The glorious elitism of Glyndebourne
Every visit to the ancestral pile of the Christie family brings joy and we lucky folk who caught the new production of Parsifal were granted double rations. Wagner's final music drama is a first for Glyndebourne and completes a triptych of the Master's late work, following productions of Tristan und Isolde and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. As Larkin wrote of Sidney Bechet: 'Oh play that thing!'
Music-lovers have been coming to this blessed plot of land outside Lewes since 1934 when John Christie invited three refugees from Germany to establish a shrine to Mozart.
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Never more comfortable than with a keyboard at his fingertips, Billy Joel was holidaying on the exclusive island of St Barts in 1983 when he happened upon a piano at the local bar. Pink from sunburn and dressed in a garish Hawaiian shirt, his playing had started to attract a crowd at the same time as a nearby fashion photoshoot wrapped. Billy suddenly found himself faced with the vision of not only supermodel Christie Brinkley, but also her fellow supermodel Elle Macpherson, who was 'draping this gorgeous body all over the place to try and get his attention,' as Christie puts it. A third young woman approached the piano, saying, 'I can sing too,' only for Billy, busy chatting up both Elle and Christie, to brush her off with a, 'Hey, don't bother me, kid.' As he later found out, the young woman could indeed sing. 'It was,' he says, somewhat chastened, 'Whitney freaking Houston.' 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Growing up in Hicksville, on Long Island in New York, Billy was four when he started playing the piano, following in the footsteps of his father Howard, an accomplished amateur classical pianist. He was just eight when Howard left the family, and Billy recalls the struggles his mother Rosalind faced raising him and his sister Judy alone. 'We were kind of outcasts,' he says. 'We didn't have a new car, we didn't have a dad, we were the Jews. We didn't have any money. Sometimes we didn't have any food.' Rosalind drank to assuage her loneliness and her unpredictable moods cast an occasional pall over the family. 'We knew that there was something very wrong, that she was most likely bipolar,' says Judy. 'We just didn't know the word at the time.' Yet despite their struggles, Rosalind always ensured that there was money to pay for Billy's piano lessons. 'Mom was my cheerleader,' he says. 'She never gave up.' Billy was 20 when he formed the band Attila with his good friend Jon Small and promptly moved in with him, Jon's wife Elizabeth Weber and their young son Sean. But when Billy and Elizabeth began an affair, the trio imploded. 'I felt very, very guilty about it,' Billy admits. 'They had a child. I felt like a home-wrecker.' When the affair was revealed, Elizabeth took off without either man, and with his relationship with Jon in tatters, Billy slept in launderettes, drinking heavily to erase the pain. 'Tomorrow is going to be just like today and today sucks,' he surmised, 'so I just thought I'd end it all.' When his first attempt to die by suicide with sleeping pills landed him in a coma (Judy had unwittingly given him the pills to help him sleep), he tried again by drinking furniture polish. It was Jon who took him to the hospital and who, says Billy, 'saved my life'. After a brief stint in a psychiatric observation ward, Billy vowed thereafter to channel all his emotions into music. And what music it turned out to be. The documentary – co-executive produced by Tom Hanks and split into two films, each two-and-a-half hours long – charts the stories behind hits such as Tell Her About It and The River Of Dreams. Fans such as Bruce Springsteen, Paul McCartney and Pink marvel at the 76-year-old's musical range, and at one point Billy even plays Uptown Girl in the style of a Mozart piece. Yet by his own admission, 'I couldn't recognise a hit if I stepped on it.' When he eventually got back together with Elizabeth, marrying her in 1973, he wrote numerous songs about her – including one he dismissed as 'too mushy'. Elizabeth pushed him to release it as a single and the resulting smash hit Just The Way You Are marked a big turning point in his career. Paul McCartney describes it as the song he always wished he'd written. Elizabeth became Billy's manager and his career went from strength to strength, but their relationship started to suffer. A woman in the man's world of 70s rock, the formidable Elizabeth was charged with not only having to keep Billy and his unruly band to schedule, but also to protect her son Sean. 'There was a lot of alcohol use and eventually a lot of drug use,' says Elizabeth of that period. 'It was just out of control in a way that I was frightened.' Sean was a teenager at the time and he admits, 'I was a very young user of drugs and alcohol. 'I was going down the very same roads that all those guys were because I looked up to them.' When Billy was involved in a near-fatal motorbike accident in 1982, breaking his leg, arm and wrist, Elizabeth left her house key on his hospital tray and walked out. 'There was no way that I could stand by and watch him kill himself,' she says. A devastated Billy looked at the key and lamented, 'She's not going to be there to hear my music any more.' By the following year, however, Billy had found himself a new muse in Christie Brinkley – but while her appearance in the video for Uptown Girl is very well-known, what is more notable is the fact that the video was produced by Jon Small – the man whose wife Billy had stolen. 'I finally got over it,' says Jon. The early days of Billy's marriage to Christie were, in her words, 'so much fun, so great'. Their happiness was heightened by the arrival of their daughter Alexa in 1985. 'I wanted to be the dad I didn't have,' says Billy. A wealthy star by this point, Billy was planning to buy a house, but was shocked to be told that funding the purchase would be a problem. Frank Weber, Elizabeth's brother, had taken over from her as his manager and as Christie says in the film, she believed Frank was ripping Billy off. 'Billy did not want to hear that,' she says, crying as she recalls how Billy trusted his former brother-in-law 'more than he trusted me, which of course hurt me'. In 1989, Billy sued Frank for $90 million (£67 million). He was eventually awarded $2 million by the court in a partial judgment against Weber, but had to go back on the road to recoup his earnings. Eventually, the stresses of touring and being away from his family started to take their toll and he began drinking heavily once more. 'He couldn't really remember what he did when he was drinking,' says Christie. 'So he didn't really know how he could hurt people.' When, after almost ten years of marriage, Christie told him she couldn't take any more, Billy replied with a cursory, 'Yeah, fine. Go.' Underneath, however, he was 'devastated'. As a man seemingly more comfortable expressing himself in song than in everyday life, the pain of not seeing his daughter enough led him down a new musical path. Eschewing words to focus purely on music, in 2001 he released the album Fantasies & Delusions, which topped the US Billboard classical charts for 18 weeks. Three years later he embarked on a third marriage, to chef Katie Lee, 32 years his junior. She encouraged him to enter the Betty Ford Clinic to deal with his alcohol issues. 'I didn't want to do it,' he admits. They divorced after five years and, having finally made back the money he had lost, Billy said to Jon over dinner one night, 'I've got a half a billion dollars and nobody to love.' He remedied that in 2015 by marrying his current wife, Alexis Roderick, 43, with whom he has two daughters, Della, nine, and Remy, seven. Billy missed the film's premiere in New York last month after being diagnosed with normal pressure hydrocephalus (NPH), a treatable condition in which fluid builds up on the brain and causes mobility and cognitive problems. Susan Lacy, who directed the documentary with Jessica Levin, insists he's 'going to be fine'. Certainly Billy has managed to weather more challenges in his life than most. 'I think music saved my life,' he remarks at the end of the film. 'It gave me a reason to live.' Billy Joel: And So It Goes, Saturday 2 August, Sky Documentaries/NOW.
