Christoper Nupen, brilliant classical music film director who confessed to an affair with Lotte Lehmann – obituary

Christopher Nupen, who has died aged 88, was a celebrated director of classical music films, many featuring Vladimir Ashkenazy, Daniel Barenboim and Jacqueline du Pré; he founded Allegro Films, shared a London apartment with the guitarist John Williams, and enjoyed romantic liaisons with the dancer Margaret Hill and the soprano Lotte Lehmann, the latter being 46 years his senior.

Nupen was working for BBC Radio when, at Williams’s suggestion, he enrolled in Accademia Chigiana, the summer music school at Siena in Italy, having first persuaded the BBC that there was a radio documentary to be made. This was followed by a programme featuring the guitarist Andrés Segovia that caught the ear of Huw Wheldon, BBC TV’s controller of programmes. He summoned Nupen to join the TV music department, headed by Humphrey Burton.

Meanwhile Daniel Barenboim had become a regular visitor to the flat close to Broadcasting House that he shared with Williams and was keen to arrange a televised concert with Ashkenazy. The resulting Double Concerto (1966) captured their ebullience and joy in music-making. As David Attenborough, then director of programming for BBC Television, later said: “Nobody had ever made a film in that kind of way and it was very clear that it was a new directorial voice … on the same wavelength, indeed the same note, as those who were taking part.”

Nupen enjoyed two further strokes of luck: hand-held silent 16 mm cameras had just arrived, allowing close-up filming of musicians without disturbing their performances; and the BBC allocated him a lighting cameraman, David Findlay, and film editor, Peter Heelas, who worked with him for many decades.

His next project was a film about Segovia, made at the guitarist’s home in Los Olivos, southern Spain. He then proposed a portrait of Ashkenazy making his family home in Iceland. But when he asked to work again with Findlay and Heelas, the BBC insisted that he must take whoever was available. He promptly resigned, as did his colleagues, and in 1968 they created Allegro Films. Fourteen years later Allegro Films was still one of only a handful of independent production companies, or “indies”, who were able to persuade doubting ministers that the new Channel 4 should make a special place for their talents.

The Ashkenazy film, The Vital Juices are Russian, was eventually broadcast twice by the BBC and then seen in 18 other countries. There followed two seminal pieces of film-making: Beethoven’s trio The Ghost with Barenboim, Jacqueline du Pré and Pinchas Zukerman that was filmed three times, each using three cameras in three different positions, and then edited together seamlessly. Even more remarkable was a film about Schubert’s quintet, The Trout, where the trio were joined by Zubin Mehta on bass and Itzhak Perlman on violin.

It was not always smooth going. On one occasion Nupen arranged a series of concerts for the BBC featuring Barenboim as conductor and soloist, with Ashkenazy, Fou T’song and Jacqueline du Pré (who called him Kitty while he called her Smiley, a tribute to her good humour). Alas, all the video tapes were wiped after the broadcast, though his memories of the cellist remained. “She had the ability to make me feel music with a depth and intensity that few other musicians have,” he recalled.

Another project that went astray featured 13 half-hour films, commissioned by Denis Forman of Granada TV in Manchester, in which Barenboim explained Beethoven’s music, performing and conducting as he went along. Forman, however, could not secure an ITV network slot, so the films were only broadcast locally and it was not until 50 years later that Channel 4 provided the first network showing of all 13.

Disaster almost struck when Nupen was filming a Pinchas Zukerman concert in Munich and a rebellious audience protested at the extra lighting. “Licht aus!” cried some. Zukerman himself appeared to explain why the lights were needed, announcing “we are here to make music” and offering personally to refund ticket money to those who wished to leave. The concert was a success, helping to salvage the seven-year project of which it was a part: its broadcast title was Here to Make Music (1975).

Allegro Films gathered supporters among European broadcasters as well as securing commissions from the BBC, The South Bank Show on ITV and Channel 4, where both Jeremy Isaacs and Michael Grade were strong supporters. One autumn Grade scheduled an Allegro Films programme every Saturday night for 16 weeks.

The roster of musicians with whom Nupen collaborated included Isaac Stern, Nathan Milstein, Murray Perahia, Gidon Kremer, Evgeny Kissin and Daniil Trifonov. We Want the Light (2003), an inquiry into German music and the Jews, featured the pianist Alice Herz-Sommer, who survived Theresienstadt and lived to the age of 110; she was also the subject of another Nupen film, Everything is a Present (2009).

Christopher Peter Nupen was born on September 30 1934 in South Africa, the son of Claire Meikle and her Norwegian husband, Eiulf “Buster” Nupen, a one-eyed lawyer and spin bowler who captained South Africa to a famous victory over England in 1930, taking eleven wickets in the match. One of his son’s conceits was to entertain friends in the Long Room at Lord’s, celebrating the writing of Neville Cardus.

Nupen grew up with a love of music, especially opera, and was introduced to both Beniamino Gigli and Tito Gobbi after their respective Johannesburg appearances in Rigoletto and La Traviata. He was entranced when Gigli pinched his cheek calling him Christoforo, a name he often used thereafter.

Aged 19 and a law student, he saw the visiting Sadler’s Wells ballet company and afterwards introduced himself to their leading lights, Kenneth MacMillan and Margaret Hill. Before the company returned to London he spent a night with Hill making love seven times, or so she told her friend Peggy van Praagh. Moving to London, where his father had secured him a merchant bank job, he tried to resume the liaison but was embarrassed to discover that MacMillan and Hill were a couple.

An even more improbable relationship came when Nupen visited Vienna for the postwar reopening of the State Opera, where the guests of honour were the conductor Bruno Walter and the soprano Lotte Lehmann. Wearing borrowed white tie and tails, he mistakenly sat in Lehmann’s box. She invited him to lunch the following day and, despite their age difference, they embarked on an affair.

Another of his father’s contacts arranged for him to be interviewed by the BBC, resulting in a job as studio manager in the radio features department. By then he was studying classical guitar with Len Williams, striking up a lifelong friendship with his son John.

The golden age of European arts programming started to fade at the turn of the century. Projects such as the Perlman film, I Know I Played Every Note (1978), and Elegies for the Deaths of Three Spanish Poets (1979) became rare events. Of the 75 programmes in the Allegro Films archive, only 13 were made after 2000. Nupen’s last film, about Chopin and George Sand, remains unfinished.

In 1975 he married Diana Baikie, who worked with Barenboim and Jacqueline du Pré; she died of cancer in 1979 at age 39. He is survived by his second wife Caroline Percival (née Holmes), whom he married in 1989. She helped to produce his charming memoir, published in 2019, and his stepson Matthew produced a 90-minute tribute for the BBC that shares the book’s title, Listening Through the Lens.

Christopher Nupen, born September 30 1934, died February 19 2023