“There is no excuse,” Sir John Eliot Gardiner repeats softly. Yes, the temperature in southern France was 39C. Yes, there was no air conditioning backstage. Yes, the opera — Berlioz’s take on the Trojan war — is difficult with the best acoustics, which these were not. And yes, there’s a question “whether the concert really should have taken place”.
But the performance went well. Only at the end did it unravel. The audience failed to give a standing ovation. The bass singer William Thomas took the stage at the wrong side. Gardiner — by now “very dehydrated” — “made a crass, cardinal error. I lost my rag. I did something that is really unpardonable in a conductor.” He hit the soloist.
“I didn’t strike him too hard, I did nonetheless cuff or biff a young singer.” He demonstrates his version of the contact to me, raising a palm to his own cheek. It looks not like a punch, more an open-handed slap. Was it enough to shatter Gardiner’s career?
Gardiner is one of the pre-eminent living figures of English classical music. Three months before the incident of August 2023 — the date is “engraved” in his mind — he had conducted much of the glorious music at the coronation of his friend, King Charles. After the episode in France all his performances with the Monteverdi Choir & Orchestras were pulled. He entered the purgatory of public cancellation.
His case illustrates a dilemma to which society still has no clear answer: should there be a path back for those stars (usually men) who, brought up in a different era, violate the ethos of this one? Do we pardon the unpardonable, or draw a final line? The British TV presenter Jeremy Clarkson was sacked by the BBC after punching a producer. He went on to excel on Amazon Prime Video.
Like Clarkson, Gardiner had a record of misbehaviour — shouting at musicians. But he founded the Monteverdi choir 60 years ago, as a precocious student at King’s College, Cambridge. He expected a path back.
Instead he didn’t perform for 11 months. Last week he received a call from the Monteverdi’s chair, telling him his time was up. Gardiner’s agent put out a statement, in which the conductor said he had “decided to step down”. Even before I meet Gardiner at his farm in Dorset, I know this is an unconvincing gloss.
The elegant converted barns, where he lives with his 42-year-old partner, harpist Gwyneth Wentink, are a reminder that his punishment has been far from total. Gardiner is unlike the other 81-year-old shunted aside this month: in energy, he is closer to Kamala Harris than US President Joe Biden. “I don’t feel, in any sense, ready to retire,” he tells me in his study. He is tall, mild and hospitable: charm was always one part of the man.
Remorse is essential to redemption. This is Gardiner’s first interview since the incident. He hits the right notes — mostly. “I needed to sort this out. It’s part of a pattern . . . I’m hugely grateful for this time away . . . I own the responsibility for what occurred . . . There is no excuse. Provocation yes, but not an excuse.” Can a musician’s inattentiveness, and objection to being shouted at, amount to provocation?
He points to “three, four types of therapy”, including “hugely helpful” cognitive behavioural therapy, and leadership coaching “from a specialist who does this with captains of industry, politicians, CEOs”. He’s done yoga, as he has since the 1990s, and mindfulness.
“I’ve changed. I feel I really have crossed a Rubicon in this last year . . . I’ve got techniques in place that will guard me against any . . . ” He interrupts himself. At a comeback concert in France this month, with another orchestra, “it was just such a relief to get back to music-making and to find that, even when the intensity in rehearsal is high, I was in control.”
But can he prove he will remain in control?
Gardiner grew up “in a very, very different environment, where criticism and even bullying were ubiquitous”. He was bullied at his boarding school. Later he was taught music by the legendary Nadia Boulanger, “the tender tyrant”. He recalls one exercise where she forced him to compose a canon onstage, while saying: “He must suffer, he must suffer.” He still reveres her: “I owe her a great debt of gratitude for having subjected me to such a stern discipline.”
Boulanger’s example made him see brilliance and bullying as two sides of a coin. “I swore to myself that I would never do it. But I was so much a product of that culture that I couldn’t escape it for several years. There was always a tendency of losing one’s rag, and I was immediately remorseful when it happened.” I note the language is detached.
“In my book anyway, there has to be a degree of forgiveness and tolerance.” He has in mind those mistakes that are “in pursuit of excellence”.
It took him time to accept that “musicians generally don’t respond well to fear”. Had he ever hit a musician before last August? In 2014 he “pushed away a musician who was aggressive towards me. But never cuffing anybody.”
I stumble across something else when I ask Gardiner for his advice to a younger person dealing with anger. “My advice would be to a young conductor: recognise the fact that the musicians are not naturally hostile towards you . . . Don’t immediately imagine that they’re antagonistic or hostile towards you.” Did he really imagine the musicians were against him? “As an apprentice conductor, I certainly felt that.”
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When the Financial Times asked Gardiner about his reputation for rudeness in a 2010 interview, he replied: “I don’t think I behaved anything like as heinously as you have heard.” Is he only remorseful now because he was caught?
He insists that, even before the slap, he had discussed anger management “with my shrink” and with his family. “I wish I had [had professional help], because it was a problem that was clearly going to surface at some stage.” (He did have marriage counselling; he has married and separated three times.)
“Why didn’t I deal with this long ago?” he asks. He offers no direct answer. The closest is his “crazy” schedule. He owns an organic farm and woodland. He has written a biography of Bach and is working on another about 17th-century luminaries. Both farming and classical music are forms of stewardship, he rationalises.
In the 48 hours before the coronation last year, he conducted a concert in Amsterdam, flew back to England by private jet for the rehearsal at Westminster Abbey, then back to Amsterdam for another concert, then back to London for the main ceremony. “It was like that all the year.”
Before the infamous August concert, he was filming with French TV: “I was carrying the whole bloody thing . . . These all sound like excuses and they’re not.”
Even so, “the feedback I got from musicians is that they felt I’d got a lot better — in terms of far fewer hostile and unhelpful criticisms, and temporary loss of temper.”
One, Andrew Richards, recalls Gardiner telling him in 2009: “You are the worst singer I have ever worked with.”
“I don’t recognise that,” Gardiner tells me. He concedes some musicians refuse to work with him: “They’ve decided it’s too high a price to pay, it’s too risky, and I respect that. But others, with whom I’ve had the odd contretemps, there’s been nearly always — or very often — a good reconciliation.”
If the altercation with Thomas had happened years ago, “we’d have gone to the pub together, and sorted it out.” There was talk of financial compensation. Instead, Gardiner says he offered an apology, which wasn’t accepted.
Why didn’t he relax his schedule? “I have a strong sense of what used to be called vocation. Boulanger used to say to us: every time you get up in the morning, look in the mirror, ask yourself by what right do you call yourself a musician?” Her implication was to work hard? “Pitilessly.”
Demonstrating he has changed is difficult. “Until you get on the box, and are working with the ensemble, you can’t prove [it]. That’s been very frustrating.” He wanted to return to the Monteverdi, partly to “have a voice” in choosing his successors.
He insists he did the training the Monteverdi asked of him, including on subconscious bias. “A most delightful blind person came to the farm and exposed the unconscious bias that all of us have. I’m really grateful to have done that.” He complains the board kept making new demands. “When I felt I’d achieved one, there was a new one I had to go through . . . I really wanted to come back, but there never seemed to be an end.”
But others close to the choir have a different version. The Monteverdi, a regulated charity with legal duties of care, said that its primary concern was to uphold “values of inclusion, equality and respect” and that preventing a recurrence of abuse “remains a priority”. It did want him back, but it didn’t see sufficient evidence he had changed.
Is it true, for example, Gardiner lobbied European venues to cancel performances by the Monteverdi if he wasn’t involved? Gardiner concedes he asked for a performance in Leipzig to be postponed, insisting it was at the violinist’s request. When pushed, he admits that the choir “saw it differently”. I sense there is more to it.
There is still a disagreement on the incident itself. A representative for Thomas states there was a slap to the face, “followed by a punch to the mouth.” Gardiner says there was “absolutely not” a punch. The choir hasn’t published an independent report into his conduct.
Gardiner thinks his recent soul-searching will influence his conducting, via “a kind of empathy with composers who have scores to settle”. Since the Monteverdi announced his departure, “this phone hasn’t stopped with the messaging,” he says, pointing at a mobile on the desk. (It is actually my phone, but I get the gist.) He plans performances in Europe and Asia, and has “lots of plans churning around in my head”.
His year of non-performance has coincided with tough moments for his farm. Some 170 of his sheep were infected by a midge-born virus that made them lose their pregnancies. “Fortunately they do get immunity. Next year they’ll be OK.” The same may be true of Gardiner. Society is confused about forgiveness, but simpler about celebrity: it generally finds room for the famous.
Even so, I leave Dorset with the sense that Gardiner’s path back is only half-travelled. In our interview, the conductor seemed in control — but, as with the Berlioz opera, the performance is not the whole story.
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