The great Italian conductor and composer Victor de Sabata died on December 11, 1967. In this article, reprinted from February 1990, John Amis recalls a conversation with the EMI producer Walter Legge...

In 1971 I recorded a series of interviews with Walter Legge at his home near Geneva. He spoke without notes and I have not changed anything. Legge (1905-79) worked for The Gramophone Company (EMI) from 1927 until 1964 and was responsible for conceiving and supervising recordings by many artists, including Callas, Karajan, Klemperer, Furtwängler and Schwarzkopf (to whom he was married). In August 1953 and June 1954 Walter Legge worked in the studio with the great Italian conductor, Victor de Sabata, a collaboration Legge recalls below. 

I'd love to hear from you about de Sabata, whom you worked with quite a lot, didn't you? 'Not a great deal, but I did his best recordings – the Tosca with Callas, Gobbi, di Stefano, La Scala – and I also did the Messa da Requiem, which was the last thing he did, and I don't think it's as good as it should have been. But nobody knew at the time – I didn't know – in between the Tosca recording and some eight months before the Verdi Requiem, he had a major heart attack and he was terrified that to conduct again might cost him his life. And after that Messa he conducted only twice; the slow movement of the Eroica for the funeral of Toscanini and the same movement for the funeral of Cantelli. And in the last seven years of his life – oh, longer than that – from the time he recorded the Messa, he always promised he would come to London and get qualities out of the Philharmonia that nobody had yet heard and, as a matter of fact, he said to me after the second Philharmonia concert in Milan: "This is the greatest orchestra in the world – I have never heard anything like it. But it needs me to get what's latent in it: it needs to be raped by me, an Italian, and then you will hear what warmth it has." But he never took the chance to rape the Philharmonia. I gave him endless chances – I used to go three or four times a year to see him because he would not conduct at all. He lived in two small modest rooms in a grubby little hotel in Santa Margherita.' 

But I thought he was a wealthy man? 'He had very little sense of creature comforts, I think; in all the years I knew him he never ate more than an ailing man's diet: he drank very little and he didn't smoke. The only creature comfort was his clothes. He was always exquisitely dressed – perhaps a little ostentatiously by Savile Row standards: white silk shirts, with large, loosely tied ties, light grey, silver grey or white coloured suits, immaculately pressed and always to be noticed. He had a very good head – extremely fine, sharp nose, incredible penetrating eyes.' 

Was he as tyrannical off the podium as he was on? 'On the contrary, he was the gentlest, most amusing of men. His conversation was brilliant – he had an enormous knowledge of a great number of subjects. One of his pet things in life was PG Wodehouse. He knew everything that Wodehouse had written and I have got several letters from him, somewhere, written in the style of Wodehouse: sometimes so good – a sentence here and there – you would say that must be original or a quote. But the moment he got on the platform appeared this demon of tension. He had a habit of being so harsh with singers that he reduced them to tears. In the recording of the Messa we wanted, he and I, Callas to sing the mezzo part. My wife was doing the soprano part. After a couple of days Callas declined, which I regret to this day, and we got Oralia Dominguez. She was not used to singing with a man of de Sabata's authority and was probably not as well prepared as she should have been, because he expected people to come ready to sing with him – and he had her in tears virtually the whole time of the recording. She was always breaking down.' 

I imagine that de Sabata's character and personality must have been influenced in some way by his lameness, was it not? 'Towards the end of his life, when I was badgering him every three or four months to come to London and at least make some records, even if he would not do concerts, he did say to me, "I haven't the agility I used to have. First of all , every morning of my life since I was about 20 I have played through Scarbo on the piano and the Ravel Tzigane on the violin just to see that I have maintained the old facility. And now I find that in the high positions in the Tzigane my fingers do not go exactly where they should do immediately and since I have gone through life, since the public has seen me always as a man limping, I don't want them to see me with a lamed arm".' 

But Tzigane and Scarbo – it's fascinating – I mean, first of all that he could play the pieces, but secondly why keep to such a limited repertoire, or did he just view them simply as a sort of daily dozen? 'He knew they were about the most difficult things in the repertoire to execute perfectly and with this obsession he had for doing things better than anybody elsewhat was left!'