Source.

Alas, Nicolas Robertson died in Lisbon earlier this month, after many years of chronic illness.

A fine tenor (“cheap at the price”, as we would say), after his early years in Cambridge Nick became a long-term member of early-music groups such as the Monteverdi Choir, the Tallis Scholars, and the Sixteen. As a Bach scholar, he worked assiduously in assisting John Eliot Gardiner‘s research, and I pray that Nick’s own studies of Bach may yet see the light of day.

Mozart with the Monteverdi Choir in Barcelona, 1991:
Nick back row, centre.

Notwithstanding his bookish demeanour, the touring life gave him ample opportunity to sample the richesses of continental beverages; a denizen of sleazy bars in every port, he was an unlikely pinball wizard. Marrying his soulmate Lidia in 2003, they lived together in Lisbon. At the end of 2008 Nick declared himself bankrupt (“one of the best things I ever did, as well as a fascinating experience”). I suppose he never recovered from losing first their house (in a fire, 2009) and then Lidia (to cancer, 2013). He died on her birthday.

Softly spoken, even reserved, Nick’s conversation was erudite, arcane, and hilarious, making him a somewhat unusual drinking buddy. A devotee of Oulipo and Perec, he delighted in language (or rather, languages). The gnomic tales that he concocted out of anagrams provided by fellow choristers on tour (mostly composers’ names, like Gran visits York [Igor Stravinsky] or Nubile gorilla [Lili Boulanger], and Mozart operas, like Noon? Gad–vini! [Don Giovanni], are just extraordinary—a kind of Esperanto fiction, creating spiralling worlds of fantasy. I was honoured to post a series of these tales on my blog. Nick’s meticulous system of indents, single and double quotes, long and short dashes, italics, and so on offers the reader crucial clues to the possible meaning of the arcane text, so typesetting was fiendishly complicated—Lear (Bacon), aka Barcelona, is a good example—and our correspondence about such minutiae provided us with hours of harmless nerdy fun. I’ve listed the tales here, and they’re among the treasures of this site. Now I really must edit some of the remaining stories, “compiled without regard to expense or the feelings of the public”, in the words of our inspiration Flann O’Brien.

As a keen football aficionado, another ongoing project in which Nick delighted was collecting drôle headlines about Jesus (“Jesus is very happy with his eleven”, and so on).

I didn’t actually spend much time with him on tour. For reasons that may be apparent by now, I have only a hazy recollection of our encounters in said hostelries. During the Paris legs of our annual Mozart opera tours in the 1990s he took up residence in the little dive next to the Châtelet, which boasted one of his favourite pinball machines; after concerts in Lisbon, I knew he was just the guide for the tiny holes in the wall where you could hear amateur fado singers, away from the pomp of the fancy restaurants; and, unlike most of the choir (alas), he was always up for flamenco bars in Andalucia.

After decades of quiet Bacchic indulgence, eventually his taste for the grape caught up with him. Already ailing seriously the last time we met in Lisbon, he remained fascinating company. His emails were a constant source of abstruse giggles.

See also this tribute from his colleague Richard Savage; more on Nick’s Facebook page.

We both chortled over this line from Vivien Stanshall:

If I had all the money I’ve spent on drink… I’d spend it on drink

—and I think Nick might have approved of it as a suitable epitaph.