My thanks to Disney, Visconti and Kubrick for leading me to classical music

During my childhood our house was filled with classical music – on records, on the radio, and, of course, on the piano in our music room (we all played a variety of instruments, naturally). Apart from that, there were endless visits to Covent Garden, and the Proms and the Wigmore Hall. Once a quarter, my parents would host musical soirées: I remember once having to help break up a fight about the correct way to hold a baton between André Previn and the Aussie bruiser, Charles Mackerras…

Well, no, it wasn’t quite like that, to be honest. 

There was practically no classical music in the house, as far as I can remember. I spent two painful years learning the violin at school and then, when it was adjudged a trifle, shall we say, “delicate” for such a big lump of a boy, the viola. Rather than waste everyone’s time by moving inexorably up the scale to the cello and, ultimately, the bass, I decided to throw in the sponge. The music I was being asked to play bored me to tears, and my violin technique was so bad my grandmother once - seriously - asked if there was a wounded cat trapped somewhere inside the house.

As so often in my life, the movies were responsible for unlocking the door to enlightenment. 

The first time I became vaguely aware that there might be more to life than popular music was when my brother took me to a screening of Fantasia at a cinema on the King’s Road. It was, I’ll admit, that delightful musical world tour The Nutcracker Suite that, as it were, cracked my musical nuts. And Mussorgsky’s Night on the Bare Mountain, featuring the scary Demon. And The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, of course. And Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphonysounded wonderful, despite the accompanying collection of embarrassing centaurs and nymphs. As for The Rite of Spring – it was sensational. Critics have given Fantasia a bit of a kicking over the years for the vulgarity of its visual interpretation of great music, but it was made for ignorant people like me, not the cognoscenti.

I bought one or two records as a result of that visit – including an EP of excerpts from Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite, and a wonderful compilation of Wagner’s orchestral pieces (The Ride of the Valkyries actually brought tears of excitement to my eyes).

But the film that really made me realise what I’d been missing was Death in Venice. I was reminded of its extraordinary impact on me by a recent Radio 4 programme in which people described the effect that first hearing the Adagietto from Mahler’sFifth Symphony had on them at the time – and subsequently. Hearing it for the first time in a cinema in the West End, accompanying Pasqualino de Santis’s liquidly beautiful cinematography, made me experience, at the age of eighteen, a depth of emotion I didn’t know I was capable of. 

I saw Death in Venice eight times in the year following its release. It was only when I bought the soundtrack  that I began to realise it was the music, more than anything, which was making me blub during the movie: I can sympathise with those critics who’ve dubbed it a 130-minute classical music video. I’ve never deserted popular music – it’s an immensely enjoyable and harmless addiction – but ever since Death in Venice, I’ve known it’s mainly an amusing diversion from the real thing.

By the time I got to college I was still massively ignorant when it came to serious music, but some of the friends I made there weren’t, and I was soon buying box-sets of Solti’s Ring Cycle (when I could afford them, which made it a slow process) and exploring further afield - Elgar, Brook, Saint-Saens, The Flamin’ Groovies, you mame it. I remember with great fondness some friends and visiting the Cambridge Union Society and playing the sublime ending toGötterdämmerung in the enormous music room there, while (and I’m not making this up) quaffing Grand Marnier  - dead Evelyn Waugh, we were – until someone came and told us we were drowning out the debate downstairs (no doubt some public schoolboy from Godalming with a White Man’s Afro whanging on about Vietnam or Black Power or Trotskyism or somesuch twaddle).

The third in the trilogy of films that introduced me to classical music was  A Clockwork Orange. I’m sure purists were horrified, but Walter (now Wendy) Carlos’s synthesised versions of Beethoven’s Ninth and Purcell’s haunting, majestic Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary led me to the originals, and to The Moog Strikes Bach, an album by Hans Wurman, which used to drive my more aesthetically evolved companions mad – but which also undoubtedly paved the way for my “discovery” of Bach some twenty years’ later (for me, he is The Boss).

I was reminded of the dumbed-down, “accessible” nature of my route to classical music when I was introduced to someone as “a fellow Wagnerian ” (yes, we could be that pompous) at a Cambridge party. He had one of those glossy, fat faces which, in those days, betokened a young man heading for the City. “Wagner’s wonderful, isn’t he?” he drawled. “Did you get to Bayreuth last year?”

I weighed up the pleasure I’d get from smashing his face in against the likelihood of being sent down (no doubt Pater had “roomed” with the Senior Tutor).

I contented myself with saying, “No, I was with my people in Monte. Frightful bore.”

He nodded. “Pity.”

“I’m joking. I’ve never been to the opera. I’ve only ever heard Wagner on records.”

“Ah!” He wafted away without another word.

I really hope he went to work for Barings.

I’m pretty sure I’d have “got” classical music eventually - but I’m grateful to those directors for accelerating the process.