Edinburgh-born Sir Donald Runnicles is, among other titles, the general music director of Deutsche Oper Berlin and conductor emeritus of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. He has a lifelong passion for the music of Wagner and will be conducting Tannhäuser both at the Edinburgh Festival on 25 August with Deutsche Oper Berlin, and then at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in November and December.
Music that changed me
My earliest musical memories are of singing as a choirboy in my father’s church choir – he was the organist and choirmaster of an Episcopal church in Edinburgh. Church and choral music had a profound effect on me: I loved above all the purity of the Baroque and Renaissance repertoire, the beauty of singing in a choir and the selfless nature of being part of the whole. I was so impressed by the way my father brought the disparate voices together as he sought, his favourite phrase, ‘unanimity in sound’. His leadership and natural authority inspired me – the seeds were sown. As an orchestral conductor, I strive to achieve that same unanimity. The purity and ethereal beauty of the CHOIR OF KING’S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE was that to which we aspired – the Mecca – most especially at Christmas or Easter.
I didn’t sing after my voice broke; instead, I started a rather robust training as a concert pianist and won a piano scholarship to Edinburgh University. As a teenager, I had begun to conduct an amateur orchestra and it was soon clear to me that, skills at the piano notwithstanding, it was the orchestral world to which I was drawn. I first encountered WAGNER at a performance of Das Rheingold by Scottish Opera in Edinburgh in 1971. As if struck by lightning, my life changed forever. This was the soundworld in which I wished to live. It set me on the path of opera, and I used my piano skills to become a coach and kapellmeister in opera houses around Europe. In 1990, I was invited to assist and to conduct my first Ring cycle at San Francisco Opera, which led to the music directorship there. I’ve just conducted a centenary concert for SFO and one of the highlights was Nina Stemme singing the ‘Liebestod’ – a reminder in 2023 of my 50-year love affair with Wagner’s music. As a young music student, I had saved up to buy the legendary Solti Ring recording – imagine my joy in 1983 to be asked to assist the great maestro at the Bayreuth Festival; Tony Pappano and I were both assistants and we found Solti’s dynamism and energy astonishing, even in his seventies.
Life-changing also were performances at the Edinburgh Festival in 1974: Leonard Bernstein conducting the LSO and Edinb
