Desert Island Discs with Anthony Burgess

Anthony Burgess selects his eight favourite pieces of music for an episode of the BBC's long-running radio show, broadcast in 1966.

Photo by Daniel Öberg on Unsplash

On 25 October 1966 Anthony Burgess joined Roy Plomley at the BBC studios at Egton House in London to record an episode of the radio interview programme, Desert Island Discs. He’d been asked to choose his eight favourite pieces of music, along with a luxury and a book, to sustain him if he were cast away on a remote island.

The interview with Burgess was broadcast on 28 November 1966 and repeated on 3 December, but it was never heard again. The recording is now lost and presumed to have been destroyed, but Burgess’s choices can be found in a transcript of the programme, which reveals a great deal about his musical tastes.

Here we explore Burgess’s selections, find out what he said about them, and add context from the archives at the Burgess Foundation. In the accompanying playlist, we have tried to include the precise recordings specified by Burgess.

Commenting on his choice of music, Burgess said: ‘It was only after selecting them that I found there was a plan. Most of the works are English, in fact, and I suppose I instinctively chose English works because I wanted to be an English composer myself. These English composers are the ones who have influenced me most.’

1. Rejoice in the Lord Alway (Bell Anthem) by Henry Purcell, performed by the Deller Consort.

Burgess said: ‘Purcell is our first great modern composer, modern in the sense that he speaks our language, that this work sums up the whole of the Restoration period, because it’s both secular and religious, and because it’s highly personal. It’s the first piece of strongly individual music I know.’

Burgess returns to Purcell frequently in his writing, identifying him as one of the quintessential English composers. He often judged later English composers against Purcell. Writing about Arthur Sullivan, he said that Sullivan’s music was a ‘revival of the native quality lost since Purcell.’ Burgess also claimed that his first guitar quartet was influenced by Purcell, and in his song cycle The Brides of Enderby, there is a song parodying Purcell’s ‘Nymphs and Shepherds’. Purcell’s Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary also inspired Wendy Carlos’s theme to the film adaptation of A Clockwork Orange. In a later article about music and food, Burgess said that Purcell was the perfect composer to accompany a good Stilton cheese.

2. Goldberg Variations BWV 988, Variation 30 by J. S. Bach, performed by George Malcolm.

Burgess said: ‘It was written originally to ease the hours of sleeplessness of the man who commissioned it. It wasn’t intended to send him to sleep but to make sleeplessness more bearable. It contains so much. It’s the whole picture of human structure. It’s physical, it’s emotional, highly intellectual and I feel, living on a desert island, this sort of thing would keep one totally alive.’

Bach’s influence on Burgess can be seen in a composition that he subtitled The Bad-Tempered Electronic Keyboard, written for the Bach tricentenary. This set of 24 preludes and fugues, in all the major and minor keys, has been recorded by the pianist Stéphane Ginsburgh (see below for details). Bach features strongly in Burgess’s personal collection of vinyl records, with more than fifteen recordings, including Wendy Carlos’s Moog synthesiser renditions, Switched On Bach. In his notes on music and food, Burgess suggests that Bach should be enjoyed with a rack of lamb.

3. Symphony No. 1 in A Flat Major, Op. 55: III. Adagio by Edward Elgar, performed by Sir John Barbirolli/The Philharmonia Orchestra.

Burgess said: ‘There are many reasons for choosing this. Elgar sums up so much of English music and the feel of England, what England is, what England used to be, and I know no work better than this slow movement for summarising, giving expression to, certain aspects of England which words can’t possibly express.’

Burgess was aware that Elgar’s symphony was first performed in Manchester by the Hallé Orchestra in 1908, with his father in the audience. The Hallé remained important throughout his childhood, and he attended weekly performances with his father. In Burgess’s later years, Elgar’s music remained a potent source of inspiration. In 1990, he wrote that he ‘could happily sit down and write Elgar’s third symphony for him, knowing his idiom inside out, having pored over his scores, able, in fact, to reproduce page after page of his Symphony No. 2 in E flat from memory.’

4. ‘Walter’s Trial Song’ from Die Meistersinger by Wagner, performed by Sandor Konya with the Berliner Philharmoniker Orchestra (unavailable).

Burgess said: ‘I was brought up on Wagner, being a Mancunian, and I choose “Walter’s Trial Song” which has a very personal significance for me. I remember in Malaya, roasting in the heat, I used to think of this song as epitomising the northern winter and the kind of civilisation which would be quite unintelligible to the people of Malaya.’

When Burgess was twelve years old, his father took him to a Wagner concert at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester. He remembered being bored by it, but days later he realised the tune from Wagner’s Rienzi overture was stuck in his head. Wagner was his introduction to the world of orchestral music, and he frequently returned to the Hallé in Manchester because he wanted to see live performances as well as hearing them on the radio. In the 1960s he adapted the plot of Wagner’s Ring Cycle for a novel, The Worm and the Ring (soon to be reprinted). Burgess also admired what he called the ‘physicality’ of Wagner: ‘the crash of chords, the bang of the drum, the howling of the woodwind’ would be ideal for representing a shipwreck. Wagner’s music, Burgess claims, would be best served alongside a trout from the Rhine.

5. Nocturnes, L. 91: No. 2, Fêtes by Claude Debussy, performed by Ernest Ansermet/L’Orchestre de la Suisse Romande.

Burgess said: ‘Debussy is a composer who means a great deal to me. He sums up an epoch of French culture, the belle époque, and his influence on the kind of music I always wanted to write has been immense. There’s no composer like him for distilling the atmosphere of something which words can’t possibly touch.’

Burgess discovered Debussy in 1929, when he was twelve years old. He had built his own crystal radio set to listen to music in bed, and he was captivated by an unknown piece of music: ‘the velvet strings, the skirling clarinets, the harps, the muted horns, the antique cymbals, the flute, above all the flute.’ After the piece had finished, the announcer said he had been listening to Debussy’s L’Après-midi d’un Faune. It was a ‘psychedelic moment’ for Burgess and he scoured the Radio Times and the Hallé listings for a future performance. His recommended food to accompany Debussy is ‘good game,’ or, for the lighter works, soup or fish.

6. The Rio Grande by Constant Lambert, performed by Constant Lambert/the Philharmonia Orchestra.

Burgess said: ‘I think this work, rather like the 30th variation of the Goldberg Variations, does a remarkable job of work in bringing together, synthesising, the popular and the more severely intellectual. It’s an amazingly successful fusion of jazz rhythms, jazz feeling, with classical form. The work, I think, is greatly neglected.’

Lambert was another composer whose music Burgess discovered through the Hallé Orchestra. He attended the world premiere of The Rio Grande in Manchester on 12 December 1929. The piece is a setting of Sacheverell Sitwell’s poem of the same name. Burgess saw the influence of Duke Ellington in Lambert’s writing for piano, and he said that when he sat next to Ellington on a plane in 1972, the jazz musician spoke ‘almost with tears in his eyes’ about Lambert.

7. Symphony No. 1 in B-Flat Minor: IV. Maestoso by William Walton, performed by William Walton/The Philharmonia Orchestra.

Burgess said: ‘This is the kind of music that I would want to write if I were a composer. A real composer. And unfortunately I can’t.’

In Walton, Burgess saw much of himself. Both men were Lancastrian, Burgess being from Manchester and Walton being from Oldham, and both spent much of their lives in Italy — Burgess in Rome, Siena and Bracciano, Walton on Ischia, an island off the coast of Naples. The influence of Walton’s Portsmouth Point overture can be heard in Burgess’s Manchester Overture and Glasgow Overture. His novels Tremor of Intent and Any Old Iron both contain references to Walton’s Belshazzar’s Feast. Burgess called this influence on his work ‘a fine and greatly needed tribute to a composer who has meant more to some of us than anyone since Stravinsky.’

8. ‘Clun’ from On Wenlock Edge by Ralph Vaughan Williams, performed by Alexander Young & the Sebastian String Quartet.

Burgess said: ‘I choose this because musically it’s interesting, moving, and in terms of musical history it’s significant. It was a breakthrough for English music. And it has a stoical quality about it, which matches my normal mood and would certainly match my desert island mood.’

Burgess wrote that On Wenlock Edge ‘provides A.E. Housman’s verses with the passion they lack unset.’ He revered Vaughan Williams’s music, and enjoyed hearing it in an orchestral setting and on film soundtracks. Of the composer’s work on the Powell and Pressburger film 49th Parallel, Burgess said that the ‘brotherhood of man’ theme is ‘one of the best film overtures ever penned.’ Burgess and Vaughan Williams both composed music for the harmonica player Larry Adler: Vaughan Williams wrote ‘Romance for Harmonica in D-Flat Major’ and Burgess wrote a suite for harmonica, though Adler only performed the former. The Vaughan Williams catalogue of traditional English folk songs is highly regarded by musicians. Even though Burgess regarded this form of music as ‘already near dead,’ he praised the Englishness of the composer’s work, stating that he was one of three composers — the others being Walton and Gustav Holst — who had inspired his own Symphony in C (1975).

Luxuries, Books and More

Each castaway on Desert Island Discs is permitted a luxury item, a book (in addition to the Bible and the Complete Works of Shakespeare), and are asked to pick their one favourite piece of music form their selection.

Asked to identify his luxury, Burgess chose: ‘a wad of scoring paper, and many pencils and pens and rubbers and so forth.’ He added: ‘I would try to get down to [writing an] opera, or some musical work. Certainly, I don’t want a typewriter, or paper.’

His chosen book was James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake — because ‘it would keep me going for a very long exile indeed.’

Burgess ended the interview by revealing that his favourite piece of music was ‘Elgar’s First Symphony, without any doubt.’

Listen to the complete playlist of Anthony Burgess’s Desert Island Discs choices here (free Spotify account needed):

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Find out more

Listen to our podcast episodes about Anthony Burgess and music.

Stephane Ginsburgh’s recording of Anthony Burgess’s The Bad-Tempered Electric Keyboard is available to buy from Naxos or to stream on Spotify (free account needed):

The Devil Prefers Mozart: On Music and Musicians by Anthony Burgess (affiliate link)

This Man and Music by Anthony Burgess

Mozart and the Wolf Gang by Anthony Burgess

Each purchase from an affiliate link supports the charitable work of the Burgess Foundation.

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