Thomas Beecham
He used his access to the family fortune to finance opera from the 1910s until the start of the Second World War, staging seasons at Covent Garden, Drury Lane and His Majesty's Theatre with international stars, his own orchestra and a wide repertoire.
[9] Beecham first conducted in public in St. Helens in October 1899, with an ad hoc ensemble comprising local musicians and players from the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and the Hallé in Manchester.
[4] A month later, he stood in at short notice for the celebrated conductor Hans Richter at a concert by the Hallé to mark Joseph Beecham's inauguration as mayor of St Helens.
In his early discussions with his new orchestra, he proposed works by a long list of barely known composers such as Étienne Méhul, Nicolas Dalayrac and Ferdinando Paer.
From 1907 he had an annuity of £700 left to him in his grandfather's will, and his mother subsidised some of his loss-making concerts,[12] but it was not until father and son were reconciled in 1909 that Beecham was able to draw on the family fortune to promote opera.
[40] The ballets included Debussy's Jeux and his controversially erotic L'après-midi d'un faune, and the British premiere of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, six weeks after its first performance in Paris.
[54] Originally Sargent and Beecham envisaged a reshuffled version of the London Symphony Orchestra, but the LSO, a self-governing co-operative, balked at weeding out and replacing underperforming players.
[58] During the next eight years, the LPO appeared nearly a hundred times at the Queen's Hall for the Royal Philharmonic Society alone, played for Beecham's opera seasons at Covent Garden, and made more than 300 gramophone records.
[76] As his sixtieth birthday approached, Beecham was advised by his doctors to take a year's complete break from music, and he planned to go abroad to rest in a warm climate.
Musically his reunion with the London Philharmonic was triumphant, but the orchestra, now, after his help in 1939, a self-governing co-operative, attempted to hire him on its own terms as its salaried artistic director.
[84] The orchestra later became celebrated for its regular team of woodwind principals, often referred to as "The Royal Family", consisting of Jack Brymer (clarinet), Gwydion Brooke (bassoon), Terence MacDonagh (oboe) and Gerald Jackson (flute).
Instead of short, star-studded seasons, with a major symphony orchestra, the new director David Webster was attempting to build up a permanent ensemble of home-grown talent performing all the year round, in English translations.
[91] In 1953 at Oxford, Beecham presented the world premiere of Delius's first opera, Irmelin, and his last operatic performances in Britain were in 1955 at Bath, with Grétry's Zémire et Azor.
After the sudden death of the German conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler in 1954, Beecham in tribute conducted the two programmes his colleague had been due to present at the Festival Hall; these included Bach's Third Brandenburg Concerto, Ravel's Rapsodie espagnole, Brahms's Symphony No.
[95] In the summer of 1958, Beecham conducted a season at the Teatro Colón, Buenos Aires, Argentina, consisting of Verdi's Otello, Bizet's Carmen, Beethoven's Fidelio, Saint-Saëns's Samson and Delilah and Mozart's The Magic Flute.
Beecham's own last illness prevented his operatic debut at Glyndebourne in a planned Magic Flute and a final appearance at Covent Garden conducting Berlioz's The Trojans.
[n 7] Sixty-six years after his first visit to America, Beecham made his last, beginning in late 1959, conducting in Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago and Washington.
Owing to changes at Brookwood, his remains were exhumed in 1991 and reburied in St Peter's Churchyard at Limpsfield, Surrey, close to the joint grave of Delius and his wife Jelka Rosen.
He edited the incomplete Requiem, made English translations of at least two of the great operas, and introduced Covent Garden audiences who had rarely if ever heard them to Così fan tutte, Der Schauspieldirektor and Die Entführung aus dem Serail; he also regularly programmed The Magic Flute, Don Giovanni and The Marriage of Figaro.
[137][138] The chief music critic of The Times observed: "Beecham's Lohengrin was almost Italian in its lyricism; his Ring was less heroic than Bruno Walter's or Furtwängler's, but it sang from beginning to end".
[146] Bizet was among Beecham's favourites, and other French composers favoured by him included Gustave Charpentier, Delibes, Duparc, Grétry, Lalo, Lully, Offenbach, Saint-Saëns and Ambroise Thomas.
[148][149] Of the more than two dozen operas in the Verdi canon, Beecham conducted eight during his long career: Il trovatore, La traviata, Aida, Don Carlos, Rigoletto, Un ballo in maschera, Otello and Falstaff.
[151] His 1956 recording of La bohème, with Victoria de los Ángeles and Jussi Björling, has seldom been out of the catalogues since its release[152] and received more votes than any other operatic set in a 1967 symposium of prominent critics.
[164] The composer Richard Arnell wrote that Beecham preferred making records to giving concerts: "He told me that audiences got in the way of music-making – he was apt to catch someone's eye in the front row.
[169] He began recording with the London Philharmonic Orchestra in 1933, making more than 150 discs for Columbia, including music by Mozart, Rossini, Berlioz, Wagner, Handel, Beethoven, Brahms, Debussy and Delius.
[170] In 1936, during his German tour with the LPO, Beecham conducted the world's first orchestral recording on magnetic tape, made at Ludwigshafen, the home of BASF, the company that developed the process.
27, K199, the overtures to Smetana's The Bartered Bride and Mozart's La clemenza di Tito, the Sinfonia from Bach's Christmas Oratorio,[172] a 1947–48 complete recording of Gounod's Faust, and an RPO studio version of Sibelius's Second Symphony.
[169] For the Columbia label, Beecham recorded his last, or only, versions of many works by Delius, including A Mass of Life, Appalachia, North Country Sketches, An Arabesque, Paris and Eventyr.
[172] From his return to England at the end of the Second World War until his final recordings in 1959, Beecham continued his early association with HMV and British Columbia, who had merged to form EMI.
In 2011, to mark the 50th anniversary of Beecham's death, EMI released 34 CDs of his recordings of music from the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, including works by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Wagner, Richard Strauss and Delius, and many of the French "lollipops" with which he was associated.
