Giovanni Battista Barbirolli was born on 2 December 1899 in Southampton Row, Holborn, London, the second child and eldest son of an Italian father and a French mother.

[2][9] In 1914 he was joint winner of the academy's Charles Rube Prize for ensemble playing,[10] and in 1916 The Musical Times singled him out as "that excellent young 'cello player, Mr Giovanni Barbirolli.

Barbirolli was keenly interested in modern music, and he and three colleagues secretly rehearsed Ravel's String Quartet in the privacy of a men's lavatory in the Academy.

His association with Edward Elgar's Cello Concerto began with its première in 1919, when he played as a rank and file member of the London Symphony Orchestra.

[26] The following year he was invited to conduct the opening work in Covent Garden's international season, Don Giovanni, with a cast that included Mariano Stabile, Elisabeth Schumann and Heddle Nash.

[27] In 1929, after financial problems had forced the BNOC to disband, the Covent Garden management set up a touring company to fill the gap, and appointed Barbirolli as its musical director and conductor.

The operas in the company's first provincial tour included Die Meistersinger, Lohengrin, La bohème, Madama Butterfly, The Barber of Seville, Tosca, Falstaff, Faust, Cavalleria rusticana, Pagliacci, Il trovatore, and the first performances in English of Turandot.

[28] In later tours with the company Barbirolli had the chance to conduct more of the German opera repertory, including Der Rosenkavalier, Tristan und Isolde, and Die Walküre.

[2] Notwithstanding his growing reputation in Britain, Barbirolli's name was little known internationally, and most of the musical world was taken by surprise in 1936 when he was invited to conduct the New York Philharmonic Orchestra in succession to Arturo Toscanini.

[n 5] Wilhelm Furtwängler had accepted the orchestra's invitation to fill the post, but he was politically unacceptable to a section of the Philharmonic's audience because he continued to live and work in Germany under the Nazi government.

[41] During his ten weeks, he programmed several American novelties including Charles Martin Loeffler's tone-poem Memories of My Childhood, a symphony by Anis Fuleihan, and Philip James's Bret Harte overture.

He gave the world premières of Walton's second Façade Suite,[45] and Britten's Sinfonia da Requiem and Violin Concerto; he also introduced pieces by Jacques Ibert, Eugene Goossens, and Arthur Bliss and by many American composers including Samuel Barber, Deems Taylor and Daniel Gregory Mason.

Barbirolli conducted six operas for Webster, Turandot, Aida, Orfeo ed Euridice, Tristan und Isolde, La bohème and Madama Butterfly, 1951–53,[62] but he declined to be wooed away from the Hallé.

[67] In 1960 he accepted an invitation to succeed Leopold Stokowski as chief conductor of the Houston Symphony in Texas, a post he held until 1967, conducting an annual total of 12 weeks there in early spring and late autumn between Hallé engagements.

[70] Barbirolli's interest in new music waned in post-war years,[71] but he and the Hallé appeared regularly at the Cheltenham Festival, where he premiered new works of a mostly traditional style by William Alwyn, Richard Arnell, Arthur Benjamin, Peter Racine Fricker, Gordon Jacob, Alan Rawsthorne, Kenneth Leighton and others.

[73] Increasingly, Barbirolli concentrated on his core repertory of the standard symphonic classics, the works of English composers, and late-romantic music, particularly that of Mahler.

His loyal friend and admirer the critic Neville Cardus wrote privately in 1969, "he seems so much to love a single phrase that he lingers over it, caressing it; meanwhile the general momentum is lost.

[87] The Sir John Barbirolli Memorial Foundation of the Royal Philharmonic Society was instituted after his death to assist young musicians with the purchase of instruments.

[90] Barbirolli is remembered as an interpreter of Elgar, Vaughan Williams and Mahler, as well as Schubert, Beethoven, Sibelius, Verdi and Puccini, and as a staunch supporter of new works by British composers.

The music critic Richard Osborne wrote that, if all Barbirolli's recordings were to be lost except that of Lehár's Gold and Silver Waltz, "there would be reason enough to say, 'Now, there was a conductor!

His colleague Sir Adrian Boult liked and admired Barbirolli but teased him for his meticulousness: "We can't all be like you and spend months studying these things and then have days of rehearsals before we conduct them.

His biographer Michael Kennedy commented, "it is ironical that the effort of composing the symphonies shortened Mahler's life; interpreting them certainly put an enormous strain on Barbirolli in his last decade.

Elgar, despite an extensive discography as a conductor, never recorded the work himself, and some have speculated that "the breadth, nobility and lyrical poetry" of Barbirolli's interpretation left the composer disinclined to compete.

Immediately after the LSO concert at which he had stood in for Beecham, he was approached by Fred Gaisberg, the chief recording producer for His Master's Voice who signed him for his company shortly afterwards.

[101] An HMV colleague of Gaisberg described Barbirolli as "a treasure", because he "could accompany Chaliapin without provoking an uproar, win golden opinions from Jascha Heifetz, Artur Rubinstein, Fritz Kreisler and Pablo Casals, and conduct one of the finest recorded performances of the Quintet from Meistersinger".

[47] Among his early His Master's Voice records are works, mainly concertos, by Brahms, Bruch, Chopin, Dvořák, Glazunov, Mendelssohn, Mozart, Schumann, Sibelius, Tchaikovsky and Vieuxtemps.

"[2] Recordings from this period include symphonies by Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Mozart, Schubert, Schumann, Sibelius and Tchaikovsky, and other orchestral music by Berlioz, Debussy, Menotti, Purcell, Ravel, Respighi, and Rimsky-Korsakov.

[99] Within six months of his return to Britain in 1943, Barbirolli resumed his contract with HMV, conducting the Hallé in the Third Symphony of Bax and the Fifth of Vaughan Williams, followed by works by a wide range of composers from Corelli to Stravinsky.

[103] They made many recordings, including symphonies by Beethoven, Dvořák, Elgar, Mozart, Nielsen, Sibelius, Mahler, Tchaikovsky and Vaughan Williams, as well as a few concertos, short orchestral pieces and operatic excerpts.

"[47] HMV planned to record Die Meistersinger with Barbirolli in Dresden in 1970, but following the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 he refused to conduct in the Soviet bloc, and his place was taken by Herbert von Karajan.