“What, Tommy Beecham dead? And I’m still
alive?” So spoke a drunk in Hampstead High
Street on the afternoon of March 8, 1961, when
London newspaper placards announced that Sir
Thomas, at 81, was gone. The words expressed
what many felt — that it was surely an excessive
insolence of fate that so singular a man and artist
should at any age be taken.
In his own field, Sir Thomas had become a fig-
ure approaching Churchillian stature — “one of
the great character symbols of his country,”
Charles Reid, in High Fidelity, called him. He
was ‘poet and visionary and pure stylist of
sound,” wrote Desmond Shawe-Taylor of the
London Sunday Times, adding, “The inner es-
sence of the man has been captured on the in-
numerable gramophone recordings he has left
us. We had better continue to cherish these, for
if all genius is unique, that of Beecham .. . is
more unique than others.”
The family Beecham was born into made the
famous Beecham’s Pills, which kept much of
England regular. The young Thomas was edu-
cated at Rossall School, received the basics of
composition from Dr. Sweeting, later from Var-
ley Roberts at Oxford, and then went on to in-
tensive study of music on the Continent. In 1899
he founded an amateur orchestral society at
Huyton. In 1902 he substituted for Hans Richter
in a concert by the Hallé Orchestra and
astounded everyone by conducting the Beetho-
ven C minor symphony from memory, a feat
which was not then common practice. There-
after he obtained desirable conducting posts by
what was for him the simplest means: he estab-
lished his own orchestras — the New Symphony
in 1906, the Beecham Symphony, with which he
made his reputation, in 1909, the great London
Philharmonic in 1932 (in the opinion of many,
the finest orchestra of its time; Léon Goossens
was first oboe, Reginald Kell principal clarinet),
and the splendid Royal Philharmonic in 1947.
Sir. Thomas! accomplishments were many. He
greatly enlarged the music-listening, public in
England and reshaped its tastes. He vigorously
promoted opera, the ‘service for which he was
knighted in 1915. His three seasons beginning in
February, 1910, are legendary: In a total of 28
weeks he staged 190 performances of 34 operas,
most of them new or virtually new to London.
His concerts gave vigorous new zest and life to
old symphonic warhorses and championed ne-
a o
glected works which might otherwise still lan-
guish. He created vaster audiences for Haydn
and Mozart. He reclaimed from limbo Liszt’s “A
Faust Symphony,” Goldmark’s “Rustic Wedding”
Symphony, and symphonies by Balakirev, Lalo
and Bizet. He singlehandedly saved Delius from
total extinction.
Recordings were for Beecham a lifetime pas-
sion. He recorded prolifically, seeking always
demandingly and tirelessly to combine the best
possible musicianship with the best possible re-
corded sound. Wrote David Hall in 1948, “As a
recording conductor, he is incomparably the
greatest,” adding in Stereo Review in 1961 that
“During an era that saw the prime of such giants
of the baton as Toscanini, Stokowski, Koussevit-
zky, Furtwangler, Mengelberg and Bruno Walter,
Sir Thomas surpassed them all when it came to
documenting on records a personal kind of mu-
sicianship.’” Wrote. Roland Gelatt: ‘(He made
music like nobody else and in every measure
gave himself away. When a new Beecham disc
arrived, one put it on the, turntable with the cer-
tainty that boredom would not ensue. A Bee-
cham recording was invariably an event.” Wrote
Robert C. Marsh: “Sir Thomas did not merely
make a great many records; he made a great
many great records.’
He had little time for moderns, ignoring even
Stravinsky and Bartok, but otherwise his sym-
pathies were vast. He seemed a specialist in al-
most everybody and in addition to the compos-
ers previously named, his repertoire included
Handel, Beethoven, Brahms, Mendelssohn, Schu-
bert, Schumann, Wagner, Richard Strauss, French
composers through Debussy, Russians from
Glinka and Tchaikovsky to Prokofiev, and Scan-
dinavians from Grieg to Sibelius.
His admiration for Berlioz endured for more
than half a century until his death. Beecham re-
cordings of ‘Harold in Italy” and the “Te Deim”’
were outstanding. Oddly enough, his first re-
cording of the Symphonie fantastique was long
in coming. When he did record the work at last,
at the close of the 1950s, he made two versions,
one in mono and the other, shortly afterward, in
stereo sound. Only the mono was issued in the
United States, where Robert C. Marsh wrote of
it in High Fidelity: ‘There is nothing in the cata-
logue that can touch it for interpretive insight,
zest, or the achievement of the composer’s
unique effects.””
In England, where the stereo recording was
released, Denis Stevens in The Gramophone
called it “a genuinely French Fantastique, won-
derfully performed and superbly recorded.” Sir
Thomas’ Symphonie fantastique of Berlioz in
stereo sound is now released for the first time in
America, adding yet another treasure to the
growing catalogue of superlative Beecham re-
cordings on Seraphim. = Rory Cry
If there is one thing that everybody knows about
Berlioz’ life and work, it is that he fell wildly in
love with the Irish actress Harriet Smithson,
whom he first saw when she was acting Shake-
speare in Paris in 1827, and that, inspired by his
passion for her, he wrote the Symphonie fantas-
tique. What is less widely known is that the sym-
phony, so far from being written with haste and
in a fever of emotion, was the product of much
consideration and self-control.
In February, 1830, Berlioz wrote to a friend,
“| was about to begin my symphony . . . it was
all if"my head but | cannot write a thing. We
must wait.’ However, the work was completed
that year, and given its first performance in the
Conservatoire, under Francois Habeneck, on De-
cember 5, 1830. The work was greeted with
marked enthusiasm. Nonetheless, the always
self-critical composer subsequently made a num-
ber of far-reaching revisions to the symphony.
Furthermore, he wrote in the following year a
sequel entitled Lélio, ou le Retour a la vie. This
monodrame lyrique was designed for a stage
performance in which the Symphonie fantastique
should act as a purely instrumental introduction.
Although the opening of Lélio was designed
to afford the necessary musical contrast with the
close of the symphony, the monodrame is pri-
marily a dramatic, rather than a musical sequel,
taking its-lead from the well-known program
which Berlioz attached to the symphony. While
it is true that this program may illuminate certain
musical events, it is equally true that it may fal-
sify or cheapen our response to the work as a
purely musical organism. Berlioz’ own hope
“that the symphony can provide its own musical
interest independently of any dramatic inten-
tion” is amply fulfilled by the music, and in view
of the fact (almost always ignored) that Berlioz
expressly demanded the suppression of the pro-
gram, apart from the movement titles, when the
symphony is played without its dramatic sequel,
the advantages of considering the work as a
piece of pure music can be enjoyed with a clear
conscience.
‘As for the romance which inspired the sym-
phony, its development is a story of the most
lifelike irony. Miss Smithson refused the barrage
of letters which Berlioz directed at her, avoided
the first performances of the symphony, and res-
olutely declined to meet the composer. Ulti-
mately, however, she capitulated to his unremit-
ting courtship and the two were married. The
graceful actress then suffered a series of mis-
fortunes. Her popularity declined, she was hissed
off the stage, she suffered an accident which
marred her beauty and left her a querulous in-
valid. She and Berlioz were separated. Harriet
Berlioz died penniless in Montmartre in March,
1854, and seven months later Berlioz remarried.
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