Obituary, Benjamin Luxon (1937-2024)

The Cornish baritone Benjamin Luxon, who created the title-role in Britten’s Owen Wingrave and was particularly renowned for his performances of English song, has died aged 87.

Born in Redruth in 1937, Luxon trained with Walther Gruner at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and came to prominence after winning third prize at the ARD International Music Competition in 1961; shortly afterwards he joined Benjamin Britten’s English Opera Group, singing the roles of happy-go-lucky butcher’s boy Sid in Albert Herring and the predatory prince Tarquinius in The Rape of Lucretia (recording the latter role under the composer, with Janet Baker as Lucretia).

Britten went on to compose the title-role in his opera Owen Wingrave for Luxon; based on a short story by Henry James about a pacifist born into a militaristic family, the work was recorded at Snape in 1970 and premiered on BBC television the following spring.

Television work of a different variety would feature prominently in Luxon’s career: in the late 1970s he made several appearances on the BBC light entertainment programme The Good Old Days and was a regular guest on the Channel Four series Top C’s and Tiaras, which ran in the mid-1980s and celebrated operetta and musical theatre. Light music was a particular passion for Luxon, and his open-hearted personality and affecting (but never affected) delivery were ideally suited to the drawing-room ballads of the Victorian and Edwardian eras, which he often performed and recorded with his regular pianist partner David Willison and the tenor Robert Tear.

Folk song was another abiding enthusiasm; he enjoyed a long-standing friendship with the American folk musician Bill Crofut (1935-99), and throughout the 1980s the pair toured widely together, including celebrated concerts at the Edinburgh and Tanglewood Festivals.

Meanwhile, Luxon’s operatic career was flourishing at home and abroad: having made his first appearances at both Covent Garden and Glyndebourne shortly after Owen Wingrave was recorded, he made a number of high-profile international debuts in the 1980s (including Eugene Onegin at the Metropolitan Opera and La Scala, and Berg’s Wozzeck in Los Angeles).

Fundamentally a large lyric baritone throughout his career, Luxon’s repertoire included Mozart’s Papageno and Count Almaviva, Rossini’s Figaro and Ulisse in Monteverdi’s Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria; he also created the role of The Jester in Peter Maxwell Davies’s Taverner (his Covent Garden debut in 1972) and the charismatic, manipulative valet Jean in William Alwyn’s Strindberg-inspired Miss Julie in 1977. Excursions into Verdi, Wagner and verismo were occasional and carefully-chosen, including Wolfram in Tannhäuser for Covent Garden and Falstaff for English National Opera (with whom he had been associated for two decades) in the early 1990s.

It was around this time that Luxon began to experience auditory problems, and by 1994 he told The New York Times that he had lost two-thirds of his hearing, struggling with high frequencies in particular. After exploring a range of treatments and coping-strategies for the condition he made the difficult decision to retire from singing in the late 1990s, but following a cochlear implant in 2007 he began to perform again as a reciter, narrator and voice-actor; notable successes included Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale, Strauss’s Enoch Arden, Honegger’s King David, and (as an audio-book) Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island.

Luxon made over a hundred opera, recital and oratorio recordings, with particularly highlights including the three great Schubert cycles and albums of songs by Quilter, Butterworth, Vaughan Williams, Delius, Elgar, Britten and Mussorgsky (all with David Willison), Haydn’s The Creation with both Klaus Tennstedt and Antal Doráti, Britten’s War Requiem with his friend Robert Shaw, and Walton’s Belshazzar’s Feast with Sir Georg Solti. He was made a CBE in the 1986 New Year’s Honours List.

Luxon spent the latter part of his life in Sandifield Massachusetts, where he was heavily involved with community theatre and the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute; he always maintained strong links with his beloved Cornwall, and returned there with a 26-strong company from his adopted home-town to perform at the Minack Theatre in 2018. He died on 25th July.

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