Hello, I'm Kirstie 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 1988 and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

My cast away this week is an academic statistician and banker, but those rather dry titles

rely a man whose passion for music has ruled his life. The son of a wealthy Jewish banker

he grew up in Hitler's Berlin. His family fled here to Britain before war broke out and

in the 50 years he's lived here since he's become a natural part of English public life.

Now head of an Oxford College he can look back on a career which has taken him through the LSE,

the Civil Service, a merchant bank and the Royal Opera House. He is Sir Klaus Moose.

Sir Klaus, there are at least three careers there if not ten. Energy presumably is not a quality

you're short on. No, I think that isn't the main problem. You're a workaholic, isn't it? Yes,

I've always worked very hard. I love it and I always find time for music too. That's always been

a dominating force in your life. Absolutely. Since I started playing the piano in I was five,

my parents always playing, my brother was playing, music was part of home life in Berlin.

And musicians visited your house too? Yes, the great memories really of the Berlin days,

with those evenings when my parents had rather superior musicians come to play with them,

not just to give concerts. I mean my mother would play with great musicians. I was meant to be in

bed of course, but I crouched under the staircase listening and I just loved it and I loved it

ever since and I loved playing, I loved listening. My parents were very clever, they took us to

lots of concerts, they never allowed us to stay to the end. At the interval they said now it's time

to go home to bed and so I always wanted more of my life and I didn't discover how I either ended

until a quite late in life. Let's have your first record shall we? I gather it's been an

...