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By that time Georg Solti had arrived as music director. The two men began with an argument: Solti wanted Downes to conduct Gluck, but Downes declared roundly that he had no sympathy with the 18th-century repertoire in general and that composer in particular. Once that argument was resolved Solti realised Downes’s value and treated him almost as a right-hand man — an approval he certainly did not accord to other staff conductors. Although Downes was never to conduct Mozart in the house, he was the first British musician to conduct a Ring cycle at Covent Garden since Beecham in 1939.

He taught himself Russian and opened up the Russian repertoire, conducting Khovanshchina as well as Boris. Under him the company gave the West European premiere of Shostakovich’s Katerina Ismailova, for which he also translated the libretto. The composer came to London and turned out to have an uncanny resemblance to Downes: broad shoulders, square face, thick pebble glasses. They could have been father and son — until the “son” started speaking Russian, Downes was apt to comment.

Solti believed in supporting new British opera, but tended to leave the conducting to Downes, who gave the premieres, three years in succession, of Humphrey Searle’s Hamlet, Richard Rodney Bennett’s Victory and Peter Maxwell-Davies’s Taverner.

When Solti decided to leave the Opera House to devote more time to concert work, Downes looked well in the running to be his successor, but the job went to Colin Davis. He was disappointed. But salvation appeared to be around the corner in the shape of the Australian Opera, which invited him to become music director and to open the Sydney Opera House. He accepted, but the career move was a false one. The inaugural opera, Prokofiev’s War and Peace, was very much to Downes’s taste but not to that of Sydney. He wanted to introduce Australia to works like Wozzeck, but Sydney preferred the glamour of Sutherland performances in Donizetti. That battle Downes lost and he left the company in 1975.

Back in Britain he devoted himself much more to concert work, becoming principal conductor of the BBC Philharmonic in 1980, a post he held for the next ten years. With them he conducted broadcasts of rare Russian operas, including Rimsky-Korsakov’s Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh, Christmas Eve and the original version of Tchaikovsky’s Vakula the Smith. He briefly occupied a similar position with the Netherlands Radio Orchestra until 1983.

One surprise of his post-Australian period is the small quantity of symphonic work he was invited to record — a mere handful of pieces, including Maxwell Davies’s Third Symphony. Earlier in his career he had made quantities of recital discs with the leading singers and had given the first performances of important British concert pieces, including Birtwistle’s Chorales for Orchestra and Havergal Brian’s 14th and 21st symphonies.

Downes was ever a champion of the neglected and little known. With the help of Prokofiev’s widow he pieced together the score of the opera Maddalena and gave the first performance, with the BBC Philharmonic, in 1979. He fought the cause of the same composer’s The Fiery Angel and eventually got it on in a controversial production at Covent Garden in 1992.

The year before he had returned to the house as associate music director and principal conductor. He went on to conduct Stiffelio there, in a performing edition based on his own musicological researches, and Attila, inaugurating a plan to conduct all Verdi’s operas by the time of the composer’s centenary in 2001.

That plan almost came to fruition. But Downes’s general health, hearing and eyesight, never good, deteriorated to such an extent that by the time of the anniversary year, Alzira, Un Giorno di Regno and The Sicilian Vespers remained to be performed.

Downes’s lifetime in opera taught him to be in many ways a pragmatic man. He recognised that stars were needed to sell seats, especially those at high prices. But he had no truck with the glamour and socialising that are also part of the operatic world. He believed in hard work, disciplined rehearsals and total command of the score.

His contempt for symphony orchestra conductors who thought they could drop in and conduct a performance of Bohème was famous. Through and through Ted Downes was an opera house man, a supreme technician and a supreme Verdian.

He was appointed CBE in 1986 and knighted in 1991.

Downes and his wife Joan died together at an assisted suicide clinic in Zurich. They are survived by their son and daughter.

Sir Edward Downes , CBE, opera conductor, was born in Birmingham on June 17, 1924. He died on July 10, 2009, aged 85