Violin star Nicola Benedetti reveals Italian father’s fear over her 25-year age gap with trumpeter husband

Scottish violinist Nicola Benedetti has revealed her father found it hard to accept she was settling down with a man 25 years her senior.

Ms Benedetti, now 39, married multi Grammy Award-winning American trumpeter and composer Wynton Marsalis, now 64, in 2021. They have a two-year-old daughter Elise – his fifth child.

Ms Benedetti met Marsalis when she was 17 but from the age of 19 to 28 she was in a relationship with German cellist Leonard Elschenbroich.

In an interview for podcast Rosebud, she doesn’t reveal when the relationship with Marsalis became intimate but admits that her Italian father, Giovanni – who she says ‘is in his mid-80s now and has been suffering from a lot of health issues recently’ – had difficulty accepting the situation.

She recalled: ‘By the time I said, “This is the person I want to be with”, my parents had been used to me making very bold and outlandish and highly risky choices, like leaving school when I was 15.

‘They weren’t in support of that at all, but I was convincing enough that it was the right thing to do.

‘So I think by that point my parents were sort of a little resigned to “OK, she’s going to carve her own path and it’s not necessarily going to be what we approve of.” But then, of course, they got to know Wynton.

‘I think it was tough for my dad obviously as a much older person. I think there were big discussions that they (he and Wynton) probably had.’

Ms Benedetti, who is the artistic director of The Edinburgh Festival at which Marsalis is performing, said of her husband: ‘He is much older than me.

‘We have grown up in such drastically different parts of the world, and effectively in different generations.

‘However, our view of the world is scarily aligned and similar. I remember somebody saying to me “Is this relationship going to continue?”, almost like ‘surely this is not a long-term thing’.

‘I remember saying, “I would never have stepped into it if I wasn’t utterly convinced that this was my life, this was going to be the person I would marry.”‘

Ms Benedetti also said that behind closed doors, Marsalis, like her father, ‘is not an easy person’ to live with but is a good dad and happy to change their daughter’s nappies when he’s at home.

She said: ‘Elise is his fifth child. What he will give to her and has given to his other children is a sort of world insight that is not easy to come by.’

Ms Benedetti revealed that Elise already has her own ‘proper’ violin, adding: ‘She likes to pick it up and play her violin like Mummy.’