Oral History: Colin Mackerras

Interviewer: Chih-yu Shih

Transcriber:

Dates: 2009.08.14, 17, 18

Place: Honorable Guest Room, College of Social Science, NationalTaiwanUniversity

2009.08.14

Interviewer: Why don’t we just begin with your path of growth intellectually as well as socially?

Colin Mackerras: Okay. Please interrupt if you want me to add something more or one of you doesn’t understand. I was brought up in Sydney. And both my parents were also born and brought up in Sydney, so we’re from Sydney. I had an ancestor who came to Australia from England, a man called Isaac Nathan, who was Jewish. He claimed to be descended from the last kind of Poland, but no one could ever ascertain whether that was true or not. He left England because he got into some shady deal with King William IV, who ruled from 1830 to 1837, and when Queen Victoria came in, she was very suspicious of this. She came to the throne in 1837, and was very distrustful of Isaac Nathan, and so was her first Prime Minister, a man called Lord Melbourne, after whom the city of Melbourne is called. Isaac Nathan kept asking for money for a job he said he had done for William IV, but neither Lord Melbourne nor Victoria was prepared to honour this. So Nathan felt he had to leave England, and that was why he went to Australia, In fact he went to Melbourne, but he wouldn’t live there, because it was named after Lord Melbourne, whom he hated.

Isaac Nathan settled in Sydney in 1841, and then his descendents were in Sydney. These included my mother, and of course me and my brothers and sisters. My mother was a very remarkable woman in a lot of ways. She was very musical, and she was very intelligent, and intellectual. She did a university degree at the University of Sydney at a time when very few women did, because this was in the second decade of the twentieth century. However, despite being so intelligent, she didn’t have a career, because women didn’t in those days. Instead, however, she did write about her ancestors, and she did pass on a great deal of her cultural and academic interests to her children, and I owe her a lot in that respect.

I must say one other thing about her, which I’ll come back to later. She was very Europe-based. She loved Europe, and she didn’t really like Australia much, and she had no time for Asia. Her favourite place was Europe. She liked to go to Spain, she converted to Catholicism, and became very dedicated. That influenced me for a while, though not for long.

Now myself, I have been interested in music ever since I was a child. And I remember my eldest brother Charles, playing music on the gramophone. I remember, there are some works I cannot remember the time when I did not know them, like the Jupiter Symphony by Mozart, and the other last Mozart symphonies. I loved them and I still love them, and I owe this love of music to my brothers. My eldest brother left Australia, and went to England in 1947 and he has become very well-known as a conductor. He conducts orchestras all over the world. He hasn’t been to Taiwan, he should come here, but I’m afraid he’s too old now.

Interviewer: Does he teach?

CM: He used to teach, but he doesn’t now because he’s getting old. He’s 83 now. He still makes recordings, with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. He recently made a complete recording of the nine Beethoven Symphonies. Also, he has just conducted a Mozart opera in Wales. He’s very distinguished.

So I became interested in music through my mother and through him. When I was a child, I used to play records of Western operas and Western symphonies, and in particular I got very interested in Richard Wagner. Is Wagner ever performed in Taiwan? I know in China it has occasionally been performed. The Ring Cycle of four enormous operas has once been performed in China, but it’s very rare. However, things are getting much better in China now, they have a NationalCenter for the Performing Arts in Beijing, which is actually very good.

Anyway, so my brother was very interested in those operas. This is relevant to me, because I later transferred my interest in Western opera to Chinese opera, And my love for Western opera was one of the reasons why I got interested in Chinese opera as well. Is this interesting?

Interviewer: Yes!

CM: Well, I’ll just continue then. I recall that I got to know all of the Wagner operas and a lot of the Mozart operas when I was in my teens, and I loved them so much that I could remember them by heart. I didn’t learn them by heart, but I loved them so much that I could remember them by heart. Even now, I can remember much of them. My long-term memory is good, but my short-term memory is very bad.

I studied a secondary school, the SydneyGrammar School, which is actually the oldest school in Sydney, and it’s quite well known. My father went there, and my brother went there, not Charles but my second brother Alastair, he was the headmaster there for a long time. I was very good at languages. I studied French and German and did very well at them. Then I went to SydneyUniversity, and I studied music and modern history, which was all European history, no Asian history or Australian history. I also studied French and German, and I did very well in those. When I got to the end of the year, I was wondering if I should continue this university degree or change to something else.

At that time, my mother saw and advertisement in the paper for Asian studies scholarships. They were introduced in Canberra, by the Menzies government, and I think they were mainly focused on Japanese, because the Menzies government signed an agreement on trade with Japan in the late 1950s. As you know, there was still quite strong anti-Japanese feeling throughout the world and in particular in Australia, because of the war, even in the 1950s. And it was considered something of a breakthrough by the Menzies government to befriend Japan because he argued we can’t go on being enemies. The war is over and we must become friends. As you know, in China, even now, there’s a lot of anti-Japanese feeling.

Anyway, Menzies reached this agreement with Japan and then followed it up with offering money to teach Japanese and Asian languages in Australia. Now that had been extremely rare before then, in fact it had been almost nothing. There was a professor at the University of Sydney, but he didn’t make much of an impact. Then after the war, the Chifley government, invited a man called Charles Patrick Fitzgerald to come to Canberra to head a department of Far Eastern History. Fitzgerald was very well known. He wrote about the Bai People, quite a path-breaking book, called the Tower of Five Glories., The Bai people are centred in Dali in Yunnan province.

I should perhaps add that Ben Chifley was the leader of the Labor Party. In Australia, The Labor Party tends to be a bit left-wing. Then there’s the conservative parties called the Liberal National Coalition. The Labor party was in government from 1942-1949 and then the Liberal leader Robert Gordon Menzies won the election, remaining in office as prime minister from 1949 until 1966. Even after he retired, the conservative parties remained in government until 1972. Anyway, it was Menzies who offered these scholarships to study Asian studies in Canberra.

Fitzgerald was a great student of China, and wrote a great deal about it. He wrote a book called China: A Short Cultural History, which was published in the mid-30s, and that had a very big impact. It was perhaps the earliest general cultural history of China in English, certainly one of the earliest. He was a very good scholar and I got to know him very well because he encouraged me. He is no relation to John Fitzgerald, or Stephen FitzGerald, the latter being the first ambassador from Australia to the PRC. Anyway, Patrick Fitzgerald was a very good scholar and set up Chinese studies in Canberra, but only for research, not for teaching.

When the Menzies government advertised these scholarships, my mother suggested to me that I should apply. Looking back, I think that was remarkable. She was influenced by the fear of China that was very strong in the 1950s. We had the fear that they were going to come and invade Australia. And she believed that. But she thought that China would be important for Australia’s future, and she encouraged me to apply for a scholarship. I thank her for that because I got one, and would not have thought to apply if she had not suggested it to me. Her suggesting to me to apply for the scholarship changed my life.

On a personal note, the woman who was later to become my wife heard that I had gotten a scholarship. We didn’t know each other well then, although we’d studied French together at the University of Sydney. When she heard that I got the scholarship, she wrote to me to ask me about it. She applied for a scholarship too and got one, and that’s how we met. We became very good friends when we did Asian studies together. She emphasized Japanese studies, but then later on she changed to Chinese studies. She has written a textbook on Chinese language. I may mention her a bit later also, because of that textbook.

Anyway, at Canberra, there was a man who was asked to set up Chinese and Asian studies, named Hans Bielenstein. He was a Swedish aristocrat. He did not approve of Fitzgerald, regarding him as rather low-class, who didn’t study the Chinese sources as greatly as he might have done, although he did intensive work on the Bai. Hans Bielenstein’s work was on the Han Dynasty. He wrote extensively on the fall of the Han Dynasty and the Wang Meng interregnum, and then the restoration of the Han Dynasty in 9 AD. I think that was very interesting work. He came up with the view that the reason why was the change in course of the Yellow River. In other words he associated China’s geography and physical environment with its history. I think that’s quite an interesting way of looking at it. There are many people who think that you shouldn’t look at the environment as a mover of history, but other people think the reverse, namely that the physical environment has a big impact on society. Bielenstein was very conservative, and his views about politics were very conservative. He came here to Taiwan, but he wouldn’t have anything to do with the PRC. He thought that was the devil, that it was evil. He went to ColumbiaUniversity and took up a position there.

There was also a woman called Joyce Ackroyd who taught Japanese language. One of the things about Hans Bielenstein was that he taught historical texts. He didn’t teach contemporary language, only historical texts. He didn’t want to study contemporary times, only the past. That’s one view and it’s a view I respect, but my personal view is that we should study both, because Chinese history, as well as history in general, have a lot of impact on the present and that’s why I think it’s useful to understand both. Anyway, Bielenstein began to teach me Chinese, The methodology of language training he used was not very good, so I didn’t actually learn that much from him. But there was a woman called Vieta Rimsky-Korsakov, who was Russian, and a relation of the famous musical composer of the same name. She had lived in China and knew Chinese well. She was also a good teacher, so I learned a good deal from her. Still the emphasis in the course was on the study of China, rather than the language. I regret that in a way, but it was a good beginning.

Australia at that time was very anti-Asian, and people didn’t take any notice of Asia. In particular it was very anti-China, but it was also anti-Japan because of World War II. It just wasn’t fashionable to learn about Asia. I was one of the first, actually, who broke that mould. I don’t regret that at all.

Interviewer: I’m just waiting for you to tell us about your interest and curiosity in Chinese opera? How was that a factor?

CM: Now should I talk about opera, because we have plenty of time, or should we talk about ethnicity?

Interviewer: Why don’t you just continue on your path?

CM: Alright then, I’ll continue on.

Interviewer: I think all this is very new to us, and it’s very interesting.

CM: Let me talk a little bit about my time in Canberra. I studied to Canberra from 1958 to 1961. On the world scene, that was the time of Mao Zedong, the Great Leap Forward and the big famine. The Korean War of course had finished by then. As for Australia, it was under the Menzies government and it was following a very, very pro-American line in its foreign policy, but in terms of its education and social policy it was still very pro-British. In those days, not many young people went abroad. But I came from a very well-off family and my mother wanted me to go abroad, but she wanted me to go to England, not to Asia. She thought England was the best place to go and in Canberra that was still the thinking I had. It wasn’t a bad decision in some ways, but I think it would have been better to go to Asia already. Then later on I came to Asia.

I continued learning Chinese history; I learned Japanese history, and a bit about Indian history, although not a lot of Indian. But I took very little interest in politics, and the idea of studying the modern history of China or the modern history of East Asia, you just didn’t do that. I didn’t study modern Chinese history or modern Japanese history in Asia. I did, however, get interested in student politics and I was the president of the student association for a year. I was a Catholic in those days, influenced by my mother, and a lot of nuns came to vote for me. It was very strange. But I wasn’t left or right. We didn’t do anything like that we just organized student functions and outings and made recommendations to the university administration.

Now when I finished that, I did an honours degree, and in that degree I wrote a dissertation. I remember writing it on the neo-Confucianists, the two Cheng brothers, Zhou Dunyi, and Zhu Xi. In the meantime, I got very interested in some European Medieval philosophies and what the Catholic Church described as heresies, in particular one called the Albigenses, the Albigensian heresy, which was based on Manichaeism. This has two main ideas. One is that all material things are evil and all spiritual things are good. The other idea is that there are three moments. The first is when evil and good are separated, the second is when they’re together, which is now, and the third one is when they’re separated again. This means that they’re very puritanical, they don’t like things like sex or eating or banquets, and they don’t drink. I got interested in this idea, I didn’t like it, but I did find it interesting. There is a people called the Uighurs, who have been a lot in the news recently, but in the eighth century, they established a kingdom, focused in what is now Mongolia, and they converted to Manichaeism in 762. I became very interested in these people and I decided to do a thesis about them. I was able to go to Cambridge. The professor there was Edwin Pulleyblank, who wrote a book called The Background of the Rebellion of An Lu-shan. Anyway, The An Lushan rebellion went from 755 to 763. It changed the face of China, really, it was very influential in Chinese history. I went to Cambridge, and studied this period with Pulleyblank. The connection with the Uighurs is that the Uighurs set up a kingdom, and they helped the Tang Dynasty to suppress the An Lushan rebellion. They sent troops at the request of the Chinese emperor. Xuanzong, he was the emperor from 712 to 756. But he abdicated because of the An Lushan Rebellion. His successor Suzong invited the Uighurs to send troops to suppress the An Lushan Rebellion. I found that extremely interesting. While the Uighur Kaghan actually came to China, he met some Manichaeans in Luoyang, the second capital. The capital Chang’an (present-dayXi’an) was occupied by the An Lushan forces for several years. After they had recaptured Chang’an, the Uighurs and the Tang forces went to recapture Luoyang. The Uighur Kaghan met with some Manichaeans in a temple, and they converted him to Manichaeism. That is the only time in history, as far as I know, where a whole people in Eastern Asiaconverted to Manichaeism. I found that very, very interesting. I did a thesis about them for my master’s degree, and I later published it, a book called The UighurEmpire. It had a translation, together with annotation, of the chapters on the Uighurs in the Xin Tangshu and the Jiu Tangshu.

One thing is that the Chinese were not interested in Manichaeism. It’s a very un-Chinese religion because it hates everything material. I don’t need to tell you that Chinese people love banquets and material things. Why would the Chinese people be interested in that religion? But the Tang Dynasty tolerated it, because they were very tolerant in terms of religion. Anyway, the Uighurs converted to Manichaeism, and it was because of the influence of their participation in the An Lushan rebellion. The Chinese sources don’t have a lot about Manichaeism, but there’s a lot of Turkic and Uighur sources which were translated into German by a woman called Ann-Marie von Gabain and her mentor called W. Bang. They translated a lot of texts into German, and I knew German so I could use their work.