Stephen Fry: 'I would lock myself in and air conduct like crazy'

TL: When was the moment that you realised that you had a deep connection to classical music?

SF: I suppose it was probably hearing the overture to Wagner’s Tannhäuser on my father’s gramophone. But also his playing: he was a fine pianist and so the sounds of Schubert, Bach, Beethoven, Chopin and Brahms would fill the house.

TL: Is there a teacher who has influenced you strongly in a positive way?

SF: Not really, I’m sorry to say. They quite rightly were more frustrated at my complete inability to count, read music efficiently or sing in tune than they were interested in developing an enthusiasm for music. My real teacher was a room at school called the Music Library, where there was a large selection of gramophone records (as they were called then). I would lock myself in and air conduct like crazy. It was the closest I could come, being so talent-free musically, to being inside the music that so thrilled me.

TL: What advice would you give to teachers and professionals working to engage students with classical music?

SF: I do appreciate that it is a hard sell in a world which pushes dance, pop, hip hop, R&B and all kinds of other forms of contemporary music over music that seems to come from long ago and far away.

While it may be fallacious to connect ‘pure’ music to stories and pictures too much, I do think it is very useful to encourage young people to hear a story or narrative of some kind in the music they hear. There is, as a more adult listener might say, a dialectic going on in almost all music, a call and response, a breath in and a breath out.

Concertos can be modelled as competitions between the individual and a group, that sort of thing. I also think the great Warner Bros cartoons, with Bugs Bunny etc., as well as Disney and MGM's Tom and Jerry all help bring music alive. I would try to take it out of chandeliered concert halls and Baroque palaces.

Read our interview with the VOCES8 Foundation on The Winter House project. 

Stephen Fry narrating The Winter House (LFL VOCES8 Studios)