A touching memoir from Katia de Peyer about her life with the internationally renowned clarinettist
Every instrument has its legendary advocate. For the clarinet, Gervase de Peyer assumed the role, establishing an enviable reputation as a principal in the London Symphony Orchestra, an international soloist, and conductor and director of the Melos Sinfonia.
Katia de Peyer’s memoir Gervase de Peyer – As I Knew Him is a collection of well-meaning recollections that capture a moment in time when the classical industry was in its heyday. De Peyer is shown as a charismatic well-connected figure, respected, sought after, and highly influential — a founder member of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln, set up in 1969 by Charles Wadsworth with money from Alice Tully. This speaks to the international reputation he had established and the credibility his name could lend. The recollections are scattered, but the point is made reasonably cleanly: in fifteen years in the public eye, De Peyer was highly prized.
Whilst the musical descriptors can sometimes avoid the detail about the man’s craft a musician might crave, it is the personal and business which paints the most vivid picture.
Staging an ambitious concert at Carnegie Hall for the Melos Sinfonia he had established and conducted himself, de Peyer’s vision was demanding. We are told the initial concert promoter lacked the necessary experience to do the job, leaving Katia to step up to mount a fundraising campaign. De Peyer would play Francaix’s Clarinet Concerto – a demanding play even by the composer’s assessment. After that Gervase would return to the stage to conduct a three soloist line-up including Jean-Jacques Kantororow and Philippe Muller in the Brahms Double, and Maurice Bourgue in Richard Strauss’ Oboe Concerto. A considerable undertaking, similarly in scale it appeared, to the hotel rack-rate. ‘Rookie’ concert manager and fundraiser Katia recalls being charged with paying hotel bills with $3000 dollars cash in her pocket — the equivalent of £8000 today.
A few pages later it is revealed that a second mortgage had been taken out on their US home to mount the concert. The De Peyers would later sell Gervase’s Langford Place property in London, the clarinettist insisting it was put on the market for more than the market ‘offered’. “He anticipated the trend in the real estate market in the years to come. And he sure needed the money.”
The reputation remained solid, so too the recordings. A customary celebration in the form of an 80th birthday concert at Wigmore Hall was met with critical appreciation. De Peyer was described as ‘spry’, his playing ‘like that of a human singer’ and ‘undimmed technical and musicianship’, in addition to bold assertion, that ‘he understands the art of rubato, which almost all singers have lost: the art of preserving the rhythm while allowing the phrase to flow.’
Notwithstanding the limitations of memoir, there’s a sense in Katia de Peyer collection of memories that we are celebrating the man in the way he was appreciated at his 80th birthday concert in 2006. We smile warmly at the idea of him because he was from an entirely different age. In preparing for his 80th birthday concert, Katia observes him looking pensive. “It happens for me to be low, but you know, what comes quickly to my mind are the gorgeous symphonies of Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms .. This is bliss. And I am no longer depressed.”
De Peyer would live for another nine years, so the quote and the concert isn’t really an ending. It’s an illustration — of him, and the audience and its preferences he connected with. De Peyer traded in that appeal his whole career; Katia’s recollections make some of that transaction visible.
