John Ogdon: Living with Genius

You see, it is often assumed that

an explosion can be pinpointed immediately.

It isn't, it's always the result of years of building up,

tiny little ratchets towards an explosion.

I can't think of any other pianist that was like him.

He was a one-off.

He and the piano were in communion,

expressing something the rest of us could not get anywhere near.

When he sat down at the piano, he became like a man possessed.

He could sight read everything, he could play anything,

he wrote music...

He had a very deep emotional and intellectual presence.

It was much more than a talent.

It was a God-given gift, I think.

He was in America, he was in Japan, he was in Australia,

and everybody wanted a piece of him.

The wear and tear element entered really fairly quickly.

Suddenly, the coordination wasn't this phenomenon any more.

Genius is precious, but it's also dangerous.

We went to several hospitals, where they all sounded alarm bells.

They said he had to be committed.

Brenda, you found your husband turning into

really rather a violent stranger, did you?

Well, it was the illness, you see, which I was totally unprepared for.

-He cut himself.

-Mm.

-With a razor blade.

-Mm.

-Yes.

Now, Brenda, you consented that he should have some

electric shock treatment, didn't you,

for which you were much criticised?

It was not suggested, it was made totally compulsory to me.

I had no option.

Do you feel that you are as great a pianist as ever you were?

Well, I...

I feel I'm playing as well as I did, you know.

But now you're recording together, you're playing together?

-Yes.

-Yes, we are.

-Very happily.

So, life is looking rosy, in that sense?

-Oh, yes.

-Yes.

MUSIC: "Nocturne Op.9, No. 2" by Frederic Chopin

You were actually born near Nottingham, weren't you?

Yes, in Mansfield Woodhouse, a suburb of Mansfield.

What sort of family were you born into? Can you describe it to me?

Well, it was a very musical family.

My father wrote one or two essays on Berlioz

and also played the trombone and the xylophone, and did bell-ringing.

And my mother was very musical, she loved music very much.

He lived in a very modest home.

When I stayed there, it was this tiny little house,

with lots of novels and books piled in stacks everywhere.

It was almost like walking in a maze,

getting to the piano, in and out of these books.

And John read a lot, he'd read many, many, many books.

He won scholarships to three grammar schools

when he was 11.

So, music was your passion from a very early age.

You went on to the Royal Northern College of Music,

-that was in the early '50s?

-Yeah.

I mean, it was like two stars, of course I was the girls' star

at the Manchester College of Music, and he was the men's star.

So, I was set for a career.

And at the college, friends and students said, "Well, you can't...

"It's two peacocks in the same room, you can't marry."

But we had a happy wedding.

John graduated with a hugely successful Brahms D Minor Concerto

with Sir John Barbirolli and the student orchestra.

And that was the first inclination of public success.

His teacher in Switzerland

was a Hungarian pianist called Egon Petri,

who studied with Busoni, who himself, of course,

studied with Liszt, so he viewed himself in that lineage of,

if you like, great pianists,

composers with a strong virtuoso element.

'John Ogdon, 24 years old

'and certainly the most brilliant pianist now emerging in England.'

MUSIC: "Variations on a Theme by Paganini, Op.35" by Johannes Brahms

There was a massive technique, a massive command of the instrument.

But there was a huge imagination at work.

Everything sounded different to other people.

He had such technical command,

he could throw all caution to the winds and go with tremendous

risks in concert, which made his performances very exciting.

It was powerful, it was resonant, it echoed,

it made you shiver a bit.

One felt the certainty that this man was in a different world

when he was playing the piano. He was not mortal like us.

It's really quite romantic, looking back on it.

He said to me over the phone, "I did it for you, darling."

You know, which is really quite a present, wasn't it?

A declaration of love, really.

MUSIC: "Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 1" by Franz Liszt

APPLAUSE

At that time, the Brahms Competition

and the Tchaikovsky were very important.

If you won one of those, you became very famous.

He had this obsession to go to Moscow and do the best he could.

Do or die in Moscow.

And the competitions were the gateway to an international career.

You had to play enormous amounts of repertoire.

Under enormous nervous strain, obviously.

And you had to play two concertos, more or less back-to-back.

But for him, it was tailor-made,

because he had this huge force and energy

that I think just sort of doubled throughout the competition -

as he went on, it got bigger and bigger

and utterly overwhelmed his jury.

I did feel it had gone exceptionally well, and we awaited the results,

really, through an evening, into the early hours of the next day.

Volodya Ashkenazy and I were equally awarded first prize.

-ARCHIVE NEWSREEL:

-'The other first prize and gold medal

'are adjudged John Ogdon, the British pianist.'

I felt really wonderful, but stunned at the same time.

'"Music can accomplish anything," Premier Khrushchev declares.'

The first one, in 1958, was won by an American.

Can you imagine the embarrassment for the Soviet Government?

In the end, of course, John Ogdon and I shared first prize.

So, that was acceptable to them.

At least it wasn't just a foreigner with the first prize!

When Khrushchev saw John, with his great big beard,

he said, "Oh, boroda!" - that means beard - and laughed.

But he was terribly friendly.

Maybe he hadn't seen too many people with beards. I don't know why.

It was terribly funny.

The degree to which a competition win like that creates a diary

that's absolutely jammed full

can, of course, make or break an artist.

'John Ogdon, 25, arrived at London airport to a spotlight

'reception and a "well done" hug from his pretty wife...'

'The first Englishman ever to win the Tchaikovsky Contest in Moscow

'has returned to a proud welcome from his native city...'

'Music-loving Muscovites applauded for six minutes,

'chanting, "Ogdon! Ogdon!"'

'Pianist John Ogdon and his wife -

'triumph has not changed their ideals.'

'His wife Brenda is also a pianist

'and he insists on her being able to develop her own career.'

'A charming, chubby man with a beard,

'he responded with disarming modesty...'

'..And now seems likely to make his international breakthrough.'

Nobody had ever done this before.

An Englishman, winning the Tchaikovsky Prize, in Moscow?

It was unheard of, and it was intensely exciting.

He belonged to the nation from that day on.

It took some time to sink in.

Because I was a naive girl from the North of England.

There was so much attention.

There was so much from the press, that hullabaloo, I would say.

There was a hullabaloo.

The work flooded in, out of the Tchaikovsky prize,

and he went straight back to Russia and did a three-week tour.

NEWS COMMENTATOR SPEAKS IN RUSSIAN

And then, he had jobs in Italy, in Holland...

He was in America, he was in Japan, he was in Australia,

and everybody wanted a piece of him, and he couldn't say no,

John would just say yes to everything.

He was a young man, he was about 26, 27, he was really energetic.

He loved doing it.

One couldn't give more, one couldn't project more,

and it was very intense.

We were just sort of on a cloud of concerts

and, um, parties

and recording sessions, and we just went on and on.

It was lovely.

APPLAUSE

He was quite magnetic, actually, when he came onto the stage.

He grabbed the audience by the scruff of the neck,

they couldn't look anywhere else.

And he just performed so well, so naturally.

MUSIC: "Piano Concerto, Op.39" by Ferruccio Busoni

'Even though one thinks of John Ogdon as having this

'powerhouse of a technique, and there is a kind of caricature

'vision of him being huge

'and everything being enormously explosive, it was actually

'in the very quiet moments where he was at his greatest.

'And there are many quiet moments in the biggest pieces,

'and John Ogdon was wonderful at those.'

Simply, just a series of crotchets, or quarter notes.

And actually, very much in the lower part of the piano.

So, if you didn't play in a colourful way,

you wouldn't even hear the pitches properly.

But he did.

He could play more delicately than anybody I ever heard.

And I had the privilege to record and play live with Horowitz and with

Rubinstein, and they did not have a greater pianissimo than John Ogdon.

And they arguably where the two greatest legends of the 20th century.

He had this beautiful touch on the piano, and he was a big man

and you would think that he would get to that piano

and thump the living daylights out of it,

but it was beautiful, gentle...

For someone to whisper and to capture your attention that way

was something that I haven't really thought of

and it's stayed with me very much since.

And I realise that when you play that softly,

the audience is forced to become active.

You can't just let the sound wash over you.

You have to lean forward,

a little bit like if you can't hear what's going on.

And that's really what he made us do

and it's an impression that stayed with me ever since.

If you watched his hands they would literally float over the keyboard.

Big bear-like hands, but very light in touch,

and they could evoke this emotion, this great range of emotion,

from very quiet and gentle melodies to great powerhouse chords.

He played these extremely complicated works, works by Busoni,

works by Sorabji, works by Godowsky.

These people who stretched the limits

of writing for the piano to the extremes.

And the more extreme it seemed, the more John devoured it.

What a pianist!

And the contralto, the orchestra and the soloist, it was a unity.

A musical unity that until now I have not seen.

He played this colossal repertoire.

He learnt with a facility which was actually frightening.

He played the standard repertoire, of course - classic Beethoven

and Chopin and so on.

But then there was Busoni, Albeniz, you know, the whole lot.

Even for a pianist with a wide repertoire,

John's was wider still and wider.

The Dante Sonata. The Mount Everest of the keyboard, the hammerklavier.

Alkan's etude for the left hand.

Islamey, reputed to be the most difficult thing ever

written for the piano in those days.

He was a composer's gift.

A modern composers gift,

because he was a world-famous pianist who actually really liked

playing all of these pieces that no-one else would play.

He was very fond of all the British composers, they were all

personal friends of his, and he said he played everything.

It was enormous.

I don't know how any mind could have absorbed all that at all.

I remember very clearly, as if it was really yesterday,

the sonata arriving by post

from a composer called Sorabji.

A lot of the new composers in Manchester at that time,

like Max Davies and Sandy Goehr and Harry Birtwistle

and those people, they were all around

when John opened that score and, from sight, played that whole thing,

which took three hours.

There was not a problem.

It was just a purely fascinating musical experience for those

composers to have the music come alive through the hands of John.

Without preparation. The preparation was not necessary.

His brain-finger-hand coordination was just completely natural.

A facility that we can only... We can just sit back and envy.

Do you enjoy the challenge of a completely new work?

Well, yes, I do.

I think music of the present time had got so much variety

that one can enjoy, for instance,

playing works by Malcolm Williamson

or Richard Rodney Bennett or Alexander Goehr.

You yourself are a composer as well as a pianist.

The first performance of one of your compositions

inspired comparison with two of the greatest composer-pianists ever,

Liszt and Rachmaninov.

He was really more interested in composition.

He spent all his holidays...

He would spend days composing his piano concerto.

When we went to bed I noticed that John's light in his room

was still on and I would go and knock on the door

and he would be composing,

sometimes three or four o'clock in the morning.

He composed the piano concerto, he composed two piano concertos,

he composed three operas.

He composed over 200 compositions altogether.

John Ogdon was obviously primarily a pianist, but he wasn't just

a pianist who composed on the side, he was also very much a composer.

And had he decided to become simply a composer

he would have made a great one, I'm pretty sure of that.

So, John Ogdon,

you were celebrated as one of the great pianists of the world.

The concert circuit became your life.

-Yes.

-You toured Australia, the United States, Europe.

You became very, very famous.

Yes, we had a wonderful tour of Australia which we really enjoyed.

We played in Singapore, as well, which was wonderfully exciting.

-And you lived very well. You were very well off.

-Yes, yes, indeed.

They moved into this very prestigious address in London

and led a very intensive social life.

Endless parties with this celebrity and that celebrity.

It was very practical, because they had this first floor where they

had two pianos abutting each other and they did a lot of work together.

There aren't many houses in London where you could have

two concert grands placed like that.

But it was a really beautiful house and we were terribly excited

because we were very young and thought, "Gosh!"

It was actually five floors. It had a lift, which was a real novelty.

It had three grand pianos -

one on the first floor, two in the basement.

So there was a lot of music, a loss of practising.

We were spoilt, really. We had so much money, really.

A friend of mine, Jackie Digby, said,

"John Ogdon is a licence to print money, isn't he?"

He was making a lot of money, in classical terms.

You have to remember that they both came from middle-class families,

and what had happened to John and Brenda as a result of his career -

and hers, but his primarily - was that they were living the high life

and they felt, she certainly felt, "This is enjoyable.

"Long may it last."

There was a wonderful collection of quite eminent people

all of whom admired John enormously, obviously.

And he was so...

He had a sort of benign presence at the end of the table,

terribly charming always.

He had an ashtray beside him at the dining table

and he was obviously a prolific smoker,

and he'd just have a sort of drag between mouthfuls

and then occasionally say, "Yeah, great, lovely."

He was not socially at ease at all. He lacked some of the social graces.

Not that he was rude, it was just that he didn't quite know

how to start a conversation, so he would respond only.

And I think the cigarette was the kind of defence mechanism, as well.

It was a device to ward off conversation,

because he knew he wouldn't be able to cope very well with it.

There was a sort of contrast between John, the self-effacing guy,

and the style of the presentation, so to speak,

which obviously was probably masterminded by Brenda,

because she ran the social side of things.

And they did do it in great style.

I remember there was one occasion when we had supper at their house

and went in a white Rolls-Royce down to the Albert Hall.

You know, which was fun.

He was disastrous at small talk.

I remember one party we went to in Italy

and there were aristocrats there,

and you know how they chat - they never stop chatting.

And he was the guest of honour, sitting by this Lady Something,

and she said, "Mr Ogdon, you're supposed to talk. Talk! Speak!

"Converse! Converse with me.

"Converse with the lady on your other side."

He sat there like a lump.

I don't know whether he enjoyed parties

or whether he just enjoyed OUR parties.

He could loosen up very well, very easily,

and he was a very charming person in his looseness.

SHE CHUCKLES

REPORTER: On this tour the soloists were Janet Baker and John Ogdon,

but Sir John Barbirolli, who was to have conducted,

died suddenly less than a week before take-off.

REPORTER: The orchestra gave seven concerts in all -

five in Osaka and two in Tokyo.

Colleagues say all the time, and I think you would agree, John, that...

-the keenness for Western sound is fantastic here.

-Yes.

The workload was heavy

and John organised his workload with Emmy Tillet, his manager.

And some weeks were heavier than others, you know.

Some weeks there would be four concerts in a week,

the next week perhaps two concerts in a week.

But all this involved travelling.

I think he had the energy at the beginning

and the ability to play night after night after night everywhere.

But going all over the world, frequently on your own,

I think the wear and tear element entered really fairly quickly.

When you talk about the life of an international pianist,

you come to a place a day or two before,

you play the recital, you travel again.

It depends on your planning.

If he or she feels you can play every day on your highest level,

you do it!

I play around 100, just under 100 concerts a year,

which I think is actually too much

and I'm trying to cut down from that.

He apparently played over 200 a year,

and I can't even imagine how that's possible.

It's possible physically, but I don't think it's possible

emotionally, psychologically, spiritually.

I think it just dries up what's there.

With the wisdom of hindsight, he was doing too many.

But I can only blame his manager for that.

There were too many, and he complied,

so he did it.

There is a temptation to make hay while the sun shines

by everyone around you, as well as yourself,

because lots of money is to be made. And there's always a feeling

that the sun might not shine for a long time.

But to play in the Festival Hall on Tuesday night

and play in...

Concertgebouw on Wednesday night

and play in the Bunka Kaikan Hall in Tokyo on Sunday night,

because of modern transport it's possible.

But it's not a way to live.

Because, you know, of course technology has moved another

million miles since...since since John...

unfortunately...

..he's not with us. But...

I think that...

I think that, you know, that's a kind of a...

I'm sorry, I upset myself.

He had found himself...

..in the hands of...

an agency who exploited the talent without looking at the human being...

And I have to be a little careful how I say this,

but I do believe that his closest family...

..should have been more aware of all the red lights that were

flashing like crazy at that time that John did not need that lifestyle.

That financial, monetary thing was not him.

Brenda wasn't the most popular person in the musical world.

A lot of people thought that she overprotected John,

that she kept people away.

They also thought that she drove John too hard.

Though, actually, it was John who wanted to get out there,

John who wanted to play, John who wanted to travel.

It is probably true that things could have been

done on his behalf with more of a long-term view in mind, I suppose.

But that involves telling the artist not to do things.

To say, it might be tempting for you to go

and play that tour of Japan,

immediately after you've just done San Francisco,

but you mustn't do it, you must say no, because you will play

less well than if you have time to prepare for it and time to travel.

Whatever I did it was wrong, you see.

If I stopped him from doing concerts, that was wrong.

If I allowed him to do concerts and encouraged him,

that was equally wrong.

So I felt quite alone with it all.

Left to his own devices, had Brenda not come into his life,

he may not have had the same glittering career

because he might have been happy, someone said he would be happy

with a piano in a small room just playing all the time.

And I think that's probably true of him

more than most people I can think of.

Where to go, when to go, how to live, what to wear,

what to eat, all up to Brenda.

He had this sort of helpless look, "I'm a genius, look after me!"

I didn't object to doing things like that. I was happy to do it for him.

I was thrilled with him. He was wonderful. He was a great man.

It was a great privilege to be with him.

And there were very happy years between '60 and '71,

till it started going pear-shaped.

MUSIC: "Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 1" by Franz Liszt

I think that winning the Tchaikovsky competition

was not in John's best interest.

Because that threw him too quickly

into a situation where he was playing the piano all the time.

The applause was totally not necessary for John Ogdon.

It simply was not necessary.

He wanted to breathe the music, and he needed to be out somewhere

where he had tremendous space in order to breathe that.

And there is no space in an aeroplane.

There is no space in a green room. There is no space in a hotel room.

So this was all lopsided. It was crazy.

I was, of course, studying with Gordon Green who was even closer to

the situation than most, because he was getting phone calls from John.

I think he was very upset at the number of concerts

John was playing and felt that this was crazy.

That he was pushing himself and that things would go wrong.

I just think he felt a kind of compulsion to play

and also it became habitual.

You become addicted to a certain kind of way

and you think you should accept every concert.

I mean, how many times do you want to play Tchaikovsky's piano concerto?

For him, if he played it 20 times in his life,

it would have been enough.

He certainly didn't need to play it 1,000 times.

So why did he play it 1,000 times? Because he had got 1,000 fees?

To do what? I sent my kids to good schools.

I didn't have to do that.

Things started to really alarm me

when we went in the summer to Schoen Lake, summer school,

Vancouver Island, where he had been invited to teach there.

His moods were intransigent.

He had sudden rages and he was in a bad temper with me the whole time.

He flung out statements like, "I hate you," with blazing eyes.

So that was the beginning of the end I think, really.

He had another side.

My mother used to say,

"I don't believe he's got a dual personality, you're making it up.

"He must be like Jekyll & Hyde then, because I've never seen it."

I said, "I promise you, he has a dual personality."

I invited John and Brenda to dinner

in a perfectly ordinary manner, as I often did.

I had no idea there were problems brewing at all.

And there were four of us.

There was John and Brenda, and an actress called Barbara Leigh Hunt.

I first noticed that something was odd

when, after dinner, Brenda volunteered

to come out to the kitchen and help me with the washing up.

Which left John with Barbara Leigh Hunt in the front room.

And I think - I have no proof - but I surmise, I suspect,

that John felt, "How dare you leave me

"in this social situation talking to a lady I don't know?

"You should be looking after me."

I suspect that's what was going on in his head.

Because he stormed into the kitchen to retrieve Brenda

to get her back into the front room.

And it was after that, after they left,

that the real explosion occurred.

I had a red Mini car at the time and at the end of the evening,

I drove back to the terrace and went into the house.

I had the car keys in my hand.

And he suddenly turned round with blazing eyes and said,

"This charade has got to stop."

I didn't know what he meant by that.

And then he kind of lunged.

I thought he was going to lunge at me, but he lunged at a huge mirror

which was hanging on the wall and smashed it with his hand.

So I dashed out of the door -

thank God I had the keys to the car in my hand -

and got in the Mini and drove off down the terrace.

And he was chasing the car.

So then I ended up at Brian Mercer's house.

The next morning, Brenda and I went over to the house in Regent's Park.

John answered the door,

and immediately one saw that he was in real danger.

He'd cut a cross on his forehead and two other crosses on his temples

and the blood had flown down his face and it had dried and congealed,

and he didn't notice. He was unaware of what had happened.

And he spoke as if it was an ordinary day.

"Nice to see you, come in, come in."

And it was then that the nightmare started,

because I said to Brenda, look, this is not right.

Something's got to be done. We've got to take him to hospital.

We then spent the whole of Saturday, the whole of Sunday,

visiting various hospitals to try to get somebody to help.

It got worse because Brenda drove the car, I sat in the front seat,

John was in the back seat mumbling all the time, having a private

conversation with himself and then trying to take his shirt off,

trying to undo his trousers, trying to display himself

through the window of the car to the world outside.

The man had gone.

He was in a totally distressed state saying there were omens for this

and omens for that, and he was hearing voices...

It wasn't John Ogdon, the world-famous pianist,

it was a man in danger of losing his mind and he had to be controlled.

They recommended shock electric therapy treatment.

This was a terrible thing to say to Brenda.

I remember her saying to the doctor, "He doesn't belong to me..."

"He belongs to the world."

That is a drastic measure, isn't it? It will block his memory.

He won't be able to remember anything, you will ruin his talent,

and all this stuff.

So I was very alarmed about all this and we went back to The Priory.

And I said, well, there should be some other way of curing him.

"No, no," he said.

And then he consulted two of his colleagues from Harley Street.

The three of them ganged up on me and said,

"You have to sign this paper,

"otherwise you just take him home with you and do the best you can."

So, um... I signed the paper.

Daggers were drawn against me for signing that paper.

Well, mainly the people who had vested interests,

like the record company,

because they wanted John back on the road as soon as possible.

She did the right thing,

because genius is precious

but it is also dangerous,

and it had got to a point with John where the danger outweighed the good.

The physical effect of the treatment was to slow him down completely,

and to make him forget all these horrible things

that he had been dreaming about.

He forgot about the voices, he forgot about the omens,

and then he forgot about good things as well.

So, it did block the memory and he was very quiet.

He came home for Christmas and he was very quiet.

I think people tried to cover it up to start with, and it was some

sort of passing thing that would go away, but the word went round, as

it does, in any sort of concentrated circle of the profession.

Well, the line was, he is seriously ill, but to get him

back on the platform again could be the best possible cure.

A performance was set up at the Festival Hall at the end of January,

but it wasn't the old John, the fire and the magnetism wasn't there.

He was in a drugged state, really.

Suddenly, the coordination wasn't this phenomenon any more.

I never remember John hitting a wrong note.

I never remember John doing musically bizarre things

and this distortion of phrases and this inaccuracy.

Because I had grown up with him, I thought,

"John are you OK? You're playing wrong notes."

Battaglia alla Tucra, by Tilo Medek.

Played by John Ogdon and John Lill.

-BRENDA:

-The EST had disappeared by this time

and the suicidal tendencies were very predominant.

He cut his neck here. He cut his neck here. He hadn't cut his throat.

There were white tendrils hanging down here, his body.

He was covered in blood.

So I called 999 and they took him to the old University College Hospital.

And I remember standing there

and this surgeon came out and shouted at him.

He said, "What...?"

I can't tell you what he said.

"What do you think you are doing? We've got a lot of really

"sick people here and we can't be bothered

"with suicide attempts like this."

"You're wasting our time."

MUSIC ENDS DRAMATICALLY

RIPPLE OF LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

It was a very close call and just saved his life in the nick of time.

Then the doctors decided he should be certified insane.

Well, I mean, I must say it was a bit of a relief.

He always knew that there was something wrong with him.

His father had been schizophrenic.

He lived with that knowledge all his life.

And I think a piano was his way to sanity.

What in fact he was using the piano for, brilliantly,

was to tame the demons.

When he was in control of the piano, they could not be in control of him.

John was in the Maudsley and they wanted to keep him there

for six months, up to a year.

Sir John Peyton, the Minister of Transport in the Cabinet

at the time, his wife, Lady Peyton,

was on the board of Moorfields Eye Hospital,

and she'd arranged for John and I to give a recital there

in aid of the eye hospital.

So this didn't suit the Peytons,

that John was incarcerated in the Maudsley at all.

So John Peyton said, I think I'll get an early release organised.

So he did. He manoeuvred the release of John. He negotiated it somehow.

It was only six weeks since he'd had that suicide attempt,

that terrible, drastic suicide attempt, when he nearly

lost his life and then he was back playing at Moorfields Hospital.

Can you imagine that today? No.

They had no money, they lost money.

Uh...they had to downsize.

He had to take a job teaching to make money,

to because he could no longer play.

We'd been introduced and invited to go to Bloomington in America,

this wonderful music school in the University of Indiana,

and I thought we could get away

from all the pressures in this country

and it would be a more relaxing form of life for him.

It was clear that he was getting a bit better in America,

but there were some steps back, as well,

but mainly, the steps were forward.

Um...the problem was that, in the end, he wasn't really...

..used to the rigours of a university job.

What he was doing, he would skip class

and he would go and sit in this pub/cafe that the students had

called The Bear.

And the word was, "Go and find Ogden, he's in The Bear..."

"..again!"

But you see, they didn't like that. They dispensed with his services.

So I was shattered by that and I came home

because I really...I'd had enough.

I'd had enough.

I didn't want him staying with me in my flat in Bramerton Street.

We found this B&B in Onslow Square, a very upmarket B&B,

and he broke a window there

and transported himself back to the Maudsley.

He was quite happy in the Maudsley.

It was quite irritating for me to see him so happy,

surrounded by mental patients.

It was not nice.

I went to the Maudsley

and I was shown into the room where John was

and he was sitting in a large circle

with a lot of other people

and they were having some kind of group treatment.

I was just so upset to see him.

I mean, that enormous gift - to everybody -

sitting there, totally a shell.

I presume, then, during your illness,

one of your biggest fears was that you might never be able

to play in public again.

Uh...well, yes, it was, but for a time,

I had some bad chemical reactions, I think, possibly.

But I had a lot of help from Brenda in getting my playing back to normal

and I did make a comeback recital at the Queen Elizabeth Hall.

NEWSNIGHT THEME PLAYS

At the Queen Elizabeth Hall, John Ogden,

one of Britain's leading pianists of the Sixties and Seventies,

giving his first London recital

since a mental breakdown in the mid-Seventies.

I'll be asking him in a moment how he made out.

-You've got to sign something, John.

-OK.

A pianist's life is never done.

His agents believed that he was ready to make a comeback.

So he did this big concert at the Elizabeth Hall.

JOHN LAUGHS

It was a publicity exercise to get work,

because a lot of people in London and the UK,

they thought he'd been off the scene,

and a lot of people didn't realise he was in America, giving concerts.

So this was a big publicity exercise,

which paid off well.

It was a big deal, and I remember...I was there,

and I remember my piano teacher at the time, a great guy called Peter Smith,

watched the coverage on the News at Ten -

it was when you had boxes for big news events.

And he said he couldn't believe it -

in the top left-hand box was Mrs Thatcher

and in the top right-hand box was John Ogdon,

returning to play the piano.

Was it an ordeal? Did you find it was just like the old days?

Um...I enjoyed it tremendously.

I was a little nervous before the Szymanowski,

which is a complicated piece.

But I enjoyed so much the warmth of the audience

and, um...I thought they were tremendous, really.

Absolutely marvellous.

You're going back now to hospital, tonight.

How long will you be staying in hospital?

Probably another seven days, I think, or ten days, possibly.

Do you find that practising in hospital has been a good way

of keeping in touch with the piano?

Yes, very much so - they have a good piano there,

which I enjoy practising on.

It was far better that he should get out of the Maudsley

and play in public

than that he should simply stay as a man

being treated for mental illness.

It was...kinder to him.

Whether it was good for the public is a different matter.

APPLAUSE

There were nights when things did not go well.

Things would go at a colossal pace

and simply fall over themselves, become convoluted and confused

and the focus would go -

simply like a sort of giant train, out of control.

He would have been much better off

getting on a train with some of his chums

and going up to Scotland and staying with Max Davies and Stevenson

and all those people who loved him and would have taken care of him

and got him better through his music.

He shouldn't have been doing that

and going out, playing these silly pieces, yet again.

I think what I sensed was that there were still flashes

of the amazing brilliance that was there before,

but, probably because I think he was very heavily medicated,

there were moments of a sort of strangeness

that seemed chemically-induced, rather than what he wanted to do,

and that was something very sad.

Those years, from 1959 to 1971,

he never played like that again, ever.

I mean, not really.

Those were such startlingly wonderful performances -

breathtaking, spellbinding.

Never got that back, you see.

And people say, "Oh, he will get it, he will..."

No. Never got it back.

When he was playing, you saw the shadow

of what had once been genius

but wondered why it couldn't be retrieved.

There's been suggestion that the strong medications

-that you've required over the years might have taken their toll...

-Hm...

-..on coordination and things.

-Yes, that's true.

Have you ever noticed stages where John has suffered in this way?

Yes, of course. Yes.

But fortunately, he's off all that, now.

Lithium doesn't seem to have any effect at all on the coordination.

It's not called lithium in this country -

-it's called something else.

-It's called Priadel.

Yes. Well, it seems very good medication, yes.

Seems right for me.

It's quite a big debate, actually.

I think some of his best piano playing definitely was

when he was a young man, but then some of his best piano playing

was also just before he died, actually.

I remember being at his Sorabji concerts

and the critics were very clear after that

that he'd firmly re-established himself

as Britain's premier pianist.

TANNOY: Mr John Ogdon, arriving from Vancouver,

please contact the airport information desk.

Mr John Ogdon, please.

Dad was living in a halfway house.

He would play the piano for the residents there.

There was definitely a sense of community about those places,

which he enjoyed.

-Ah, John.

-Hello there.

-Oh, John, lovely!

-Oh, how are you?

-Fine, thank you.

-Nice to see you back.

-Nice to see you.

-Good trip?

-Oh, fine, thank you.

-Good, good.

Oh, I am glad.

John, what concerts did you do?

-It went terribly well. I've got some cassettes of them, actually.

-Have you? Good.

They had an opera thing, they put on two operas -

-one by Haydn...

-Yes?

..and one by a modern New York composer called Pasatieri,

Signor Deluso.

And I went to the rehearsals -

sounded marvellous.

But unfortunately, I was a bit tired and couldn't go to the performances.

HE PLAYS GENTLE CLASSICAL PIECE

And of course, they loved the fact they would get this amazing pianist,

playing their piano in their drawing room

while they were doing the crossword.

Living in a halfway house, it must have been very lonely for him.

And he was someone, although he...liked being alone,

I think, some of the time...

He really wanted to be with Brenda all the time.

Come...come and sit down.

Come and sit down.

If you want to sit down, sit, because nobody else wants to...

Oh...

Then...good...

I was trying to phone you yesterday.

Dad didn't have a piano at that stage and,

in one of the interviews that Dad gave to a newspaper,

he mentioned this, and the newspaper turned the story into

"Pianist genius doesn't have a piano."

And John Paul Getty read that article and made contact

and made it possible for him to have a piano.

He actually bought him a Steinway Model D.

"Mr G", they call him - he had that...

There was nowhere to put this piano, because it was so big,

and I was living in Harcourt Terrace at the time,

still no room in Harcourt Terrace for a grand piano.

So he said, "Oh, well, I'll buy them a flat."

SHE LAUGHS

It's like a miracle, isn't it?

Uh...Mr Getty's generosity enabled them to live together

in these two flats, upstairs-downstairs situation,

where Brenda would live downstairs in one flat

and John would live upstairs in another.

It was a good living arrangement, in separate flats, it really was.

We had found peace. Yeah. Yes. Hm.

HE PLAYS ATMOSPHERIC CLASSICAL PIECE

The pianist John Ogdon has died in a London hospital

at the age of 52.

He was suffering from bronchopneumonia.

-REPORTER:

-John Ogdon was a virtuoso pianist in the grandest tradition.

He had an extraordinarily powerful and seemingly tireless technique

and a huge memory.

Great man, great artist and devoted musician -

absolutely devoted musician.

I was very sad and very upset.

And I couldn't believe it was so early in his life,

I just couldn't believe it.

He was definitely not a healthy man -

he didn't really do much exercise and he smoked for England.

Uh, but...

And he took a lot of medication, which masked a diabetic condition

that no-one actually had spotted.

And, extremely sadly for all of us,

he had a diabetic attack and went into a coma.

He'd always been saved from these dire situations

in the past.

Miracles had happened - he'd cut his neck and been saved.

And I thought he was such a strong, in a way, physique.

But not this one. No.

No amount of recordings or films will tell you what it felt like

to be there, to hear that, to see that,

to watch it happen, to share it.

He was a very humanitarian person.

He created an aura of love around him.

In all of the recordings, they all have his personality there.

They sound different.

They don't sound like you could hear them and you'd say,

"That could be anyone." It couldn't be anyone.

It's actually him.

I don't like to say the word "genius",

but actually, I mean, he was pretty close to whatever genius is.

I mean, he could do things that were not normal, "the norm."

And of course, the legend is the legacy.

The legend's enormous and people have talked about him every since.

It's not a name that disappears.

These days, people come and go, you know.

Within a few weeks, someone can't remember someone's name

who's been at a competition - they just say, "Who?"

Not John Ogdon.