebourne he took a leap into the 20th century when, in 1975, he conducted Janácek’s The Cunning Little Vixen, directed by Jonathan Miller and starring Norma Burrowes and Benjamin Luxon.
From 1976 Leppard made his home in the US, initially in New York, where he conducted at the Metropolitan Opera, including Britten’s Billy Budd, and later in Indianapolis, where for 14 years from 1987 he became synonymous with the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra – against the advice of his agent and friends, who considered it foolhardy to move to a city more associated with motor‑racing than culture. Despite their warnings he considered those years to be “among the happiest and, in some ways, the most fruitful of my life”.
Leppard reserved particular disdain for artists who grew too popular. “Who wants to work with Pavarotti any more, for instance? There’s no point,” he told the Chicago Tribune in 1987. “Even Kiri Te Kanawa has gone out of sight. You know, I used to work with Kiri, but now she actually believes her PR. She has become a silly girl, and she needs a good slap on her bottom, she really does.”
Raymond Leppard published a handful of books including Authenticity in Music (1988), a serious consideration of how music from the 17th century and earlier can be realised for modern ears without denigrating the composer’s intentions, and Music Made Me (2010), a memoir with a foreword by the Prince of Wales.
Leppard, who was partial to a dry Martini, was appointed CBE in 1983. He is survived by his husband Jack Bloom, with whom he built a garden of rare beauty at their home on the north side of Indianapolis.
He enjoyed a long friendship with Princess Margaret, known as LF, or Little Friend
Raymond Leppard, born August 11 1927, died October 22 2019