Sir Thomas Beecham, 2nd Baronet, (29 April 18798 March 1961) was an English conductor and impresario best known for his association with the London Philharmonic and the Royal Philharmonic orchestras. He was also closely associated with the Liverpool Philharmonic and Hallé orchestras. From the early 20th century until his death, Beecham was a major influence on the musical life of United Kingdom and, according to the BBC, was Britain's first international conductor.
Born to a rich industrial family, Beecham began his career as a conductor in 1899. 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. Among the works he introduced to England were Richard Strauss's Elektra, Salome and Der Rosenkavalier and three operas by Frederick Delius.
Together with his younger colleague Malcolm Sargent, Beecham founded the London Philharmonic, and he conducted its first performance at the Queen's Hall in 1932. In the 1940s he worked for three years in the United States, where he was music director of the Seattle Symphony and conducted at the Metropolitan Opera. After his return to Britain, he founded the Royal Philharmonic in 1946 and conducted it until his death in 1961.
Beecham's repertoire was eclectic, sometimes favouring lesser-known composers over famous ones. His specialities included composers whose works were neglected in Britain before he became their advocate, such as Delius and Hector Berlioz. Other composers with whose music he was frequently associated were Joseph Haydn, Franz Schubert, Jean Sibelius and the composer he revered above all others, Mozart.
Beecham was educated at Rossall School between 1892 and 1897, after which he hoped to attend a music conservatoire in Germany, but his father forbade it, and instead Beecham went to Wadham College, Oxford to read Classics.Reid, pp. 25–27 He did not find university life to his taste and successfully sought his father's permission to leave Oxford in 1898.Reid, p. 27 He studied as a pianist but, despite his excellent natural talent and fine technique, he had difficulty because of his small hands, and any career as a soloist was ruled out by a wrist injury in 1904. Jefferson, Alan. "Beecham, Sir Thomas, second baronet (1879–1961)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004. Retrieved 24 May 2016 Lucas, p. 144 He studied composition with Frederic Austin in Liverpool, Charles Wood in London, and Moritz Moszkowski in Paris. As a conductor, he was self-taught.Crichton, Ronald, and John Lucas. "Beecham, Sir Thomas", Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online. Retrieved 13 March 2011
Beecham's professional début as a conductor was in 1902 at the Shakespeare Theatre, Clapham, with Balfe's The Bohemian Girl, for the Imperial Grand Opera Company.Lucas, p. 20 He was engaged as assistant conductor for a tour and was allotted four other operas, including Carmen and Pagliacci. A Beecham biographer calls the company "grandly named but decidedly ramshackle", though Beecham's Carmen was Zélie de Lussan, a leading exponent of the title role.Lucas, p. 22 Beecham was also composing music in these early years, but he was not satisfied with his own efforts and instead concentrated on conducting.Beecham (1959), p. 74
In 1906 Beecham was invited to conduct the New Symphony Orchestra, a recently formed ensemble of 46 players, in a series of concerts at the Wigmore Hall in London.Lucas, p. 32 Throughout his career, Beecham frequently chose to programme works to suit his own tastes rather than those of the paying public. 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.Reid, p. 54 During this period, Beecham first encountered the music of Frederick Delius, which he at once loved deeply and with which he became closely associated for the rest of his life.Jefferson, p. 32
Beecham quickly concluded that to compete with the two existing London orchestras, the Queen's Hall Orchestra and the recently founded London Symphony Orchestra (LSO), his forces must be expanded to full symphonic strength and play in larger halls.Lucas, p. 24 For two years starting in October 1907, Beecham and the enlarged New Symphony Orchestra gave concerts at the Queen's Hall. He paid little attention to the box office: his programmes were described by a biographer as "even more certain to deter the public then than it would be in our own day".Reid, p. 55 The principal pieces of his first concert with the orchestra were d'Indy's symphonic ballad La forêt enchantée, Smetana's symphonic poem Šárka, and Lalo's little-known Symphony in G minor.Reid, pp. 55–56 Beecham retained an affection for the last work: it was among the works he conducted at his final recording sessions more than fifty years later.Salter, p. 4; and Procter-Gregg, pp. 37–38
In 1908 Beecham and the New Symphony Orchestra parted company, disagreeing about artistic control and, in particular, the deputy system. Under this system, orchestral players, if offered a better-paid engagement elsewhere, could send a substitute to a rehearsal or a concert.Russell, p. 10 The treasurer of the Royal Philharmonic Society described it thus: " A, whom you want, signs to play at your concert. He sends B (whom you don't mind) to the first rehearsal. B, without your knowledge or consent, sends C to the second rehearsal. Not being able to play at the concert, C sends D, whom you would have paid five shillings to stay away."Reid, p. 50 Henry Wood had already banned the deputy system in the Queen's Hall Orchestra (provoking rebel players to found the London Symphony Orchestra), and Beecham followed suit.Reid, p. 70 The New Symphony Orchestra survived without him and subsequently became the Royal Albert Hall Orchestra.
In 1909, Beecham founded the Beecham Symphony Orchestra.Reid, p. 71 He did not poach from established symphony orchestras, but instead he recruited from theatre bandrooms, local symphony societies, the of hotels, and music colleges.Reid, pp. 70–71 The result was a youthful team – the average age of his players was 25. They included names that would become celebrated in their fields, such as Albert Sammons, Lionel Tertis, Eric Coates and Eugene Cruft.
Because he persistently programmed works that did not attract the public, Beecham's musical activities at this time consistently lost money. As a result of his estrangement from his father between 1899 and 1909, his access to the Beecham family fortune was strictly limited. 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,Reid, p. 62 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.Reid, p. 88
In 1910, Beecham either conducted or was responsible as impresario for 190 performances at Covent Garden and His Majesty's Theatre. His assistant conductors were Bruno Walter and Percy Pitt.Beecham (1959), p. 88 During the year, he mounted 34 different operas, most of them either new to London or almost unknown there.Reid, p. 97 Beecham later acknowledged that in his early years the operas he chose to present were too obscure to attract the public.Reid, p. 108 During his 1910 season at His Majesty's, the rival Grand Opera Syndicate put on a concurrent season of its own at Covent Garden; London's total opera performances for the year amounted to 273 performances, far more than the box-office demand could support.Reid, p. 96 Of the 34 operas that Beecham staged in 1910, only four made money: Richard Strauss's new operas Elektra and Salome, receiving their first, and highly publicised, performances in Britain, and The Tales of Hoffmann and Die Fledermaus.Reid, p. 107
In 1911 and 1912, the Beecham Symphony Orchestra played for Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, both at Covent Garden and at the Krolloper in Berlin, under the batons of Beecham and Pierre Monteux, Diaghilev's chief conductor. Beecham was much admired for conducting the complicated new score of Igor Stravinsky's Petrushka, at two days' notice and without rehearsal, when Monteux became unavailable.Canarina, p. 39 While in Berlin, Beecham and his orchestra, in Beecham's words, caused a "mild stir", scoring a triumph: the orchestra was agreed by the Berlin press to be an elite body, one of the best in the world.Reid, p. 123 The principal Berlin musical weekly, Die Signale, asked, "Where does London find such magnificent young instrumentalists?" The violins were credited with rich, noble tone, the woodwinds with lustre, the brass, "which has not quite the dignity and amplitude of our best German brass", with uncommon delicacy of execution.
Beecham's 1913 seasons included the British premiere of Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier at Covent Garden, and a "Grand Season of Russian Opera and Ballet" at Drury Lane.Reid, p. 141 At the latter there were three operas, all starring Feodor Chaliapin, and all new to Britain: Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov and Khovanshchina, and Rimsky-Korsakov's Ivan the Terrible. There were also 15 ballets, with leading dancers including Vaslav Nijinsky and Tamara Karsavina.Reid, p. 142 The ballets included Claude 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. Beecham shared Monteux's private dislike of the piece, much preferring Petrushka.Reid, p. 145 Beecham did not conduct during this season; Monteux and others conducted the Beecham Symphony Orchestra. The following year, Beecham and his father presented Rimsky-Korsakov's The Maid of Pskov and Borodin's Prince Igor, with Chaliapin, and Stravinsky's The Nightingale.
During the First World War, Beecham strove, often without a fee, to keep music alive in London, Liverpool, Manchester and other British cities.Reid, pp. 161–162 He conducted for, and gave financial support to, three institutions with which he was connected at various times: the Hallé Orchestra, the LSO and the Royal Philharmonic Society. In 1915 he formed the Beecham Opera Company, with mainly British singers, performing in London and throughout the country. In 1916, he received a Knight Bachelor in the New Year Honours"The Honours List", The Times, 1 January 1916, p. 9 and succeeded to the on his father's death later that year.Lucas, p. 136
After the war, there were joint Covent Garden seasons with the Grand Opera Syndicate in 1919 and 1920, but these were, according to a biographer, pale confused echoes of the years before 1914.Reid, p. 181 These seasons included forty productions, of which Beecham conducted only nine. After the 1920 season, Beecham temporarily withdrew from conducting to deal with a financial problem that he described as "the most trying and unpleasant experience of my life".Beecham (1959), p. 181
Beecham and his brother Henry had to sell enough of their father's estate to discharge this mortgage. For more than three years, Beecham was absent from the musical scene, working to sell property worth over £1 million. By 1923 enough money had been raised. The mortgage was discharged, and Beecham's personal liabilities, amounting to £41,558, were paid in full."Sir Thomas Beecham to Pay in Full: The Receiving Order Discharged", The Manchester Guardian, 29 March 1923, p. 10 In 1924 the Covent Garden property and the pill-making business at St Helens were united in one company, Beecham Estates and Pills. The nominal capital was £1,850,000, of which Beecham had a substantial share.
In 1931, Beecham was approached by the rising young conductor Malcolm Sargent with a proposal to set up a permanent, salaried orchestra with a subsidy guaranteed by Sargent's patrons, the Courtauld family.Aldous, p. 68 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. In 1932 Beecham lost patience and agreed with Sargent to set up a new orchestra from scratch.Reid, p. 202 The London Philharmonic Orchestra (LPO), as it was named, consisted of 106 players including a few young musicians straight from music college, many established players from provincial orchestras, and 17 of the LSO's leading members.Morrison, p. 79 The principals included Paul Beard, George Stratton, Anthony Pini, Gerald Jackson, Léon Goossens, Reginald Kell, James Bradshaw and Marie Goossens.Russell, p. 135
The orchestra made its debut at the Queen's Hall on 7 October 1932, conducted by Beecham. After the first item, Berlioz's Roman Carnival Overture, the audience went wild, some of them standing on their seats to clap and shout.Russell, p. 18 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.Jefferson, p. 89 Berta Geissmar, his secretary from 1936, wrote, "The relations between the Orchestra and Sir Thomas were always easy and cordial. He always treated a rehearsal as a joint undertaking with the Orchestra.… The musicians were entirely unselfconscious with him. Instinctively they accorded him the artistic authority which he did not expressly claim. Thus he obtained the best from them and they gave it without reserve."Geissmar, p. 267
By the early 1930s, Beecham had secured substantial control of the Covent Garden opera seasons.Jefferson, p. 171 Wishing to concentrate on music-making rather than management, he assumed the role of artistic director, and Geoffrey Toye was recruited as managing director. In 1933, Tristan und Isolde with Frida Leider and Lauritz Melchior was a success, and the season continued with the Ring cycle and nine other operas.Jefferson, p. 170 The 1934 season featured Conchita Supervía in La Cenerentola, and Lotte Lehmann and Alexander Kipnis in the Ring.Jefferson, p. 173 Clemens Krauss conducted the British première of Strauss's Arabella. During 1933 and 1934, Beecham repelled attempts by John Christie to form a link between Christie's new Glyndebourne Festival and the Royal Opera House.Jefferson, p. 172 Beecham and Toye fell out over the latter's insistence on bringing in a popular film star, Grace Moore, to sing Mimi in La bohème. The production was a box-office success, but an artistic failure.Jefferson, p. 175 Beecham manoeuvred Toye out of the managing directorship in what their fellow conductor Adrian Boult described as an "absolutely beastly" manner.Kennedy (1989), p. 174
From 1935 to 1939, Beecham, now in sole control, presented international seasons with eminent guest singers and conductors.Jefferson, pp. 178–190 Beecham conducted between a third and half of the performances each season. He intended the 1940 season to include the first complete performances of Berlioz's Les Troyens, but the outbreak of the Second World War caused the season to be abandoned. Beecham did not conduct again at Covent Garden until 1951, and by then it was no longer under his control.Jefferson, pp. 178–190 and 197
Beecham took the London Philharmonic on a controversial tour of Germany in 1936.Russell, p. 39 There were complaints that he was being used by Nazi propagandists, and Beecham complied with a Nazi request not to play the Scottish Symphony of Mendelssohn, who was a Christian by faith but a Jew by birth. In Berlin, Beecham's concert was attended by Adolf Hitler, whose lack of punctuality caused Beecham to remark very audibly, "The old bugger's late."Lucas, p. 232 After this tour, Beecham refused renewed invitations to give concerts in Germany,Reid, pp. 217–218 although he honoured contractual commitments to conduct at the Berlin State Opera, in 1937 and 1938, and recorded The Magic Flute for EMI Records in the Beethovensaal in Berlin in the same years.Jefferson, pp. 214–215
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.Lucas, p. 239 The Australian Broadcasting Commission had been seeking for several years to get him to conduct in Australia. The outbreak of war on 3 September 1939 obliged him to postpone his plans for several months, striving instead to secure the future of the London Philharmonic, whose financial guarantees had been withdrawn by its backers when war was declared.Reid, p. 218 Before leaving, Beecham raised large sums of money for the orchestra and helped its members to form themselves into a self-governing company.Lucas, p. 240
In 1944, Beecham returned to Britain. Musically his reunion with the London Philharmonic was triumphant, but the orchestra, now, after his help in 1939, a self-governing cooperative, attempted to hire him on its own terms as its salaried artistic director.Reid, p. 230 "I emphatically refuse", concluded Beecham, "to be wagged by any orchestra ... I am going to found one more great orchestra to round off my career."Reid, p. 231 When Walter Legge founded the Philharmonia Orchestra in 1945, Beecham conducted its first concert. But he was not disposed to accept a salaried position from Legge, his former assistant, any more than from his former players in the LPO.
In 1946, Beecham founded the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (RPO), securing an agreement with the Royal Philharmonic Society that the new orchestra should replace the LPO at all the Society's concerts. Beecham later agreed with the Glyndebourne Festival that the RPO should be the resident orchestra at Glyndebourne each summer. He secured backing, including that of record companies in the US as well as Britain, with whom lucrative recording contracts were negotiated. As in 1909 and in 1932, Beecham's assistants recruited in the freelance pool and elsewhere. Original members of the RPO included James Bradshaw, Dennis Brain, Leonard Brain, Archie Camden, Gerald Jackson and Reginald Kell.Reid, p. 232 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).Jenkins (2000), p. 5
Beecham's long association with the Hallé Orchestra as a guest conductor ceased after John Barbirolli became the orchestra's chief conductor in 1944. Beecham was, to his great indignation, ousted from the honorary presidency of the Hallé Concerts Society,Lucas, pp. 308–310 and Barbirolli refused to "let that man near my orchestra".Kennedy (1971), p. 189 Beecham's relationship with the Liverpool Philharmonic, which he had first conducted in 1911, was resumed harmoniously after the war. A manager of the orchestra recalled, "It was an unwritten law in Liverpool that first choice of dates offered to guest conductors was given to Beecham. ... In Liverpool there was one over-riding factor – he was adored."Stiff, Wilfred, quoted in Procter-Gregg, pp. 113–114
Between 1951 and 1960, Beecham conducted 92 concerts at the Royal Festival Hall.Jefferson, p. 103 Characteristic Beecham programmes of the RPO years included symphonies by Bizet, Franck, Joseph Haydn, Franz Schubert and Tchaikovsky; Richard Strauss's Ein Heldenleben; concertos by Mozart and Saint-Saëns; a Delius and Jean Sibelius programme; and many of his favoured shorter pieces."Concerts", The Times, 13 and 29 September 18 and 25 October 1, 15 and 29 November and 6 December 1958 He did not stick uncompromisingly to his familiar repertoire. 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, Maurice Ravel's Rapsodie espagnole, Johannes Brahms's Symphony No. 1, and Samuel Barber's Second Essay for Orchestra."Concerts", The Times, 19 and 21 January 1955
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. These were his last operatic performances.Reid, pp. 238–239 It was during this season that Betty Humby died suddenly. She was cremated in Buenos Aires and her ashes returned to England. 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.
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. During this tour, he also conducted in Canada. He flew back to London on 12 April 1960 and did not leave England again.Jefferson, pp. 21 and 226–27 His final concert was at Portsmouth Guildhall on 7 May 1960. The programme, all characteristic choices, comprised the Magic Flute Overture, Haydn's Symphony No. 100 (the Military), Beecham's own Handel arrangement, Love in Bath, Schubert's Symphony No. 5, On the River by Delius, and the Bacchanale from Samson and Delilah.Reid, p. 244
Beecham died of a coronary thrombosis at his London residence, aged 81, on 8 March 1961.Reid, p. 245 He was buried two days later in Brookwood Cemetery, Surrey. 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.Lucas, p. 339
In 1909 or early 1910, Beecham began an affair with Maud Alice (known as Emerald), Maud Cunard. Although they never lived together, it continued, despite other relationships on his part, until his remarriage in 1943. She was a tireless fund-raiser for his musical enterprises.Reid, pp. 134–137 Beecham's biographers are agreed that she was in love with him, but that his feelings for her were less strong.Jefferson, p. 39 During the 1920s and 1930s, Beecham also had an affair with Dora Labbette, a soprano sometimes known as Lisa Perli, with whom he had a son, Paul Strang, born in March 1933.Lucas, p. 212 Strang, a lawyer who served on the boards of several musical institutions, died in April 2024. Remembering Paul Strang (1933–2024), Trinity Laban, 4 April 2024
In 1943 Lady Cunard was devastated to learn (not from Beecham) that he intended to divorce Utica to marry Betty Humby, a concert pianist 29 years his junior.Reid, p. 220 Beecham married Betty in 1943, and they were a devoted couple until her death in 1958. On 10 August 1959, two years before his death, he married in Zurich his former secretary, Shirley Hudson, who had worked for the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra's administration since 1950. She was 27, he 80.Reid, p. 241
With Haydn, too, Beecham was far from an authenticist, using unscholarly 19th-century versions of the scores, avoiding the use of the harpsichord, and phrasing the music romantically. He recorded the twelve "London" symphonies, and regularly programmed some of them in his concerts.Jefferson, pp. 235–236 Earlier Haydn works were unfamiliar in the first half of the 20th century, but Beecham conducted several of them, including the Symphony No. 40 and an early piano concerto.Procter-Gregg, p. 197 He programmed The Seasons regularly throughout his career, recording it for EMI in 1956, and in 1944 added The Creation to his repertoire.
For Beecham, Mozart was "the central point of European music,"Jefferson, p. 238 and he treated the composer's scores with more deference than he gave most others. 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.Lucas, pp. 62–63 He considered the best of Mozart's piano concertos to be "the most beautiful compositions of their kind in the world", and he played them many times with Betty Humby-Beecham and others.Jefferson, pp. 115 and 238
Beecham was not known for his BachCardus, p. 28 but nonetheless chose Bach (arranged by Beecham) for his debut at the Metropolitan Opera. He later gave the Third Brandenburg Concerto in one of his memorial concerts for Wilhelm Furtwängler (a performance described by The Times as "a travesty, albeit an invigorating one")."Concerts", The Times, 19 January 1955 In Brahms's music, Beecham was selective. He made a speciality of the Second Symphony but conducted the Third only occasionally, the First rarely, and the Fourth never. In his memoirs he made no mention of any Brahms performance after the year 1909.Beecham (1959), p. 81
Beecham was a great Richard Wagner,Cardus, p. 109; Procter-Gregg, p. 77; and Melville-Mason (Wagner), p. 4 despite his frequent expostulation about the composer's length and repetitiousness: "We've been rehearsing for two hours – and we're still playing the same bloody tune!"Reid, p. 206 Beecham conducted all the works in the regular Wagner canon with the exception of Parsifal, which he presented at Covent Garden but never with himself in the pit.Jefferson, p. 189Procter-Gregg, p. 203 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".Howes, Frank, quoted in Procter-Gregg, p. 77
Richard Strauss had a lifelong champion in Beecham, who introduced Elektra, Salome, Der Rosenkavalier and other operas to England. Beecham programmed Ein Heldenleben from 1910 until his last year; his final recording of it was released shortly after his death.Greenfield, Edward. "Strauss, Richard. Ein Heldenleben", Gramophone, June 1961, p. 32 Don Quixote, Till Eulenspiegel, the Bourgeois Gentilhomme music and Don Juan also featured in his repertory, but not Also Sprach Zarathustra or Tod und Verklärung.Jefferson, pp. 234–235 Strauss had the first and last pages of the manuscript of Elektra framed and presented them to "my highly honoured friend ... and distinguished conductor of my work.""Composer's Gift to Sir T. Beecham", The Times, 22 April 1938, p. 12
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. As early as 1904, Beecham met Giacomo Puccini through the librettist Luigi Illica, who had written the libretto for Beecham's youthful attempt at composing an Italian opera.Lucas, pp. 22–23 and 24–26. Jefferson (pp. 204–205) incorrectly gives the librettist's name as "Giuseppe Illica". At the time of their meeting, Puccini and Illica were revising Madama Butterfly after its disastrous première. Beecham rarely conducted that work, but he conducted Tosca, Turandot and La bohème.Procter-Gregg, p. 202 His 1956 recording of La bohème, with Victoria de los Ángeles and Jussi Björling, has seldom been out of the catalogues since its releaseJefferson, p. 200 and received more votes than any other operatic set in a 1967 symposium of prominent critics.March, pp. 62–63
Another major 20th-century composer who engaged Beecham's sympathies was Sibelius, who recognised him as a fine conductor of his music (although Sibelius tended to be lavish with praise of anybody who conducted his music).Osborne, p. 387 In a live recording of a December 1954 concert performance of Sibelius's Second Symphony with the BBC Symphony Orchestra in the Festival Hall, Beecham can be heard uttering encouraging shouts at the orchestra at climactic moments.Originally issued on LP as HMV ALP 1947 in 1962 and subsequently reissued on compact disc as BBC Legends BBCL 415–4 in 2005
Beecham was dismissive of some of the established classics, saying for example, "I would give the whole of Bach's Brandenburg Concertos for Jules Massenet's Manon, and would think I had vastly profited by the exchange".Cardus, p. 29 He was, by contrast, famous for presenting slight pieces as encores, which he called "lollipops". Some of the best-known were Berlioz's Danse des sylphes; Chabrier's Joyeuse Marche and Charles Gounod's Le Sommeil de Juliette.Jenkins (1991) pp. 4 and 12
Beecham began making recordings in 1910, when the acoustical process obliged orchestras to use only principal instruments, placed as close to the recording horn as possible. His first recordings, for HMV, were of excerpts from Offenbach's The Tales of Hoffmann and Johann Strauss's Die Fledermaus. In 1915, Beecham began recording for the Columbia Graphophone Company. Electrical recording technology (introduced in 1925–26) made it possible to record a full orchestra with much greater frequency range, and Beecham quickly embraced the new medium. Longer scores had to be broken into four-minute segments to fit on 12-inch 78-rpm discs, but Beecham was not averse to recording piecemeal – his well-known 1932 disc of Chabrier's España was recorded in two sessions three weeks apart.Jenkins (1992), p. 3 Beecham recorded many of his favourite works several times, taking advantage of improved technology over the decades.Procter-Gregg, pp. 196–199
From 1926 to 1932, Beecham made more than 70 discs, including an English version of Gounod's Faust and the first of three recordings of Handel's Messiah. 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. Among the most prominent of his pre-war recordings was the first complete recording of Mozart's The Magic Flute with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, made for HMV and supervised by Walter Legge in Berlin in 1937–38, a set described by Alan Blyth in Gramophone magazine in 2006 as having "a legendary status".Blyth, Alan. "Masonic Magic", Gramophone, January 2006, p. 28 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.Borwick, John. "Commentary: 50 Years of (BASF) Tape", Gramophone, April 1984, p. 91. Retrieved 13 March 2011
During his stay in the US and afterwards, Beecham recorded for American Columbia Records and RCA Victor. His RCA recordings include major works that he did not subsequently re-record for the gramophone, including Beethoven's Fourth, Sibelius's Sixth and Mendelssohn's Reformation Symphonies.Jenkins, Lyndon. "The Beecham Archives", Gramophone, September 1987, p. 11 Some of his RCA recordings were issued only in the US, including Mozart's Symphony No. 27, K199, the overtures to Smetana's The Bartered Bride and Mozart's La clemenza di Tito, the Sinfonia from Bach's Christmas Oratorio, a 1947–48 complete recording of Gounod's Faust, and an RPO studio version of Sibelius's Second Symphony. Beecham's RCA records that were released on both sides of the Atlantic were his celebrated 1956 complete recording of Puccini's La bohème"Sir Thomas Beecham Selected Discography", Gramophone, May 2011, p. 11 and an extravagantly rescored set of Handel's Messiah.Culshaw, p. 212 The former remains a top recommendation among reviewers,See, for instance, "CD Review: Building a Library Recommendations" , BBC, 14 June 2008. Retrieved 13 March 2011; and "Sir Thomas Beecham Selected Discography", Gramophone, May 2001, p. 11 and the latter was described by Gramophone as "an irresistible outrage … huge fun".Blyth, Alan. "Music from Heaven", Gramophone, December 2003, p. 52
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. Other Columbia recordings from the early 1950s include Beethoven's Eroica, Pastoral and Eighth symphonies, Mendelssohn's Italian symphony, and the Brahms Violin Concerto with Isaac Stern.
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. From 1955 his EMI recordings made in London were recorded in stereo. He also recorded in Paris, with his own RPO and with the Orchestra National de la Radiodiffusion Française, though the Paris recordings were in mono until 1958.Wigmore, Richard. "Haydn Symphonies", Gramophone, September 1993, p. 53 For EMI, Beecham recorded two complete operas in stereo, Die Entführung aus dem Serail and Carmen.Vaughan, Denis. "Beecham in the Recording Studio: a centenary tribute to Sir Thomas Beecham", Gramophone, April 1979, p. 1 His last recordings were made in Paris in December 1959. Beecham's EMI recordings have been continually reissued on LP and CD. 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.EMI (2011), "Sir Thomas Beecham Edition", catalogue numbers 9099462 , 9099642 , 9186112 and 9099322
Despite his lordly drawl, Beecham remained a Lancastrian at heart. "In my county, where I come from, we're all a bit vulgar, you know, but there is a certain heartiness – a sort of bonhomie about our vulgarity – which tides you over a lot of rough spots in the path. But in Yorkshire, in a spot of bother, they're so damn-set-in-their-ways that there's no doing anything with them!"Procter-Gregg, p. 152
Beecham has been much quoted. In 1929, the editor of a music journal wrote, "The stories gathered around Sir Thomas Beecham are innumerable. Wherever musicians come together, he is likely to be one of the topics of conversation. Everyone telling a Beecham story tries to imitate his manner and his tone of voice."Grew, Sydney. "British Conductors", British Musician and Musical News, June 1929, p. 154 A book, Beecham Stories, was published in 1978 consisting entirely of his bons mots and anecdotes about him.Atkins, passim Some are variously attributed to Beecham or one or more other people, including Arnold Bax and Winston Churchill; Neville Cardus admitted to inventing some himself.Cardus, p. 26 Among the Beecham lines that are reliably attributed are, "A musicologist is a man who can read music but can't hear it";Procter-Gregg, p. 154; and Cardus, p. 75 his maxim, "There are only two things requisite so far as the public is concerned for a good performance: that is for the orchestra to begin together and end together; in between it doesn't matter much";"Jolts and Jars: some wit and wisdom by Sir Thomas Beecham", The Listener, 3 October 1974; also heard on the EMI "Beecham in Rehearsal" disc, EMI CDM 7 64465 2 (1992) and his remark at his 70th birthday celebrations after telegrams were read out from Strauss, Stravinsky and Sibelius: "Nothing from Mozart?"Cardus, p. 125; and Atkins, p. 48
He was completely indifferent to mundane tasks such as correspondence, and was less than responsible with the property of others. On one occasion, during bankruptcy proceedings, two thousand unopened letters were discovered among his papers. Havergal Brian sent him three scores with a view to having them performed. One of them, the Second English Suite, was never returned and is now considered lost.Charles Reid, Thomas Beecham: An Independent Biography, 1961, p. 93 The Havergal Brian Society Newsletter, No. 228, July–August 2013, p. 3, footnote 28. Retrieved 23 May 2016
Beecham, by Caryl Brahms and Ned Sherrin, is a play celebrating the conductor and drawing on a large number of Beecham stories for its material. Its first production, in 1979, starred Timothy West in the title role. It was later adapted for television, starring West, with members of the Hallé Orchestra taking part in the action and playing pieces associated with Beecham. Timothy West as Beecham, BBC TV film, 1979, British Film Institute Film and TV database. Retrieved 26 July 2007
In 1980 the Royal Mail put Beecham's image on the 13½p postage stamp in a series portraying British conductors; the other three in the series depicted Wood, Sargent and Barbirolli."Conductors on Stamps", The Times, 17 July 1980, p. 18 The Sir Thomas Beecham Society preserves Beecham's legacy through its website and release of historic recordings. "Membership information" , Sir Thomas Beecham Society. Retrieved 30 March 2011
In 2012, Beecham was voted into the inaugural Gramophone magazine "Hall of Fame". "Sir Thomas Beecham" Gramophone. Retrieved 10 April 2012
1910–1920
Covent Garden estate
London Philharmonic
1940s
1950s and later years
Personal life
Repertoire
Handel, Haydn, and Mozart
German music
French and Italian music
Delius, Sibelius and "Lollipops"
Recordings
Relations with others
Honours and commemorations
Books by Beecham
See also
Notes
Sources
External links
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