Ann Rachlin

Creator of ‘Fun with Music’ who enthralled children with stories about the great composers

ANN RACHLIN, who has died aged 90, gave up being a secretary to become a musical storyteller, inspiring children of all backgrounds with a love of classical music.

It began after she moved to London from Leeds following her divorce from her first husband. She loved music and wanted to go to concerts but, with no childminder, had to take her three children, too. To interest them, she told them stories about the composers and the music, and noticed that they seemed to get much more out of the concerts as a result.

When she mentioned this at the prep school where her small son was being interviewed for a place in 1965, she was invited back to teach music.

She soon branched out on her own and founded after-school “Fun with Music” classes, initially at her home and later in a church hall in St John’s Wood.

There, to musical accompaniment, she would dish out home-made food and colouring books and tell stories about the music and composers from her magic story-telling chair. “I think the children regard me as a very good friend, slightly nutty, slightly crazy. It’s a party atmosphere,” she told an interviewer.

Her stories contained such homely or amusing details as Beethoven’s love of noodles and Haydn’s expulsion from the choir for snipping off the ponytail of the boy in front.

“I teach them that grown-ups sometimes are inhibited about listening to music – that if a composer has written funny music it’s good to laugh, and if it’s sad, then cry.

“If any of the children cry when Mimi dies at the end of La bohème, I tell them I’m really proud of them. They’re doing just what Puccini wants them to do.”

She began with three children, but news spread, and by the early 1990s she had 300 children, aged three to nine, and a waiting list several years long. Actors including Peter O’Toole and Bob Hoskins, whose children attended, were roped in as guest speakers, and she took the children on trips on the Thames to listen to Handel’s Water

Music and country picnics to listen to Beethoven’s Pastoral symphony.

Among her pupils were the young Princes William and Harry. She included a segment on ceremonial music, because “I was teaching the future king the music to which he would be crowned.”

Ann Rachlin told her stories at youth concerts around the world. She also made recordings, narrating stories to the music of different composers, and published picture books on composers’ childhoods, which were translated into 17 languages.

In 1976 she founded the Beethoven Fund for Deaf Children, to provide special musical equipment to schools for the deaf in the UK.

Dame Evelyn Glennie, the virtuoso percussionist, who was deaf from the age of eight, has credited Ann Rachlin as being instrumental in her “big break” when she travelled from Scotland with her school percussion group to perform at the Albert Hall.

Sybille Ann Lyttleton was born in Leeds on July 23 1933 to a Welsh businessman father and a mother of Polish-Lithuanian descent. As a pupil at Allerton High School she learnt piano with Fanny Waterman, and while boarding at Overstone College, Northampton, was taught piano by Valley Lasker, a protegée of Gustav Holst.

After finishing school in Paris, she took a course at Yorkshire Ladies’ Secretarial College. In 1952 she married Neville Ziff, a shoe company director. The marriage was dissolved in 1964, and in 1967 she married the American pianist and conductor Ezra Rachlin.

After a few years in America, they settled in London, where in 1986 she was engaged by the London Symphony Orchestra to perform at a series of children’s concerts entitled Funtasia at the Barbican, with the LSO conducted by her husband.

The same year she was appointed MBE for her services to music and deaf children.

Ezra Rachlin died in 1995, and a year later, at a concert in his memory, Michael Aspel invited her to appear on This Is Your Life.

Those paying tribute on the programme included Robert Runcie, Rabbi Hugo Gryn, Yehudi Menuhin and Sir Georg Solti. In 2000 pupils past and present honoured her with a party at the Royal Opera House.

In 1978, by chance, Ann Rachlin acquired the colourful memoirs of Edith Craig, a costume-designer, costume-maker and fencing expert and the daughter of the Victorian actress Dame Ellen Terry. She became an authority on both women and in 2011 she published the edited memoirs as

Edy Was a Lady.

Ann Rachlin is survived by a son and daughter from her first marriage. Another daughter died last year.

Her pupils included Princes William and Harry