[3] While at Sydney Grammar, he showed a precocious talent by composing operas and conducting student performances in his early teens, but his non-musical studies suffered.
[5] At the all-male St Aloysius, he participated in the school's Gilbert and Sullivan productions, playing the roles of Kate in The Pirates of Penzance, Leila in Iolanthe and Ko-Ko in The Mikado.
[6] Unconvinced that music was a viable profession, his parents removed the young Mackerras from temptation by sending him to board at The King's School.
The school's focus on sport and discipline led the young artist to run away several times, and he was eventually expelled.
[5] By 1941, while still at the conservatorium, Mackerras began to get professional performing jobs in Sydney, partly because he was too young to join the military, while older musicians had been called up to go to the war.
[3] He later won a British Council Scholarship, enabling him to study conducting with Václav Talich at the Prague Academy of Music.
[3][5] While there, he formed a strong friendship with Jiří Tancibudek, Principal Oboe of the Czech Philharmonic, who introduced him to the operas of Leoš Janáček, thus commencing Mackerras's lifelong passion for that composer's music.
[9] In August 1947, shortly before the couple set off for Prague, Mackerras married Judy Wilkins, a clarinettist at Sadlers' Wells.
[3][5] In the 1950s, well before the "authenticity" movement had come to general notice, Mackerras focused on the study and practical realization of period performance techniques, culminating in his landmark 1959 recording of Handel's Music for the Royal Fireworks using the original wind band instrumentation.
His ballet with John Cranko, Pineapple Poll, is an arrangement of Sullivan music with a story based on one of W. S. Gilbert's Bab Ballads.
[3] In 1982 Mackerras was the first Australian national appointed chief conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, a post he held until 1985.
As Conductor Emeritus of Welsh National Opera, his successes included Tristan und Isolde, The Yeomen of the Guard, and La clemenza di Tito (all of whose productions were brought to London).
Mackerras also had a long association with the Metropolitan Opera, where he conducted The Makropulos Case, Káťa Kabanová, Le prophète, Lucia di Lammermoor, Billy Budd, Hansel and Gretel and The Magic Flute.
Mackerras summarised his strategy for working with an orchestra as follows: I believe it's very important to edit orchestral parts explicitly and as thoroughly as possible so that the musicians can play them without too much rehearsal.
[25] On 18 December 2008, Mackerras served as the conductor for Alfred Brendel's final concert performance with the Vienna Philharmonic.
[28] Wright paid tribute to Mackerras, saying "Sir Charles was a great conductor and his loss will be deeply felt by musicians and audiences alike",[28] while Rory Jeffes of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra said that Australia had "lost a living treasure".
In 1952, he conducted his first recording of his own Pineapple Poll ballet, which was issued on twelve sides, and subsequently transferred to LP.
[19] Some of his early recording sessions were for Walter Legge, standing in when Otto Klemperer and other eminent conductors were ill.[31] He did not always restrict himself to the classical repertoire.
For example, on 4 May 1955 he recorded Albert Arlen's song Clancy of the Overflow (to Banjo Paterson's poem) with Peter Dawson and the London Symphony Orchestra.
'[31] The recording, issued in 1959, was received with critical acclaim for attempting to reproduce the sound Handel would have heard, rather than the smoother orchestral arrangements usually played at that time.
For DG he conducted Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, and for HMV a 'new-look' Messiah, with scholarly texts, small forces and sprightly tempi.
[15] Along with the Mozart operas, these recordings continue to attract critical acclaim; as do his recordings of the operas of Janáček (Decca, Supraphon, and Chandos), and major works of Handel, Dvořák, Martinů, Richard Strauss, Shostakovich, Sibelius, Donizetti, Elgar, Delius, Walton, Holst, and Haydn, among many others.
[19] Sullivan's manuscript and most of the orchestra parts were destroyed in a fire, and more than three decades after that single BBC performance, in collaboration with David Mackie, Mackerras reconstructed the concerto, conducting its first performance with cellist Julian Lloyd Webber and the London Symphony Orchestra at Barbican Hall, London, in April 1986, and a recording for EMI shortly afterwards.
[33][34] For Telarc in the 1990s, with Welsh National Opera's chorus and orchestra, he also conducted Gilbert and Sullivan's Trial by Jury, H.M.S.
[35] His final recording was Suk's Asrael Symphony, which was the composer's response to the deaths in quick succession of his father-in-law Dvořák and his wife.
[37][38] In 1978, he was presented with the Janáček Medal for services to Czech music, on stage at the Coliseum Theatre, by the Czechoslovak ambassador.