Few recent TV series have been as gripping as BBC One’s A Very English Scandal, which finished last Sunday.
The story of Jeremy Thorpe’s downfall was also as darkly comic as it was gripping.
Unsurprisingly, given the programme was about her husband, Marion Thorpe was only a minor presence.
And in real life, for her last decades — she died in 2014 — Marion Thorpe had no public profile at all. If she was known, it was simply as her husband’s devoted carer.
The couple could often be seem at recitals at London’s Wigmore Hall, Jeremy a gaunt, skeletal figure debilitated by Parkinson’s, and Marion focused on his needs. But before she married him — a second marriage for them both — Marion Stein was a fascinating and major figure in her own right. A hugely gifted concert pianist, she was a close friend of Benjamin Britten and one of the founders of the iconic Leeds Piano Competition.
Had she chosen it, she would undoubtedly have had a significant career and been one of the most influential figures in British cultural life.
Maria Donata Nanetta Paulina Gustava Erwina Wilhelmine Stein was born in Vienna on October 18, 1926, the daughter of Erwin Stein, a well-known and well-regarded Jewish musician and editor and his wife Sophie. She soon became known as Marion, the name that stayed with her.
John Amis, who knew the family well, wrote that Sophie was “tall, blonde and seemed to float through life, all Viennese charm. Her father, Erwin, was a distinguished musician, a pupil of Arnold Schoenberg, chubby and scarcely 5ft in height; the strikingly beautiful Marion took after her mother in inches, but her father in complexion and dark hair.”
Marion was born into the musical epicentre of the early 20th century. “My father’s circle was that of the so-called Second Viennese School,” she once said.
In his obituary of her, John Amis wrote: “As a child she was immersed in music, such as Mozart’s The Magic Flute, although her father deemed Don Giovanni, Carmen and La Bohème unsuitable. Mahler, with whom her father was acquainted, was another influence.”
The Steins were one of the most prominent Jewish families in inter-war Vienna.
As Laurence Brass, a former treasurer of the Board of Deputies, wrote in 2014, at the time of Jeremy Thorpe’s death (just months after Marion had passed away): “Although Marion doubtless preferred playing the piano to baking challah…she was fiercely proud of her Jewish heritage and Thorpe often referred to it as well.”
Indeed Thorpe was a committed friend to Israel throughout his political career, repeatedly going out of his way to dissociate the party from the hostile Young Liberals.
After the Anschluss in 1938 most of the family fled to London. (Her brother remained — and later fought enthusiastically for the Third Reich as a soldier.)
Erwin had been an editor at the leading Viennese publisher Universal Edition, so soon started working for British music publishers Boosey & Hawkes.
He was initially interned in 1940 on the Isle of Man, while Marion and her mother remained in London on a weekly allowance of £3.
John Amis describes how, “I first met Marion when she was 15: after tea on Sunday afternoons she and I would play Mahler symphonies on the Steins’ upright piano, with Erwin bouncing up and down behind us, shouting instructions in German”.
Marion’s prodigious musical and pianistic gifts led to her studying at the Royal College of Music and after leaving she took lessons from Clifford Curzon, the greatest of all British pianists, who became her mentor.
She soon became a successful professional pianist, primarily in a duo with Catherine Shanks.
Erwin’s work at Boosey & Hawkes led to a deep friendship with Benjamin Britten, whose music was published by the company. The Steins became Britten’s second family.
Marion first met him when she was 12 and as a young woman was said to have fallen in love with him, despite his homosexuality (words which could be used again when she met Jeremy Thorpe).
After a fire destroyed the Steins’ flat in 1944, they lodged with Britten and his partner Peter Pears for nearly two years; Marion later described the time as “not always easy”.
Marion was a renowned beauty and while attending Britten’s new music festival at Aldeburgh as a 21-year-old met George Lascelles, 7th Earl of Harewood, the festival’s president.
As Harewood was 11th in line to the throne, King George VI’s consent was necessary — and Marion became a member of the Royal Family.
Harewood was one of the key figures in British operatic life, director of the Royal Opera House and then the central figure in the development of English National Opera.
The marriage changed Marion’s life. She moved from musical London to the grand country estate of Harewood House in Leeds, where she lived with her mother-in-law, Princess Mary, the then Princess Royal.
Initial relations were frosty, with the Princess Royal reportedly remarking that her new daughter-in-law was “not only Jewish … she doesn’t hunt”.
Marion’s professional life ended effectively overnight but she adored family life with her three sons. “I got so far, and let it go,” she once said. “I don’t regret it.” She also travelled extensively with George, experiencing music all over the world.
In 1963 she started the Leeds International Piano Competition with Fanny Waterman. Her society and musical connections were ideal for such a venture and Leeds soon became the leading piano competition in the world, with a stellar roll call of alumni, such as Dmitri Alexeev, Radu Lupu, Murray Perahia, András Schiff and Mitsuko Uchida. She persuaded Britten to write Notturno for the first festival, which all competitors had to play.
But her life came crashing down in the early 1960s when Harewood had an affair. When they divorced in 1967, it was a national scandal.
Soon afterwards, however, she was introduced by the pianist Moura Lympany to Jeremy Thorpe, who had been leader of the Liberal party since 1967. They married in 1973.
After the divorce, she started to write the Me and My Piano series with Fanny Waterman. They have sold more than two million copies.
Marion stood by Thorpe throughout the scandal which led to his trial for conspiracy to murder.
But that was just about her only public utterance after the trial (although she was made a CBE in 2008) and she focused entirely on looking after her husband, until her death at 87.
She developed a reputation for coldness. But as Barrie Penrose noted in his book about the Thorpe scandal: “Friends said that this was no more than reserve... that she had had such a difficult life that she understood the pain of failure”.
