Sir Thomas Beecham - Biography
Sir Thomas Beecham Bart the great English conductor and perhaps the most formidable wit England has produced since Oscar Wilde was born on April 29th 1879 in St. Helens Lancashire and died on March 8th 1961 in London. Beecham was the son of Joseph Beecham who ran the Beecham Pills that was founded by his father. The patent medicines Beecham Pills produced were very lucrative and the Beecham family was wealthy and eventually was given a Barony. Beecham was educated at private schools. He had hoped to go to a musical conservatory in Germany but his father refused and insisted that Beecham go to Oxford. Beecham did poorly at Oxford and convinced his father to send Thomas to Paris for a musical education.
Beecham was self taught as a conductor, his first orchestra was an ensemble of musicians hired by his father when Beecham was twenty and played in St. Helens near Manchester. His professional debut occurred in Chapham when he conducted the opera The Bohemian Girl by Balfe a faded Irish opera that he held a sentimental attachment to for the rest of his career. His first orchestra in 1906 was a chamber orchestra the New Symphony where he conducted among other things neglected works of the Baroque. With his father’s financial help he expanded the New Symphony to full size. It was during this time that he discovered the music of Fredrick Delius an English composer living in France; Delius’s music was to become a lifelong obsession for Beecham who wrote his biography and was to make many incomparable recordings of. Beecham was to have one of his characteristic feuds with the New Symphony and then founded the Beecham Symphony made up of free lance musicians and again supported financially by Beecham. Since Beecham only conducted music he was and not necessarily the public were interested in; the venture lost money. Beecham starting in 1910 with his father’s support started presenting opera seasons at Covent Garden in London where he presented the English premieres of Richard Strauss’s Salome and Elektra and a production of Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann, a work which he was forty years later to film for Michael Powell. Beecham before the First World War supplied the orchestra for Serge Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe and along with conductor Pierre Monteux introduced England to the ballets of Stravinsky and the operas of Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin and Mussorgsky’s Boris Gudonov with the great Basso Feodor Chaliapin.
During the First World War Beecham divided his time between London and Manchester where he often conducted the Halle Orchestra. In 1916 Beecham was knighted by George the Fifth and later that year inherited the Baroncy of his father after his death. After his father’s death the business affairs of Covent Garden unraveled and Beecham was close to bankruptcy. Beecham in the 1920’s was mostly a free lance conductor performing often with the London Symphony and making his debut in America in Carnegie Hall with Vladimir Horowitz in the First Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto.
In 1932 he decided to put together an orchestra that he intended to make the finest in England, the London Philharmonic. He got the finest players available including oboist Leon Goosens and clarinetist Reginald Kell. They were to make hundreds recordings for English Columbia in the 1930’s that were considered the finest made symphonic series recorded in the 78 rpm era. Of special significance were his many Delius recordings and his recordings of Mozart. Beecham also stepped in as musical director at Covent Garden in the mid 1930’s and turned a provincial opera house into a major international one by bringing in the finest German and Italian artists. Beecham courted controversy when he toured Germany in the 1936 Olympic year and acquiesced to a Nazi request by dropping the Scotch Symphony of the Jewish composer Mendelssohn. The next year he made a superb recording of the Magic Flute in Berlin which also raised eyebrows. Beecham was vulnerable because of his outspoken reactionary political opinions and his long time intimate friendship with American born socialite and leader of the British appeasement movement Lady Cunard. Beecham to be fair never showed any inclination towards anti-Semitism and had excellent relations with Jewish artists. Beecham enemies (there were many) used this against him when he left England in 1940 in the middle of the war to go to Australia and then to America (He told the press upon arrival in Australia” I heard there was a national emergency so I emerged”). When he came to America he first had to conduct the then semi professional Seattle Symphony and WPA Orchestras in New York. No doubt his scathing remarks about Toscanini (“that glorified Italian Bandmaster”) had gotten back to the Maestro who probably used his immense influence to block him form important assignments. Beecham was openly living with the pianist Betty Humby which finally forced his long suffering wife of 35 years Utica to give him a divorce. He married Humby in 1943 and he now was getting more prestigious assignments at the Metropolitan Opera and the Philadelphia Orchestra.
After the war he returned to England he was uninterested in permanently conducting the London Philharmonic again and turned to down an offer from his old assistant at Covent Garden Walter Legge to direct his newly formed Philharmonia Orchestra. What he did was to found the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in 1946. He immediately was contracted to make recordings for RCA Victor where he made memorable recordings of Sibelius and the then rarely performed Tchaikovsky Third Symphony. He also recorded the unique pastiches of Handel Operas that he arranged (Handel’s Operas were almost totally unknown at the time). Handel was his favorite composer but he disliked Bach (“I would gladly trade all six of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto’s for Massenet’s Manon and feel that I had gotten the better of the bargain”) When asked why he didn’t use the harpsichord for Baroque music he said;”My dear sir the sound of a harpsichord reminds me of two skeletons copulating on a tin roof”) He changed affiliation to American Columbian Records in 1950 after they won the battle of the recording speeds and recorded a vast amount of music up until 1955 highlights of which were the recordings of Berlioz, Delius and Schumann’s rarely performed Manfred. He was the musical director for two famous Michal Powell movies the Red Shoes and Tales of Hoffmann. Beecham returned to Covent Garden in the early 1950’s to conduct Wagner’s Meistersinger and the Bohemian Girl, his dream of recording the Troyens of Berlioz was denied. He didn’t like the Covent Garden General Manager David Webster and made spiteful comments about him. Beecham had a streak of cruelty in him; when Webster engaged the superb but gentle soul Rafael Kubelik as music director of Covent Garden in 1955 he wrote to the London Times ;”I don’t understand why we engage third rate foreigners when we already have second rate native talent”.
Beecham in 1955 changed recording companies again when he signed with EMI HMV which was distributed in America by Capitol and Angel. While there he went from strength to strength making great recordings of Haydn’s 12 London Symphonies and brilliant recordings of Grieg, Sibelius, Rimsky-Korsakov, Bizet, Berlioz and Delius among others. He made a famous one off recording of Puccini’s La Boheme in New York in 1956 with Bjorling and De Los Angeles in the leads. Beecham made in the late 1950’s recording inimitable recordings with the French National Radio Orchestra of their native repertoire. Betty Humby died in her late forties of cancer. He was a man who adored female companionship and soon married his secretary nearly fifty years his junior. Beecham was in failing health the last year of his life and died on March 8th 1961 a few weeks short of his eighty second birthday.
Even for a man who lived a long life it is amazing how much activity there was in it. He had what was arguably the most productive recording career of any conductor. He also had the ability of making what was considered less than first rate music by let’s say Goldmark, Grieg or Gounod and make it exciting and beautiful. Though he was every the inch the autocrat he could relax; once he knew his men were absorbed in the soccer championships and stopped a rehearsal and rolled out a television so they could watch the match. He was a great Edwardian gentleman and eccentric whose likes we shall never see again.