Thomas Beecham

English classical conductor and arranger

• Born: April 29, 1879
• Birthplace: St. Helens, England
• Died: March 8, 1961
• Place of death: London, England

A leading conductor of classical music in Britain, Beecham promoted English composers within the classical repertoire.

The Life

Thomas Beecham (BEE-chuhm) came from a family that prized music as an avocation but did not practice it professionally. His father, Sir Joseph Beecham, a chemist and pill manufacturer, was made a baronet by Queen Victoria. Beecham grew up in Huyton, near Liverpool, but at the age of thirteen, he was sent to the newly founded Rossall School in Lancashire, a rigorous but experimental school that pioneered a modern approach to education. Beecham then attended Wadham College of the University of Oxford, from which he withdrew after a year to study music in Paris. Beecham studied music composition in England, with Irish composer Charles Wood, and in France, with exiled Polish-Jewish pianist Moritz Moszkowski. This combination of insular and Continental influences was a hallmark of Beecham’s versatile and inclusive approach to the repertoire. Although Beecham had no formal training as a conductor, he founded his own symphony orchestra, named after himself, in 1909. He recruited young instrumentalists and used his verve and business acumen to put the fledgling orchestra on the musical map. He also became interested in conducting opera and ballet, performing frequently at Covent Garden in London as a prelude to founding his own opera company in 1915. This eventually became the British National Opera Company.

In 1903 Beecham married an American woman, Utica Wells; they had two children. In 1911 Beecham separated from his wife. When she refused to grant him a divorce, he had a widely publicized relationship with the noted socialite Maud Alice (Emerald) Cunard, and this brought him in touch with much of the British avant-garde and intelligentsia. As his children matured, Beecham was limited financially because his father, for reasons of spite, had cut off the flow of family money. His own idiosyncratic taste, which put his preferences ahead of the ticket-buying public’s, rendered his musical ventures often short of cash.

In 1916, at the height of the carnage of World War I, he was knighted by King George V, becoming Sir Thomas. Ironically, he would have become that anyway later that year when his father died, bequeathing to Beecham the baronetcy (in which, unlike a knighthood, the title of Sir can be inherited). Beecham was particularly noted for his busy schedule during the war years, and he declined fees for many appearances. In the 1920’s he became known as the man who brought serious music to England’s provinces, especially the British industrial city of Manchester, for whose Hallé Orchestra he had made one of his first appearances. A cultured man who took the arts seriously, Beecham made it his mission to bring the best of classical music to the ordinary middle- and working-class Englishman, establishing him as a well-known and popular figure among a broad audience. Despite this fame and the considerable estate left to him by his wealthy father, Beecham faced fiscal problems, as his multiple commitments often left his financial affairs in a confusing tangle.

In the 1930’s Beecham’s interests once again focused on symphonic music. With funding from the prominent Courtauld family, he founded the London Philharmonic Orchestra in 1932 and returned to Covent Garden as principal opera conductor. Controversially, Beecham toured Nazi Germany in 1936, during which he played the works of the anti-Semitic opera composer Richard Wagner (to whose works Beecham became increasingly dedicated in the 1930’s) while complying with a Nazi request not to play the Jewish German composer Felix Mendelssohn. However, after meeting Adolf Hitler, Beecham was repelled. His detestation of the Nazi leader nullified any attempt to use his visit as propaganda. The onset of war in 1939 and the heavy German bombing of England that started a year later hindered most London cultural institutions, so Beecham spent most of World War II in the United States, conducting the Metropolitan Opera in New York and spending time in Seattle, and even crossed the Pacific to Australia. He was not much criticized for choosing to leave England to pursue his career elsewhere during the war; indeed, his service in New York as a cultural ambassador, undertaken before the United States and Britain were allied in the war, was perceived as an important advertisement for Britain’s cause in the war within the American cultural sphere. During these years Beecham’s wife, Utica, finally agreed to divorce him. In 1943 he married the concert pianist Betty Thomas, who was born in 1900.

Beecham’s energy was still undiminished in his sixties, and upon returning to London Beecham undertook the task of founding a new orchestra, the Royal Philharmonic. His relations with the London Philharmonic had cooled in his absence, during which the personnel had experienced more artistic independence and were then intolerant of Beecham’s martinet-style management. In 1957 Queen Elizabeth II made him a Companion of Honour. Beecham made one last ambitious tour in 1958, conducting operas at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, Argentina. That same year Betty died, and Beecham married his secretary, Shirley Hudson, the following year. He visited the United States and Canada the last time in 1959. Beecham was able to experience many tributes accorded him on his eightieth birthday before dying in 1961.

The Music

Beecham did not see music as merely a technical or virtuoso exercise—it was simply a part of culture. He lectured on music, making many public appearances that increased the visibility of classical music, and he championed such British composers as Charles Villiers Stanford, Ethel Smyth (a rare instance of a woman composer being widely performed in this era), Joseph Holbrooke, and especially Frederick Delius. As impresario and entrepreneur, Beecham was a pivotal figure in English culture whose erudition and high standards brought the grandeur of the nineteenth century in touch with the rigor and complexity of the twentieth.

Frederick Delius. Delius’s lush, chromatic work depends crucially on tempo for its effects, and Beecham delighted in his interpretive role as its conductor. In the second movement of Delius’s 1887 Florida Suite, “By the River,” for example. Beecham used a persistent set of beats, about a second apart, to establish the natural and folk-culture milieu of the piece, and then accelerated the rhythm, leading to a thunderous clash of joy and release. Strongly programmatic, Delius’s music depicted a specific scene or historical setting, and Beecham excelled at using it to paint pictures for the audience, achieving, more simplistically, the sort of total artistic effect aimed for by Wagnerian opera.

Beecham and Delius became close friends, both rooted in the north of England (Delius was from Yorkshire) but cosmopolitan with significant Continental influences and (unusually for cultured Englishmen of their generation save Winston Churchill) a great love of the United States. Beecham was far more sociable and business-minded than Delius and found surer footing in the salons of metropolitan London. It could be argued, however, that Delius’s friendship strengthened Beecham’s intellectual side. Delius influenced Beecham to read the works of Friedrich Nietzsche (whose Also Sprach Zarathustra provided the text for Delius’s 1905 A Mass of Life).

Other Composers. Beecham’s empathetic advocacy was not restricted to Delius. Such Continental composers as Mendelssohn and Camille Saint-Saëns were among his favorites, and he argued for the importance of less conspicuous French composers such as Vincent d’Indy, Emmanuel Chabrier, and André Gretry. Beecham also put effort into performing works by more renowned composers such as Ludwig van Beethoven, though his interpretations of Beethoven did not meet with universal praise. This was also true of his performances, castigated as too enthusiastic, of Finnish composer Jean Sibelius. More lauded were his performances of Hector Berlioz, whose Romanticism and intelligence found their perfect expositor in Beecham. Beecham was famed as a conductor of Mozart operas and tried also to give the French opera tradition, as exemplified by comparative unknown Étienne Méhul, a beachhead among a generally unreceptive English audience.

An opera and ballet as well as a symphonic conductor, Beecham promoted a pioneering composer not necessarily associated with conventional ideas—Richard Strauss, whose major operas all received their British premieres under Beecham’s direction. He also conducted the first British appearance of Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, an important moment in legitimating modern approaches to the arts in the United Kingdom. He also sponsored the first British appearance of the Russian opera singer Feodor Chaliapin, one of the most iconic musical figures of the early twentieth century.

Beecham’s musical tastes, however, were not ecumenical. He paid little or no attention to such giants as Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, and Béla Bartók, and Baroque music was not accorded much of his attention.

Conductor and Writer. Part of Beecham’s success as a conductor lay in winning the loyalty, admiration, and, most of all, involvement of his musicians. His often capricious temperament was exacting, but Beecham’s musicians found him challenging and provocative and worthy of their effort. This is all the more compelling given that Beecham’s outsize ego—in many ways emblematic of nineteenth century musical tradition—had the potential to alienate people.

Beecham linked music to the other arts, especially literature, one of his great interests. He was more than just a student of literature; he was an author as well, although his memoir is not as colorful as his legendary hilarious aphorisms.

Musical Legacy

Beecham was so active and mercurial a force on the musical scene that inevitably his influence would fade with his death. His recordings are still listened to today, and his reintroduction of British music into the standard classical repertoire has had a permanent impact. Sir Thomas Beecham societies in the United States and the United Kingdom still pay tribute to and study the great conductor’s achievements.

Principal Recordings

albums:Atterberg: Symphony No. 6, 1928; Mozart: Symphony No. 34, 1928; Gounod’s Faust, 1929; Chabrier’s España, 1932; Mozart: Symphony No. 31 in D Major, 1939; Handel: The Faithful Shepherd Suite, 1943; Famous Overtures, 1946; Handel: Messiah, 1947; Handel: The Gods Go A-Begging, 1947; Sibelius: Symphony No. 2 in D Major, Op. 43, 1947; Sibelius: Symphony No. 6 in D Minor, Op. 104, 1947; Sibelius: Tapiola, Op.112, 1947; Strauss: Ein Heldenleben, 1947; Sir Thomas Beecham Conducts Music from the Eighteenth Century, 1948; Delius: Brigg Fair: An English Rhapsody, 1948; Handel: The Great Elopement, 1951; Royal Festival Hall Concert, 1959; Handel: Love in Bath, 1961; Handel: Solomon, 1969; Sir Thomas Beecham Conducts Rossini, 1979; Beecham Plays Strauss, 1980; Sir Thomas Beecham Conducts Classical Symphonies, 1981; Thomas Beecham and the London Philharmonic Orchestra, 1996; Beecham Conducts, 1997; Beecham Conducts Sibelius, 1998; Sibelius: Symphony No. 4; Pelléas et Mélisande; Tapiola, Swanwhite; Symphony No. 7, 2000.

writings of interest:A Mingled Chime, 1943 (autobiography); Frederick Delius, 1959.

Bibliography

Beecham, Sir Thomas. A Mingled Chime. New York: G. P. Putnam, 1943. Lacking the sparkle of his treasured aphorisms, Beecham’s memoir is nonetheless a skillfully written and informative account of most of his career. Especially useful in establishing the contours of Beecham’s musical tastes.

Cairns, David. “Sir Thomas Beecham: A Lifetime—and a Fortune—Devoted to Music.” Gramophone, the Classical Music Magazine 78 (May, 2001): 8-11. Compact but informative overview of Beecham’s career as a conductor and a philanthropist.

Fenby, Eric. Delius as I Knew Him. London: G. Bell and Sons, 1936. Memoir of Delius by his young amanuensis gives key details of the Beecham friendship.

Jefferson, Alan. Sir Thomas Beecham: A Centenary Tribute. London: Macdonald’s and Jane, 1979. Full survey of Beecham’s career, including copious illustrations and photographs.

Melior, David. “A Healthy Dose of Beecham.” The Mail on Sunday, April 29, 2001, p. 75. A look at Beecham’s contributions to musical culture.

Reid, Charles. Thomas Beecham: An Independent Biography. London: Gollancz, 1961. Published the year of his death, an objective and comprehensive study of Beecham.