   #copyright

Henry Wood (conductor)

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: British History Post
1900; Performers and composers

   Sir Henry Wood Kt CH ( 3 March 1869 – 19 August 1944) was an English
   conductor, forever 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 overestimate the influence he had 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.

Early life and career

   Henry Joseph Wood was born on 3 March 1869 in London. His father was a
   qualified optician, but had become well-known as a craftsman and model
   maker, 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.

   At the age of fourteen, Henry learned to play the organ at the
   'Musicians' Church' St Sepulchre-without-Newgate, the largest parish
   church in the City of London, where his ashes now are .

   He also learned the piano and violin, 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 newly
   rebuilt Olympic Theatre. He collaborated with Arthur 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

   In 1893, Robert Newman, manager of the Queen's Hall, 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, should be brought down to diapason normal
   (A=435Hz). 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 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 now an
   indispensable item at the Last Night of the Proms.

   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 piece by a Russian composer
   called Paul 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.
   Rachmaninov 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. 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. 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’ 1994 biography Henry Wood, the list of premières
   conducted by Wood extends to eighteen pages.

   World premières included:
     * Benjamin Britten: Piano Concerto
     * Frederick Delius: A Song Before Sunrise; A Song of Summer; and the
       Idyll.
     * Edward Elgar: The Wand of Youth Suite No 1; Sospiri and the fourth
       and fifth Pomp and Circumstance Marches
     * Sergei Rachmaninoff: Piano Concerto No 1
     * Ralph Vaughan Williams: Norfolk Rhapsody No 1; Flos Campi; Serenade
       to Music

   Wood’s UK premières included:
     * Béla Bartók: Dance Suite
     * Emmanuel Chabrier: Joyeuse Marche
     * Aaron Copland: Billy the Kid (ballet)
     * Claude Debussy: L’apres-midi d’un faune; Ibéria
     * César Franck: Le Chausseur Maudit
     * Reynaldo Hahn: Le Bal de Béatrice d’Este
     * Paul Hindemith: Kammermusik 2 and 5
     * Leos Janáček: Sinfonietta; Taras Bulba; Glagolitic Mass
     * Zoltán Kodály: Dances from Galanta
     * Gustav Mahler: Symphonies 1, 4, 7 and 8; Das Lied von der Erde
     * Sergei Prokofiev: Piano Concerto No 1; Violin Concerto No 2
     * Maurice Ravel: Ma Mère l'Oye; Rapsodie espagnole; La Valse; Piano
       Concerto in D
     * Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov: Capriccio Espagnole; Scheherazade;
       Symphony No 2
     * Camille Saint-Saëns: Carnival of the Animals
     * Robert Schumann: Konzertstück for four horns and orchestra
     * Dmitry Shostakovich: Piano Concerto No 1; Symphonies 7 and 8
     * Jean Sibelius: Symphonies 1, 6, and 7; Violin Concerto; Karelia
       Suite; Tapiola
     * Richard Strauss: Symphonia Domestica
     * Igor Stravinsky: The Firebird (suite)
     * Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky: Eugene Onegin; Manfred; The Nutcracker
       (suite)
     * Anton Webern: Passacaglia

Theory that he was of gipsy stock

   It has been claimed that Wood came from a family of British Gypsies
   (Romanichel).

   says he "belonged to a traditional Romanichel family"

   disputes the Romany theory
   Retrieved from "
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Wood_%28conductor%29"
   This reference article is mainly selected from the English Wikipedia
   with only minor checks and changes (see www.wikipedia.org for details
   of authors and sources) and is available under the GNU Free
   Documentation License. See also our Disclaimer.
