Beecham - Boeing, Boeing, Gone xpost
rich...@gmail.com
Gilmore, an amateur writer (I gather) who has contributed several
volumes of clippings to the Beecham conducting history, but who is
otherwise unknown to me. The volume "Sir Thomas Beecham: The Seattle
Years 1941-1943" basically consists of every possible newspaper
article on Beecham, from every local newspaper, on Beecham while he
was the principal conductor in Seattle, a period of his artistic life
about which little has been said. The interineated notes by Gilmore,
who is more or less a Beecham 'true believer', tend to be of limited
use, end up focusing on the many typos of the various newspapers as
proof that they didn't appreciate Beecham, but can be usefully
disregarded, and the achievement of collecting so much information
from so many sources, and being able to compare their reactions to the
same events, is more than rewarding enough.
This is actually a fascinating compendium, both in terms of Beecham at
that time, and as a kind of 'x ray' of how a conductor of some
prominence can be both appreciated and resented, and the history
raises some interesting questions about how useful a conductor Beecham
was at that point.
Although I don't have the most recent Beecham biography, I am fairly
familiar with his artistic life through the standard sources, and
there has never really been any completely satisfactory explanation of
why he left Britain in 1940 and remained here, conducting essentially
second and third rate orchestras (as Charles Reid calls them). His
acceptance of the Seattle position is itself strange (he was to
conduct 7 to 10 concerts per year, free to conduct elsewhere, and had
to spend no real time there except in preparation for the concerts),
because the orchestra was no more than 60 or so strong, and was
clearly an ensemble of quite modest abilities. In fact, in the second
year of tenure, it did not even make the list of the top two dozen
regional orchestras in America as put out by the national symphony
orchestra organization of the time.
One suggestion as to both his soujoun in American, and perhaps his
tenure in Seattle, is his growing involvement with his to-be second
wife, the pianist Betty Humby. She had preceded him to America by six
months, he may have been involved with her for several years before
that, and she was a beautiful woman of very modest pianistic talents
whom the Seattle press fawned over.
The interesting factor in terms of the relation of the press (and the
community) to Beecham is seen pretty clearly in the clippings. On the
one hard, he was eminent, particularly for Seattle standards. But he
did nothing to build bridges in the city, from the very first acted in
a rather spoiled and imperious manner which put off the community (one
stops counting how many times he interrupted concerts to chastize
listeners, or was late to various lectures he was supposed to give),
and in fact it is questionable how much he improved the quality of the
orchestra. Rehearsal was at a premium, he was (with them) no orchestra
builder, and the critics, who are first taken with the pizzazz and
eclat of his interpretations and podium manner, soon begin to feel
that the orchestra sounds ragged, and many of his outings, once he
moved away from Mozart and Delius, were of doubtful interpretive
interest. Although Gilmore tends to deny the questions about Beecham's
actual conducting abilites, a look at Reid, for example, makes clear
that even at the MET, his debut performances were seen as yielding
very scappy orchestral playing, and in fact Reid, a great admirer,
feels that his entire American war tenure was something of a blot on
his record in terms of achievement.
He was, of course, a remarkably far-ranging interpreter, and this was
always a characteristic of his performances. Goosens, in his
autobiography, tells of frequently having to substitute for Beecham
where Beecham had chosen a rare work to debut and then backed out just
before the performance!!! (His MET conducting debut was a double bill
of Phoebeus and Pan, with Coq d'Or.) He once told a startled group of
Cambridge students, who came to him looking for a suggestion of an
opera to perform, that they should do Le martydom de St. Lawrence (by
memory - I may not have the exact title). One can wonder, I suppose,
if breadth to some extent substituted for a certain depth (although I
adore his Delius, Mozart, Haydn and Sibelius, whom he considered the
greatest composer of the century). In any case, his contributions to
the symphony included a fair number of American works, including the
premier of the Thomson Second Symphony, work by Arthur Benjamin,
McKay,Alvin Siegal and others, and in the more classical repertoire he
was bringing in such pieces at the Tschaikovsky C major Serenade
(first Seatlle performance, the Franck Symphonic Variations and of
course the Enigma Variations. He tended to stay away from the three
Bs. Solists (including his wife) were generally undistinguished as to
reputation, although he presented two largely Wagner concerts with
Marjorie Lawrence after her return to the MET. He did schedule, in his
first year, a several day Mozart festival, which included Act III of
Figaro, and which featured Audrey Mildmay (you know who SHE was).
There seems to have been little resistance to any of the novel music
from the critics or the audiences, wonderfully, and although he often
threatened to leave, he seems to have begun to have felt cornered
after a while by both the critics and his audiences, and towards the
end of his tenure he made the statement to the press that two of the
pieces just performed by his orchestra, were performed better in
Seattle than by any orchestra, anywhere in the world, that he had
conducted. By this time, no one believed him, and his problems were
exaccerbated by the fact that he didn't name the pieces initially, and
then seemed to change his mind about which they were. His departure
was sudden and in mid-contract, and he only returned 17 years later
for a concert with an even younger wife, the herself witty Shirley,
Lady Beecham, who survived him.
He was obviously great with bons-mots, although I don't think they
fooled anyone after a while. Some are quite funny....in an early
rehearsal, he said to the brass, "Gentlemen of the trombones - you may
take a very well-earned respite - well, a fairly well-earned
respite," but much seemed canned or prepared in advance, although
today a number of these seemingly off-the-cuff statements continue to
be repeated and chuckled over.
Not major history, perhaps, but a very interesting as to American
regional music making of the period, and detailed side light on a
conductor who, I think, was often more than the sum of his parts and
who was, perhaps tragically, as has been said, "a self made man,
although he didn't need to be."