In Memoriam: Humphrey Burton

Humphrey Burton (1931–2025) was one of the great architects of arts broadcasting. From a golden era at the BBC to landmark international productions, his vision brought opera, music and dance to millions.

Humphrey Burton, 25 March 1931 – 17 December 2025, was one of the most influential figures in arts broadcasting. As BBC Television’s head of music and arts in the 1970s, Burton presided over what must now seem to many practitioners to have been a golden age of arts on television. In one year alone, his department screened 22 operas, as well as numerous ballets, documentaries and workshop programmes.

Opera buffs were dazzled by a procession of Saturday nights on BBC Two which included the first British television performances of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger, Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina and Alban Berg’s Lulu. Never one to undervalue his own achievements, Burton described 1979 as “the most significant year in the history of opera on BBC TV”.

Burton was adept at forging links with other European television arts producers, even behind the Iron Curtain. One of his biggest coups was a 1976 deal with the Bolshoi Ballet which combined Russian artistry with British technical expertise and German money to televise a performance of Romeo and Juliet. Widely admired as a major breakthrough in international arts relations, the performance was said to have been seen in 100 countries. His musical flair and persuasive personality made him the intimate of leading names in the musical world, with whom he collaborated in bringing great music to the television screen. He established a particularly close rapport with the American conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein. In Vienna, working for an independent company, Burton filmed Bernstein conducting the complete cycle of Mahler’s nine symphonies.

In 1965, he became the BBC’s first head of music and arts, combining two previously separate departments. Taking advantage of the possibilities offered by the newly launched BBC Two, he demonstrated that opera could be as big a draw as more popular TV forms by screening a performance of La Traviata which attracted five million viewers. Burton then joined a consortium bidding for the new weekend franchise on ITV. When the company was successfully launched as London Weekend Television, he became its head of drama, arts and music. By 1975, he was back at the BBC with a £3 million budget and a slate of operatic and concert productions which included The Flying Dutchman, The Magic Flute, Berlioz’s Grande Messe des Morts, Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana and rarities like Handel’s Alcina. To those who complained that this glittering array of televised opera seldom included relays from the Royal Opera House or the Coliseum, Burton replied that in the late 1970s there was no opera he particularly wanted to take from either of these houses, adding: “But even if there had been, we could not afford it.” Burton’s final coup in his second BBC period was to secure participation in the filming of the centenary Bayreuth production of Der Ring des Nibelungen, starring Gwyneth Jones and conducted by Pierre Boulez. Directed for television by Brian Large, it was screened an act at a time over 10 weeks, with introductory essays by Burton, and secured an average weekly audience estimated at a million.

In the late 1980s, he became artistic director at the Barbican and later ran the Hollywood Bowl. He was also the instigator of the popular BBC series Young Musician of the Year, which he continued to produce long after leaving the Corporation. On his 70th birthday, having put many of the world’s leading conductors on film, he achieved a long-cherished ambition to take up the baton himself by conducting Verdi’s Requiem at the Royal Albert Hall. The sold-out performance raised money for cancer research and celebrated Burton’s own cure from cancer. A string of awards from his television peers was followed in 2000 by his appointment as CBE. He was knighted in 2020.
As well as his biography of Leonard Bernstein in 1994, he wrote another of the violinist Yehudi Menuhin in Menuhin: A Life (2000); and, jointly with André Previn and Maureen Murray, a portrait of the British composer William Walton, The Romantic Loner (2002).

Excerpt edited from a Daily Telegraph obituary by Hazel Wright.