This June 9 will mark the 111th anniversary of the meeting, in England in 1910, between former U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt and British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey. Roosevelt had travelled to England to attend the funeral of Edward VII. The President was the man responsible for earmarking the huge National Parks in the United States for protection and was also an extremely keen birdwatcher. He was something of an authority on American birds and he wanted to spend a day in the English countryside with a like-minded person. Roosevelt was put in touch with Grey, who had a simple cottage at Itchen Abbas in the Itchen valley. Grey was later to write very good books on both birds and fly fishing.
The President was put on a train at Waterloo and met at lunchtime by Grey at Tichborne, from where they proceeded to walk along seven miles of the Itchen valley to King’s Worthy and Grey’s cottage. From there they were driven to Stoney Cross and walked another seven miles to Brockenhurst. The two hadn’t met before but got on extremely well together. We must remember that in those days the British Foreign Secretary simply didn’t travel abroad. People came to him.
Sir Edward later remarked that he had only to point out the song of a particular bird previously unknown to Roosevelt for the President to be able to identify it immediately the next time he heard it. They saw forty different songbirds that day, few of which Roosevelt had previously seen and they heard the songs of twenty of them. Grey put the President on a train back to London the next morning.
And all this without a single bodyguard anywhere to be seen.
This story turns my thoughts to Sir Edward Elgar. Sir John Barbirolli, when describing the mood conjured up by the last movement of Elgar’s Second Symphony – written around that time – quoted Sir Edward Grey’s words spoken a couple of years before the great war started in 1914, “The lamps are going out all over Europe. I doubt we will see them lit again in our lifetime.” My imagination now in full flow, I am reminded of something else that involved both Elgar’s music and Sir John Barbirolli, and also – on a slightly lower aesthetic level – me as well, and a case of something else that could not happen today.
When I was twelve, I fell asleep during a performance in Lichfield Cathedral of The Dream of Gerontius played by the Hallé Orchestra and conducted by Barbirolli. The next day the music master at school said, “If you do some practice you might get to play in an orchestra like that one day.” Little did I realise that only eight years later I would actually be doing just that and in that very orchestra.
In fact, in 1965 the first recording I ever took part in was the same piece that I’d heard in the cathedral only a decade before. You might think that I had indeed done lots of practice, but sadly this was not the case, and it seems now that throughout my horn playing career, I always had luck on my side. This is something to which Tony Tunstall, my illustrious colleague and more or less mentor and guide for nearly twenty years at Covent Garden would have testified.
The way I landed my first job in the Hallé is a rather extraordinary example of something that could not happen today in quite the same way. It was Christmas Eve 1962. The phone rang and my mother went to answer it. She was sometimes a bit of a wag, especially when she had been at the cooking sherry and was very proud of the fact that she had played one of the three witches in Macbeth at the Derby Playhouse a few years before. We had all just been listening to Doctor Finlay’s Casebook on the radio and Mum answered the call by speaking in a voice like Janet’s, “Arden Hoos?” The voice at the other end said, “This is the orchestral manager of the Hallé Orchestra and I’d like to speak to Julian Baker.”
The voice belonged to Wally Jones who doubled as orchestral manager and Tuba player. He had clearly been in Cox’s bar for some hours and somehow had remembered he had one last phone call to make before Christmas. He was somewhat plastered, but we finally grasped that I had an audition for the job of principal horn on the 27th of December. This came as a bit of a shock to me as I had not applied for it, neither did I know there was a job going. It turned out that the principal horn player at that time, that great player and humourist Ifor James, who had given me a few lessons, had decided to leave and he had put me in for his job without telling me.
I turned up to Barbirolli’s house in Manchester at the appointed hour, ten a.m., having met the General Manager of the orchestra and Wally beforehand at the Free Trade Hall. Wally was armed with the sight-reading, which he let me look at in the taxi. The door was opened by Barbirolli’s manservant, who informed us in rather lugubrious tones that Sir John had “not yet risen.” It seems that he always went to bed very late, often after cooking spaghetti at around midnight. We were summoned to the bedroom and there he was, propped up on the pillows. He said to his man, “Give the boy a glass of sherry and I’ll be with you shortly.”
Talking of drink, my father said he met all his best friends in pubs and told me that when he was young there were two chapels in Birkenhead next to each other, one Wesleyan and the other Baptist. One had one of those large posters announcing that “Drink is Thine Worst Enemy” and the other one said “Matthew 5:44 – Love Thine Enemy”. I didn’t drink much when I was young and this very large schooner of Amontillado, downed under the envious eye of Wally Jones, had the desired effect of calming my nerves somewhat, and even giving me a necessary spot of Dutch courage.
Eventually the great man entered the room in his carpet slippers and first of all showed me his collection of Venetian glass and an old postcard from Sir Arnold Bax propped up on the mantelpiece. Then he asked me to play to him. No one was there to play the piano, so he hummed the piano part of the Schumann Adagio and Allegro very loudly and off-key in this extraordinary voice. He’d been a gas instructor and, as acting Lance Corporal Barbirolli on Armistice Day 1918, was on an anti-gas warfare course. They were told to inhale a small amount of gas in order to understand what they were up against and he’d overdone it somewhat and had passed out. Added to a chronic sinus problem this created a rather distinctive delivery, a sort of melodious growl, which many people learned to imitate even better than he could do it himself.
There we were, I playing Schumann and he growling the piano part. When I finished, Wally stepped forward with the sight-reading (Brahms Symphony No. 1, Rossini’s La Gazza Ladra Overture and the César Franck Symphony in D Minor, I remember). Barbirolli languidly waved these away and said that he was shortly due to conduct Mahler’s Symphony No. 9 with the Berlin Philharmonic and as the first horn part was very important to the structure of the piece he’d be obliged if I could remind him how it went.
Now, I knew Mahler was a composer, and I knew he’d written one symphony, because I used to listen to it ad nauseam in my digs while at what we call ‘The Royal College of Knowledge’, but I didn’t know he’d written eight more of the flipping things. Years later I was privileged to play even the completed Tenth Symphony in the Albert Hall.
Anyway, where was I? Oh yes. Barbirolli got out a smallish full score, put it on his ornate music stand and told me to start. Reading through the score, with JB turning the pages, I waded through most of the piece for what seemed like about thirty or forty minutes and at the end he said, “It’s not much notice, but can you start on the 10th of January? We’ll be doing a big concert, including Rossini’s Semiramide Overture, and the Dvorak ‘Cello Concerto with Tortelier that week.” I am sure I am not the only person who wonders how I got the job, let alone had the nerve to accept it. I had no time to find anywhere to live, but luckily Dad’s sister still lived in Birkenhead and agreed to have me stay there until I could find somewhere in Manchester.
Well, that was my introduction to this famous man. He was enormously kind to me and helped me find my feet. He knew I loved Delius’ music, because I had told him in my audition. Once in the middle of a concert while we were playing The Walk to the Paradise Garden, he looked at me while conducting the ‘cellos during a particularly luscious passage and gave me a huge conspiratorial wink. I can’t imagine a conductor doing that today either. As time went by, I got to know him a little and many funny things happened during the seven years I was in the orchestra.
There was the incident during a rehearsal of Verdi’s The Force of Destiny overture. The bass trombone player put his hand up and said, more in hope than expectation, “Sir John, it might help us play with more feeling if you explained something of the story behind the opera.” JB, as we called him, was only too happy to lay out the plot and began to expound the details of the Marquis putting a curse on his daughter Leonora and her lover Don Alvaro etc., while the orchestra settled back in their chairs and went straight back to their Telegraph crosswords. This went on right up to the moment the leader, Martin Milner, looked at his watch and announced it was time for the break in the rehearsal. A few months later the same player suggested that they would benefit from knowing more about the opera Sicilian Vespers, and JB, who had obviously been ruminating over the previous ploy, said abruptly, “Italian opera is about two things and two things only – Dicks and Daggers!”
As a matter of interest, Barbirolli had a great affinity with Verdi and both his father and grandfather (who was born in 1837) had both played in the first performance of Otello at La Scala in 1887. Incidentally, JB told me that his head was exactly the same size as Verdi’s, and he had had an identical copy of the composer’s wide-rimmed black hat made for himself. He didn’t like the sun very much and always wore this hat. He said that one very hot day in Bulgaria, while sitting on the steps outside Sofia Cathedral he took it off and laid it on the step beside him. As he wiped his brow someone walking past promptly dropped some small change into it.
I remember one morning he arrived at another rehearsal – seven minutes late as always –and said rather tetchily, “Shut up and behave yourselves – I’m desperate for time.” The score of Die Meistersinger overture was open on his stand and he slammed it shut as usual. He always did this theatrical gesture – both in the rehearsal and the concert – with two overtures, the Wagner and Roman Carnival by Berlioz. They were the only two pieces he conducted from memory. He picked up his baton, looked at it wobbling uncontrollably – put it carefully down on the desk with both hands and said, “I shan’t be a minute.” Well, about ten minutes later he reappeared, wiping his mouth with a voluminous handkerchief. He strode to the podium, picked up the baton, saw it was as steady as a rock. He smiled benignly and the rehearsal started.
He told me once that he and Elgar had one significant thing in common: they both married Protestants. He was a terrific interpreter of Elgar’s music, I’ve always thought, and back in 1927 when he was playing the ‘cello in the London Symphony Orchestra he had made his debut as a conductor by stepping in at the last minute to replace Beecham as conductor of Elgar’s Second Symphony. It was a resounding success and as he walked off the platform to roars of applause, he was met by a little man who whispered loudly, “Don’t sign anything – my name’s Gaisburg, HMV – come and see me in the morning.” And so, he was launched.
Barbirolli was only interested in one thing, and that was music, and it came before everything else in his life, although he loved cricket too, often telling the audience in Harrogate the latest Test Match score before he brought the baton down. On occasion he umpired the Hallé Eleven against the Liverpool Philharmonic. He also used to finish rehearsals early so that he could get home in time to watch Steptoe and Son. Many of the players that I knew in the Hallé had been with JB since the time he had brought the orchestra back to life in 1943. Interestingly, one of the first principal horn players that he appointed was Livia Gollancz, who later took over the publishing firm from her father and who sadly, recently died at aged 97. I shared two distinctions with her, our position in the Hallé, and the fact that we both played the fourth horn solo in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in a prom at the Royal Albert Hall, she in 1941 and I in 1971.
I will gloss over the incident of the player whose wife tearfully asked Barbirolli to intercede and persuade her husband to cease his indiscreet liaison. He said to her, “I’ve got nothing but the utmost sympathy for you. He’s simply got to work this affair through until he gets it out of his system.” And as she started to walk away, he said to her, “But you know my dear – there’s one very good thing that’s come out of all this.” “What’s that?”, she asked. “He’s playing better than ever!”
