Lady Natasha Spender

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 7 January 2007

⏱️ 36 minutes

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Summary

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the musician Lady Natasha Spender. She was born at the end of the First World War and has spent her life immersed in the arts. Gifted with perfect pitch, she studied under Clifford Curzon and enjoyed a highly successful career as a concert pianist. In the months after the end of the Second World War she gave a concert at Belsen to inmates who were recovering in its hospital wing and, a couple of years later, she was chosen to be the soloist in the world's first ever televised concert for the BBC. She was also one half of a cultural 'it' couple - for more than 50 years she was married to the poet Sir Stephen Spender. They had met at a literary lunch he was hosting and became friends after Natasha stayed behind to help him with the washing up. They were friends with many of the greats of the past century, including T S Eliot, Stravinsky and Leonard Bernstein. She is now the executor to Sir Stephen's very considerable estate and is writing her own memoirs.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: 1st movement of String Quintet in G Minor by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Book: Desert Islands: An Anthology by Walter de la Mare Luxury: Her grand piano.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello I'm Krestey Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.0	The program was originally broadcast in 2007. My cast away this week this week is Natasha Spender. Her life has been a remarkable one, not least because where most of us hope to be
0:35.4	capable of doing justice to one profession she has succeeded in three as a highly
0:40.4	accomplished concert pianist an academic specializing in the cognitive psychology of music,
0:45.6	and as the executor of the considerable estate of her late husband, the renowned poet Stephen Spender.
0:51.0	Hers has been a life rich with experience, from her beginnings being brought
0:55.8	up by a working-class foster mother to her place at the very heart of a vigorous and highly
1:00.8	creative community embodying many of the 20th century's greatest writers,
1:05.2	musicians, composers and thinkers.
1:08.0	Despite her own undoubted accomplishments and insights, she is steadfastly self-effacing saying I think there's one's inner life
1:16.1	and one's outer life. One's inner life is not to be talked about because it's so
1:20.8	largely music. Well hopefully through the music that you've
1:24.4	chosen Lady Spender will understand and maybe even talk a little about your
1:27.4	inner life today. Do you have any sense yourself that to date you have lived a
1:32.2	remarkable an untypically eventful life.
1:35.0	Oh yes it was certainly very varied and one was forever dovetailing the different parts of one's life, one's home life, one's
1:45.3	professional life. And right now I'm editing journals and it doesn't stop. I'm hoping to go on. I'm sure you will. Tell me about the
1:57.6	three identities. Is there one of them that you you wear more comfortably than
2:02.2	any of the others? Do you feel mostly the wife of this famous poet?
2:06.5	Do you feel mostly the concert pianist or do you mostly associate with your academic work?
2:10.9	Oh no, but the concert pianist stopped 45 years ago. I don't feel a concert
	...

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