This charmless man

I was looking forward to going to Malcolm Williamson’s opera English Eccentrics set to a text by Edith Sitwell at the Peacock Theatre this week partly because my only experience of meeting the composer was so bizarre, not to say traumatic, that I haven’t been able to face listening to any of his copious output since. Not that there have been many opportunities, since he seems to be neglected in concert, on the radio and to a large degree on CD.

The week before the Queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977 Rodney Long, the great doctor who successfully treated me for advanced alcoholism in 1971, phoned me up — he believed in keeping in touch with his former patients and encouraging them to help his present ones — and told me that the Master of the Queen’s Music was having difficulty completing a symphony for Her Majesty’s jubilee and even, I think, composing a fanfare. He asked me if he could give Malcolm Williamson my phone number. An hour later, Williamson called me, talked at enormous length — a remarkable proportion of his time was devoted to immense calls — and asked me to go and see him in his Barbican flat at the weekend. I agreed to, but the next day he called me again and told me it would be a waste of time, shortly after that calling me again and saying it was worth trying. His boyfriend, the distinguished organist Simon Campion, would meet me at Moorgate station.

So, on the Sunday afternoon I met Simon and was taken to the apartment, where Williamson, a small, puckish and handsome man, was industriously drinking gin, though Simon warned him that we had to go to a concert that evening to hear a new piece by him for string orchestra.