OPINION:
THE MAN WlTH THE GOLDEN FLUTE: THE MUSICAL JOURNEY OF A CELTIC MINSTREL
By Sir James Galway with Linda Bridges
Wiley, $25.95, 278 pages
Reviewed by Aram Bakshian Jr.
Are great musicians born or made? Leafing through the pages of this pleasant, appropriately lilting memoir by one of the world’s most famous living musicians, I recalled a thought that first came to me in Vienna more than 35 years ago. Forget about nature versus nurture: Great musicians are both born and made. This was certainly the case with Robert Stolz (1880-1975), the last of the great Austrian waltz and operetta composers, whose memoirs I co-authored in the 1970s.
His father, a minor composer who counted Johannes Brahms and Anton Bruckner among his friends, ran a modest provincial music academy along with his mother, a talented pianist. So Stolz was born with music in his blood - but he was also raised in a home filled with melody, a combination that helped him overcome many obstacles and ultimately achieve musical greatness.
The same is true of Sir James Galway, the brilliant master flutist who has achieved superstar status as both a classical soloist and a pop artist. Born into a poor working-class Protestant family in Belfast Mr. Galway’s father and grandfather, like most of their contemporaries, toiled in the grimy shipyards.
But both of them, along with several other relatives, were talented and enthusiastic amateur musicians, part of a rich Orangeman tradition of “flute bands” - a cross between a military fife and drum corps belting out marches and a concert band playing “classical music, if you can imagine playing an overture arranged for 32 flutes, four drums, a bass drum, cymbals and triangles” - that goes back at least as far as the 17th century.
Mr. Galway’s grandfather couldn’t read a note of music but was good enough to moonlight in the local opera orchestra, while his father earned extra money as a dance band accordionist and his mother could play almost anything on the piano “by ear.”
In the evenings, Mr. Galway recalls, after he and his brother had been sent to bed, his grandfather “often played softly for awhile, a few tunes he was especially fond of. I loved listening to him, and I held off falling asleep as long as he was playing. My father, meanwhile, was devoted to Mozart. By the time I was eight, I could recognize the main themes of Mozart’s G Minor Symphony and Jupiter Symphony, because my father played them for me over and over.”
All this in a small, overcrowded house with an outdoor privy and no bathtub - “We used the same tub that my mother washed clothes in and we had a bath every Saturday night. If it was cold, the tub was set up in front of the fire” - and where “I don’t remember ever going hungry, although there were times when we didn’t have much besides bread and butter.”
Nor was he ever starved for inspiration. Long before Mr. Galway dreamed of making a full-time career as a flutist, he spent hours a day practicing, playing in local “flute bands,” learning by listening, and eagerly studying under a steady progression of nurturing - and increasingly sophisticated - teachers.
Indeed, the need for a “practical” day job might have kept Mr. Galway from ever becoming more than a talented amateur were it not for what seemed like a disappointment at the time: “One thing I had loved in school was learning bookbinding. By the time I was fourteen, I had produced some leather-bound books that were really beautiful. But when I applied for a job with a bookbinding firm, they passed me by.” One small step backward for Mr. Galway, one giant step forward for the world of music.
Balked of a career in bookbinding, he obtained the first in a series of stipends and scholarships that allowed him to train as a classical musician. From these humble beginnings, Mr. Galway leads us on a pied piper’s march from threadbare but jolly student days to first flute in Europe’s most prestigious orchestra, the Berlin Philharmonic under the legendary - and sometimes iron-fisted - Herbert von Karajan. Then, in the ’70s, Mr. Galway emerges from the orchestra pit to become a star as a concert and recording soloist and, ultimately, a pop entertainer working with everyone from Stevie Wonder, Henry Mancini and John Denver to Pink Floyd and Sir Elton John.
Along the way, be witnesses the drab brutality of life in East Berlin before seeing the Berlin Wall fall, survives two broken marriages to find long-lasting happiness with his third wife, Jeanne (perhaps not coincidentally, a talented fellow flutist), loses his early religious faith and then regains it after recovering from a near-fatal and potentially crippling accident, and continues to teach as well as play beautiful classical music long after achieving great wealth and prestige, including a knighthood at the hands of one of his loyal fans, Queen Elizabeth Il.
Throughout, Mr. Galway tells his story with great good will, candor and zest. It is a tribute to his literary collaborator, Linda Bridges, that, from beginning to end, the reader feels he is sitting in the local pub listening to an amiable and gifted raconteur speaking from the heart as one friend to another.
One trusts that Mr. Galway, who turns 70 this December, will remain active for many years to come but, like maestro Stolz, not at the expense of good living. After describing a ceremonial visit to Buckingham Palace, he concludes that he has “two all-time ambitions: One is to look at the queen’s stamp collection, and the other is to get locked up in her wine cellar for about a month, with a bed, a glass, and a corkscrew.”
Cheers, Mr. Galway … and a long life to you.
Aram Bakshian Jr., who served as an aide to Presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan, co-authored the memoirs of Vienna’s last waltz and operetta master, Robert Stolz (1880-1975). His articles and reviews on politics, history, gastronomy and the arts have been widely published in the United States, the United Kingdom and Europe.
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