Sir Adrian Boult and Wagner

At the Manchester Wagner Society we had a great talk last week about Sir Adrian Boult and ‘what might have been’ if he had been given the chance to conduct more Wagner. The talk was given by Adrian Brown, a student of Sir Adrian’s, a finalist in the von Karajan conducting competition and a very experienced conductor, mainly of orchestras in the London area.

I guess this is in part a generational thing. If you were say under about 58, or not living in the UK, you would have been unlikely to have seen Sir Adrian conduct ‘live’ – his last live performances were I think in about 1978 at the age of 89! – and you would probably know him principally for his many recordings of 20th century English music. For those older than that, you might have seen his imperturbable calm presence on the rostrum, flicking his long baton at the orchestra, and extracting extraordinary performances of, yes, Elgar, and Vaughan Williams, but also Brahms and Schubert and other Romantics. His background was impressive – as a young man, he was at the first performance of Elgar 1 in Manchester, he conducted the first credible performance of Elgar 2, he gave the first performance of many of Vaughan Williams’s works, and he observed and learned from Nikisch and others before the First World War, who themselves in their youth had received directly from Brahms, Schumann or Tchaikovsky instructions on how particular works should ‘go’. He was still passing, Adrian Brown said, information to British orchestras on how Schumann wanted a particular passage of his 4^th symphony to be phrased in the mid-1970’s! However, I had no idea Boult had ever had much of a history with Wagner. But he had! Adrian Brown explained that he had conducted a number of staged Wagner performances in the mid/late 1920’s and early 1930’s, mainly of Valkyrie and Parsifal. Beyond that, he had visited Bayreuth a number of times before the First World War, and had decided views on the quality of the productions there. “Boult came in, reeking of Horlicks,” was Beecham’s dismissal of his notoriously abstemious colleague but the Tristan Prelude Adrian wanted us to play was full of passion and energy. It seems sad – though Boult might have been bound by his BBC contract, and of course by the circumstances of WW2, not to get much involved in non-BBC opera from the early 30’s to his ‘retirement’ at the age of 60 from the BBC – and extraordinary that he was never asked to take on a full Wagner performance between 1949 and 1978, nearly 30 years of conducting life beyond retirement. Even with Reggie Goodall waiting in the wings, was there really going to be more fire and life to a Wagner Ring cycle from Karl Rankl or Kubelik in the early 50’s at Covent Garden than from Boult? It seems an inexplicable mistake by both ROHCG and ENO.

But there we are – apart from the EMI recordings of Wagnerian bits and pieces that we dipped into, there are no extant Boult recordings of Wagner. Adrian Brown’s talk showed us clearly that we had all lost as a result