CHRISTOPHER NUPEN, AND HIS COMPANY ALLEGRO FILMS, HAVE REVOLUTIONISED THE MAKING OF TELEVISION FILMS ON CLASSICAL MUSIC. MALCOLM MILLER TALKS TO HIM ABOUT HIS EXTRAORDINARY LIFE AND WORK AND ABOUT WE WANT THE LIGHT, HIS NEW DVD ON THE ROLE OF MUSIC IN THE LIFE OF THE JEWS IN GERMANY.

This article is published with the kind permission of the Jewish Renaissance magazine.

Christoper Nupen peppers his conversation with so much Yiddish that it is difficult to believe that he is not Jewish. But for the eclectic Nupen, Yiddish is just one of the cultures he has acquired through osmosis, albeit the most significant one. "I am Italian in Italy, Spanish in Spain, French in France, I try to be Zulu with the Zulus, but the fact is that my closest friends, Daniel Barenboim, Itzhak Perlman, Pinchas Zukerman, Evgeny Kissin, use Yiddish. What I know comes mostly from them and their parents."

Click to play Allegro Films, an introduction Allegro Overview

In fact, Christopher Nupen was born in South Africa to a Norwegian father and a mother who may or may not have been (he has yet to investigate the truth of family stories) Lithuanian Jewish. He left South Africa for ideological reasons when he was 19 and, while pursuing his musical interests as an amateur guitarist and singer in England, he worked in a bank.

It was then that a life-changing encounter catapulted him into the world of radio and television. It was with world-famous singer Lotte Lehman, in whose box at the Vienna State Opera Nupen happened to have accidentally sat, resulting in their immediately becoming friends.

 "It was the most important thing that ever happened to me... I do the work I do today because of Lotte Lehman, because of that chance meeting on 7 November 1955 ... she was the greatest influence on my life and my thinking ...I can still hear her voice now. She said 'What do you do?' and I said 'I work in a bank', she said 'You are verking in a bank? Zat is completely unpossible!', so I changed, because of her! She tried to get me into Ibbs & Tillett, and suddenly the idea of going to the BBC came up, so I went to the BBC!"

It was during his six years in BBC Features, working for Laurence Gilliam "and pretty well every important writer in the British Isles" that Nupen made a radio programme about the Accademia Chigiana summer school in Siena, in which great musicians, such as Cortot, Thibaud, Casals, Enesco, Segovia, Rubinstein, gave masterclasses. It was a decisive step. "Huw Wheldon called up the following morning and said 'come and see me, you should be in television; the future is in television'."

We put images on the screen that had never been there before, that had been the private preserve of great musicians and their intimate friends.

 While on a three-month attachment, Nupen made his first TV film, about the young Daniel Barenboim and Vladimir Ashkenazy playing together for the first time in Mozart's Double Concerto at the Fairfield Halls, Croydon. Rather than the commissioned six-minute introduction to the concert, Nupen's film was an innovative hour-long blend of rehearsal and performance footage. "We put images on the screen that had never been there before, that had been the private preserve of great performers and their intimate friends. Suddenly you were close to these supremely talented people, enjoying their music, enjoying their craft, enjoying their company, enjoying that peculiar interchange that music gives. And these guys rehearsing, talking and laughing and enjoying themselves, were nothing short of riveting."

Double Concerto was screened on BBC2 and enjoyed such high ratings that it was instantly repeated on BBC1. After winning two major international prizes it was shown in an amazing 18 countries.

The following year came the first of five films about Jacqueline du Pré, the great British cellist who later became fatally ill with multiple sclerosis. Nupen recalled their first meeting: "I used to share a flat with John Williams, the guitarist. Jackie came to rehearse with John for her first EMI record. Fortunately I was there, one of the glorious accidents of my life. And I was struck by a curious contradiction. I saw a tall, big woman, striding like an Amazon and yet I could see that she was shy. I have never forgotten that strange image of combined boldness and vulnerability. I think the same qualities are somehow reflected in her music. She does things where you feel so often 'that's how it should be', and yet you hear things that surprise you. How can music seem eternally right and surprising at the same time? I made friends with her from that first instant and I knew her for 26 years, from the day she came into our flat until the day she died. I was holding her right hand when she died. Her teacher, William Pleeth, was holding her left."

 In 1987, when du Pré had stopped playing in public, Nupen made a new film in colour. Together with a film of Beethoven's Ghost Trio, it forms part of a DVD entitled Jacqueline du Pré in Portrait released last September. "Within nine weeks it was the top selling classical DVD of the year helped by making the front cover of Gramophone magazine. It was 17 years after she died, 31 years after she stopped playing. How many artists disappear from view when they die? Not Jackie.

MUSIC/FILM/HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL

Jacqueline du Pré was one of the five outstanding young musicians featured in one of Nupen's most famous films, The Trout. "When Daniel Barenboim was made Music Director of South Bank Summer Music, he had the idea of playing Schubert's Trout Quintet with Zubin Mehta, Jacqueline du Pré, Pinchas Zukerman and Itzhak Perlman. The minute he said it, I thought - 'Aha, like Double Concerto, there's a story to tell'. The story was: why they did it, how they did it, who they were, what was new about the time, what is the spirit in which they did it, and then the doing of it as well!"

The film includes a biographical note on each artist and notes on the concert; but what was startingly new was the communication of the spirit of enjoyment in their music-making.

 "That was the thing which hadn't been done before. Because they were my friends and welcomed what we were doing, they actually did things for the camera. The older generation expected the camera to pay respect to them, these people interacted with me. That scene backstage before they went on to play The Trout (when they show off with dazzling, witty show pieces and duets) wouldn't have happened exactly like that if the cameras hadn't been there. But we were enjoying the fact that there was a new medium bringing them to a vast audience. And in two years, television created for them an audience that it took Horowitz, Rubinstein, Heifetz, Milstein, 40 years to build!"

To bring classical music to a mass audience was the motivating force behind Nupen's prolific output. "Public service broadcasting was the most significant cultural step forward in Western society since the invention of the printing press ...Television brought literally tens of millions of people to what music can do in their lives, the way music can enrich their lives, who would probably not otherwise have got there. Because television catches your interest in things other than just the music: that shot of Jacqueline du Pré in the train, playing pizzicato cello and singing a French folksong, that picture alone probably brought ten million people to music."

With his company, Allegro Films, Nupen continued to make award-winning films about a host of artists and composers: Segovia, Kissin, Schubert, Sibelius, breaking conventional moulds by blending elements of documentary and filmed performance in daring and artistically experimental ways. "The cutting room is where all films in history are made or broken. It is a wonderful mysterious place where, if you work hard and you're lucky, miraculous things happen that give a film vibrant life." At the same time, Nupen emphasises the importance of knowledge of one's craft, and team effort: "I was lucky to meet cameraman David Findlay and editor Peter Heelas who knew a great deal about music and who have stuck with me from 1966 until now: the same cameraman and editor for all my films, which is probably unique and about which I am very proud. They taught me and I have repaid that with appropriate loyalty to them."

"We Want the Light was ...the most difficult thing I ever tried to do, and one of the most worthwhile."

 Amongst his more experimental films is a documentary about Pinchas Zukerman filmed over seven years "the first film in the history of the world to show the development of a great musical talent from adolescence to maturity." Nupen is adamant about the artistic and historical importance of film.

"Film remembers our artists in a way no other medium can do! Books can't do it. Records can't do it. Radio can't do it. Critics can't do it. Musicologists can't do it. You can't get the Elgar cello concerto in a book! You can't hear Jacqueline du Pré laugh and rehearse on a CD. A German reviewer last week said the Jackie DVD is the finest portrait of an artist that has ever been published in any medium, because DVD is so much more comprehensive."

Nupen's most recent DVD deals with a broader issue, "It's about the human spirit, it's about how much art can mean to people, about the situation of the Jews in relation to Germans, since the time of the ghettos." For Nupen, We Want the Light was "...the most difficult thing I ever tried to do and one of the most worthwhile."

The film looks at music as a symbol of emancipation and assimilation in German society, from Mendelssohn through Wagner to the Holocaust, with fascinating interviews with camp survivors. One of the highlights is the poignant testimony of Alice Sommer-Herz, a survivor of Terezin who was the pianist in the original production of Hans Krasa's Brundibar. Her son Raphael Sommer, a distinguished cellist who sadly died last year, was in the children's chorus. "One of the greatest blessings of my life is that Alice Sommer-Herz, or Gigi Sommer as she is generally known, was in such incredibly good shape at the age of 98. She lost her husband in Dachau. Sixweeks before the end of the war she lost her sister and her greatest difficulty in the camp was how to look after and keep her son alive in Theresienstadt. Yet through her testimony shines not the tragedy, but this extraordinary tolerance, wisdom, grace."

 Alice Sommer-Herz was an inspiration for the film. "I worked on it for a year, and at the end of that year I had a sort of 'conscience-slot', 'talking heads' documentary. Gigi gave me the courage to start trying to go a bit further, to experiment... And then slowly, slowly, the film transformed into something much more poetic and something much more appropriate to the subject. It is not a documentary film, nor a Holocaust film, nor a concentration camp film. It's not about any time or place or event. It's about the human spirit.<;i>"