Working in a vocal studio and playing for singers’ lessons is by far the best way for an accompanist to acquire knowledge and experience. The senior singing teacher at the Royal Academy of Music was the soprano Flora Nielsen (1900-1976). At the beginning of 1971 I jumped at the chance of playing for her lessons. Flora had been the favourite student of the most distinguished lieder soprano of the pre-war period, Elena Gerhardt. Having missed countless singing opportunities on account of the war (during which she worked on a farm), Flora had alternated with Joan Cross in the role of the Female Chorus in Britten’s Rape of Lucretia and recorded lovely performances on HMV of songs by Wolf and an outstanding Schumann Requiem, Op. 90 No. 6, with Gerald Moore. By the time I met her she had made a valiant recovery from a stroke; a part of her brain had remembered all the lieder texts she had learned during a long and distinguished recital career. The German language thus became a pathway to the recovery of her speech, which was why this venerable Canadian, educated in Britain, now spoke with a slight German accent.

As a member of staff at the RAM, Flora had taught such distinguished singers as Norma Burrowes and Sheila Armstrong. Keen as mustard and recently converted by Britten and Pears to the cause of song, I became her regular pianist, playing for her lessons. Few people encouraged me to devote myself to lieder more than Flora: she somehow made me feel I had a future in this field and that I was made for the job. In her studio on the first floor of the RAM, I was ready to play for anyone and everyone who came through the door. One day a tall and beautiful young woman with long blond hair breezed in for a lesson; she was wearing a dress à la Mary Quant and carried a purple handbag that matched her purple nail varnish. Miss Nielsen was a stickler for old-fashioned propriety as far as her female students were concerned, but libidinous freedom was in the air for everyone at the time and this stylish young lady got away with it because she was clearly one of Flora’s favourites. At the time, I had no idea that she had studied for a French degree at Royal Holloway College and went on to Grenoble. She had taken up singing there with a teacher who encouraged her to explore French mélodies – the songs of Duparc and Debussy. The discovery of her voice led her to further her studies at the RAM. On that day, a turning point in my life, she handed me the accompaniment to Strauss’s Ständchen, with its very tricky piano writing. I had never played it before, but I was not a bad sight-reader and was daily improving on account of all these new challenges.

From the moment this fair stranger began to sing, I was simply enchanted to be making music with her, even as I struggled to cope with the difficulties in F sharp major that were challenging my fingers. I knew nothing of her musical credentials and was not yet a good judge of voices, but her music-making was something of elegance and delight; songs moved forward in the kind of inevitable way that chimed with my own instinctive feeling of how phrases should be shaped and phrased. Some duos between singers and pianists are born of hard work and tortured discussion, the hammering out of compromises, with personal issues obscuring or complicating the work in hand. But the minute I came into personal contact with Felicity Lott, even then universally known by fellow students as Flott (coincidentally also the German word for stylish and smart), there were no such problems or hindrances. And I could scarcely believe it when I later discovered that she felt the same way about making music with me!

As a duo we never won any competitions while we were students at the RAM. My beloved piano teacher Harry Isaacs used to say that God arranged for people to get prizes at the Academy because He knew they would get nothing in later years. There is a weird truth in this: a lot of young singers reach their highest point during their student careers. Others take time to mature, in a race between hares and tortoises. Flott was initially overlooked by those who prided themselves as judges of voices – they believed that hers was lightweight, fragile and liable to crack. Even at the time, I thought this was nit-picking, and blindness to the bigger picture: couldn’t they hear what magical things she was doing as she moved through the music?

At the Academy, greater kudos were always lavished on fuller voices, divas before their time, none of whom have ended up with anything like Flott’s fame and distinction. Singing is an art that flourishes with time and tuition; singing can always improve, but there is no teacher who can add brain cells to a God-given allocation. I remember our performing Schubert’s Der Wanderer an den Mond for the Lieder prize at the RAM with Janet Baker as judge and not getting anywhere. Over the next few years, and taking advice from a range of people, Flott went on to develop a silvery edge to the sound; the voice gradually acquired greater body, warmth and spin; the top became ever more secure and brilliant; and her ever-improving breath control added to her ever-growing vocal presence. There, those are my vocal coach ears at work! But St. Cecilia had also gifted her qualities that were to do with music, not only singing: a violinist in her youth, she had an innate and instinctive way of shaping music and a highly nuanced sense of rhythm that was as refined as any great conductor’s (Carlos Kleiber later discovered this to his joy, when working with her on Der Rosenkavalier, and kept up a friendship and copious correspondence with her). Teachers are incapable of creating these qualities in a singer; they are as much innate God-given gifts as the quality of a voice itself, but they are harder to judge and seldom acknowledged by voice-fanciers who are hung up on vocal timbre alone and often unaware of all the factors that are necessary for a singer’s enduring success and ability to negotiate the challenges of the profession.

That first meeting of ours was a kind of coup de foudre. There was a lot of laughing, right from the start, and we never stopped laughing. We began to see a lot of each other at a time in student life full of fresh and exciting musical discoveries: for example, we both fell in love with Poulenc’s songs on the same day by listening to a Régine Crespin recording; songs like Hôtel and La reine de cœur (from La Courte paille) won us over immediately and we were also bowled over by the same singer’s sumptuous recording of Ravel’s Schéhérazade. We had found these Decca LPs and the scores in the Chimes Music Shop at the top of Marylebone High Street, run by that redoubtable Francophile Mrs. Ann Knight, a kind of musical concierge.

In June 1972 Harry Isaacs, terminally ill, celebrated his 70th birthday, his last, in the Duke’s Hall at the RAM. I organised a concert in his honour, and Flott and I performed a group of Poulenc mélodies, including the famous C. On the famous closing phrase of Hôtel, “Je veux fumer”, she took out a long, twenties-style cigarette-holder, lit up a fag, and exhaled smoke sensuously during the postlude. This gesture caused much merriment (the Principal, Sir Anthony Lewis, was in the audience). No one said anything at the time about the inadvisability of lighting a cigarette on the stage of a concert hall in a royal teaching institution. Autre temps, autres mœurs.

There are too many wonderful memories, and more joy in my heart, regarding the spending of a musical lifetime with this great artist, than I am capable of enumerating in this book. But there is one story that particularly shows just what kind of a colleague Felicity Lott would prove to be. For the 13th Songmakers’ Almanac season, I had devised a demanding all-Richard Strauss programme (A Lieder Capriccio which I styled a “liederspiel Quodlibet”) modelled on Strauss’s last opera with which Flott had become closely identified at Glyndebourne and elsewhere. This programme possibly represented something of an apex in the group’s history in terms of the musical complexity of the programme, the time and trouble it had taken to “compose” it (with Strauss lieder interwoven with passages from his last opera), and the time taken to rehearse it with an almost operatic precision – even the Haushofmeister’s opening and closing the stage door of the Wigmore Hall was transformed into high art. Although only Strauss lieder were sing throughout, not operatic extracts, the tenor, Adrian Thompson, took the role of the suitor Flamand, and the baritone, Henry Herford, was Flamand’s rival, Olivier. There was a vital non-singing part for the Haushofmeister which was taken by the baritone Richard Suart of Gilbert and Sulllivan fame. The dress rehearsal went magnificently; at the end, the Countess delays her decision regarding the choice between music and poetry, by singing the song Morgen to conclude the programme.

And then, on the night before the performance, Felicity Lott’s father died.

I will never forget that following evening in December 1988 when she sang that complicated recital faultlessly in Wigmore Hall, – to the wonder of the rest of the team, four of us, who were convinced she would have to cancel, and would have gladly allowed her to do so. This was professionalism raised to an almost absurdly higher power. She refused to let her colleagues down. Moreover, towards the end of this performance she had to sing Befreit, a song about the release of death (I had created a back-story for our purposes, apologies to Clemens Krauss, that Countess Madeleine had earlier lost her husband). How Felicity continued to sing that particular song, with its heartbreaking words, with tears streaming down her cheeks I shall never know. I could not constrain my own; playing the piece is hard enough but not nearly as difficult as singing it.

Extracted from an autobiography by Graham Johnson

There could never be another Flott. She was utterly unique, both in my life and in the musical world as a whole. The gallantry with which she prepared for her final journey was all of a piece with the elegance of the rest of her life, an awe-inspiring masterclass in grace, charm, bravery, gratitude (some weeks ago, out of the blue, handwritten in the pain of the early morning hours, a long letter to me that broke my heart) and a determination to keep going, to keep travelling and remain optimistic, never complaining, even if losing so much weight that she seemed to vanish into thin air. Cared for by her wonderful and devoted daughter (and my god-daughter) Emily, she became an expert in pain management on the move, but she also chose her resting place under a tree in Bishopstone churchyard in Sussex, near where she lived by the sea. When she wrote to me about this (we corresponded frequently in the final months) a poem by Thomas Hardy, with all its greatness and brave sadness, came into my head (readers may know the setting of it for tenor, The Dance continues by Finzi); not all the poem’s strophes are quoted below:

Regret not me;
Beneath the sunny tree
I lie uncaring slumbering peacefully.

Swift as the light
I flew my faery flight;
Ecstatically I moved, and feared no night.

Now soon will come
The apple, pear, and plum
And hinds will sing, and autumn insects hum.

Again you will fare
To cider-makings rare,
And junketings; but I shall not be there.

Yet gaily sing
Until the pewter ring
Those songs we sang when we went gipsying.

And mourn not me
Beneath the yellowing tree;
For I shall mind not, slumbering peacefully.

Whatever Hardy, or the ever-self-deprecating Flott may say, it will be quite impossible not to mourn and regret this sad passing. It was my happy destiny to "go gypsying" with her for more than half a century, and there were indeed some music-makings rare. Being with her on stage for well over half a century was more than a privilege; it was a heaven-sent gift which enabled and in. a sense created, my entire career. No one else would have learned at my behest, and without complaint, all those hundreds of songs that established my Songmakers’ Almanac in the 1970s 1980s; this was the treasure-chest of repertoire she used for the rest of her life. This alone is sufficient for me to regard Flott as a celestial blessing in my life, but in so many other hearts and minds across the world there are countless different stories and reasons for remembering her with great love as a “one-off”, someone utterly inimitable.