Charles Mackerras is increasingly regarded throughout the world as one of the truly great musicians of our time, as well as one of the most prophetically inclined. His contributions to musical culture over the past 50 years read like a list of the most significant and exciting trends in classical music today. In the 1950s, well before the "authenticity" movement had come to general notice, Mackerras pioneered the study and practical realization of period performance techniques, culminating in his landmark 1959 recording of Handel's "Fireworks Music" in its original wind band instrumentation. At the same time, as conductor of England's Sadler's Wells Opera, he single-handedly gained general recognition for Janacek as one of this century's great opera composers, and cemented his reputation as the world's most authoritative conductor of Czech music outside of (then) Czechoslovakia. A noted authority on everything from Mozart to Sir Arthur Sullivan (his Sullivan ballet arrangement "Pineapple Poll" continues to be a popular light music favorite in English speaking countries), his recent recordings include Donizetti's "Lucia di Lammermoor" in its original version (Sony Classical), Dvorak's "Rusalka" (Decca) and Slavonic Dances (Supraphon), Suk's "A Summer Tale" (Decca), Mozart's Piano Concertos Nos. 20 and 24 with Alfred Brendel (Philips), and Brahms' two orchestral serenades (Telarc).

Born in Schenectady, New York, in 1925, Charles Mackerras was raised in Australia, where he studied oboe, piano, and composition at the New South Wales Conservatorium in Sydney. In 1945 he joined the Sydney Symphony as principal oboist, but came to Europe in 1947, ultimately spending time in Prague studying with the legendary Czech conductor Vaclav Talich. On returning to England, he began his lifelong association with Sadler's Wells Opera (later the English National Opera), with whom he conducted history-making productions of operas by Janacek, Handel, and Donizetti, among others. His large and comprehensive discography includes the complete symphonies of Mozart (Telarc), Brahms (Telarc), and Beethoven (EMI), the operas of Janacek (Decca, Supraphon, and Chandos), and major works of Handel, Dvorak, Martinu, Strauss, Shostakovich, Sibelius, Donizetti, Sullivan, Elgar, Delius, Walton, Holst, and Haydn, among many others.

This year, the Cannes Classics Awards honors Charles Mackerras with three prizes: for Lifetime Achievement; for his recording of Dvorak's opera "Rusalka"; and for his collaboration with Emanuel Ax in Chopin's First Piano Concerto.

Our interview took place this past September, during the run of Lucia di Lammermoor at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

DH: I've divided your life into four categories: Czech music, Handel, Sullivan, and everything else.

CM: How convenient! Where do we start?

DH: Let's start with Handel. You were really a pioneer in research on the subject of authentic performance practice, long before the period instrument groups became so trendy. How did you first become interested in that?

CM: Well, I was always interested in how things were performed in their day. And the first thing that made me really aware of it is that I used to have a recording of the Handel Water Music conducted by Sir Hamilton Harty. I knew it was an arrangement, but I had never been aware of how much of an arrangement it was. The same was true of the Messiah. The recordings that were available when I was a child were all of the enlarged, reorchestrated version by Prout or someone like that--not even the version made by Mozart. But when I was a teenager I got to look at a facsimile of the score and I saw immediately that what we were hearing bore little relationship to what Handel had actually written. And with the Fireworks Music, I saw the original orchestration and I thought "My God, I wonder what this must sound like!" You know, the original has 24 oboes, and all those bassoons and horns. Then later, in the '50s, Pye got interested in recording the original version.

The opportunity came up in 1959 at the bicentenary of Handel's death, when we got every wind player in London to come for one session, in the middle of the night, and have a go at it. It was all edited and issued very quickly, in just a few days, and I must say I was a bit frightened that it would sound horrible, but of course just the opposite occurred. It sounded marvelous. I was very relieved, let me tell you! We also did the Concerti a Due Cori on the other side of the LP, and even these works hadn't been played at all since Handel's day.

From that point on, I did my best to use the knowledge I had of the period in my performances of the music itself. But I was always interested in the subject. Even in my teens, aside from my discoveries about Handel's scores, I made a point of reading studies of things like ornamentation and double-dotting rhythms in Baroque and Classical music. So by the time I started working at Sadler's Wells Opera, I had become very interested in the proper performance of Mozart, his operas in particular. You see, I took the chance, with a colleague of mine, to visit the museum library at Donau-Eschingen, which at that time was well known for its performances of contemporary music. But it also had this tremendous collection of old manuscripts, including very interesting performance material, particularly of Figaro, but also of Don Giovanni, The Magic Flute, and even Cosi fan tutte. I copied that all down, and started using it as an example of what was actually done at the time.

Of course, the whole point about improvisation is that it was done on the spot and not written down. But eventually I got to know about the fact that Mozart himself did rewrite certain arias for specific singers or circumstances, and with quite lavish ornamentation. I began to try to do something of this kind in my performances, although, despite the general acceptance of the authentic performance idea, I'm still regarded as somewhat "over the top" in my use of ornaments in Mozart. The funny thing is, the business of ornamentation in Handel operas is fully accepted by everyone, and yet nobody really knows what that ornamentation was like because there are very, very few examples of Handel's own ornamentation, and what he wrote himself is in fact extremely simple--a far cry from, say, what Farinelli's brother wrote down for the great castrato to sing. But we have five whole numbers giving us a sense of what Mozart really did to his music, and it was much more extensive than most people today realize. So we really know much more about Mozart's music than Handel's. But aside from myself and very few others, we ornament Handel's music lavishly, unlike anything that exists in his own hand, and we're very sparing with Mozart.

DH: So the authentic instrument movement is doing a lot of things that are actually inauthentic!

CM: Well yes, of course. And the authentic orchestras in particular have gone through a lot of change since they started. They are becoming extraordinarily adept, and at the same time they are sounding a lot more like regular symphony orchestras. It seems to me that they are heavily influenced by the sound of the modern orchestra, and so are becoming less and less true to what I imagine those old groups really sounded like. I personally think that those first recordings that musicians like Harnoncourt and Hogwood made are actually closer to my "authentic" ideal than a lot of more recent work.

DH: Because they were rougher sounding, and less polished?

CM: To a degree, but also because they simply sound much more different from a modern symphony orchestra. If you hear the latest beautiful recording of the Beethoven symphonies on period instruments--and now they go as far as Schumann and Brahms--it's hardly different from what one might normally expect at regular symphony concert. The ideal of sound really hasn't changed all that much, and many players regard the smoothness and warmth of tone of modern instruments as the end to which they should be striving. And that, for me at least, misses the main point, which is to sound as different as possible.

DH: Let's change the topic for a moment. I used to drive British friends of mine crazy whenever they went off in praise of Britten or Tippett, or one of those guys, by maintaining that the greatest English composer of all time was Sir Arthur Sullivan.

CM: (laughing) In a way that's true, at least in terms of writing music that does exactly what it sets out to; but I must say that I am a great Britten and Elgar and Walton man.

DH: So am I! But there is something special about Sullivan, isn't there?

CM: Oh, absolutely! The reason I'm so interested in him is that I was really brought up with his music. When I was young we used to sing Gilbert and Sullivan operettas constantly in all-boys productions at school. We sang all the parts, women's too, in the same treble voices, so I got to know them all very well. I've gone back to Australia many times, of course, and now, at the same school, where incidentally my brother became headmaster, they have a bigger orchestra than Sullivan ever had, and a full cast of boys and girls with adult voices. They might as well be professionals. But I used to think how nice it would be if some of these great tunes were somehow arranged into a big symphonic suite. Of course, I knew Gaite Parisienne, based on Offenbach, and I thought to myself "Why not do the same with Sullivan?" I didn't actually get the chance to do it until I got to England. I met a choreographer, also from the "colonies," in this case South Africa, and we chose "Pineapple Poll," one of Gilbert's "Bab Ballads" as the subject for a ballet. I actually chose the tunes so that if you know the words, they fit what's happening on stage. That became a tremendous success, and it was wonderful fun to do. It also opened a lot of doors for me as a conductor because I was able to play the work all around England. Actually, my first recording with the Sadler's Wells orchestra was of "Pineapple Poll". I still perform it, actually, and not long ago when I was recovering from an illness I decided I would correct the parts, since a lot of mistakes had crept in over time due to cuts and rewriting for various productions. I gave the thing a major overhaul so that it can now be performed complete in concert with ease.

DH: So you had to do a little authentic research into your own work?

CM: Exactly! A little authenticity at home. So you see, it was that, along with the fact that I'd brought back with me from Czechoslovakia this Janacek opera, Katya Kabanova, that really launched me on my career, and of course initiated the Janacek side of things at the same time, along with my involvement with Czech music in general. Also, I found myself offered many opportunities to conduct because I was happy to return to Czechoslovakia and work for Czech currency, which was non-convertible. I actually conducted throughout Eastern Europe, including East Germany, Poland, and Russia. Of course, what I did with the money was to buy loads of music, scores and parts, which I was able to mark very carefully and keep with me for use all over the world. I believe it's very important to edit orchestral parts explicitly and as thoroughly as possible, so that the musicians can play them without too much rehearsal. For instance, the other day I did all the Schumann symphonies with very little rehearsal at all. Because the parts were clearly marked, particularly with regard to dynamics, we were able to play them without needing to do that much preliminary work, focusing our attention on the interpretation rather than the technical business of who plays too loud or too soft.

DH: Do you find that when you perform Classical period symphonies in large halls that the music gets lost? Shouldn't you in fact increase the size of the strings and double the wind parts to get a full sound?

CM: Tell you what: there are several ways of looking at the problem. I mean you can increase the number of instruments, but to have a smaller string section definitely magnifies the clarity and transparency of the sound, and this can be much more musically involving than just having a bigger sound. I've found that it's quite fine to do classical symphonies up to Beethoven's time, and even Brahms, with 10 first violins down to 4 double basses. I've recorded Brahms that way, and this was in fact the size of the orchestra at the initial performances of the First and Fourth Symphonies. Not the Second and Third, though, they had larger string sections at those premieres. Curiously, at that time they never did have double woodwinds, despite that fact that the string section was so very large. In a couple of weeks time I'm doing Beethoven's Fifth at Carnegie Hall with this size string section. In fact, it's almost impossible to see from the scores themselves how large an orchestra Mozart or Beethoven might have been writing for. The style of writing remains the same, even when we know the sizes of the orchestras involved in specific performances.

DH: But I always wonder what the music would sound like played by a really large band, or at least the size and mix of instruments that we know he had at the time.

CM: Quite so. It's known, for example, that there were two contrabassoons in the orchestra at the first performance of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, and I always do use one in that work, even though there's no part in the score.

DH: They play with the bass part?

CM: Yes, and I'll tell you what sounds marvelous--the opening of the second movement. It really sounds great with the contrabassoon. It lends the music a whole new color. Of course, Beethoven didn't specify this particular sound in the score, but in those days the orchestras were rather ad hoc, and if you couldn't get enough basses, you used what was available. What has always struck me as strange, though, is that in the finales of the 5^th and 9^th Symphonies there is a part for contrabassoon, but not in any of the other movements. It really puzzles me. I would like to know if Beethoven really intended those players to sit there doing nothing for three movements and then play the finales only. In the Fifth Symphony especially, the contrabassoon has no independent part at all; it plays with the basses all the way through. In the Ninth, of course, it has a few notes of its own, but not in the Fifth, so I wonder if the player didn't just play the entire symphony. There's still quite a lot we don't know about what really went on in those days.

DH: Which is just one of the things that makes your job so interesting.

CM: Oh yes, exactly!