Personality

EDINBURGH'S sixth annual festival opened last fortnight (see Music) with a speech by Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. But the festivities really got under way when a violent little man with a spiky beard raised his baton over the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and brought it down on the first beat of Sibelius' Symphony No. 7 in C Major. Sir Thomas Beecham, Bart, was on the podium, where he belonged.

There is something more than poetic justice in the fact that for 50 years English schoolchildren have gleefully sung

Hark, the herald angels sing,

Beecham's Pills are just the thing,

for it is on the yielding soil of the fortune made from the sales of Britain's best-known laxative that the extraordinary personality of Sir Thomas Beecham, conductor, impresario and wit, has flowered and flourished. Although his access to the proceeds of that fortune has been progressively limited, it has been an important factor in the development, not only of his truly remarkable musical gifts, but also of all the extravagance, exuberance and effervescence of a rich and sensitive but irrepressible and boisterous nature. He is utterly free from cant and convention, and his fortunate combination of natural and material endowments has enabled him to become one of the most brilliant and certainly the most uninhibited public figure in the England of his time.

From this position of vantage, it has been his humor to attack established institutions and the entrenched powers of political and musical bumbledom with devastating gusto. Hailing the advent of broadcasting as "the foremost misfortune that has ever overtaken this planet," he has since accused the British Broadcasting Corp. again & again of "unprecedented acts of vandalism" and of "ineffable impudence" for its "butchering of whole works" and "massacring of masterpieces." He has shushed audiences for covert whisperings, or told them outright to shut up. Over an outraged shoulder, he has hissed at them as "savages" for untimely applause. He has locked the doors on latecomers. He has lectured and admonished audiences from the podium in picturesque and often vivid language. According to Sir Thomas, the British are "a race of barbarians" consistently guilty of musical "turpitude in the lowest degree"; Sheffield "is not civilized"; Belfast Corp. members are "intellectual thugs"; and Seattle is "an esthetic dustbin."

CONFRONTED with such snippets from his extensive vituperative record, Beecham would characteristically tend to wave them away with a modest disclaimer. "I was a perfect child," he confides to one biographer, "never spoke, never cried!" But in this pose--for Beecham can assume a pose quite naturally--he would no doubt choose to forget that his student days at Oxford came to a sudden end after 18 months and that the warden of Wadham College is then reported to have said, "Mr. Beecham! Your untimely departure has perhaps spared us the necessity of asking you to go!"

Fantastic stories about him abound, and Mr. Beecham is already well in process of becoming a legend in his own lifetime. Here is one fragment relating to a musical memory that is all but a miracle. Bending down to his orchestral leader just before an opera performance was about to begin, Beecham whispered. "We are playing Figaro tonight, are we not?" "Oh,no, Sir Thomas." said the leader in alarm, "it is Seraglio!" "My dear fellow, you amaze me!" said Beecham. With that, he closed the Figaro score on his desk and proceeded to conduct the whole of Seraglio from memory.

But Beecham cannot be dismissed merely as a brilliant swashbuckler or the self-constituted enfant terrible of music, for the Beecham legend stands on a rock of solid musical achievement. Most conductors specialize in symphonic music or opera, one or the other. Beecham specializes in both. What is more, he has probably forced through, against the odds, more performances of new or unknown works in both fields than any other two British conductors. He is, further, an impresario in the grand manner and tradition. He has given or raised vast sums of money for a multitude of large-scale musical undertakings. He has founded six separate orchestras. It is indeed hard not to agree with one responsible critic who says roundly that Beecham has done more for British music "than any man of his age--or any other."

AS a conductor, he disdains a strict beat (and often any beat at all), breaks every known rule of his art and gets clean away with it. His florid, utterly unorthodox style, his physical grotesqueries on the podium are often taken as vanity or exhibitionism. Admirers prefer to think them the result of his notable freedom from conventional inhibitions. His range of gesticulation may be anything from a full, tense crouch to the subtlest nuance of fingertip or eyebrow. The result, however fantastic to the eye, is nevertheless a brilliant coincidence of musical sensitivity and bodily gesture which comes as an astonishing contrast after his stiff, portentous progress to the rostrum--the short, plumpish, dandified figure, the familiar imperial, the slow walk, the back dead straight, the chin well up, the arms straight by the sides. On his "off" nights he can be more "off" than anybody else; but at his best and when conducting the music he loves--Mozart, Haydn, Berlioz or Frederick Delius (his favorite English composer and lifelong friend)--he is a miracle of verve and delicacy.

Characteristically, Beecham has no doubts whatever about the quality of his conducting. Congratulated after a concert by Fellow Conductor Fritz Reiner for "a delightful evening spent with Mozart and Beecham," the sudden flash came back, "Why drag in Mozart?"

This biting and vigorous wit is not reserved for public occasions. Indeed, all his personal and artistic quiddities are backed by a natural robustness of temperament which smacks of his native Lancashire, still strongly accented in his speech. With a roving eye, an eloquent eyebrow and the general air of a grand poseur in the Edwardian manner, he is a brilliant and exhilarating after-dinner speaker. ("Winston and I are the two best speakers in England!") On his 70th birthday, he announced that all his exhibitionisms to date were merely "the overture" to what he intended to be "a deadly, unstoppable and indefatigable campaign against the dry rot that one observes everywhere in this unhappy land."

IF it is still difficult to reconcile his solid musical achievement and the indefinable magic of his conducting with the wild iconoclasm of his public utterances, the explanation may lie in the fact that he is a man little compelled either by circumstance or temperament to dwell on the tragic issues of life. It is perhaps therefore only natural that his ebullient energies should seek clamant relief in attacking what he calls "this age of high comedy," in spectacularly pricking that "whole boil and bubble of insanity" which he says he sees around him and which so exasperates him that he is often driven "to hold his sides with laughter."

But through all the violence, contradiction and distortion of his denunciations, his personal credo rings clear: "Improve your standards; clean out the muck; cut out the cant!" And when he says, for once in simple seriousness, that "good seed is seldom sown in vain," musicians, the world over, can only wish him better soil and an even bigger sweep to his arm.

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