George Lascelles, Earl and Opera Writer, Dies at 88 (original) (raw)
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George Lascelles, Lord Harewood, Who Wrote Opera Reference, Is Dead at 88
- July 26, 2011
George Lascelles, the seventh Earl of Harewood, a member of the British royal family who was an internationally recognized writer on opera, died on July 11 at Harewood House, his family’s home near Leeds. He was 88.
A family spokesman announced the death, The Press Association, the British news service, reported.
A first cousin of Queen Elizabeth II, Lord Harewood was best known to American readers as the longtime editor of Kobbé’s Complete Opera Book. A volume nearly three inches thick, it has become the de facto standard reference work on the subject, thanks to its detailed plot descriptions, production histories and musical analyses of hundreds of operas.
Through his writings, and his administration of major opera companies and music festivals, Lord Harewood was considered significant in broadening the reach of opera in Britain.
From 1972 to 1985, he was managing director of what became the English National Opera. Based in London and known for its populist, often adventurous English-language productions, the company has been an upstart rival to the Royal Opera at Covent Garden, of which Lord Harewood was previously a casting manager.
As the British newspaper The Guardian commented in its recent obituary, Lord Harewood “was unusual for a member of the royal family in deserving a substantial obituary on account of what he did rather than who he was.”
The eldest grandchild of King George V, George Henry Hubert Lascelles was born in London on Feb. 7, 1923. His mother, Princess Mary — formally Victoria Alexandra Alice Mary Windsor, Princess Royal of the United Kingdom — was the king’s only daughter. His father, Viscount Lascelles, became the sixth Earl of Harewood in 1929.
At his birth, baby George was sixth in line to the British throne. As a boy, George — he was Viscount Lascelles from 1929 to 1947 — spent much time in Buckingham Palace. On one occasion, The Daily Telegraph of London reported, he sneezed in the presence of his grandfather, the king, prompting His Majesty to cry, “Get that damn child away from me!”
The young viscount scored his first literary success as a teenager. With his younger brother, Gerald, he published Harewood News, a typewritten periodical that, The New York Times reported in 1939, had “a ready sale among their fellow Eton schoolboys and among the workers on the estate of their father” because of “the excellence of its horse-racing information.”
A captain in the Grenadier Guards in World War II, Viscount Lascelles, seriously wounded, was captured in Italy. He was held in Colditz Castle, an infamous prisoner-of-war camp in Germany.
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George Lascelles, the seventh Earl of Harewood and a managing director of what became the English National Opera.
Credit...Dmitri Kasterine/Camera Press London
There the viscount, who had loved music since boyhood, managed to obtain a copy of Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians. He read it straight through as far as the letter S — as far as T, in some accounts — before the war ended.
In 1947, after his father’s death, Viscount Lascelles became the seventh Earl of Harewood. The next year he earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Cambridge University.
In 1949 in a ceremony covered by the world news media, Lord Harewood married Maria Donata Nanetta Paulina Gustava Erwina Wilhelmine Stein. A concert pianist, Miss Stein, known as Marion, was the daughter of an Austrian Jewish family that had fled the country after the Anschluss.
Kobbé’s entered Lord Harewood’s life in the early 1950s. First published in 1919 as The Complete Opera Book, it was the posthumous work of Gustav Kobbé, the music critic of The New York Herald. Mr. Kobbé had been struck by a seaplane and killed off Long Island the year before.
Reviewing a later edition of the book in Opera magazine, a British publication of which he was the founder and first editor, Lord Harewood found much to condemn. In response, the book’s publishers asked him to take over the editorship of the volume.
The first edition on which Lord Harewood worked appeared in 1954. He oversaw subsequent editions through the 1990s and was credited with mitigating Mr. Kobbé’s turgid prose and eccentric arrangement of entries.
In 1967, after the queen granted him permission, Lord Harewood became “the first royal in modern times to obtain a divorce and then remarry,” as The Guardian wrote in his obituary. Later that year he married Patricia Elizabeth Tuckwell, with whom he had fathered a son in 1964.
An Australian violinist and fashion model, Ms. Tuckwell — who became the Countess of Harewood — is the sister of the renowned French- horn soloist Barry Tuckwell.
Lord Harewood’s survivors include his wife; three sons from his first marriage, David, now the eighth Earl of Harewood, James and Robert; a son, Mark, with Ms. Tuckwell; a stepson, Michael Shmith; and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
His other posts in the arts included the directorships of the Edinburgh Festival in Scotland and the Adelaide Festival in Australia.
Perhaps the greatest testament to Lord Harewood’s democratic leanings came from his cousin the queen. Some years ago, The Guardian reported, she was moved to remark: “Funny thing about George. You know, in most respects he’s perfectly normal.”
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