Jeffrey Tate was at a crossroads. He was a qualified doctor with a promising career ahead as an eye surgeon. However, he was also an excellent pianist and had just taken a most enjoyable year off from medicine working as an accompanist for the London Opera Centre. Now the Royal Opera had offered him the post of répétiteur, helping to rehearse opera singers before handing them over to the big-name conductors. It was the bottom of the musical food chain, but Tate loved it — and the singers loved him.
There were two other considerations: first, he had no musical qualifications to speak of, and second, he was severely disabled. As he told the author David Blum: “I had misgivings — but I knew that I had to do it.” Georg Solti, the music director of Covent Garden, had fewer doubts. He appreciated Tate’s musical qualities — his ability to follow any conductor’s beat, his knack for playing an entire orchestral score on the piano — and took the young pianist under his wing, teaching him about the ways of the business and introducing him to recording studios.
For a period in the 1980s and 1990s Tate was a familiar presence to British audiences, with the Royal Opera and the English Chamber Orchestra. He spoke openly about the two conditions he had lived with since childhood, congenital spina bifida and kyphoscoliosis, a bending and twisting of the spine. As he approached the podium, audiences wondered how he would make it. He moved quickly, lurching, his stick pointing to one side, his head sunk into his shoulders. A nod to the audience, and with a big heave he was up on his stool.
“I was never taught. I got my training by watching other conductors’
Conducting came naturally to Tate, a tall man whose disability masked his height. He had long arms, large hands and a big face, and he was always eager to learn. “I was never taught conducting,” he once explained. “I got my training by watching other conductors.” He once compared his art with making pottery on a wheel. “When you conduct a vocal line, it’s somewhat like having wet clay in your hands.”
Jeffrey Philip Tate was born in April 1943, in Salisbury, Wiltshire, where his father, Harry, an RAF officer who after the war joined the post office, was stationed. He was three when his mother, Ivy (née Evans), who played piano and sang for pleasure, took him to the doctor because of his flat feet. It was then that the serious malformation of his spine was discovered.
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Much of his childhood was spent in hospital. “They wrenched a rib out of me and shoved it on the back of my spine, and they did some neurological things for my leg,” he said. He was also developing gourmet tastes, recalling hospital food being so awful that he would hide it in his locker and “when we were taken outside, wait for a suitable moment to empty it into the hedge”.
The family moved to Farnham, Surrey, when he was seven and he became a choirboy and eventually head chorister at the chapel of St Thomas-on-the-Bourne. He was a pupil at Farnham Grammar School, where Alan Fluck, later founder of Youth and Music, was his music teacher. An occasional visitor was Benjamin Britten, whose partner, Peter Pears, was from the town, although a musical career was not on Tate’s mind. “I was a good but not brilliant pianist, an indifferent cellist and I could sing,” he said.
Conscious of how much he had benefited from medicine, he opted to train as a doctor, winning a state scholarship to Christ’s College, Cambridge. However, much of his time there was spent with musical luminaries such as David Munrow and Christopher Hogwood, directing plays or playing piano for the Footlights.
Moving on to St Thomas’ Hospital, London, Tate became known for his eccentricities, including wearing black-and-white check trousers and a velvet cloak on his ward rounds. He organised a choir of medical staff, giving performances at Southwark Cathedral of works such as Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, sang in the Philharmonia Chorus under Otto Klemperer, gave faultless renditions of Noël Coward songs at parties and indulged in his passion for trad jazz.
At a New Year’s Eve party he was asked to play the piano for John Kentish (obituary, November 23, 2006), a fellow guest and principal tenor at Sadler’s Wells Opera.
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“I never expected to be accompanied so brilliantly by a complete stranger,” recalled Kentish, whose wife, Leigh, was involved at the London Opera Centre, which needed accompanists — would Tate be interested?
“He failed his finals because he had been playing too much music
He auditioned and was accepted, but suffered a rare setback, failing part of his medicine finals “because I had been playing too much music”. Not prepared to allow such a blemish on his record, he retook them, qualified and spent a year as a house physician before moving to the opera centre. There he met the soprano Teresa Cahill, who in 1970 urged him to apply for a similar post at Covent Garden. At first he was unsure, but, despite Tate’s lack of conservatoire training, Solti insisted.
Over the ensuing years he also worked with Pierre Boulez on the Bayreuth Ring Cycle, Herbert von Karajan on Parsifal for the Salzburg Easter Festival, and the first complete performance of Lulu at Paris Opera. Soon he was appearing on disc as a particularly capable harpsichordist. “I try to come to each assignment with an unbiased mind, ready to absorb what I can and give what I can,” he told The Times of his varied musical career.
In 1977 John Pritchard invited Tate to be his assistant in Cologne. Here he met the tenor Ragnar Ulfung, who also happened to be the director of Gothenburg Opera in Sweden, and was looking for a conductor for Carmen. This was Tate’s next big opportunity and, having nervously agreed, found it to be a revelation. “As the music moved under my hands, I suddenly felt that I was doing something I had been waiting to do all my life,” he recalled
Back in Cologne, Pritchard gave him a run of Les Contes d’Hoffmann to conduct, although on his first night he misjudged the steps and fell backwards into the arms of a viola player. His debut at the Metropolitan Opera in New York came in December 1980, when James Levine pulled out of Lulu and Tate was the only other musician available who knew the score. “Solti advised me that I would be mad,” he recalled. “But I decided to go through with it. It was a terrifying four hours.”
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Meanwhile, in 1977 he had met Klaus Kuhlemann, a German geomorphologist, who became his partner and who survives him. Tate was always open about his sexuality, posing with Kuhlemann for The Sunday Times in 1989.
In 1982 he was asked to conduct the ECO in a recording with Kiri Te Kanawa of Songs of the Auvergne for Decca. It was his first occasion with this orchestra and his first time conducting outside the opera pit. Before long Tate and the ECO were recording the complete Mozart symphonies and piano concertos, the latter with Mitsuko Uchida. “He’s intellectually precise and vigorous, and never lets anything get past him,” Uchida told Blum.
Tate returned to Covent Garden in 1982, now as a conductor in his own right, for Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito. Leigh Kentish recalled: “Certain people had reservations and were embarrassed about the idea of a disabled person conducting. They were amazed when Jeffrey achieved such outstanding musical results and, incidentally, got marvellous notices.” Soon he was appointed principal conductor, helping Bernard Haitink with programming.
By the mid-1990s Tate was conducting across Europe, including Hans Werner Henze’s reworking of Monteverdi’s Il ritorno d’Ulisse in Salzburg, a rare accolade for a British musician. There were appointments in Switzerland, the Netherlands and Italy, and since 2009 he had been chief conductor of the Hamburg Symphony Orchestra. Since leaving the ECO and Covent Garden in the mid-1990s he had largely vanished from the British musical scene, save for a run of Der fliegende Holländer at Covent Garden in 2011.
Ill health was never far away and he survived legionnaires’ disease and a life-threatening bacterial infection. Since 1989 he had served as president of Shine, the spina bifida charity. He collapsed and died while visiting the Accademia Carrara art gallery in Bergamo, Italy, six weeks after being knighted by the Duke of Cambridge.
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Tate never allowed music to be his all-consuming passion. He was widely read, a collector of early Meissen porcelain, an explorer of churches, an outstanding cook and a lover of fast cars. “Music in itself cannot be my whole life,” he explained. “I like to try and be as complete as I can, and music is only one element. If I only had music I think I would become slightly dead.”
Sir Jeffrey Tate, conductor, was born on April 28, 1943. He collapsed and died on June 2, 2017, aged 74