THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN FLUTE
KNIGHTHOOD DAY
It was the ninth of december 2001 -- the day after my sixty -- second birthday -- when we all set off to London from Switzerland, where we live. By "we," I mean my wife, Jeanne, and my daughter Jenny and me.
The reason we were going to London was for me to receive my knighthood from the Queen of England. That was a great occasion in my life, but it started out not too auspiciously.
My first problem was with my British management. My name had been on the Birthday Honours List, which comes out in June. If your name is on the list, Buckingham Palace then gives you a choice of dates when you can receive your knighthood. I turned this decision over to my management, but they did nothing about it. They kept saying they wanted me to play a concert the day before or the day after the ceremony, but they never managed to pull it together. I believe you have twelve shots at choosing a date, and if you fail to do so, you are off the list. So I put on my thinking cap and decided I was not going to wait for anyone to arrange a concert for me in order to make the trip worthwhile. At the top of my mind was the fact that this was an honor from the queen, and I shouldn't depend on my management to organize it for me. I simply made my own arrangements with the palace, concert or no concert.
The second problem was that my daughter Jenny has a terrible fear of flying. I find it hard to understand this from a young woman who has been flying with me since she was a small child, but there you are. When we eventually got her onto the airplane, she covered herself up from head to foot in a blanket and wasn't seen again until we landed in London. She was fi ne, though, once she was back down on terra firma.
Then I discovered the third problem. I had arranged with my tailor to make me a morning suit. I had told him that I was flying in just the day before the ceremony and that he should have it ready. He knows me very well, knows my measurements and everything, as I had been buying clothes from him for years. Also, he specializes in tailoring for smaller men. But when I got there, the morning suit they had for me was miles too big -- it would have looked great on someone who was six foot two, which I am not. It was far too late to do anything about it. Fortunately, though, I had with me a very good Italian black lounge suit, and that was permitted. My thoughts went back to when I was nineteen years old and was going to play as an extra in the London Symphony Orchestra. I needed white tie and tails, and I borrowed them from the father of my friend Jeremy Barlow. However, by 2001 Jeremy's dad had passed away, and there was no question of borrowing a morning suit from him.
We were staying at no. 30 Chester Square, which is where I usually laid my head when in London, courtesy of my good friend Richard Colburn. We were well taken care of by Ron Young and his wife, Eileen, who looked after the house and Richard's various transient guests. On the morning of the great day, we gathered downstairs in the dining room -- Jeanne in her new hat; Jenny in her new hat; my son Stephen, who lives in England, all spruced up; and me in my black suit.
1. IN THE BEGINNING
The flute was in my blood, you might say. My grandfather, also named James Galway, was a highly regarded flute player in Belfast. He in turn taught my father -- another James Galway -- to play the flute, which he did very well. So as small children my younger brother, George, and I grew up to the sound of the flute. Our grandfather came to live with us during the last years of his life. He didn't socialize much with us boys, or tell us stories about the old days. But in the evenings, after George and I had been sent upstairs to bed, he often played softly for a while, a few tunes he was especially fond of. I loved listening to him, and I held off falling asleep as long as he was playing. My father, meanwhile, was devoted to Mozart. By the time I was eight, I could recognize the main themes of Mozart's G Minor Symphony and Jupiter Symphony, because my father played them for me over and over.
Although my grandfather was self -- taught, he was good enough that he had often played in the opera orchestra. But his real passion My parents and my grandparents and their friends were in the lower working class -- not that they could always get work. Shipbuilding fell off after World War II, and my father was often unemployed, although he did pick up a nice bit of money playing the accordion in dance bands. My mother was the main breadwinner in the family, working as a winder in a spinning mill. She was also a keen amateur musician. She played the piano, entirely by ear -- she had never learned to read music or wanted to. But if she heard a tune, she could play it, and she was a great favorite playing for women's guilds and other groups. We didn't have a lot of money or special clothes -- a nice suit was reserved for going to church on Sunday and for weddings and funerals. Otherwise, people basically lived in the same clothes that they wore to work or school. But we always had a roof over our heads, except when the Luftwaffe bombed us, and I don't remember ever going hungry, although there were times when we didn't have much besides bread and butter.
We lived in a neighborhood that was built by the people who owned the shipyards to house their workers. Like most of the houses on our street, ours had two rooms upstairs, and downstairs a kitchen, a little back room, and a sitting room. There was no toilet -- just an outhouse in the backyard. And no bathtub. We used the same tub that my mother washed clothes in, and we had a bath every Saturday night. If it was cold, the tub was set up in front of the fire.
5. TURNING POINT
I resumed my place as first flute when the orchestra returned to Berlin, but I did not withdraw my resignation, and relations with Karajan didn't improve. They took another sharp turn for the worse in March, just a few days before we were due to leave for Salzburg for the Easter Festival. We were rehearsing La Boh e me in preparation for Salzburg.
There had been a pause in the rehearsal, and I took the opportunity to explain something to the second flute. While I was still talking, Karajan spoke to me, and I asked him to wait a second while I fi xed a problem in the flute section. Well, you never ask Karajan to wait for anything. I had crossed the boundary of acceptable behavior. Nothing happened right away. Karajan went on with the rehearsal. However, a few minutes after it had fi nished, a member of the orchestra committee came over to me. The committee acts as liaison between the players and management, passing on information and settling problems. In this case, it was information: Karajan would prefer that I not go to Salzburg with the others.
That really hurt. First, that he would go that far to punish me for a pretty mild form of back talk (although, of course, I think he was actually punishing me for not withdrawing my resignation).
Second, I would miss doing La Boh eme with Pavarotti, which I had been greatly looking forward to. And third, this hit me badly in the pocket. The Salzburg festivals paid very well. In fact, we had already received some of the fee in advance, and I had to give it all back. The silver lining, however, was that it gave me time to go to London and make two recordings for RCA. These two recordings, which became famous in the classical -- music world, were a major turning point in launching my solo career. One was with Martha Argerich; it is a very fi ne classical fl ute and piano disk, with sonatas by Prokofi ev and C e sar Franck. To this day, I think it's probably the best recording of these two works. Playing with Martha was a great event for me. I went to her house near Geneva, and we rehearsed both pieces in preparation for the recording, which we did in the famous Kingsway Hall in London.
The other record was called Showpieces for Flute (it was reissued a few years later as Man with the Golden Flute). I did that recording with Charles Gerhardt conducting the National Philharmonic Orchestra, and, as the title implies, it features a lot of virtuoso flute music, which was fun but very strenuous to play. It contains the famous Paganini "Moto Perpetuo," which I did in one breath, or so everyone was led to believe. In fact, we recorded it in bits and put it all together with the help of editors and a good razor blade. In those days, everything was recorded on tape, and, yes, the editing was done with a razor blade. There was an ongoing joke about the best parts of a recording lying on the floor.
10. THE FLUTE AND ME
The flute is a very large part of my life. I love playing the flute. I enjoy hearing people play it and listening to recordings of it and talking about it with other flute players. I love it as much now as I did sixty -- plus years ago in Belfast, when I became intrigued with it as a youngster -- I probably enjoy it a lot more, actually, because I play it so much better now.
Of course, I still practice every day. I enjoy that, too, because there's nothing like doing something well. Now, it's a great advantage to have a good technique that you've built up from childhood, but you still have to maintain this technique. You can't just live on what you were able to do in the past. People who don't play an instrument may think that practicing is simply a matter of learning new pieces or brushing up a piece you haven't played in a while. But it also requires keeping in shape physically. If you draw a comparison, for example, with a ballet dancer who was brilliant when he was twenty -- one, he will still be brilliant when he's thirty -- one -- barring injury -- yet he has to practice every day.
Some days I wake up, and my playing is not so good. But then I just start in practicing, and eventually I succeed, and I think, Wow! Great! Life is worth it again. It's sort of like people who play golf. I don't mean professionals like Arnold Palmer or Tiger Woods, but just ordinary golfers I've known. They don't play to compete against other people. They play to make themselves better at doing it, better at finding the soul of the game. Pianists, when they tour, have to play whatever instrument the management provides, but most instrumentalists bring their own. That's certainly the case with flutists. Over the years, I have acquired many flutes, and I still own most of them. I have quite a collection here in Meggen.
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