Private Passions

Original version

BBC Radio 3 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced Third Programme.

BBC Radio 3

Radio 3

Private Passions Podcast

Discussion & Talk

Music: Classical

Guests from all walks of life discuss their musical loves and hates

Guests from all walks of life discuss their musical loves and hates, and talk about the influence music has had on their lives

Private Passions: Diana Melly

Diana Melly

BBC Radio 3 - Private Passions, Diana Melly

Michael Berkeley’s guest is author Diana Melly.

Author Diana Melly tells Michael Berkeley about her long and complex marriage to jazz singer George Melly, and about how she developed a passion for opera in her eighties.

The author Diana Melly tells Michael Berkeley about her life lived on a rollercoaster: she has experienced passion, great friendships and celebrity but also depression, illness, heartbreak and the deaths of two of her children.

Running through her life for 46 years was her enduring - but extremely complicated - marriage to the jazz musician and bon viveur George Melly, who died in 2007.

She has written two novels, a searingly honest memoir, and has co-edited the letters of her friend Jean Rhys as well as campaigning for charities concerned with dementia and drug abuse. 

Diana Melly talks movingly about the deaths of her children and the happiness she and George found at the end of his life. And she describes her passion for trying new things late in life including ballroom dancing, philosophy and riding a tandem.

But her greatest new passion, developed in her eighties, is for opera and she chooses her favourite arias by Puccini, Massenet, Mozart, Gluck and Verdi. 

And she reveals why, having been married to a jazzman for 46 years, there is no jazz on her music list.

Producer: Jane Greenwood
A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

Live music and the arts: broadcasts more live music than any other radio network. Classical music is its core. Genres include world and new music, jazz, speech and drama.

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