Adrian Boult
Sir Adrian Cedric Boult, CH was a British conductor. Brought up in a prosperous mercantile family, he followed musical studies in England and at Leipzig, Germany, with early conducting work in London for the Royal Opera House and Sergei Diaghilev's ballet company. His first prominent post was conductor of the City of Birmingham Orchestra in 1924. When the British Broadcasting Corporation appointed him director of music in 1930, he established the BBC Symphony Orchestra and became its chief conductor. The orchestra set standards of excellence that were rivalled in Britain only by the London Philharmonic Orchestra, founded two years later.
Forced to leave the BBC in 1950 on reaching retirement age, Boult became principal conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra. The orchestra had declined from its peak of the 1930s, but under his guidance its fortunes were revived. He retired as its chief conductor in 1957, and later accepted the post of president. Although in the latter part of his career he worked with several other orchestras, including the London Symphony Orchestra, the Philharmonia Orchestra, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, and his former orchestra, the BBC Symphony, it was the LPO with which he was primarily associated, conducting it in concerts and recordings until 1978, in what was widely called his "Indian summer".
Boult was known for his championing of British music. He gave the first performance of his friend Gustav Holst's The Planets, and introduced new works by, among others, Elgar, Bliss, Britten, Delius, Rootham, Tippett, Vaughan Williams and Walton. In his BBC years, he introduced works by foreign composers, including Bartók, Berg, Stravinsky, Schoenberg and Webern. A modest man who disliked the limelight, Boult felt as comfortable in the recording studio as on the concert platform, making recordings throughout his career. From the mid-1960s until his retirement after his last sessions in 1978 he recorded extensively for EMI. In addition to several recordings that have remained in the active catalogue, Boult's legacy includes his influence on prominent conductors of later generations, including Sir Colin Davis and Vernon Handley.
Biography
Early life
Boult was born in Chester, Cheshire, the second child and only son of Cedric Randal Boult, and his wife, Katharine Florence.Cedric Boult was a Justice of the Peace and a successful businessman connected with Liverpool shipping and the oil trade; Cedric and his family had "a Liberal Unitarian outlook on public affairs" with a history of philanthropy.
When Boult was two years old the family moved to Blundellsands, where he was given a musical upbringing. From an early age he attended concerts in Liverpool, conducted mostly by Hans Richter. He was educated at Westminster School in London, where in his free time he attended concerts conducted by, among others, Sir Henry Wood, Claude Debussy, Arthur Nikisch, Fritz Steinbach, and Richard Strauss. His biographer, Michael Kennedy, writes, "Few schoolboys can have attended as many performances by great artists as Boult heard between 1901 and October 1908, when he went up to Christ Church, Oxford." While still a schoolboy, Boult met the composer Edward Elgar through Frank Schuster, a family friend.
At Christ Church college at Oxford, where he was an undergraduate from 1908 to 1912, Boult studied history but later switched to music, in which his mentor was the musical academic and conductor Hugh Allen. Among the musical friends he made at Oxford was Ralph Vaughan Williams, who became a lifelong friend.
In 1909, Boult presented a paper to an Oxford musical group, the Oriana Society, entitled Some Notes on Performance, in which he laid down three precepts for an ideal performance: observance of the composer's wishes, clarity through emphasis on balance and structure, and the effect of music made without apparent effort. These guiding principles lasted throughout his career. He was president of the University Musical Club for the year 1910, but his interests were not wholly confined to music: he was a keen rower, stroking his college boat at Henley, and all his life he remained a member of the Leander Club.
Boult graduated in 1912, with a basic "pass" degree. He continued his musical education at the Leipzig Conservatory in 1912–13. Musician Hans Sitt was in charge of the conducting class, but Boult's main influence was Nikisch. He later recalled, "I went to all his rehearsals and concerts in the Gewandhaus. ... He had an astonishing baton technique and great command of the orchestra: everything was indicated with absolute precision. But there were others who were greater interpreters."
Boult admired Nikisch "not so much for his musicianship but his amazing power of saying what he wanted with a bit of wood. He spoke very little". This style was in accord with Boult's opinion that "all conductors should be clad in an invisible Tarnhelm which makes it possible to enjoy the music without seeing any of the antics that go on". He sang in choral festivals and at the Leeds Festival of 1913, where he watched Nikisch conduct. There he made the acquaintance of George Butterworth, and other British composers. Later that year Boult joined the musical staff of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, where his most important work was to assist with the first British production of Wagner's Parsifal, and do "odd jobs with lighting cues" while Nikisch conducted the Ring cycle.
First conducting work
Boult made his début as a professional conductor on 27 February 1914 at West Kirby Public Hall, with members of the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. His programme comprised orchestral works by Bach, Butterworth, Mozart, Schumann, Wagner and Hugo Wolf, interspersed with arias by Mozart and Verdi sung by Agnes Nicholls.Boult was declared medically unfit for active service during the First World War, and until 1916 he served as an orderly officer in a reserve unit. He was recruited by the War Office as a translator. In his spare time he organised and conducted concerts, some of which were subsidised by his father, with the aims of giving work to orchestral players and bringing music to a wider audience.
In 1918, Boult conducted the London Symphony Orchestra in a series of concerts that included important recent British works. Among them was the première of a revised version of Vaughan Williams's A London Symphony, a performance which was "rather spoilt by a Zeppelin raid". His best-known première of this period was Holst's The Planets. Boult conducted the first performance on 29 September 1918 to an invited audience of about 250. Holst later wrote on his copy of the score, "This copy is the property of Adrian Boult who first caused The Planets to shine in public and thereby earned the gratitude of Gustav Holst."
Elgar was another composer who had cause to be grateful to Boult. His Second Symphony had, since its premiere nine years earlier, received few performances. When Boult conducted it at the Queen's Hall in March 1920 to "great applause" and "frantic enthusiasm", the composer wrote to him: "With the sounds ringing in my ears I send a word of thanks for your splendid conducting of the Sym. ... I feel that my reputation in the future is safe in your hands." Elgar's friend and biographer, the violinist W. H. Reed, wrote that Boult's performance of Elgar's neglected work brought "the grandeur and nobility of the work" to wider public attention.
Boult took a wide variety of conducting jobs in the years following the war. In 1919, he succeeded Ernest Ansermet as musical director of Sergei Diaghilev's ballet company. Although Ansermet gave Boult all the help he could in his preparations, there were fourteen ballets in the company's repertory – none of which Boult knew. In only a short period, Boult was required to master such scores as Petrushka, The Firebird, Scheherazade, La Boutique fantasque and The Good-Humoured Ladies.
In 1921, Boult conducted the British Symphony Orchestra for Vladimir Rosing's Opera Week at Aeolian Hall. He also took on an academic post. When Hugh Allen succeeded Sir Hubert Parry as principal of the Royal College of Music, he invited Boult to start a conducting class along the lines of Leipzig – the first such class in England. Boult ran the classes from 1919 to 1930. In 1921 he received a Doctorate of Music.
When Raymond Roze, the founder of the British Symphony Orchestra died in March 1920, Boult took over. He conducted the orchestra, made up of professional musicians who had served in the Army during the First World War, in a series of concerts at the Kingsway Hall.
Birmingham
In 1923 Boult conducted the first season of the Robert Mayer concerts for children, but his participation in the following season was prevented by his appointment in 1924 as conductor of the Birmingham Festival Choral Society. This led to his becoming musical director of the City of Birmingham Orchestra, where he remained in charge for six years, attracting widespread attention with his adventurous programmes.The advantage of the Birmingham post was that for the first time in his life Boult not only had his own orchestra, but sole control of programming as well; the only time in his life, he later said, when that was so. The disadvantages were that the orchestra was inadequately funded, the available venues were unsatisfactory, the Birmingham Post's music critic, A. J. Symons, was a constant thorn in Boult's side, and the local concert-going public had conservative tastes. Despite this conservatism, Boult programmed as much innovative music as was practical, including works by Mahler, Stravinsky and Bruckner. Such departures from the repertoire expected by the regular concert-goers depressed the box-office takings, requiring subsidies from private benefactors, including Boult's family.
While at Birmingham Boult had the opportunity to conduct a number of operas, chiefly with the British National Opera Company, for which he conducted Die Walküre and Otello. He also conducted a diverse range of operas from such composers as Purcell, Mozart and Vaughan Williams. In 1928 he succeeded Vaughan Williams as conductor of the Bach Choir in London, a position he held until 1931.