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Sir Henry Joseph Wood, CH (3 March 1869–19 August 1944) was an English conductor, best known for his association with London's Promenade Concerts which he conducted for half a century. Founded in 1895, they became known after his death as the "Henry Wood Promenade Concerts" (later renamed the "BBC Proms". He had an enormous influence on musical life in Britain: he improved access immensely, and also raised the standard of orchestral playing and nurtured the taste of the public, introducing them to a vast repertoire of music, encouraging especially compositions by British composers. He was knighted in 1911.

Biography

Early years

Wood was born in Oxford Street, London, the only child of Henry Joseph Wood and his wife Martha, née Morris. Wood senior had been a member of his family's pawnbroking business but by the time of his son's birth he had set up business as a jeweller, optician and engineering modeller, much sought-after for his model engines. It was a musical household: Wood senior sang as principal tenor in the choir of St Sepulchre-without-Newgate, known as "the musicians' church", and also played the cello; 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.

two elderly Victorian men in head and shoulders shots, the first is bearded; the other is clean-shaven and bald
Two of Wood's teachers: Ebenezer Prout and Manuel Garcia

Attending services at St Sepulchre, Wood received little religious inspiration but was deeply stirred by the playing of the resident organist, George Cooper, who welcomed the boy 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 Fisheries Exhibition at South Kensington with his father, Wood was invited to play the organ in one of the galleries, and made a good enough impression to be engaged to give recitals there over the next three months.

After taking private lessons from Ebenezer Prout, Wood entered the Royal Academy of Music at the age of seventeen, studying harmony and composition with Prout, organ with Charles Steggall, and piano with Walter Macfarren. It is not clear whether he was a member of Manuel Garcia's singing class, but it is certain that he became its accompanist and was greatly influenced by Garcia. Wood also accompanied the opera class, taught by Garcia's son Gustave. His ambition at the time was to become a teacher of singing (and he gave singing lessons throughout his life), and so he attended the classes of as many singing teachers as he could.

Opera

On leaving the Royal Academy of Music Wood set up as a singing teacher, and was soon very successful, with "more singing pupils than I could comfortably deal with" at half a guinea an hour. Wood 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 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 misleading". However, it is certain that Wood was répétiteur for the productions of Sullivan's grand opera Ivanhoe in late 1890 and early 1891 and André Messager's La Bazoche in 1891-2. He also worked for Carte at the Savoy Theatre as assistant to François Cellier on The Nautch Girl in 1891. He remained devoted to Sullivan's music, and later insisted on programming it when it was out of fashion in musical circles. During this period, Wood 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).'

Wood recorded his first professional appearance as a conductor as a choral concert in December 1887. Such ad hoc engagements were commonplace for organists, and were far removed from the revered status given to British composer-conductors such as Sullivan, Charles Villiers Stanford and Alexander Mackenzie, or the rising generation of German star conductors led by Hans Richter and Arthur Nikisch. His first sustained work as a conductor was as musical director of a small touring opera ensemble, the Arthur Rouseby English Touring Opera, to which he was appointed in 1889. The company was inadequate, with an orchestra of only six players, augmented by local recruits at each tour venue. Wood eventually secured his release from his contract, and after a brief return to teaching he secured a better appointment as conductor for the Carl Rosa Opera Company in 1891, followed by a similar engagement for former Carl Rosa singers who had set up a company of their own. When Signor Lago, formerly impresario of the Imperial Opera Company of St. Petersburg, was looking for a second conductor to work with Luigi Arditi for a proposed London season, Garcia recommended Wood. The season opened at the newly rebuilt Olympic Theatre in October 1892 with Wood conducting the British premiere of Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin. Wood won excellent reviews, but the work was not popular with the public, and the season was cut short when Lago disappeared, leaving the company unpaid. Before that debacle, Wood had also conducted performances of Maritana and rehearsed Oberon and Der Freischütz. After the collapse of the Olympic opera season Wood returned once more to his singing tuition. He conducted only once more in the opera house during the rest of this career.

Promenade concerts

Bust of Sir Henry Wood at the Duke's Hall, Royal Academy of Music, London. During the Proms, it is placed in front of the organ at the Royal Albert Hall.

]

In 1893 Wood's career moved into the concert hall, and remained there for the rest of his life. Robert Newman, manager of the newly-opened Queen's Hall, proposed holding a series of promenade concerts and invited Wood to conduct them. The term promenade concert referred to concerts where the audience could walk about as they listened (French se promener = to walk). There had been promenade concerts in London since 1838, under conductors from Louis Antoine Jullien to Arthur Sullivan. Newman's aim for his promenade concerts was to offer low-price admission and educate the musical taste of the public who were not used to listening to serious classical music unless it was presented in small doses with plenty of other popular items in between. Wood shared Newman's ideals. Dr George Cathcart, a wealthy ear, nose and throat specialist, offered to sponsor the project on two conditions: that Wood should take charge of every concert, and that the pitch of the orchestral instruments should be lowered to diapason normal (A=435Hz). Concert pitch in England was nearly a semitone higher than that used on the continent, and Cathcart regarded it as damaging for singers' voices. On 10 August 1895 the first of the Queen's Hall Promenade Concerts took place. The singer Agnes Nicholls, who was in the audience, recalled:

Just before 8 o'clock I saw Henry Wood take up his position behind the curtain at the end of the platform – watch in hand. Punctually, on the stroke of eight, he walked quickly to the rostrum, buttonhole and all, and began the National Anthem. … A few moments for the audience to settle down, then the Rienzi Overture, and the first concert of the new Promenades had begun.

It is particularly significant that he should have chosen an overture by Wagner to open the first programme. Prejudice against British musicians was very strong. Nineteenth century England had been labelled by the Germans Das Land ohne Musik (“The Land without Music”) and not without a certain amount of justification. Henry Wood was to alter all that. In particular, it was thought that no British conductor would be capable of conducting Wagner. Wood was to prove otherwise. In fact, for many years the programming of the promenade concerts followed a particular pattern according to the day of the week, with Monday nights being Wagner nights and Friday being dedicated to Beethoven. Wood also bravely introduced British audiences to many noteworthy European composers, especially Sibelius and composers of the Russian school. In 1912 he conducted Schoenberg's Five Orchestral Pieces (“Stick to it, gentlemen” he urged the orchestra at rehearsal, “This is nothing to what you'll have to play in 25 years' time”).

Wood remained in sole charge of the Proms (with one or two exceptions) until 1941 when he shared the conducting with Basil Cameron and, in the following season, with Sir Adrian Boult as well. During Wood's time the Proms were a central feature of British musical life and he gained the nickname of "Timber" from the Promenaders. He brought about many innovations. He fought continuously for improved pay for musicians, and introduced women into the orchestra in 1911. In 1904, after a rehearsal in which he was faced with a sea of entirely unfamiliar faces in his own orchestra, he at one stroke abolished the deputy system in which players had been free to send in a deputy whenever they wished. Forty players resigned en bloc and formed their own orchestra: the London Symphony Orchestra.

Other musical activities

Wood's fame lies mainly with the promenade concerts, but he was active in many areas of musical life. He conducted many concerts in London and the provinces, and appeared regularly at choral festivals in Norwich and Sheffield. He conducted many amateur groups, and was very generous with the time he gave to the students' orchestra at the RAM. He was meticulous and thorough in his preparation, and built up a large library of scores which were carefully marked up in coloured pencil. His famous medley Fantasia on British Sea Songs, prepared for the 1905 centenary celebrations of the Battle of Trafalgar, is well known for its frequent appearances at the Last Night of the Proms, though in fact this has often been arranged further by others.

His orchestrations of other composers' works drew frequent criticisms, so when in 1929 he made an orchestral transcription of Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor, he presented it as a transcription by a Russian composer called Paul Klenovsky. Klenovsky was a real person, a recently deceased young musician friend of Alexander Glazunov's, and Wood thought a foreign name would secure a more favourable reception than his own. It was a great success. Only several years later did he confess to the little joke. The work was nonetheless published in 1934 as "Bach-Klenovsky, Organ Toccata and Fugue in D minor, for Orchestra (orchestrated by Sir Henry J. Wood)".

In 1938 he presented a jubilee concert in the Royal Albert Hall. Sergei Rachmaninoff was the soloist, and for the occasion Vaughan Williams wrote his Serenade to Music for orchestra and sixteen soloists.

A number of honours were bestowed on him: knighted by the King in 1911, he was awarded the gold medal of the Royal Philharmonic Society in 1921 and was made a Companion of Honour in 1944.

Wood tended to overwork himself, and the strain began to tell in his later years. He died on 19 August 1944 at Hitchin in Hertfordshire, just over a week after the fiftieth anniversary concert of the Proms, which he had been too ill even to listen to on the radio.

The poet laureate John Masefield composed a poem of six verses in his honour, entitled "Sir Henry Wood" but often referred to by its first line "Where does the uttered music go?". This was set to music as an anthem for mixed choir by Sir William Walton which received its first performance on 26 April 1946 at St. Sepulchre's Church, Holborn, London, on the occasion of a ceremony unveiling a memorial stained-glass window in Sir Henry Wood's honour.

He is remembered today in the name of the Henry Wood Hall, the deconsecrated Holy Trinity Church in Southwark, which was converted to a rehearsal and recording venue in 1975. His bust stands upstage centre in the Royal Albert Hall during the whole of each Prom season, and is decorated by a chaplet on the Last Night of the Proms.

Premières

In Arthur Jacobs's 1994 biography Henry Wood, the list of premières conducted by Wood extends to eighteen pages.

World premières included:

Wood's UK premières included:

Notes and references

Notes
  1. According to Wood, his father was urged to become a professional singer by the conductor Sir Michael Costa and others.
  2. Two shillings and sixpence: in decimal coinage, 12½ pence. In terms of average earnings this equates to more than £65 in current values.
  3. Wood (p. 29) lists Garcia as among his professors, but Jacobs (p. 13) notes that Wood's name does not appear among the choir lists in which Garcia's pupils all appeared.
  4. Ten shillings and sixpence: 56½ pence in decimal terms; in 2009 values somewhere between £40 (based on retail prices) and £275 (based on average earnings). Jacobs (p. 19) suggests that Wood may have exaggerated his fee when recalling it in his memoirs.
References
  1. Jacobs, p. 4
  2. Wood, p. 17
  3. Wood, p. 16
  4. Wood, p. 13
  5. ^ Jacobs, p. 6
  6. Wood, p. 17 and Jacob, p. 6
  7. ^ Williamson, Samuel H., "Five Ways to Compute the Relative Value of a UK Pound Amount, 1830 to Present", MeasuringWorth, accessed 16 November 2010
  8. Jacobs, p. 10
  9. ^ Wood, p. 29
  10. Jacobs, p. 13
  11. Wood, p. 36
  12. Wood, p. 39
  13. Jacobs, p. 14
  14. Jacobs, Arthur, "Wood, Sir Henry J." Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, accessed 17 October 2010 (subscription required)
  15. ^ "Mr. Henry J. Wood", Musical Opinion & Music Trade Review, March 1899, pp. 389-90
  16. Jacob, p. 329
  17. Jacobs, pp. 3 and 17
  18. Wood, pp 53–6 and Jacobs, pp. 19–20
  19. Wood, pp. 58–60 and Jacobs, pp. 21–2
  20. Wood, p. 59
  21. Jacobs, p. 24
  22. Jacobs, p. 26
  23. Jacobs, p. 27
  24. Jacobs, p. 30
  25. Jacobs, p. 34
  26. Performances of Fantasia on British Sea Songs from the 1950s Malcolm Sargent is often credited as arranger; also in 2002 and 2003, it was performed "with additional Songs arranged by ], Stephen Jackson (chorusmaster of the BBC Symphony Orchestra) and Percy Grainger", ; in 2004 "with additional Songs arranged by Stephen Jackson", ; and in 2005, 2006 and 2007 with "extra Songs arranged by Bob Chilcott", see . All information from th BBC Proms Archive
  27. "Names make news". Time. XXIV (12). 17 September 1934. Retrieved 2007-07-28.
  28. Grove V, Vol.4, "Klenovsky, Paul"
  29. Jacobs, pp. 442-461
  30. BBC Proms

Bibliography

  • Cox, David (1980). The Henry Wood Proms. London: BBC. ISBN 0563176970.
  • Jacobs, Arthur (1994). Henry J. Wood: maker of the Proms. London: Methuen. ISBN 0413693406.
  • Orga, Ates (1974). The Proms. Newton Abbot, London: David & Charles. ISBN 0715366799. {{cite book}}: Check |isbn= value: checksum (help)
  • Wood, Henry J (1938). My Life of Music. London: Gollancz. OCLC 30533927.

External links

Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Principal Conductors

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