David Nice writes: A year ago, I phoned to speak to Sir Charles Mackerras (obituary, 16 July), and Lady Mackerras told me candidly that he was receiving treatment for myeloma. So I prepared for the worst; and yet, what a year of vintage Mackerras performances we've had.
Not all the ones promised, because with typical common sense he sometimes robbed Peter to pay Paul. Withdrawing in January from his role in an English-language recording of Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos – Richard Armstrong took over the baton – probably bought him time to conduct the opera of which he has made unquestionably the Desert Island recording, Janacek's Cunning Little Vixen, at Covent Garden. Handing over to Ilan Volkov for what should have been his last performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment no doubt permitted his final fling at Glyndebourne with Mozart's Così Fan Tutte.
He felt his waning physical abilities acutely. Going to see him backstage after a Wagner concert with the Philharmonia in December last year, I found him apologetic for "conducting chunks, when I wish I still had the strength for the complete operas". But what an event that was: a still hypercharged Prelude and Venusberg sequence from Tannhäuser, a totally organic Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde, a lightning-flash tour through Götterdämmerung excerpts, with the magnificent Christine Brewer by his side for extra solidity. A couple of days later, he turned to the flipside of German music, Beethoven in genial mood, with an unfussy, flowing Pastoral Symphony, and excerpts from Act 2 of Humperdinck's Hänsel und Gretel.
By the time of the Vixen, he was visibly tiring and the sheer effort began to take its toll; but still there was no fuss. As a colleague put it to me on the day the news of his death broke, he was the Forester of Janacek's wisest opera, the man who comes to realise that everything is part of the natural cycle and that you go on giving what you do best until it is time to stop.
