Benjamin Luxon has died at 87

One of the UK’s finest opera singers, Benjamin Luxon, has died at the age of 87. A proud Cornishman, he was born in Redruth in 1937 and had a musical childhood. It was when he was at teacher training college after completing his national service that, as he told BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, ‘he got the bug for singing’.

He went off to the Guildhall School of Music and Drama to study. Luxon’s career flourished when he got his big break and became part of the English Opera Group in 1963, a company run by composer Benjamin Britten. He sang with them for years.

‘Britten was scary because he could tell immediately exactly what you were capable of doing,’ Luxon told The Times in 2013. ‘And if he was displeased his disapproval was extremely uncomfortable. … He said one day: ‘Ben, there’s something special coming up for you.” Nothing else. That was the first inkling I had that he was writing Owen Wingrave and wanted me for the title role.’

Luxon was indeed the star of Britten’s Owen Wingrave. The opera was performed at Snape in Suffolk and broadcast on television, and also staged at Covent Garden. That wasn’t the baritone’s first appearance at the Royal Opera House – he’d previously appeared in Peter Maxwell Davies’s Taverner – nor would it be his last. A guest artist at opera houses around the UK and Europe, he became known for roles including Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, Berg’s Wozzeck and Mozart’s Don Giovanni.

Schubert was one of his musical gods, and he recorded the song-cycles Winterreise and Die Schöne Müllerin for Chandos; his recording legacy more widely includes over 100 recordings. English song was another passion, as were folk and light music. In 1986 Luxon was made CBE for his services to British music.

In the 1990s, he began to experience hearing loss and eventually decided to retire from singing later that decade. However, after a cochlear implant, he returned to the stage as a narrator and reciter. Bass Matthew Rose was among those who have paid tribute to him: ‘Wonderful Benjamin Luxon. A singer like very few, a man so unique and able, and a brilliant career interrupted by fate far too early. His legacy will live on.’