From Edward Elgar to Benjamin Britten via Victorian music hall and belting out Rule Britannia! at the Last Night of the Proms, Benjamin Luxon excelled in the rich repertoire of English song — yet he insisted that he wasn’t really English at all.
“I’m a Cornishman, a very different race,” he told Roy Plomley when he was the castaway on Desert Islands Discs. He looked it, too, with his bushy fisherman’s beard and to prove his fealty to the southwest peninsula and his Celtic roots, he chose as the first of his eight records the Newquay Fishermen’s Song, performed by a full-throated Cornish male voice choir.
His choices soon moved on to the music of Britten, in whose operas he made his name as one of the finest singers of his generation. If Peter Pears was the composer’s favourite tenor, Luxon was Britten’s first-choice baritone and he wrote the title role of his opera Owen Wingrave specifically for him.
The composer, who had been a conscientious objector during the Second World War, based the opera on a story by Henry James about a young man who rejects his family’s military traditions and becomes a pacifist. With Pears in the role of General Sir Philip Wingrave, Owen’s grandfather, who disinherits him, the opera was premiered on BBC2 in 1971. Luxon reprised the role two years later when it received its first staged production at the Royal Opera House.
Britten had handed Luxon his operatic break seven years earlier when his English Opera Group was due to tour the Soviet Union and the company lost one of its leading baritones on the eve of departure. Luxon reckoned that as a young and unknown singer he was the only baritone available at such notice but he got the gig and never looked back.
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On the tour Luxon sang in two Britten operas, The Rape of Lucretia and Albert Herring, and he remained with the group for the next seven years, touring Europe, North America and Australia in productions of English language operas mostly by Britten but also by other contemporary composers including William Walton and Malcolm Williamson, and older works such as Henry Purcell’s King Arthur and John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera.
A long association followed with English National Opera and with the Royal Opera House, as Luxon expanded his repertoire to include Mozart and Rossini, Wagner and Verdi.
He made a spectacular debut at the New York Metropolitan Opera in 1980 in the title role in Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin and six years later made his La Scala debut. He was also a favourite at Glyndebourne, with his marvellously engaging Papageno in the David Hockney-designed production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute.
He sang under the baton of many of the most celebrated conductors including Daniel Barenboim, Bernard Haitink, Herbert von Karajan, Georg Solti and Leonard Bernstein, and made more than 100 recordings, among which his personal favourite was Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius with the Scottish National Chorus and Orchestra under Sir Alexander Gibson.
He sang Rule Britannia! at the Last Night of the Proms twice, including in 1982 just a few weeks after the Falklands conflict ended, when his performance was met with a particularly enthusiastic display of patriotic fervour by promenaders.
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The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians noted that on the operatic stage he used “his warm, sympathetic baritone with commendable artistry to evoke character”.
Luxon refused to be restricted to the classical repertoire. He made his TV debut in the 1960s singing sea shanties on Westward TV, recorded folk songs with the American folk singer Bill Crofut, sang a little jazz, appeared on the music hall show The Good Old Days and staged evenings of Victorian parlour and songs with his friend, the tenor Robert Tear. “If I’d been born 500 years ago, I would have been a minstrel,” he said.
A large and energetic man, every so often he felt the need to escape from the concert stage and “just get out and work physically. I don’t really care what it is, so long as it’s good physical hard work.” On one occasion after some elm trees had been felled on his Hertfordshire farm, he spent ten days from dawn until dusk chopping them up into logs purely for the satisfaction he derived from the sweat on his brow.
He is survived by his second wife, Susan Crofut, the widow of his folk singing partner Bill, who died in 1999. On their marriage in 2002 he took American citizenship and settled in Sandisfield, Massachusetts.
He is further survived by three children from his first marriage to the Israeli soprano Sheila Amit, whom he met when they toured the Soviet Union together in 1964 with Britten’s opera group.
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Benjamin Matthew Luxon was born in 1937 in Redruth, Cornwall, and grew up in nearby Camborne, the son of Lucille (née Grigg) and Ernest Luxon. It was, he said, “a completely unsophisticated background” but his father was an amateur singer with a fine bass voice and his son was soon singing as a boy soprano at the local Methodist chapel and in his school choir. By the age of nine he was performing in concerts almost every week, but, he said, “everyone in Cornwall sang in those days so I wasn’t unusual”.
He continued singing as a scholarship boy at Truro School but had no thoughts of becoming a professional singer and, after doing his two years of National Service, he enrolled at a teacher training college.
It was there that he “got the bug for singing properly” and with the encouragement of the soprano Marion Studholme he enrolled at the Guildhall School of Music, funding his studies by working part-time as a PE teacher in the East End.
In his final year he won the Guildhall gold medal and began his professional career giving recitals of German lieder. For all his later association with the English repertoire he called Schubert his “musical god”.
His singing came to an unfortunate end in 1990 when in the middle of a Schubert recital in London he found he couldn’t pitch his voice to the piano. “I tried to get through but I couldn’t,” he recalled. “The music would start, and I had no idea where to sing. It was so distorted.”
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Within two days he had gone so deaf that he “couldn’t hear the difference between men and women’s voices. They all sounded like weird robots.”
It was eventually diagnosed as an auto-immune problem and with a cochlear implant he attempted to take to the stage again. “There was nothing wrong with my voice, but I couldn’t really hear what was happening around me and I was far too damaged to carry on a major international career,” he said.
He bore it with fortitude. “I never expected to sing at the places where I sang or do the things I did. It was all a bonus, really,” he reasoned. “And once I stopped the profession, I began to look a little bit more at life and people.”
Benjamin Luxon, opera singer, was born on March 24, 1937. He died of colon cancer on July 25, 2024, aged 87