Mingled Chime: Leaves from an Autobiography ebook

Sir Thomas Beecham was not only one of the greatest conductors of
the first half of the twentieth century but also a perspective
critic and great wit. Look at what he says about Melba -- no
one else got it so perfect. True, he came from a monied family
but how many operas and other works did he put on stage that
no one else would have dared. Of course, it is better to listen
to his marvelous recordings but this is a nice supplement.

This is the first volume of the great maestro's account of his own career. I say advisedly `career' and not `life'. He was born in 1879 and this volume, first published in 1944, takes us as far as 1923. He underwent his first marriage in 1903, there being two sons from this union, but you would never know any of that for anything he tells us about it here. What this book is about is his life as a musician, with a 3-year hiatus forced on that through the financial problems consequent on his father's untimely death together with the exceptional circumstances of world war 1. We hear about any number of musicians and persons ancillary to musicians, some of them quite minor. Of his first wife and of his children - nothing.

This suits me very well. The Beecham I want to read is the musician of exceptional gifts and attainment who was also a wit to rival Oscar Wilde. His early life is sketched in with a reasonable amount of detail. He discusses the value of public-school education in general and is even fairly forthcoming about his own experience of it. Oxford, where he never wanted to go in the first place, gets only the most cursory mention. The one personality outside of the purely musical sphere who is depicted in any detail is his father, the pharmaceuticals magnate Sir Joseph Beecham, with whom his relationship suffered some undisclosed estrangement at one stage but ended on a happier level, and to whom his musical career owed more than to anyone else apart from his own efforts. Those efforts were Herculean, and his account of them is fascinating and of course often very entertaining. Great orchestras as we now know them were largely the product of Beecham's generation, and great maestros as we now know those didn't spring into existence fully equipped like the goddess Athena. They had to put in an unholy amount of work to establish themselves.

One impression I gain very strongly from this book was that Beecham's prodigious musicianship was a thing of the instincts much more than of the intellect. His memory was phenomenal of course, and his culture was wide, but he followed his tastes rather than more analytical processes. These tastes famously included what we usually think of as pretty minor stuff as well as the towering peaks, and I was fascinated to find out just what it was that attracted him to his eclectic enthusiasms. He followed no school of thought, and his special insights were entirely personal. This book does not contain some of his very off-message opinions about Beethoven which seem to me to possess a devastating clarity and independence, but his view of Tristan as a dream-fantasy is an extremely interesting one too, and I'm not sure how I feel about it. His remarks about Brahms and Elgar might be thought downright superficial if they were anyone else's, and it would be the easy course to attribute them simply to the newness of their music when Beecham first encountered it, but it definitely seems to be the case that his views once formed didn't change much subsequently. Naturally we hear a lot from him about Handel, about Mozart and of course a great deal indeed about Delius, and I felt a sense of privilege at being allowed to share the special perceptions of a musician of such stature expressed with such brilliant clarity.

His style of writing is simply exquisite. It is more than slightly lofty, of course, but he is neither self-important nor (perhaps surprisingly) snobbish - he knew talent when he saw it and did not confuse it with status. He has a little to say about politics and the world scene, but here too he is surprisingly undoctrinaire. Naturally there are some caustic denunciations, but the ironic sideswipes are more characteristic, including his delicious comment on the meetings held with a view to establishing an orchestra in Birmingham - `all the trite sentiments ever uttered upon such a subject anywhere since life began were rolled out by one speaker after another'.

It's all a marvellous read, quite apart from the significance and interest of the subject-matter. How I have managed to be aware of it for so long without getting round to reading it I would have difficulty in explaining, but I intend to repair the deficiency a great deal more promptly with the remaining volumes.