Henry Wood
English Conductor
| Date of Birth | : | 03 Mar, 1869 |
| Date of Death | : | 19 Aug, 1944 |
| Place of Birth | : | London, United Kingdom |
| Profession | : | Conductor, Composer, Film Editor, Higher Education Teacher |
| Nationality | : | English |
Sir Henry Joseph Wood CH was an English conductor best known for his association with London's annual series of promenade concerts, known as the Proms. He continued to conduct them for nearly half a century, introducing hundreds of new works to British audiences. After his death, the concerts were officially named "Henry Wood Promenade Concerts" in his honor, although they are commonly referred to as "Proms".
Born into modest circumstances to parents who encouraged his musical talent, Wood began his career as an organist. While studying at the Royal Academy of Music, she came under the influence of voice teacher Manuel Garcia and became his accompanist. After similar work for Richard D'Oyly Curt's opera companies on works by Arthur Sullivan and others, Wood became conductor of a small operatic touring company. He soon joined the larger Carl Rosa Opera Company. A notable event in his operatic career was conducting the British premiere of Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin in 1892.
Biography
Early years
Wood was born in Oxford Street, London, on 3 March 1869, the only child of Henry Joseph Wood and his wife Martha, née Morris. Wood senior had started in his family's pawnbroking business, but by the time of his son's birth he was trading as a jeweller, optician and engineering modeller, much sought-after for his model engines. It was a musical household: Wood senior was an amateur cellist and sang as principal tenor in the choir of St Sepulchre-without-Newgate, known as "the musicians' church". His wife played the piano and sang songs from her native Wales. They encouraged their son's interest in music, buying him a Broadwood piano, on which his mother gave him lessons. The young Wood also learned to play the violin and viola.
Wood received little religious inspiration at St Sepulchre, but was deeply stirred by the playing of the resident organist, George Cooper, who allowed him into the organ loft and gave him his first lessons on the instrument. Cooper died when Wood was seven, and the boy took further lessons from Cooper's successor, Edwin M. Lott, for whom Wood had much less regard. At the age of ten, through the influence of one of his uncles, Wood made his first paid appearance as an organist at St Mary Aldermanbury, being paid half a crown. In June 1883, visiting the International Fisheries Exhibition at South Kensington with his father, Wood was invited to play the organ in one of the galleries, making a good enough impression to be engaged to give recitals at the exhibition building over the next three months. At this time in his life, painting was nearly as strong an interest as music, and he studied in his spare time at the Slade School of Fine Art. He remained a life-long amateur painter.
Opera
On leaving the Royal Academy of Music in 1888, Wood taught singing privately and was soon very successful, attracting "more singing pupils than I could comfortably deal with" at half a guinea an hour. He also worked as a répétiteur. According to his memoirs, he worked in that capacity for Richard D'Oyly Carte during the rehearsals for the first production of The Yeomen of the Guard at the Savoy Theatre in 1888. His biographer Arthur Jacobs doubts this and discounts exchanges Wood purported to have had with Sir Arthur Sullivan about the score. Jacobs describes Wood's memoirs as "vivacious in style but factually unreliable".
It is certain, however, that Wood was répétiteur at Carte's Royal English Opera House for Sullivan's grand opera Ivanhoe in late 1890 and early 1891, and for André Messager's La Basoche in 1891–92. He also worked for Carte at the Savoy as assistant to François Cellier on The Nautch Girl in 1891. Wood remained devoted to Sullivan's music and later insisted on programming his concert works when they were out of fashion in musical circles. During this period, he had several compositions of his own performed, including an oratorio, St. Dorothea (1889), a light opera, Daisy (1890), and a one-act comic opera, Returning the Compliment (1890).
Early years of the Proms
In 1894, Wood went to the Wagner festival at Bayreuth where he met the conductor Felix Mottl, who subsequently appointed him as his assistant and chorus master for a series of Wagner concerts at the newly built Queen's Hall in London. The manager of the hall, Robert Newman, was proposing to run a ten-week season of promenade concerts and, impressed by Wood, invited him to conduct. There had been such concerts in London since 1838, under conductors from Louis Antoine Jullien to Arthur Sullivan. Sullivan's concerts in the 1870s had been particularly successful, because he offered his audiences something more than the usual light music. He introduced major classical works, such as Beethoven symphonies, normally restricted to the more expensive concerts presented by the Philharmonic Society and others. Newman aimed to do the same: "I am going to run nightly concerts and train the public by easy stages. Popular at first, gradually raising the standard until I have created a public for classical and modern music."
Newman's determination to make the promenade concerts attractive to everyone led him to permit smoking during concerts, which was not formally prohibited at the Proms until 1971. Refreshments were available in all parts of the hall throughout the concerts, not only during intervals. Prices were considerably lower than those customarily charged for classical concerts: the promenade (the standing area) was one shilling, the balcony two shillings, and the grand circle (reserved seats) three and five shillings.
Early 20th century
bearded man in evening dress seen from his left, conducting an orchestra and making a dramatic gesture, holding the baton high over his head The promenade concerts flourished through the 1890s, but in 1902 Newman, who had been investing unwisely in theatrical presentations, found himself unable to bear the financial responsibility for the Queen's Hall Orchestra and was declared bankrupt. The concerts were rescued by the musical benefactor Sir Edgar Speyer, a banker of German origin. Speyer put up the necessary funds, retained Newman as manager of the concerts, and encouraged him and Wood to continue with their project of improving the public's taste. At the beginning of 1902, Wood accepted the conductorship of that year's Sheffield triennial festival. He continued to be associated with that festival until 1936, changing its emphasis from choral to orchestral pieces. A German critic, reviewing the festival for a Berlin publication, wrote, "Two personalities now represent a new epoch in English musical life – Edward Elgar as composer, and Henry J. Wood as conductor."
Later that year, overtaxed by his enormous workload, Wood's health broke down. Even though this was during the Proms season, Cathcart insisted that Wood should have a complete break and change of scene. Leaving the leader of the orchestra, Arthur Payne, to conduct during his absence, Wood and his wife took a cruise to Morocco, missing the Proms concerts from 13 October to 8 November.
First World War and post-war
On the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, Newman, Wood and Speyer discussed whether the Proms should continue as planned. They had by this time become an established institution, and it was agreed to go ahead. However, anti-German feeling forced Speyer to leave the country and seek refuge in the US, and there was a campaign to ban all German music from concerts. Newman put out a statement declaring that German music would be played as planned: "The greatest examples of Music and Art are world possessions and unassailable even by the prejudices and passions of the hour." When Speyer left Britain, the music publishers Chappell's took on the responsibility for the Queen's Hall and its orchestra. The Proms continued throughout the war years, with fewer major new works than before, although there were nevertheless British premieres of pieces by Bartók, Stravinsky and Debussy. An historian of the Proms, Ateş Orga, wrote, "Concerts often had to be re-timed to coincide with the 'All Clear' between air raids. Falling bombs, shrapnel, anti-aircraft fire and the droning of Zeppelins were ever threatening. But kept things on the go and in the end had a very real part to play in boosting morale.
BBC and the Proms
On his return to England from his first Hollywood trip, Wood found himself in the middle of a feud between the chairman of Chappell's, William Boosey, and the BBC. Boosey had conceived a passionate hostility to the broadcasting of music, fearing that it would lead to the end of live concerts. He attempted to prevent anyone who wished to perform at the Queen's Hall from broadcasting for the BBC. This affected many of the artists whom Wood and Newman needed for the Proms. The matter was unresolved when Newman died in 1926. Shortly afterwards, Boosey announced that Chappell's would no longer support concerts at the Queen's Hall. The prospect that the Proms might not be able to continue caused widespread dismay, and there was a general welcome for the BBC's announcement that it would take over the running of the Proms, and would also run a winter series of symphony concerts at the Queen's Hall.
Last years
In 1936, Wood was in charge of his final Sheffield festival. The choral works he conducted included the Verdi Requiem, Beethoven's Missa Solemnis, Berlioz' Te Deum, Walton's Belshazzar's Feast, and, in the presence of the composer, Rachmaninoff's The Bells. The following year, Wood began planning for a grand concert to mark his fiftieth year as a conductor. The Royal Albert Hall was chosen as the venue, having a far larger capacity than the Queen's Hall. The concert was given on 5 October 1938. Rachmaninoff played the solo part in his Second Piano Concerto, and Vaughan Williams, at Wood's request, composed a short choral work for the occasion: the Serenade to Music for orchestra and 16 soloists. The other composers represented in the programme were Sullivan, Beethoven, Bach, Bax, Wagner, Handel and Elgar. The orchestra comprised players from the three London orchestras: the London Symphony, London Philharmonic and BBC Symphony Orchestras. The concert raised £9,000 for Wood's chosen charity, providing health care for musicians. In the same year, Wood published his autobiography, My Life of Music.
Recordings
Wood's recording career began in 1908, when he accompanied his wife Olga in "Farewell, forests" by Tchaikovsky, for the Gramophone and Typewriter Company, better known as His Master's Voice or HMV. They made eight other records together for HMV over the next two years. After Olga's death, Wood signed a contract with HMV's rival, Columbia, for whom he made a series of discs between 1915 and 1917 with the singer Clara Butt, including excerpts from Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius.
Between 1915 and 1925, he conducted 65 recordings for Columbia using the early acoustic recording process, including many discs of Wagner excerpts and a truncated version of Elgar's Violin Concerto with Albert Sammons as soloist. When the microphone and electrical recording were introduced in 1925, Wood re-recorded the Elgar concerto, with Sammons, and made 36 other discs for Columbia over the next nine years. The 1929 recording of the Elgar concerto has been reissued on compact disc and is well regarded by some critics.
Wood was wooed from Columbia by the young Decca company in 1935. For Decca he conducted 23 recordings over the next two years, including Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, Elgar's Enigma Variations and Vaughan Williams's A London Symphony. In 1938 he returned to Columbia, for whom his five new recordings included the Serenade to Music with the 16 original singers, a few days after the premiere, and his own Fantasia on British Sea Songs.
Honours, memorials and reputation
In addition to the knighthood bestowed in 1911, Wood's state honours were his appointments as Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour in the 1944 King's Birthday Honours List, to the Order of the Crown (Belgium; 1920), and Officer of the Legion of Honour (France; 1926). He received honorary doctorates from five English universities and was a fellow of both the Royal Academy of Music (1920) and the Royal College of Music (1923). In March 1963, The Henry Wood Concert Society (in association with The Henry Wood Memorial Trust) presented The Henry Wood Memorial Concert. The concert was held at the Royal Albert Hall, London and conducted by Sir Malcolm Sargent in the presence of H.R.H. The Duchess of Gloucester.
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