Clive Wearing

For that occasion, he chose to recreate, with authentic instruments and meticulously researched scores, the Bavarian royal wedding that took place in Munich on 22 February 1568.

The music by Lassus, Padovano, de'Bardi, Palestrina, Gabrieli, Tallis and others was performed by the Taverner Consort, Choir and Players and the Natural Trumpet Ensemble of the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, conducted by Andrew Parrott.

Clive Wearing (born 11 May 1938) is a British former musicologist, conductor, tenor and keyboardist who developed chronic anterograde and retrograde amnesia in 1985.

Since then, he has lacked the ability to form new memories and cannot recall aspects of his memories, frequently believing that he has only recently awoken from a comatose state.

Clive Wearing is an accomplished musician who edited the works of Orlande de Lassus.

Wearing sang at Westminster Cathedral as a tenor lay clerk for many years and also had a career as a chorus master and worked as such at Covent Garden and with the London Sinfonietta Chorus.

In 1968, he founded the Europa Singers of London, an amateur choir specialising in music of the 17th, 18th and 20th centuries.

It won critical approval, especially for performances of the Monteverdi Vespers.

In 1977, it gave the first performance in the Russian Cathedral of Sir John Tavener's setting of the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom with Roderick Earle as bass soloist and subsequently made a recording (Ikon Records No. 9007).

While he was working at the BBC, Wearing was made responsible for the musical content of BBC Radio 3 for much of 29 July 1981, the day of the royal wedding of Prince Charles and Diana Spencer.

Wearing also organised The London Lassus Ensemble, designing and staging the 1982 London Lassus Festival to commemorate the composer's 450th Anniversary.

The Europa Singers also competed in the XXXII Concorso Polifonico Internazionale in Arezzo in 1984 and provided choruses for operas staged by the London Opera Centre, including Lully's Alceste and Mozart's Marriage of Figaro, which was performed at Sadler's Wells.

On 27 March 1985, Wearing, then an acknowledged expert in early music at the height of his career with BBC Radio 3, contracted herpesviral encephalitis, a herpes simplex virus that attacked his central nervous system.

Since then, he has been unable to store new memories.

He has also been unable to associate memories effectively or to control his emotions, exhibiting unstable moods.

Wearing developed a profound case of total amnesia as a result of his illness.

Because of damage to the hippocampus (an area required to transfer memories from short-term to long-term memory), he is completely unable to form lasting new memories.

His memory for events lasts between seven and thirty seconds.

He spends every day 'waking up' every 20 seconds or so, 'restarting' his consciousness once the timespan of his short-term memory has elapsed.

During this time, he repeatedly questions why he has not seen a doctor, as he constantly believes that he has only recently awoken from a comatose state.

If he is engaged in conversation, he is able to provide answers to questions, but he cannot stay in the flow of conversation for longer than a few sentences and is angered if he is asked about his current situation.

Wearing remembers little of his life before 1985.

He knows, for example, that he has children from an earlier marriage, but he cannot remember their names.

His love for his second wife, Deborah, whom he married the year before his illness began, is undiminished.

He greets her joyously every time they meet, believing either that he has not seen her in years or that they have never met before, even though she may have just left the room momentarily.

When he goes out dining with his wife, he can remember the names of food, but he cannot link them with taste, as he forgets what food he is eating by the time it has reached his mouth.

In a diary provided by his carers, Wearing was encouraged to record his thoughts.

Page after page was filled with entries similar to the following:

8:31 AM: Now I am really, completely awake.

9:06 AM: Now I am perfectly, overwhelmingly awake.

9:34 AM: Now I am superlatively, actually awake.

Earlier entries were usually crossed out, since he forgot having made an entry within minutes and dismissed the writings.

He did not know how the entries were made or by whom, although he did recognise his own handwriting.

In a documentary broadcast in 2005, Wearing was interviewed about the experience of his condition:

Is it very hard?

Do you miss your old life?

Wishing to record 'waking up for the first time', he still wrote diary entries in 2007, more than 20 years after he started them.

Wearing can learn new procedures and even a very few facts, not from episodic memory or encoding, but by acquiring new procedural memories through repetition.

For example, having watched a certain video recording multiple times on successive days, he never had any memory of ever seeing the video or knowing the content, but he was able to anticipate certain parts of the content without remembering how he learned them.

Despite having no memory of specific musical pieces when they are mentioned by name and an extremely limited recall of his previous musical knowledge, Wearing remains capable of playing complex piano and organ pieces, sight-reading and conducting a choir.