Cut Out the Cant

There was the time when he became so elated at a New York Philharmonic rehearsal that he fell off the podium into the second violins. "Podiums," he said, picking himself up with a lordly air, "are expressly designed as a conspiracy to get rid of conductors." Or the time Fritz Reiner congratulated him on "a delightful evening spent with Mozart and Beecham." "Why," came the reply, "drag in Mozart?" Or the time he was visiting as an honored guest in Mexico City and was asked his opinion of the regular conductor of the Mexico City Opera. "You know what we do with a musician like that in England?'' he roared. "We clap him in the Tower." The stories clustered so thickly about Sir Thomas Beecham that at his death last week--of a cerebral hemorrhage, at 81--the personal legend almost obscured the professional one. The fact remains that he was one of the world's great conductors and probably did more for British music than any man of his time.

Revived with Brandy. During his lifetime, he organized and largely supported six orchestras, and used his personal fortune so lavishly to bring new operatic productions before British audiences that he was once said to be out-of-pocket by a million pounds ("When I heard it," said Sir Thomas, "I fainted and had to be revived with brandy"). Almost singlehanded, he forced British orchestras away from their slavish loyalty to the Germanic tradition (Beethoven, Brahms, Wagner), won recognition for native composers (Williams, Delius), and introduced such composers as Dvorak, Smetana and Strauss to British concert halls. Perhaps no other conductor of his time performed Mozart with comparable fluency and grace, and few could equal him in his communion with those other 18th century masters, Haydn and Handel. But apart from being a conductor and impresario. Beecham had another important career--he was a gadfly committed to "a deadly, unstoppable and indefatigable campaign against the dry rot that one observes everywhere in this unhappy land." His coat of arms might have been emblazoned with his personal credo: "Improve the standards; clean out the muck; cut out the cant!" Beecham was sometimes referred to as the greatest amateur in musical history --partially because he was financially independent, partially because he approached his music with a relaxed urbanity foreign to such great, tyrannical contemporaries as Toscanini or Reiner. Despite the ferocity of his public utterances, he handled his orchestras with velvet irony. "We can not expect you to follow us all the time," he would say to an offending player, "but if you would have the kindness to keep in touch with us occasionally . . ."

On the podium, the short, dignified man with the spiky beard would kick, lunge, shout and. in moments of intense excitement, occasionally throw his baton.

Through it all, he was able to inspire an orchestra -- even a second-rate one -- with some of his own passion. The Beecham sound was always elegant, the tempos pliant and relaxed, the balance of the orchestra luminous and precise.

Some professionals thought that he was lacking in technique, and he was often accused of disdaining a regular beat. To a lady who implored him to use a score for a performance of Goetterdaemmerung, the better to follow the opera's "rhythmical changes," he replied serenely: "There are no rhythmical changes in Goetterdaemmerung, my dear Emerald. It goes on from half-past 5 till midnight like a damned old cart horse."

Sold with Hymns. "I was a perfect child," Sir Thomas once remarked. "Never spoke, never cried!" Presumably, the perfect child owed his disposition to the consumption of Beecham's Pills, a laxative invented by his grandfather, a Lancashire horse doctor. Eventually the sale of Beecham's Pills rose to a million a day with the aid of a hymn book circulated free of charge and containing a famous quatrain:

Hark! the herald angels sing,

Beecham's Pills are just the thing.

Peace on earth and mercy mild,

Two for man and one for child.

Beecham's father wanted him to go into law or the pill business (the family fortune was estimated at $140 million).

But Tommy decided, after studying the piano and vainly attempting to write The Great English Opera, that what he really wanted to be was a conductor. After a brief career at Oxford, he bought himself an orchestra, which he called the Beecham Philharmonic but which the rest of the musical world called the "Pillharmonic." After a while, Beecham's father decided to endorse his career, gave him financial backing to form his own opera company and to rent London's Covent Garden opera house, which Beecham Sr. later bought. There Beecham presented some 60 operas unfamiliar to the British public, but still found himself regarded more as a playboy impresario than as a serious conductor. When Beecham's father died, the estate was tied up in litigation, and Thomas soon found himself so broke that he had to retire from music for three years to straighten out his affairs.

Inflicted with Gusto. When he returned to music in 1923, it was to conduct the London Symphony and eventually to organize what was to become one of the world's great orchestras--the London Philharmonic. After that, his international reputation grew rapidly. Sir Thomas earned his title for his services to the government as an unofficial good-will ambassador (he gave concert-dinners for important Italian politicians, was credited with helping keep Italy on the side of the Allies in World War I). His manner of spreading good will, however, was sometimes open to question. In Australia, he kept the Prime Minister waiting for an appointment, breezily told the press that the acoustically improved stage of which the citizens of Brisbane were so proud was nothing but a "rabbit hutch.'' But he also delighted in lashing out at his own country, which he called "the laziest nation in the world; I foresee a generation which will never get out of bed. I advise as many English musicians as possible to leave the country." Married three times--the last time to his 27-year-old secretary, who made him "coo like the proverbial dove"--Sir Thomas always professed surprise at his fearsome reputation. "I am," he would say, "a peaceful and harmless man." The whole trouble was that most people did not "give a rap" about music: "It is a parasitical luxury supported by the few.

It is something that must be inflicted on the public." Nobody in his time inflicted music with greater gusto than England's aggressively peaceful man of music. Summing up his career in a mood of rare humility, he remarked: "I will not be called the greatest musician ever." But, added Sir Thomas, "I am better than any damn foreigner."

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