Obituary: Remembering Benjamin Luxon

Notable for his burnished baritone, genial personality, and seemingly effortless vocal projection, Benjamin Luxon, who has died aged 87, was successful in opera, oratorio, lieder, folk song, and Victorian parlour ballads.

Stricken in his early 50s by a rare auto-immune disease that caused him to lose his hearing, he was forced to abandon his international career. He settled in rural Massachusetts, where he was able to deploy his dramatic talents as an actor, director, and reciter — not least of Victorian poems and songs.

He made his debut with Benjamin Britten’s English Opera Group in 1963, going on to sing roles such as Sid (Albert Herring), Tarquinius (The Rape of Lucretia), and Demetrius (A Midsummer Night’s Dream). He sang in Purcell’s King Arthur until 1970. He came to greater prominence when he undertook the title role in Britten’s television opera Owen Wingrave (1971), written specially for him, and subsequently sang the Jester, Death, and Joking Jesus in Peter Maxwell Davies’s Taverner at Covent Garden (1972).

Other roles he sang for the Royal Opera included Owen Wingrave, Onegin, Wolfram (Tannhäuser), Marcello (La Bohème), Falke (Die Fledermaus), and Diomede (William Walton’s Troilus and Cressida). He won equal acclaim at English National Opera and Glyndebourne and was a firm fixture on the oratorio circuit too.

In works by Edward Elgar, he sang the Priest/Angel of the Agony in Alexander Gibson’s recording of Dream of Gerontius (1976) and the role of St Peter in Leonard Slatkin’s recording of The Kingdom (1988). His performances in the Gerontius roles were notable for their benignity as well as their authority. Walton’s Belshazzar’s Feast he recorded twice, for Georg Solti and André Previn.

One of the last major recordings he made was as the baritone soloist in Robert Shaw’s recording of Britten’s War Requiem with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra (1989). It is a characteristically persuasive performance that demonstrated Luxon’s musical response to the text was still sovereign, showcasing his highly regarded readings of Wilfred Owen’s poetry.

On a less sublime level, he appeared frequently on the programme Top Cs and Tiaras, created for Channel 4 in the early 1980s to bring popular classical music to a wide, mainstream public. Whether in his spellbinding Ol’ Man River or in saccharine Victorian ballads, there was an undeniable sincerity in his delivery to which audiences responded. Nor was he too proud to walk on in his long johns as the monarch in Danny Kaye’s song The King’s New Clothes.

In tandem with the tenor Robert Tear, he combed the repertory of Victorian and Edwardian ballads rendered by their bewhiskered predecessors. Michael William Balfe’s Come Into the Garden, Maud, and Julius Benedict’s The Moon has Raised her Lamp Above were among the gems recorded, with Previn at the piano, on a pair of discs titled The Dicky Bird and the Owl (1973) and Home, Sweet Home (1976).

Luxon was also a popular exponent of such tearjerkers as Give Me a Ticket to Heaven (1978) on The Good Old Days, a long-running BBC show recreating the ambience of the music hall. Under the same title as that song, he made a recording of similar repertory (1976) with his regular accompanist, David Willison.

Born in Redruth, Cornwall, Benjamin was the son of Ernest Luxon, an amateur singer, and his American wife, Lucille (nee Grigg). After Truro school and national service, he went to London to study at Westminster Training College and the Guildhall School of Music, as it was then known. Lacking a musical training of any real rigor, he launched his career with the standard classical repertory in concerts and recitals up and down the country, a “baptism of fire” as he later described it. “If training did come, it was rather late in life and a little bit sketchy,” he said.

But his talent was recognized by Britten, and their 13-year collaboration provided a major boost to his career. His Posa in Don Carlos at ENO in 1974 was singled out by one critic as “the truly outstanding performance of the production” – even though it was his first Verdi role – his phrasing, legato line, and feeling for words being especially praised. In the same year, he joined Peter Hall’s production of Eugene Onegin at Covent Garden, where his mellifluous tone and fully rounded portrayal of the title role were similarly acclaimed. He went on to record the work twice: with Mstislav Rostropovich (1982) and Seiji Ozawa (1986).

A regular at Glyndebourne between 1971 and 1980, he sang the roles of Onegin, Ulysses (The Return of Ulysses), Count Almaviva (The Marriage of Figaro), the Forester (Cunning Little Vixen), Ford (Falstaff), Don Giovanni, and Papageno (The Magic Flute) there. His incarnation of Ulysses, alongside Janet Baker as Penelope, was considered a particular success. The Marriage of Figaro, directed by Hall with Kiri Te Kanawa as the Countess and Ileana Cotrubas as Susanna, was filmed for television in 1973 and released as a DVD in 2004. His warm, sympathetic, dramatically intelligent Wozzeck was heard in Glasgow (under Gibson), Los Angeles (under Simon Rattle), and Chicago (under Claudio Abbado).

As a lieder singer, he brought an appealing, fine-grained tonal quality and an expressive response to the text in both Franz Schubert and English repertory such as Ralph Vaughan Williams, John Ireland, George Butterworth, Herbert Howells, and Roger Quilter. He was appointed CBE in 1986.

Following some troubling warning signs, the catastrophic, career-ending hearing loss came quite suddenly during a Schubert song cycle in 1990. Unable to determine the pitch of notes while warming up, he started the recital only to observe perplexed looks on the faces of the audience. Aware that something was seriously wrong, he brought the performance to a close.

Two days later, he was totally deaf in one ear, and the sound in the other was seriously distorted. After treatment with steroids, chemotherapy, and a cochlear implant, he attempted a return to the stage on a reduced schedule. However, after two years, he decided to retire. In due course, he came to terms with his hearing loss, describing his subsequent life as “very rich.”

In 1969, he married the Israeli soprano Sheila Amit, and they had two sons and a daughter. Following their divorce in 2002, he married Susie Crofut, the widow of the American folk singer Bill Crofut, with whom he had performed for many years. She and his children survive him.

Benjamin Matthew Luxon, baritone, born 24 March 1937; died 25 July 2024.

Source: The Guardian