The year was 2015. It was one of many afternoons in London, waiting for a Premier League football match. I was sitting in a pub, passing the time with a few pints, when the thought suddenly struck me: why not take the Tube to visit Sir John Barbirolli’s grave? The match wouldn’t start for hours, and Barbirolli had long been a conductor I found fascinating.

With the help of the Underground and Google Maps on my phone, I soon reached St Mary’s Catholic Cemetery in Kensal Green. First I came upon an ancient Victorian graveyard, divided even in death into Protestant and Catholic sections. Since Sir John was Catholic, I knew which way to go — but before long my search came to a halt.

What lay before me was a chaotic burial ground, straight out of a Gothic ghost story: old crosses and monuments leaning at odd angles, weathered and broken. Two hundred years of forgotten dead, seemingly left to the elements. Luckily, there was a small office, and a friendly caretaker found the great British conductor’s name in his register. He tried to pinpoint it on a map of the cemetery, but the directions were vague — “somewhere around here…”

So I searched on my own in the area he had shown me. Eventually I found it: a long stone slab lying almost carelessly on the grass. Here the British maestro (1899–1970) rested alongside his mother, father, and second wife. Standing alone on that inhospitable graveyard in the September sun, looking at an inscription almost erased by decades of wind and rain, felt oddly eerie. Yet here lay what remained of one of Britain’s most important musical figures of the 20th century — an individualist, both loved and questioned.

Barbirolli’s flaw was that he was too loyal — but in those days, that was part of being an British gentleman. He should have left the Hallé Orchestra in Manchester much earlier, to pursue a career with more famous ensembles around the world. He was a popular guest conductor, and offers came constantly. Many of his recordings reveal that the orchestra could not always realise the vision he carried in his head.

He was no great orchestra builder in the style of Karajan or Szell. In that respect, he resembled Bernstein, who, like his English colleague, relied heavily on the spark of inspiration. Yet Sir John still managed to produce interpretations that felt complete, not only spontaneous — some of which have endured for half a century and become classics.

He was born in London to immigrant parents — a French mother and an Italian father. His father played the violin, as did his grandfather, who had performed at the premiere of Verdi’s Otello. At the same time, Barbirolli was a British patriot. He even broke his contract with the New York Philharmonic and, by way of a perilous sea crossing, returned home in the middle of the Second World War. That blend of Latin and British culture was one of his strengths, and in a truly Barbirolli interpretation you often hear a mix of passion and discipline.

For me, melancholy is the very core of Barbirolli’s music-making. There are flashier performances of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, but with him you feel the grief almost physically. That’s why some of us keep coming back to him in Mahler, Sibelius, Elgar, Puccini, Brahms, and Vaughan Williams. He struggled with depression and alcohol, which perhaps made him more attuned to the fragility in music.

Maybe it was the effect of that lukewarm but good English ale on that sunny September afternoon in London — but I could almost hear faint, dissatisfied grumbles from the grave. Had it all turned out the way he dreamed?

“I can’t die before I’ve conducted all of Bruckner’s symphonies,” he once told André Previn, sitting next to him on a turbulent flight to Houston in the 1960s. Fate decided otherwise. But at his best, Barbirolli could open up the inner world of music and give the listener a feeling of catharsis. And isn’t that, after all, what art is really about?