A guide to the legendary British conductor, Sir Thomas Beecham, and his best recordings <\/p>
W<\/span>hen a 50-year-old Thomas Beecham made his debut with the Berlin Philharmonic<\/a> on 29 January 1930, his rapport with them was immediate. At the end of their first rehearsal, the players gave him a standing ovation. <\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n The German press were equally impressed \u2013 not so much by the Elgar<\/a><\/strong> and Delius<\/a><\/strong> works Beecham conducted, but by his performances of Mozart<\/a><\/strong>\u2019s Symphony No.\u00a034 and Richard Strauss<\/a><\/strong>\u2019s Ein Heldenleben<\/i>. <\/span><\/p>\n In that same year, Beecham drew admiring reviews for performances of Wagner\u2019s Tannh\u00e4user<\/i> and Lohengrin<\/i> in Wiesbaden, and Strauss\u2019s Der Rosenkavalier<\/i> (introduced to Britain by Beecham in 1913) in Hamburg.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p><\/div> <\/section> For Wagner\u2019s Die Meistersinger<\/i> at Cologne\u2019s Easter opera festival, though assigned just \u2018a rehearsal and a half\u2019 with one of the principals arriving only in time for the performance itself, Beecham received 15 minutes of applause. The British critic Richard Capell, covering the event, reflected that, in contrast to Beecham\u2019s overwhelming success in Germany, \u2018at home, a proper sphere of action is still denied this rare spirit, who (can it be questioned?) is so far and away the finest musician our race and generation have produced in the executive field\u2019.<\/span><\/p>\n Thomas Beecham\u00a0 was a legendary conductor famous for some of the greatest performances in the early to mid-20th century<\/p>\n Clearly, and contrary to legend, Beecham\u2019s talent was not one solely promoted by the prodigious wealth of his family\u2019s pharmaceutical business (which, in fact, had been bought from the family in 1924).<\/span><\/p>\n Still, being a son of Joseph Beecham, the music loving and well-to-do proprietor of Beecham\u2019s Patent Pills, undoubtedly kick-started his career. He was born on 29 April 1879<\/span><\/p>\n On 8 November 1899 the young Beecham, having had just <\/span>one previous outing as a conductor with an amateur orchestra, found himself conducting the Hall\u00e9 in a programme including Beethoven\u2019s Fifth Symphony<\/a><\/strong>. His father, on being elected mayor of St Helens, had booked the Hall\u00e9 to give a celebratory concert conducted by Hans Richter. On discovering that Richter was due to be in Vienna on the date of his concert, and unable to find a conductor of similar repute, Joseph insisted \u2013 to the leader of the Hall\u00e9\u2019s dismay \u2013 that his son should take charge instead.<\/span><\/p>\n The event proved a great success. Beecham, who had memorised the entire programme, impressed everyone by cuing the orchestra even without a score (a practice he maintained throughout his career). All too soon, though, he was at odds with his father, joining his eldest sister, Emily, to insist on their mother\u2019s release from the asylum in which Joseph had incarcerated her against her will. Thomas and his father were estranged for almost ten years.<\/span><\/p>\n Self-taught as a conductor, Beecham\u2019s technique was anything but orthodox. The Musical Standard<\/i> observed of his Queen\u2019s Hall<\/a> <\/strong>debut with the New Symphony Orchestra on 12 April 1907 that Beecham \u2018has a good rhythmic beat but has a jerky awkward manner of exhibiting it and an exceedingly irritating habit of putting his left hand on his hip as if he didn\u2019t know what to do with it\u2019. <\/span><\/p>\n Yet such was Beecham\u2019s passionate knowledge of the music he conducted, and his ability to communicate this to his players, that, as The Times<\/i> reported of an earlier concert, \u2018He got many effects that can only be got by a fine musician with his forces absolutely at his command.\u2019 <\/span><\/p>\n Beecham\u2019s technique was scarcely more refined in 1941, although according to Olin Downes of the New York Times<\/i> his performances with the New York City Symphony Orchestra eclipsed any from the more prestigious New York Philharmonic under Sir John Barbirolli: \u2018Judged by the conventions of conducting, his technique, if such it can be called, and his style are precise examples, at least to the casual glance, of what a conductor should not do \u2026 He may indicate a sforzando<\/i> in the manner of a man hurtling a brick or a bomb at a foe, or beat the measure freely with one arm while holding the baton in a clenched fist, invisible to the orchestra, at his back. It remains that the orchestra understands him, and that singularly inspired music floods torrentially and with precision from him and the instrumentalists\u2026\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n Beecham founded his first professional orchestra, the Beecham Symphony Orchestra, in 1909, drawing many of its players from the New Symphony Orchestra, the London Symphony Orchestra and Henry Wood\u2019s Queen\u2019s Hall Orchestra. In many ways the BSO established a pattern repeated when Beecham created the London Philharmonic Orchestra (founded 1932), and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (1946).<\/span><\/p>\n Each orchestra was made up almost entirely of talented young players, whose playing Beecham honed through a combination of intense rehearsal (according to composer Dame Ethel Smyth, \u2018only in Vienna under Mahler had I heard music rehearsed to such a pitch of perfection\u2019), his sheer enthusiasm, genuine respect for the most capable of his musicians, and a mischievous, almost irreverent bonhomie \u2013 several of Beecham\u2019s witticisms, however, some of them apocryphal, have not translated well in the 55 years since his death.<\/span><\/p>\n The BSO\u2019s opening concerts in 1909 included the premiere of Vaughan Williams\u2019s In the Fen Country<\/i> and the first London performance of Delius\u2019s Sea Drift<\/i>. That summer, Beecham and his orchestra participated in the first complete staging of Smyth\u2019s The Wreckers<\/i>. Joseph Beecham was finally reconciled with his son after watching that production \u2013 not coincidentally on the same night as Edward VII\u2019s attendance. <\/span><\/p>\n From then until his death in 1916, Joseph lavishly supported Beecham and his projects. These included the British premieres of several Strauss operas: Feuersnot<\/i>, Elektra<\/i> and Salome<\/i>, all in 1910, followed by Der Rosenkavalier<\/i> in 1913. Joseph financed the Ballets Russes\u2019s first London appearance in 1911, with the BSO accompanying, the orchestra winning the admiration of Stravinsky himself when performing his The Firebird<\/i> and Petrushka<\/i> under Pierre Monteux. <\/span><\/p>\n Beecham himself not only gave many performances of the Firebird<\/i><\/a><\/strong> suite (his 1916 recording of excerpts was apparently the first made of any Stravinsky) and Petrushka<\/i>, but also gave the first British performance of Three Japanese Lyrics<\/i> in January 1915, and just months later the London premiere of Ravel\u2019s closely related Trois po\u00e8mes de St\u00e9phane Mallarm\u00e9<\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n Beecham\u2019s most ambitious creation was the Beecham Opera Company, founded in 1915 in the midst of the First World War<\/a><\/strong>. This was Britain\u2019s first permanent national opera company, and its conductors apart from Beecham would later include Albert Coates, formerly of the Mariinsky Theatre, who left Russia after the Revolution. <\/span><\/p>\n Perhaps the company\u2019s biggest coup was the world premiere of Puccini\u2019s Il trittico<\/i>, though Beecham offended the composer by dropping the least popular of its three single-act operas, Suor Angelica<\/i>, after its second performance to make the evening shorter. The company collapsed in 1920 thanks to over-ambitious productions (both in number and cost), poor planning and lack of finance, Joseph having died in 1916.<\/span><\/p>\n Beecham acknowledged that unlike his father he had \u2018no financial ability\u2019. Though he often waived his fee, it was not enough to off-set the thousands of pounds (millions by today\u2019s value) he spent both on projects which made poor return \u2013 including his Herculean efforts for English music in the first decades of the 20th century \u2013 and on several extra-marital affairs. Beecham\u2019s disregard for inconvenient details such as the need to pay overtime for extra rehearsals, or to fulfill all rather than just some contracted performances, meant that many organisations were wary of him as a permanent liability.<\/span><\/p>\n In addition, his success as a conductor coupled with his minimal sense of diplomacy made him many enemies. Several of his peers, such as Henry Wood<\/a><\/strong> and Adrian Boult, found his affected nonchalance, lack of responsibility and casual poaching of their players hard to bear.<\/span><\/p>\n Beecham caused further resentment \u2013 even among players of the LPO (which ultimately spurred him to form the RPO) \u2013 by spending most of World War Two in America, enjoying the adulation of critics and audiences there. In New York, the laudatory reviews Beecham received from Olin Downes and Virgil Thomson galled John Barbirolli, the then chief conductor of the New York Philharmonic, and provoked Toscanini into writing a letter of protest to Downes, branding Beecham as \u2018that Nazi-sympathizer man\u2019 alluding to his controversial pre-war tour of Germany with the LPO (though Beecham rescued conductor Wilhelm Furtw\u00e4ngler\u2019s Jewish assistant, Berta Geissmar, by appointing her as his own).<\/span><\/p>\n Nor did Beecham help his cause by playing the old reactionary, telling a journalist in the 1940s: \u2018My boy, creative music is dead. I have an orchestra. I have an opera house. I can find nothing new that is worth listening to. It is over!\u2019 Yet his legacy appears to have been not only unavoidable, but also nourishing. <\/span><\/p>\n Benjamin Britten<\/a><\/strong> for all his sniping against Beecham, persisted in listening to a broadcast of him conducting Bart\u00f3k\u2019s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celeste<\/i> in 1939, despite interruptions by phone calls. Bart\u00f3k\u2019s work clearly haunted Britten when he composed Peter Grimes<\/i><\/a><\/strong>, its eerie celeste music resounding in the opera\u2019s Passacaglia. Then in 1943, coincidentally the year in which Beecham\u2019s Mephistophelean features graced the cover of Time<\/i> magazine, Britten, still composing Peter Grimes<\/i>, wrote to his publisher requesting a score of Der Rosenkavalier<\/i>: \u2018I am impatient to see how the old magician makes his effects!\u2019 Though Britten meant Strauss, he could equally have been referring to that genius of English music who first introduced Rosenkavalier<\/i> to his eager British public. \u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Thomas Beecham died from a coronary thrombosis on\u00a0 8 March 1961. He is buried in Brookwood Cemetery, Surrey.<\/p>\n We named Thomas Beecham one of the greatest conductors of all time<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Borodin Polovtsian Dances<\/strong> Thomas Beecham conducted the Ballets Russes\u2019s stagings of these two Russian scores, and his zest for these \u2018exotic\u2019 works is infectious.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u2022 A guide to Delius<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n \u2022 A guide to Mozart<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Delius Appalachia; Hassan etc<\/strong> Appalachia<\/em> captured Beecham\u2019s imagination and devotion to Delius<\/strong><\/a>\u2018s music. The sinew and exuberance of this performance transcends the late-1930s sound.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Mozart The Magic Flute<\/strong> Most of Beecham\u2019s Mozart<\/strong><\/a> recordings are unavailable, but this charming 1937-38 Berlin recording of The Magic Flute<\/em> shows his affection for the composer.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Strauss Elektra (final scene); Ariadne auf Naxos (final Scene)<\/strong> Recorded in 1947 after his broadcast performance of Elektra<\/em> before the composer, this dramatic account affirms Beecham\u2019s Strauss<\/strong><\/a> credentials.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u2022 The best recordings of Vaughan Williams\u2019s Sea Symphony<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n\n
Who was Thomas Beecham?<\/h2>\n
When was Thomas Beecham born and who were his parents?<\/h2>\n
When did he get his first break?<\/h2>\n
Thomas Beecham\u2019s unorthodox <\/span>technique<\/h2>\n
How many orchestras did Thomas Beecham found?<\/h2>\n
Was Thomas Beecham liked?<\/h2>\n
When did Thomas Beecham die?<\/h2>\n
Best recordings by Sir Thomas Beecham<\/h2>\n