Music that Changed Me

Writer and broadcaster

Journalist Matthew Parris

Matthew Parris was the Conservative MP for West Derbyshire from 1979-86 and a parliamentary sketchwriter for The Times for 13 years. He now writes columns for The Times as well as The Spectator and has presented BBC

Radio 4’s Great Lives series since 2006. He is a prolific travel writer, essayist and editor and his latest book, Fracture: Trauma, Success and the Origins of Greatness, is out next year.

I’ve always loved music – as a listener, not as a performer. In many ways, music offers a window into the soul. I’ve learned a lot about people and ideas through music. I grew up in Africa, the oldest in a family of six. My mother was always singing and my father loved music deeply. He was quite a distant character, but when I saw how he could be moved, as I was, by BRAHMS’S Alto Rhapsody,

I knew he had a passionate soul.

My grandmother was similar to her son – entirely undemonstrative – and I only ever learned how she felt about things through music. We listened together to the radio and when KATHLEEN FERRIER came on singing Blow the Wind Southerly, my grandmother quickly turned it off. She had lost a little daughter to meningitis and the feelings evoked by the piece were too painful. It taught me that art and music are not just there to please and amuse – beauty can hurt. I developed a great love for Kathleen Ferrier and the contralto voice; you don’t hear many around today.

A charismatic violinist came regularly to give music lessons at my school and he stirred my dawning interest in classical music. I was a treble in the Presbyterian church choir in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. I played the governess’s little son in a production of The King and I. Sadly, my treble turned into a weedy tenor and I hardly sing now.

I spent my boyhood from four to 19 in Rhodesia. You can’t hear Africans singing together in harmony without loving

Africa and its people. When I hear NKOSI SIKELEL’ IAFRIKA (Lord bless Africa)

I get a tingle down the back of my spine. A lot of the music I love probably has its roots in both Western, missionary music and in African music – the two combine in the most beautiful way. After Africa I found Britain a bit cold. I was 19 when I came to Cambridge and though I looked and sounded like an Englishman, I found people strangely reserved. I don’t any more, which is probably an indication that I’ve become strangely reserved, too! There’s a lot I love about Britain, but a part of me will always be in Africa.

I developed a love of choral music as a scholar at Clare College, Cambridge, and it was hearing BACH’S St John Passion sung in German that changed my attitude to that country. Born just after the war, I was prey to the caricature version of the Germans, but when I heard the St John Passion I was struck by the beauty of the language and, through it, the beauty of the German spirit.

I like ‘middlebrow’ opera and I must have heard every Verdi and Puccini opera there is. I think it’s right that one recognises what one loves, but also what one hates. My partner Julian loves Wagner and I can see the appeal, but I feel there’s something degenerate about it. And I hate Sondheim! There’s a meretriciousness, a bloodlessness about it that makes me angry. I don’t like cleverness in music or politics. Music in the end appeals to the heart and to the soul, not to the intellect. I’ve had a few arguments about it with friends, notably Radio 3’s Petroc Trelawny!

I do enjoy the Buxton International Festival – I was the MP for West Derbyshire and I still live in the area and go to the festival regularly. I like the way they include music you won’t necessarily have heard before. Some years ago, I was captivated by Richard Strauss’s reworking of MOZART’S Idomeneo. I always thought Mozart’s version was rather stiff, but I found the combination of Strauss and Mozart absolutely thrilling.

When I feel like being lifted, I sometimes listen to Gilbert and Sullivan, especially 'The Sun whose rays are all ablaze' from The Mikado. I absolutely love it and play it again and again.