Henry Wood (conductor)
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Sir Henry Wood (3 March 1866 – 19 August 1944) was an English conductor. His name is always associated with the Promenade Concerts which he conducted for half a century. Founded in 1895 they became known after his death as the “Henry Wood Promenade Concerts” (now the “BBC Proms”). It is impossible to underestimate the influence he had on musical life in Britain: he raised the standard of orchestral playing and nurtured the taste of the public, introducing them to a vast repertoire of music, especially encouraging compositions by British composers. He was knighted in 1911.
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Early Life
Henry J(oseph) Wood was born on 3 March 1866 in London. His father had qualified as an optician, but it was as a craftsman and model maker that he had become widely known, running a highly successful model engine shop in Oxford Street. Both parents were keen amateur musicians: his father sang in church choirs and played the cello and his mother sang songs from her native Wales. Henry learned to play the piano, violin and organ, but it was not until he entered the Royal Academy of Music at the age of sixteen that he received methodical tuition. During his two years at the RAM he took classes in piano, organ, composition and singing. His teachers included Ebenezer Prout (composition) and Manuel Garcia (singing). His ambition at the time was to become a teacher of singing (and he gave singing lessons throughout his life), and so he attended classes of as many singing teachers as he could, both as pupil and as accompanist.
On leaving the Royal Academy of Music he found work as a singing teacher and as an orchestral and choral conductor. He gained experience by working for several opera companies, many of them obscure. He conducted the Carl Rosa Opera Company in 1891, and the following year the English premiere of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin at the New Olympic Theatre. He collaborated with Sullivan on preparation of The Yeomen of the Guard and Ivanhoe. Meanwhile he was deriving a steady income from his singing tuition, and he published a manual “The Gentle Art of Singing”.
Promenade Concerts
It was in 1893 that Robert Newman, manager of the Queen's Hall, first proposed holding a series of promenade concerts with Wood as conductor. The term promenade concert normally referred to concerts in London parks where the audience could walk about as they listened (French se promener=to walk.) Newman’s aim was to 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 condition that Wood took charge of every concert. He also insisted that the pitch of the instruments, which in England was nearly a semitone higher than that used on the continent, would be brought down to Diapason Normal (Hz 435). On the 10 August 1895 the first of the Queen’s Hall Promenade Concerts took place. The singer Agnes Nicholls, who was in the audience, recalls:
“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. 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”).
Henry Wood remained in sole charge of the Proms (with one or two exceptional occasions) 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. He brought about many innovations. He fought continuously for improvement of pay for the 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 were 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
Although it is through his work with the promenade concerts that Wood’s fame mainly lies, he was active in many areas of musical life. He conducted many concerts, both in London and in the provinces. He appeared regularly at the choral festivals in Norwich and Sheffield and conducted many amateur groups. He was also very generous in 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, are now an indispensable item at the Last Night of the Proms. His orchestrations of other composer’s works drew frequent criticisms, and so, when in 1929 he made an orchestral transcription of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor, he presented it as a piece by a Russian composer called Klenovsky. It was a great success. Only several years later did he confess to the little joke. In 1938 he presented a jubilee concert in the Royal Albert Hall. Rakhmaninov was the soloist, and Vaughan Williams wrote his Serenade to Music for orchestra and sixteen soloists. He tended to overwork himself, and the strain began to tell in his later years.
Wood died on 19 August 1944, 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. He was bestowed with many honours during his life: 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. 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 laurel wreath on the Last Night of the Proms.
Bibliography
- Henry J. Wood: ‘’My Life of Music’’, London 1938
- David Cox: ‘’The Henry Wood Proms’’ (BBC 1980) ISBN 0 563 17697 0
- article Sir Henry (Joseph) Wood in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians ed Stanley Sadie vol 20 1980