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

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

The program was originally broadcast in 1979, and the presenter was Roy Plumlee. Our castaway this week is a patron of music who for over 50 years has provided

symphony concerts for young people. He's still hard at it and this very day

is celebrating his 100th birthday.

It's Sir Robert Mayer.

Not Sir Robert.

Going back to the beginning, your love of music showed itself very early,

I believe you were playing the piano at the age of five

is that right? Correct. I played with one finger but was sufficient

indication for better things to come. So my parents took me to the conservator in the

little town I was born called Mannheim and so I became a pupil of the

conservator when I was six years old and was eight years old.

I was chosen at the annual concert to play, perform.

My aunt and cousins and not, the second most had come to earth, but my father was a brewer and

were a sensible man, he took different views, and he says if the boy really has got talent it'd be wonderful things life

if music must become his great love but not his profession. But believe it or not in those days you actually did what your father told

you to do. The feeling of reverence was expressed in that way. So I made my mind I was going

to be a great amateur musician, but my dream was to make sufficient money to live so worth and in a remote place and have living at the same time a quartet with me, a chamber message to the rest of my days as it happens, something else happens.

But at that age of eight years old, played the Beethoven sonata called the Spring Sonata and F.

And that's I've chosen it not only for that reason, but also because the people whose records you will be hearing

are Bush and second who came to England in 1925 and they became one of our most input friends and Bush and Second have meant so much in

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