Mozart was unloved in my family: “twiddly pom pom”, “tee tum tee tum tee tum”, were the phrases maddeningly and mechanically trotted out. Then, one day in my early teens, I heard by chance a performance on the radio of the great G minor symphony, the 40th, and was astonished by its dark beauty, listening to the last movement breathless with excitement at its cumulative and unrelenting power.

A little later I bought a second-hand LP of the String Quintet in G, and was again astonished both by the piercing intensity of the music and the drama of the interchanges between the five players.

Intrigued by the oddity of its title, I next discovered the Masonic Funeral Music, sublime beyond any other music I had heard (or have since).

This was the time of the film Elvira Madigan, the slow movement of the piano concerto in C floating serenely downstream with the autumn leaves as the lovers decide to end it all, spattering a passing white butterfly with blood. Any sense that Mozart lacked emotional potency was clearly preposterous.

On the contrary, he seemed to offer the ideal accompaniment to the most complex of human relationships. A provocative French film of the mid-Sixties, Le Bonheur, had a soundtrack drawn from the Wind Serenades. The endless amorous couplings of the instruments, the startling beauty of their reedy timbre, administered another shock to the soul, while perfectly illustrating the story of a man who would not choose between wife and mistress.

John Schlesinger eventually made the connection explicit in Sunday, Bloody Sunday, echoing his plot by using the great trio from Così fan tutte, with its myriad layers of deception, expressed in the most balmy tones.

The vocal music had been my final great discovery in Mozart’s music, starting with the song Abendempfindung (Evening Mood), spun out in a line of fragile perfection by Elisabeth Schwarzkopf against Gerald Moore’s spellbinding piano. I then stumbled across the heart-stoppingly stratospheric concert aria Vorrei Spiegarvi (“I wish to apologise”) sung by Margaret Price in some kind of heaven inhabited only by the highest of high sopranos.

Finally I came, through Sadler’s Wells, to the operas, many of them in Charles Mackerras’s new editions but all of them, in those far-off days, staged, as the composer would ardently have desired, as profoundly human dramas. In the concert hall I had the good fortune to catch widely different performances by Klemperer, Böhm, Colin Davis, Mackerras, Clifford Curzon, Giulini, Wilhelm Kempff, Yehudi Menuhin, Brendel, Marriner, Barenboim, the young André Previn, perhaps most illuminatingly of all by Benjamin Britten, in whose interpretations one seemed to hear the composer composing.

I was by now Mozart-drunk, almost literally besotted with the music, so when I was asked to play the man himself in Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus it seemed like destiny.

It is strange to remember now that in 1979, when we first did the play, many theatregoers were at a loss as to how to pronounce the title (Norbert Brainin told me that the same thing had been true when he and his colleagues had formed the famous quartet of the same name 30 years before).

Doing the play led to my long association with the London Mozart Players and, even more happily, to my first production of an opera, in 1985: Così fan tutte. If I had my druthers, I’d do a new production of that rich model of human affairs every year.

But the reason that I became a director was to prepare myself one day to direct The Magic Flute. It is potentially one of the greatest of all pieces of music theatre in its inspired combination of fairytale, music hall and Freemasonry, a combination deriving to a large extent from its librettist, Emmanuel Schikaneder, whom I had the rich experience of playing in the film of Amadeus.

No, I have nothing but gratitude for Mozart, at every possible level.

His top five...

1. The concert aria Vorrei Spiegarvi, Oh Dio K418

2. Masonic Funeral Music K479a

3. String Quintet in G K516

4. The Magic Flute

5. Così fan tutte