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 Beecham conducting the LPO in 1944 |
An improbable musical genius
Grandson of the creator of the cure-all pill, Sir Thomas Beecham’s undoubted talent as a conductor was something of an enigma, writes Gerald Isaaman
Thomas Beecham: An Obsession With Music.
By John Lucas.
Boydell Press £25.
HE was a maestro, an impresario with a formidable presence and passion for music who could bring a great orchestra alive as he wielded his baton on stage.
Yet the conductor Sir Thomas Beecham (1879-1961) was equally an enigma, a personality whose complex life both with music, money and the law, let alone women, was so packed with dramatic detail that writing about it daunted at least two biographers.
That’s where John Lucas brilliantly stepped in. As a journalist and one-time arts editor of the Observer, he wrote a biography of the conductor Reginald Goodall, and then followed that by completing the late Peter Heyworth’s monumental biography of Otto Klemperer.
“The idea of one day writing a biography of Beecham had always been at the back of my mind,” says Lucas, now 73, who lives in Vincent Square, Islington. “I had heard a number of his concerts and had always been totally gripped by them. He could make orchestras play like no other British conductor I have come across and had an extraordinary ability of making an audience feel that it was being drawn to what was not only a very intense musical experience, but also a hugely enjoyable one.
“I knew of at least two writers who wanted to undertake a comprehensive biography, but, in the end, were stopped by the sheer complexity of the different strands of the story. And I was driven on by the feeling that if I didn’t get on with it, there would be soon be very few people left who had actually known this man who, for me, was the greatest executant musician this country had ever produced.”
But it turned out to be a compelling adventure that took him round the world doing research over a 10-year period – and one with local aspects – made possible by his distinguished wife, the soprano Dame Anne Evans.
Lucas calls it his “piece of luck” and explains: “She was travelling a great deal and I, by now free of the Observer, went with her. While she rehearsed, I scoured libraries and archives from New York to Buenos Aires to Auckland and all over Europe.
“Wherever we went, Beecham seemed to have been there too. So I was able to recreate his war-time years in America that had never been dealt with properly before. And the Australian chapter, too, consists almost entirely of new material, including the tale of the Australian airman trying to cut off Beecham’s beard.”
And there were local venues to visit: the solid grey mansion in Arkwright Road, Hampstead, built by his father, Joseph, where Beecham often stayed as a young man. (His grandfather Thomas was creator of the eponymous pill.) Then there is the flat at Bell Moor, overlooking the Heath, where the bailiffs were called in when Thomas got into a credit crunch.
They hauled off a radiogram to cover his debts, much to the dismay of Beecham’s lawyer, Philip Emanuel, who cried out in protest: “He promised it to me in payment of my fees!”
Yet for all the commanding detail that Lucas has amassed, he confesses that the source of Beecham’s musical genius is far from obvious. Apart from being a natural talent who played the church organ in his teens, by many accounts he had no real feeling for music, even his lover Lady Cunard wondered where his musical gene came from.
Lucas recalls: “During the Second World War she asked the American poet and novelist Frederic Prokosch, ‘What is your own frank opinion of Sir Thomas? He is rather a puzzle, isn’t he? He comes from a curious background and there is a hint of the parvenu but it’s a miracle, that musicality of his, don’t you agree?”
A miracle, indeed. As the composer Richard Strauss declared: “What you, dear Mr Beecham, have done for my works in England cannot be sufficiently appreciated.”
The Lucas biography comes with a CD of Beecham rehearsing with the RPO, playing Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Handel and Liszt. |
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