Sir Edward Downes died he was 85

Sir Edward Thomas Downes died he was 85, he was an English conductor, specialising in opera.
(17 June 1924 – 10 July 2009)

Known as Ted Downes, he was associated with the Royal Opera House from 1952, and with Opera Australia from 1970. He was also well known for his long working relationship with the BBC Philharmonic and for working with the Netherlands Radio Orchestra. Within the field of opera, he was particularly known as a conductor of Verdi.

He and his wife both committed assisted suicide at the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland on 10 July 2009, an event that received significant publicity.

Downes was born in Birmingham, England on 17 June 1924, son of a bank teller. He took up the piano and violin when he was five and sang as a boy chorister. At age sixteen he won a scholarship to the University of Birmingham where he studied English literature and music, and began playing the cor anglais. Downes's pursuit of conducting was aided by a two-year Carnegie scholarship from the University of Aberdeen, which allowed him to study with Hermann Scherchen after postgraduate studies at the Royal College of Music.^[1]

In the 1960s, he married Joan, a dancer with the Royal Ballet. She later became a choreographer and television producer. They had two children: a son, Caractacus, (born December 1967), who is a musician and recording engineer, and a daughter Boudicca, a video producer.

The conductor's long and fruitful association with the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, began in 1952 with his appointment as an assistant to Rafael Kubelík. His first job was prompting Maria Callas.^[1] He remained a company member for 17 years, returning annually thereafter as a guest conductor before assuming the post of Associate Music Director in 1991. Downes conducted at least 950 performances of 49 operas at Covent Garden.^[2]

Elsewhere, he became the Australian Opera's Music Director in 1970, conducting the first performance in the Sydney Opera House in 1973^[1] (the Australian premiere of War and Peace by Sergei Prokofiev). He was Chief Conductor of the Netherlands Radio Orchestra until 1983. While Downes worked with many of the world's symphony orchestras, he enjoyed a particularly long relationship with the BBC Philharmonic (formerly the BBC Northern Symphony Orchestra), serving as its Chief Guest Conductor, then Principal Conductor,^[3] and finally as Conductor Emeritus.

Downes was noted for his championing of British music, and for Prokofiev and Verdi. He advocated the symphonies of George Lloyd and premiered works by Peter Maxwell Davies and Malcolm Arnold. His passion for Prokofiev was felt in performances of both major and lesser-known Prokofiev scores throughout the world. He conducted the British première of War and Peace in a concert performance at Leeds Town Hall in 1967, and orchestrated Prokofiev's one-act opera Maddalena in 1979 and subsequently gave its world premiere.

Downes's first experience of conducting the music of Verdi came in 1953 when Rafael Kubelík withdrew from a Covent Garden Otello and Downes led the opera with no rehearsal. He felt on home ground, and then championed Verdi revivals in England. He conducted 25 of Verdi's 28 operas, and devised the idea to perform all of them in time for the 2001 centenary of the composer's death. Downes's regret was that he never conducted Alzira, Un Giorno di Regno or, especially, Les vêpres siciliennes. The conductor said: "I seemed to understand Verdi as a person. He was a peasant. He had one foot in heaven and one on the earth. And this is why he appeals to all classes of people, from those who know everything about music to those who are hearing it for the first time."^[4]

Downes was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 1986 New Year Honours,^[5] and knighted in the 1991 Queen's Birthday Honours.^[6]

Eighty five year old Downes and his 74 year old wife ended their lives by assisted suicide at the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland on 10 July 2009. Their children issued a statement speaking of "serious health problems" suffered by the couple, including Lady Downes's terminal cancer and Sir Edward's blindness.^[7][8] The statement issued by the couple's children said that while Downes could go on living with his deafness and blindness, he did not want to do so after his wife was diagnosed with terminal cancer.^[1]