Proper recognition came late to Ted Downes. He was well into his sixties before the London critics began to acknowledge that they had at Covent Garden one of the world’s finest Verdi conductors. Downes had been admired over the years, and sometimes attacked for being too forceful in the pit. But when he conducted the first performance in the house of Verdi’s early opera Attila in 1990 his true worth began to be realised.

The Royal Opera, which he had joined as a young répétiteur in 1952, suddenly acknowledged what it had in its midst. For too long Downes had been taken for granted as a man prepared to tackle anything from the early 19th century onwards, including the most difficult contemporary scores. In 1991 the house belatedly made him principal conductor and associate music director to Bernard Haitink. The same year he was knighted.

The success of Attila was followed three years later by that of Stiffelio, an even less familiar Verdi. It was given its British professional premiere by Downes, with Carreras in the title role. The Garden was encouraged to embark on a complete Verdi cycle designed to culminate with the centenary of the composer’s death in 2001. Bayreuth had Wagner, Downes argued, Salzburg had Mozart, so why should London not have Verdi.

The names of conductor and composer became inextricably linked as far as London was concerned, and Downes started receiving some of the rewards for working at the pit face for more than 40 years: he had conducted every season at Covent Garden since he made his debut with Carmen when the company was on tour in Rhodesia in 1953. The run of appearances was not even broken when he was music director of the Australian Opera from 1972 to 1975.

Ted Downes never sought recognition, other than the purely musical kind. Some conductors carefully cultivate those with influence. Downes, by contrast, was often openly contemptuous of people in high places, especially when they were musically ignorant. From youth onwards his eyesight was extremely poor, and on occasion he failed to recognise those who wanted to be recognised. His entourage was his wife Joan, whom he met when she was a dancer with the Royal Ballet. He was by nature a rebel, mindful of his poor Birmingham upbringing, under which he had to fight for everything he wanted to achieve.

The Downes family lived close to Aston Villa football ground; his father was a bank clerk, not always in work. Ted left school when he was 15 for financial reasons.

The family were highly religious and highly intolerant, so Ted Downes felt well equipped when he came to deal with the bigotry that lies at the heart of the plot of Stiffelio. The idea of the son wanting to be a musician filled the parents with horror — “My mother would have regarded Debussy as pornographic,” Downes once said when late in life he started to talk about his unhappy childhood.

Independence was the only exit. Having studied piano and violin since the age of 5, Downes won a scholarship to the University of Birmingham to read English and music, a development which his parents discovered by reading the news in the Birmingham Mail.

He graduated at the early age of 19 and won another scholarship to the Royal College of Music. And yet a third, after he had been appointed to the University of Aberdeen as a lecturer in music, to study with Hermann Scherchen in Zurich. Scherchen had two advantages: he was an expert in contemporary music and he was one of the few distinguished musicians prepared to teach the art of conducting. He was also irascible and eccentric; Downes found himself forced to read the Berlin newspapers to Scherchen’s aged blind mother. At least he learnt German in the process.

Back in Britain Downes played the French horn — he had already been in the pit for the famous first night of Peter Grimes at Sadler’s Wells. But work as a session musician, although lucrative, was unfulfilling, and conducting engagements were hard to come by. As a lecturer at Aberdeen he had already conducted his first opera, Le nozze di Figaro, but he was fated to conduct only a single performance with the Carl Rosa Opera before it closed forever. Then, in 1952, he joined Covent Garden as a répétiteur.

Luckily, at the Royal Opera his mentor was the incoming music director, Rafael Kubelik, who was ready to take a chance. In 1953 he made his house debut with La bohème and the following year conducted a new production of Der Freischütz. The same year the aged French maestro engaged for a new production of Hoffmann became ill, and Downes, who had prepared most of the singers, including Patzak in the title role, was given the first night and the rest of the run. Two years later Downes took over an Otello, with the leading exponent of the day, Ramón Vinay, as the Moor, at a few hours’ notice. This was the first Verdi he conducted. He acquired the reputation of being a handy man in a crisis.

The next influence was Carlo Maria Giulini, who came to London for a production (by Visconti) of Don Carlos in 1958. This was to mark a turning point for the house. A cast had been assembled which brought the Garden back to international level and, with Downes closely assisting Giulini in the musical preparation, the finished performance was a triumph. Downes conducted many of the Carlos performances when the Verdi opera was revived in the Sixties and he formed close friendships both with Giulini and the Canadian tenor who took the title role, Jon Vickers.