The refugee who taught Prince Charles to love opera
Else Mayer-lismann fled the Nazis and became an opera lecturer in England who inspired future stars and the Prince of Wales. Else’s god-daughter Serena Davies tells her remarkable story
As a child, I was rather frightened of my German godmother Else. She was statuesque, and she used to clasp me to her capacious bosom in a gesture I associated more with suffocation than embrace. Indeed the conductor Anthony Negus, now music director of Longborough Festival Opera and a leading proponent of Wagner, whom Else mentored, remembers her gesticulations being so violent when visiting his family home that he was anxious for the Venetian glass. “I knew my mother was going through absolute hell!” he laughs.
Still, more usually, Else’s taste for drama was an inspiration. Else Mayer-lismann, who died in 1990, was a lecturer in and teacher of opera, and for many years ran a celebrated workshop teaching young students how to perform.
She was the great professional and artistic influence on my mother, Gay Campbell, who had been an opera singer before she had children. And through her passionate conjurings of the works of the best composers in talks she gave across British musical institutions, from Glyndebourne to the Royal Opera House, introduced many others to the profundities of Wagner, Beethoven, Mozart and more.
Among her fans was the Prince of Wales, who, when he met her in his thirties, was keen to expand his already impressive knowledge of opera. “I was incredibly fortunate to have been introduced to Else Mayer-lismann back in the Eighties by an old friend of mine,” recollects the Prince. “Else was a wonderful character and her deep knowledge of opera and music was infectious. Her descriptions and explanations of the background to various operas – particularly those of Wagner – made the whole difference to my subsequent enjoyment of the actual performance and transformed the experience.”
The two programmes the Prince has made for Classic FM, on yesterday and today, have brought to the awareness of many his appreciation of music, and I’ve had the luck to have a special insight into this because he wrote Else letters, which I inherited. The letters tell of his joy and pleasure at going to the works Else had tutored him in, presenting long, ecstatic reports of the Salzburg Festival (this one written on the plane back), nights at Covent Garden and watching opera under the stars at Verona. The Prince’s passion for the singing and fascination with the logistics of putting it on stage is everywhere.
Else didn’t talk much about “mein prinz”, as she called him, and kept her visits to Kensington Palace, where she gave him the talks, private, but it was a friendship she valued deeply. There was the great moment when he took her to Covent Garden to watch The Barber of Seville, and she sat in the royal box – this was relayed to her friends. And the acclaimed soprano Anne Evans, another of her acolytes, wrote this in her obituary of Else in Opera magazine.
“When I last saw Else, just before she died, she showed me her greatest treasure, a get-well card from Prince Charles.” I have this card, too.
Recognition from the Prince also represented recognition from the British establishment. Anne Evans went on, “it was a source of pride to her that her adoptive country should have awarded her an MBE… and a source of happiness that so many of her pupils and ex-pupils – her ‘children’ [she had none of her own] – had been to see her” now she was ill.
“I’ve had a bloody good life. I don’t regret a moment of it,” she told Evans at that last meeting.
Else’s life could have been very different. Born in Frankfurt in 1914 into a cultured family, her father, Paul, was a businessman and her mother, Mitia, was the official lecturer at Frankfurt Opera House and Salzburg Festival.
It was at Salzburg in 1934 that Mitia Mayer-lismann met Ida and Louise Cook, the Sunderland-born spinster opera fans who had moved to London to work as secretaries, saving their pennies to travel the world to see the stars they adored.
They looked after Mitia when she took a trip to England shortly after their encounter – a favour asked of them by the Romanian singer Viorica Ursuleac (reputedly Richard Strauss’s favourite soprano). They didn’t
‘Else’s deep knowledge of music was infectious’ – the Prince of Wales
understand the significance of Ursuleac’s quest at the time – and were surprised to discover that Mitia was Jewish.
“We didn’t know – imagine!” Ida wrote in her memoir, We Followed Our Stars, “In these days we didn’t know that to be Jewish and to come from Frankfurt-am-main in Germany already had the seeds of tragedy in it.”
They realised soon enough and went on to enable the escape of 29 Jews and others needing to flee from Nazi Germany, funding this in part with the money Ida made when she turned her hand to writing Mills and Boon novels from 1936 – she wrote 112 under the pseudonym Mary Burchell.
They smuggled jewels and fur coats across borders, provided the financial guarantee each refugee needed, and gave them an address to come to, a flat in Dolphin Square in Pimlico.
A 22-year-old Else was the flat’s first resident and the first person the Cooks saved, the rest of the Mayer-lismanns following soon after (Mitia had had to return to Germany from that initial short London visit). Ida writes that it was the delightfulness of the Mayerlismanns – “such a fine and worthwhile family”– that helped inspire them to continue their dangerous rescue missions.
My mother recalls that Else would refer to the Cooks as “the chefs”. They remained close with Else and my mother met them a number of times. Even after the cash input their manner was plain and unassuming.
Else was unstinting in her praise of her new homeland they had brought her to: she would tell anyone who would listen that England was the best place to live. It had given her and her family sanctuary, for which she was grateful all her life.
Else’s father died soon after arriving in England but Mitia found work teaching in schools, and Else, who had been the last Jew to be allowed to get a degree at the Frankfurt conservatoire, followed in her footsteps before graduating to opera lecturing herself.
The idea of the workshop came about as her gaggle of fans, my mother included, pressed her to give some more practical way of imparting her flair for communicating opera. It still continues in Spain and Hungary, carried on after Else’s death by the equally brilliant Jeanne Henny, an opera director and teacher.
The workshop was attended by many students who went on to have illustrious careers, taking place originally in a school gym off Kensington High Street. I have memories of scenes from Fidelio being played out there, accompanied by a honky-tonk piano.
The way Else “transformed the experience” of listening to opera, as the Prince put it, was to demand full absorption into the emotions of the piece. “The approach to opera must be the same as that to a fine play,” she told an interviewer in 1959. “I try to give the emotions and conflicts of the characters and the world they live in.”
When teaching about a particular scene, “She’d bash it out on the piano first,” recalls my mother, “pretending to be the full orchestra. Then she’d play the recordings full blast.”
My mother remembers Else playing her Maria Callas shrieking out a note as Lady Macbeth. “Else said how important it was not to bother making a beautiful sound and just be the person.”
Anthony Negus remembers her telling her students how all the characters in The Magic Flute, often thought of as a comic piece, have to face the prospect of death. “Now that’s a very simple statement but it’s a very profound one. Else inspired the imagination,” he says, “and opened everything up. You felt as if she led you to what you already knew deep down inside you.”
The Prince of Wales pays tribute thus: “I remain forever indebted to her for her uniquely invaluable ‘tutoring’. And above all for proving the adage of ‘time spent in reconnaissance is never wasted’… It was a privilege and a blessing to have known her.”
Of course, Else was not alone in her talent for what her friend, the music critic Neville Cardus, described as her “unselfconscious power of communication”. Else was only one of many musical émigrés from Germany and Austria who came to the UK because of Hitler, transforming British musical life in the process.
In a 2015 interview at the Royal College of Music, Dame Janet Baker, one of our finest ever mezzo sopranos, who was taught by Austrian émigré Hélène Isepp, marvelled at, “How much we owe to that input of culture and ideas and professionalism. I think it must have turned this country around [musically], not to denigrate what had gone on here, but before it was different. And I’m not talking about the music itself, I’m talking about the approach to the performance of it, that’s what amazes me… It gave us the opportunity to transfer from a national to an international opera world and people began to respect
Else was one of many musical émigrés who transformed British musical life
English singers in a way that had not been done before.”
It was brilliant German émigrés, Fritz Busch, Carl Ebert and Rudolf Bing, that made up the musical triumvirate behind the birth of Glyndebourne: creating with that festival an emphasis on expressive dramatic performance that chimed with Else’s sensibilities and was unknown hitherto in Britain.
The first music director at the Royal Opera House was a German Jew, Karl Rankl. Georg Solti, who turned the ROH into one of the greatest opera houses in the world, was a Hungarian Jew who trained in part at Karlsruhe, Germany in the Thirties and conducted at Salzburg. German and Austrian émigrés would take leading musical roles at the BBC; teach musicology at UK universities. Else was a part of this world.
At a time when the arts face their biggest crisis in a generation, with opera (requiring just about everything that is banned in the time of coronavirus, from foreign travel to physical contact) looking in particular peril, it is touching to think of this refugee from Nazism helping to seed love of the art form in this country, and imparting a sense of its spiritual value to so many who came across her. Via my mother, she gave this love of opera to me too, a treasured bequest.