Music: Cut Out the Cant

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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.