My lunch with Pierre Monteux

It should have been the highlight of my years in the London office of The Scotsman, and in a way it was - though not the way I hoped or expected it to be.

Pierre Monteux, the doyen of French musicians, had just been appointed conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra at the age of 86. The year was 1962, and he had agreed to have lunch with me and talk about his plans.

We would meet, he said, at the Knightsbridge hotel where he stayed whenever he was in Britain.  But when I turned up at 1pm on the agreed day to meet the man who had first sensationally conducted The Rite in Paris in 1913, he was not there. He had been seen sitting in the foyer, I was told, but had gone shopping with his  wife.  By the time they returned, it was too late for lunch. He was tired, so  we arranged to meet at the same time on the same day the following week. But the  following week the same thing happened.

Yet  who could feel impatient with the oldest and finest French conductor in the world? A third date was set and this time it happened. Sitting  in the foyer, complete with walrus moustache and smiling benignly,  was the man who had first drawn Stravinsky’s high, eerie bassoon notes from page one of the mighty score. Small and plump, he could have been mistaken for Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot.  But it was unquestionably Monteux in person - he who had brought  Petrushka and Daphnis et Chloe into the world, as well as The Rite, and whom I had last heard in the Theatre des Champs-Elysees (scene of his early triumph) in  a mammoth programme with Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique as prelude, followed by Debussy’s  Gigues, Iberia, and Rondes de Printemps, with Respighi’s Pines of Rome as finale.

Initial formalities completed - “Shall we proceed to the restaurant” - Monteux decided that he would like some meat while we discussed his future ideas. But persuading him to turn his attention to Stravinsky proved surprisingly difficult. No doubt he had said it all before, hundreds of times. At any rate it soon became apparent that he wanted to talk about Brahms and only about Brahms, a composer now closer to his heart and about whom his views  were growing somewhat  heated.

Suddenly, in the middle of a mouthful of food, he choked and collapsed. Waiters rushed to the table, Mrs Monteux took command and asked for him to be carried upstairs. Fearing that I had killed him, I remained, as requested, at the table.

Eventually Mrs Monteux returned. “All is well,” she said. “It was only the milk he  had been  drinking before lunch. I should    have locked it away, but he had got his hands on it.”

Severe indigestion was the result. He had been put to bed, she said, but was recovering. Thus ended my lunch with Pierre Monteux. Though we never met again, I felt truly glad that he lived to conduct the LSO.
6 October 2014