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The Genius of Valhalla – a celebration of Reginald Goodall: Introduction by Humphrey Burton and panel discussion with Norman Bailey, Margaret Curphey, Dame Anne Evans, John Lucas, Sir Brian McMaster, Anthony Negus and Nicholas Payne. Followed by a showing of The Quest for Reginald Goodall a BBC TV Omnibus programme; originally broadcast in 1984. London Coliseum, London 23.11.2008 (JPr)

Rita Hunter, Reginald Goodall and Alberto Remedios

This event set out to investigate why Reginald Goodall was such a consummate Wagnerian and to celebrate him by hearing from people who knew and worked with him. It also afforded an opportunity for a showing of the 1984 film directed by Humphrey Burton which is the only filmed record of the painfully-shy conductor talking about himself and his approach to making music.

Reginald Goodall was one of the most revered Wagner conductors of the twentieth century. When he died in 1990  aged 88 he had achieved cult status but it was only during his last twenty years that he became well known. Yet in 1945 he had conducted the première of Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes when the Sadler’s Wells Theatre reopened after the war. His performances were considered by the first Grimes, Peter Pears, to be better than those conducted by the composer himself.

Goodall was born in 1901 in Lincoln and studied conducting and piano at the Royal College of Music. He travelled throughout Germany and Austria to observe the premier conductors of the day whilst supporting himself as a piano accompanist. His first appointment was as choirmaster and organist at St Alban’s, Holborn, in London were he gave a number of important first UK performances of music by Bruckner and Britten amongst others. In the late 1930s he started work as an assistant to Albert Coates at Covent Garden and with the Royal Choral Society under Malcolm Sargent. The war was a miserable time for anyone pro-German and therefore for the regrettably pro-fascist Goodall yet within a short time of Germany surrendering, he was surprisingly asked to conduct Peter Grimes written by the pacifist Britten and with Pears ,another pacifist, in the title role. The following year in Glyndebourne’s first post-war season,  Goodall shared the baton with Ernest Ansermet for the first performances of The Rape of Lucretia.

Goodall soon joined the music staff of the Royal Opera at Covent Garden and in 1953 after replacing Britten as conductor of Peter Grimes there - and because of the excellent reviews he received – he was given four performance of Die Walküre on tour. The first in Croydon on 5 March 1954 was given a glowing appreciation by a young Andrew Porter in Opera magazine. Porter was later to translate the Ring for Sadler’s Wells and Goodall was on the path to becoming recognised as a Wagner specialist. However his time at Royal Opera was to be one of relative obscurity and although he conducted a wide repertoire from Il trovatore to Troilus and Cressida,  his opportunities became less frequent for various reasons. He continued however to coach singers in ‘Valhalla’ - the nickname given to the small, sparsely equipped room (used by cleaners at night for their mops and buckets and as a changing room for front-of-house staff) under the roof of the Royal Opera House. There, during the 1960s he coached singers such as Amy Shuard, Otakar Kraus, Ronald Lewis, Gwyneth Jones, Donald McIntyre, Gwynne Howell, Ronald Lewis, Michael Langdon – to name a few. He continued to coach singers in ‘Valhalla’ even when preparing performances for the other companies he worked with. In the opera house refurbishment I believe this room became a toilet and so presumably not the best place for a plaque!

He was given few further opportunities to conduct the operas by Wagner, the composer he most admired, but he was invited by Sadler’s Wells Opera to conduct a new production of The Mastersingers to mark the opera’s centenary in 1968. Those performances have become the stuff of legend as has his Ring cycle built up between 1970 and 1973 and the first to be given in English for some years. He also conducted Das Rheingold and Die Walküre for The Royal Opera, Tristan und Isolde for Welsh National Opera and Tristan and Parsifal for English National Opera, which Sadler’s Wells Opera later morphed into becoming. He was awarded a CBE in 1975 and knighted in 1985.

In his last years,  I knew ‘Reggie’ as his friends and admirers affectionately called him when he was president of The Wagner Society but my most abiding memories are of a frail old man being carried backstage in the arms of a nurse after Act I of Tristan and Isolde at the London Coliseum in January 1985 and his being present for an incandescent Parsifal Act 3 at the BBC Proms on 9 August 1987.  In his splendid, but sadly out-of-print, biography Reggie – the life of Reginald Goodall, John Lucas  reminds us that this was ‘the final conducting engagement of his career’.

 ‘Genius’ was a tribute that Goodall would have abhorred as referring to himself and what made him  the  genius that he undoubtedly was,  is difficult to pin down exactly. The administrator Brian McMaster noted that Goodall was accused of having ‘no conducting technique’ yet  he did have the phenomenal knack of getting a desired result from an orchestra. Goodall’s collaborator the conductor Anthony Negus, said he chose to ‘nurture’ the music in order to get from his orchestras ‘a chamber music-like way of playing with a wonderful sound’. Goodall told the singer Margaret Curphey that ‘I can’t tell you how to sing but learn what I say’ and Norman Bailey, Goodall’s Hans Sachs and Wotan, recalled that he was ‘wonderful playing the piano but when he sang he had 3 pitches and it was a matter of absorbing the music from Reggie’. Anne Evans remembered being told to ‘Shush’ before even singing a note. When asked why,  Reggie’s reply was ‘I know it will be too loud’! Alberto Remedios (in a message read by Humphrey Burton) made the pun that he didn’t like to ‘regimented’ but always enjoyed his sessions with Goodall even when Reggie came to him during the intervals of their Wagner performances to point out that  he had missed a note or phrase. He would say,  Alberto recalls,  ‘Don’t worry we can go through it tomorrow’!

There was much discussion why Goodall had not been more successful earlier in his career particularly during his time on the music staff for the Royal Opera. The consensus was that  rehearsal time he wanted and his other demands were too troublesome. Nicholas Payne told how Goodall once wanted 9 double basses at Welsh National Opera and how after he was offered 7,  finally agreed a compromise of 8; ‘I had to lose the extra orchestra costs under other headings’, he said. Nicholas Payne went on to consider how Goodall was happy to rehearse although it was often difficult to get him to do the performances. Brian McMaster added that once there was a midweek Tristan und Isolde revival performance with Welsh National Opera and unusually for Goodall evenings,  it was not sold-out.  The  conductor did not find this out until he came to the podium for Act I and during the interval he refused to conduct Acts II and III.  Finally he  agreed to continue for Act II but that would be all until  McMaster gathered everyone available from backstage and front-of-house to stand and cheer Goodall as he entered for Act II. No more was ever said and he went on to conduct Act III.

Whether or not  Goodall left  a ‘legacy’ was also considered and John Lucas reminded us that because of the ‘principles of Wagnerian technique’ that he instilled in the singers and musicians who worked with him -  and who now teach this to their students – it was clear that he does.  We were also reminded that in 1989,  three of his protégés, Anne Evans, John Tomlinson and Linda Finnie sang in the Ring at Bayreuth. Norman Bailey summed it up best when he said that for opera Goodall had ‘the love of the language and the language is the soul of the music’.

Humphrey Burton then introduced his 1984 BBC TV programme The Quest for Reginald Goodall a rare and poignant glimpse of such a quiet and unassuming man being talked about and forced to talk about himself,  whilst more revealingly being seen working on Die Walküre at Welsh National Opera. Overcome by these memories Humphrey Burton abandoned a post-screening discussion saying that this was the ‘fitting end’ to a memorable afternoon.

On 4th May 1990,  the bed-ridden Goodall told Anne Evans ‘I’d like to have one more go at the Ring, dear. I never got bits of it right. It’s the work of a lifetime.’ As John Lucas writes in his Goodall biography ‘That night, while listening to Götterdämmerung, he drifted into a coma and never came out of it.

Through the determination of Sir Peter Moores and his Foundation Goodall’s   ‘English’ Ring was ‘captured live’. These recordings and also the BBC broadcast of The Mastersingers from 10th February 1968 are preserved on re-mastered recordings on Chandos Records’ ‘Opera in English’ label. It was Peter Moores in fact who was responsible for this splendid meander down a Wagnerian yellow brick road. So a big ‘Thank you’  to him … and to  Reggie - his dubious personal politics forgotten if not forgiven -  for some wonderful musical memories!

Jim Pritchard

Picture © The Observer Newspaper

Recording Details: THE MASTERSINGERS - CHAN 3148

THE RING OF THE NIBELUNGS
The Rhinegold – CHAN 3054
The Valkyrie – CHAN 3038
Siegfried – CHAN 3045
Twilight of the Gods – CHAN 3060


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