PROFILE Earl Of Harewood Wins His Own Status

Press, Volume C, Issue 29480, 5 April 1961, Page 20

PROFILE Earl Of Harewood Wins His Own Status

IBP

SIMON KAVANAUGH]

LONDON. Muffled in a heavy overcoat, he drew hardly a stare from the Sunday sightseers as he wandered abroad in the thin Moscow sunshine. In the fashionable Hotel National he sat unnoticed over his Georgian wine and caviare as young Russians stomped around him to Dixieland strains. No protocol marked his coming. No strolling Muscovite could ever have guessed that. his presence there made a little sliver of history: the first visit to the U.S.S.R. by a member of the British Royal Family since the Revolution. This pleased him. The smile was almost grateful on the face of this rather intense, earnestly good-looking young man of 38. Which is almost the whole point about George Henry Hubert Lascelles, cousin of Queen, seventh Earl of Harewood. Accepted A* Professional The anonymity, which he cannot always win so readily. meant that he had been accepted at a quite different level that matters to him at least as much: As a professional. For the seventh Earl is also one of the world’s leading musical administrators; a top opera man and, since last year, the hard-working artistic director of the Edinburgh International Festival. He was the first member of the Royal Family to shape for himself a real career, based on his own expert knowledge. There was rarely a neater object lesson in contemporary reality for Dickens - reading Muscovites. Here was a young man of Royal blood who has won through to responsibility not because of status, but despite it and on merit. In an odd kind of way, the legend of titled ease is almost more easily stifled for this earl behind the Iron Curtain than at home. When first he went to work at Convent Garden, Lord Harewood has revealed, the only real fear of the musical Establishment was that they would be accused of taking him on the strength of his name. Even now, when he returns from abroad sometimes, there are those who ask. in the way one has always been used to asking an English Lord, whether it has been business or pleasure. The last time it happened, just before Christmas, there was an understandable note of asperity in his voice as he replied: “I have slept in six different places for the last six nights. I would hardly call that pleasure.” But, on the whole. Lord Harewood has made his point. He is an accepted authority; and exhilaratingly clear of the tight, restrictive little world of countrysquire royalty that was never nearly satisfying enough for young royal gentlemen of purpose and imagination. Musical Kingdom His first appearance on a T.V. “Brains Trust” was intended as a gimmick. Soon the producers, astonished at his excellence, were inviting him back as a first-rate performer. Now he does programmes for sixthformers too. He is royalty still; but a new kind, with a musical kingdom. It is the proof of Lord Harewood’s resolve to do a real job well that, when he took on the Festival directorship, it had to be on his own terms: with a guaranteed free hand in programmebuilding. There will be no cosy, comfortable spate of Beethoven and Brahms at his first. Edinburgh Festival this year. There will be shocks and excitement: overtones of Schoenberg and Liszt. It Is the proof of his achievement that he can go as a plain citizen to Russia, at the personal invitation of the Soviet Government, to

negotiate the appearance of famous Russian performers at the 1962 Festival.

It is no surprise to find so purposeful a career wellrooted; that young Lascelles had always a fair idea of what he sought from life. Or that even as a teen-age Eton schoolboy, tending to shut himself away with operatic records, he had an inkling already that a venerable family tradition and the rolling acres of a North Yorkshire manor house were never going to be enough. The war may well have pressed things further. As a Grenadier Guards captain, wounded and taken prisoner in Italy in 1944, he found an unexpected opportunity to think things out for himself Opposes Hanging Searching his heart in captivity, he found himself in other ways too. One striking non-musical result is that he now comes out strongly and publicly as a campaigner against capital punishment: a royal earl nearer the touchline of worldly affairs than any before him. But it was always mainly music. He began, when peace returned, by graduating at King's College, Cambridge (he wants that for his children too, although they are not down for Eton). And, with nothing more musically significant in his background than a passionately operatic grandfather who died when he was six, he embarked determinedly on his chosen course. He found stimulation in working as music critic for a left-wing magazine. He began to be known as a patron of music and musicians. Happy Marriage Then, one day, he slipped into a back pew at the Aldeburgh Festival to hear a recital by a beautiful, gifted, dark-eyed young Viennese pianist They talked afterwards — and a royal love story began. It might have been a story with a different ending had not Lord Harewood’s mother, the Princess Royal, been sympathetic from the start to the idea of an heir-in-line

discarding Debrett for true love’s sake. So Maria Stein from Vienna, the daughter of music publisher Erwin Stein, went home to tea at St. James’s Palace: and soon the young couple were seen on every musical occasion together. And. after a fairy-tale wedding in 1949, a very special kind of social life began to revolve about a quiet 12-roomed house in Orme Square. Kensington. Composers, long-haired and even foreign, were seen calling there; musicians famous and obscure. There was usually a musical committee lady or two for lunch with the Countess; and always a wealth of like minds at the dinner-parties that involved no protocol, and the Earl serving from the buffet. Lord Harewood was becoming known, too, for his association with the English Opera Group; then as the founder and first editor of the magazine "Opera.” In 1951 he gave up his editorship to join the staff of Convent Garden Opera, first as an administrative assistant and then as Controller of Opera Planning. Notable Impression By now there was no doubt he was making a notable, impression on the musical world, which is tougher and less impressionable than it sometimes seems. It has all worked out defiantly well. It takes more than a titled dilettante to navigate to triuphant success, as Lord Harewood did three years ago, an undertaking like Leeds Centenary Festival. The royal patron is no figurehead to such bodies as the Music Advisory Committee of the British Council, the English Stage Society and the Royal Manchester College of Music. Nor do struggling young performers needing a leg up fail to get it, once Lord Harewood knows about it. To win his freedom the professional way, he has had to show proof of mettle more than other men. And now the Princess Royal, who fought for his right to do it, is content to be left almost alone to do the local honours at Harewood House, the family home. Lord Harewood sees little of his 7,000 acres; he cannot be there to shape the estate improvements for which £69,000 worth of family jewels were sold last January. He has a job to do. And he finds it a very adequate reward indeed to be able to sit in the Moscow Hall of Unions where Francis Gary Powers was tried, and to listen unrecognised to an orchestral concert. Then to see about booking the Leningrad Symphony Orchestra for Britain. "Yes. I am happy,” he says.’T’m doing the sort of thing that I like doing and that I know I do better than I would anything else.” To the seventh Earl, there is nothing at all special about any of this. He is just another busy professional chap. Which is precisely what makes him special.