He is a member of the universities of Chicago, California, and Cambridge. He was taken to his first opera � Le Nozze di Figaro at the Peabody in Baltimore � at the age of 11, and he spent his last evening resident in the United States at a performance of Der Rosenkavalier with the incomparable Elisabeth Schwartzkopf singing the Marschallin. He is now so old that he can recall overnight queuing for tickets for Covent Garden � in the days when it was worth going to Covent Garden regularly.