Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1990, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My cast away this week is an opera supremo. At the age of three his parents observed him

trying to conduct Rossini. In his teens he resolved to run a great opera house.

Such ambition inevitably met with setbacks when he applied to sweep the stage of the London

Coliseum in 1974 he was turned down flat but fate protected his greatest wish and

11 years later he walked through its doors as the boss.

His flare for business combined with his passionate love of music

have transformed the fortunes of the company he runs

and made it one of the most successful and innovative in the country.

He is the general director of the English National Opera, Peter

there are few people who win the job of their dreams.

I mean, how much has the dream been shattered by the reality?

Not at all I mean I still feel as though I've died and gone to heaven and in that

heaven there are extraordinary rewards after a great deal of hard graft and a great deal of hard work and some

exasperating moments, there are still those rewards when the house lights go down and

when an opera starts or a performance starts or one is on tour and a performance starts in front of another public.

But there must be some moments of hell too. I mean what about the first night of a new production?

I probably initiate a kind of nervous fever in myself two hours before the performance.

I walk around the dressing rooms, I walk around the theatre, I always visit the stage itself

and actually go on to the stage and look at the scenery and look at the empty theatre beforehand.

But what happens perhaps when you suddenly hear a wrong note or you know something's gone wrong?

...