Last Saturday, Radio National broadcast the last ever episode of John Cargher’s Singers of Renown, after 43 years and 2143 episodes.

We have heard his voice move from the confidence of a man in his prime clear through to old age, as mortality took hold of his larynx,but not his spirit.

Saturday’s episode was a rebroadcast of the commemorative edition he made to celebrate 2000 programs. It ends with a scene from Mephistopheles, where Margharita repudiates Faustus and enters the gates of heaven. This time, he did not speak at all, and his farewell message was delivered by someone else. I imagine him in bed, listening to his own finale, hearing himself two years ago as he spoke of his own life through music.

He died today.

On the radio, he told us how he was a Jewish orphan who started work in a factory at the age of twelve, and spent fourpence a week on the cheapest entertainment he could find – the Sadler’s Wells Opera. When the war came, he was a trained toolmaker, too short-sighted for violence. In the Blitz, he combed the ruins for records, kept the important ones, and took the rest to be crushed for their shellac.

After the war, he became an agent and musical entrepeneur, who sent many an up-and-coming talent to Australian productions, until he came here himself in 1951. He developed the retail music trade for classical music, using old warehouse stock he bought in bulk and shipped out here. He reminded us the musical theatre scene in Melbourne was lively and joyful.

By 1966 he was putting his huge collection and encyclopaedic knowledge on the airwaves, and we are the better for his coming.

I’ve never been a regular radio listener, but I love it in the car. It turns out I am often travelling at 4 o’clock on a Saturday afternoon, in a floating pause between busy stuff. As my life moved between joy and travail over decades, he took me into an art that spoke of such human depth and immensity it bound me back into the great human journey, to the collective search for serenity and acceptance.

I am sure he died as we all want to die, no matter what happened to his body. I know he was loved until the end, and he was a man of great emotional wisdom.

You might like to play this in his memory.

It is sung by Kathleen Ferrier, who I first learnt about on his program. The song is Um Mitternacht, in Mahler’s version, which is translated here. And here is the kind of detail that Cargher always knew how to fit into the story – she was probably dying when she recorded that song.

There are a heap of comments from his listeners on the ABC website.

And you can hear the last episode here. I hope the ABC leaves it up for a long time.

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