Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.

For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk.

Radio 4. My castaway this week is the Opera Director John Coppley. Throughout his 60 year

career he's worked with all the greats at the major opera houses of the world. His acclaimed

production of Laboem is still performed after more than 30 years. He was 10 when he

says he caught opera like the measles.

Yet with parents who would lock up the piano to stop him playing,

it seems remarkable he established a career in music at all.

They wanted him to be a priest.

I was a little bit of a star, he says,

and that's what my family didn't like.

You weren't supposed to be a star.

You'd end up getting a thick ear and being called a big girl's blouse.

John Coppley, Desert Islandists in fact holds a special place in your family folklore.

Tell me about the music you used to...

Well, the introduction to this program was used in a pantomime which my parents took me. We went to the panto always and it was da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da. And it was the ballet sequence and I went home and I was already theatre mad and I learned

a little dance that went to it so whenever the desert time discs came on I used to get up and do

my little dance and my father would give me a great cloud

at the time to see big girls blouse. And did your father have a point insofar as you know the big girls

blouse thing? it has it been a

professional career full of tantrums and tiaras what you mean the people I've

...