Reginald Goodall

Sir Reginald Goodall (13 July 1901, Lincoln – 5 May 1990) was an English conductor, noted for his performances of the operas of Richard Wagner and conducting the premieres of several operas by Benjamin Britten.

Biography

Known as "Reggie", Goodall studied at the Royal College of Music and elsewhere in Europe. In 1929, he became the organist and choirmaster at St. Alban's, Holborn. In the 1930s, he was a member of Oswald Mosley's short-lived British Union of Fascists, and gave out leaflets and sat in on meetings. He maintained his outspoken pro-Nazi views during World War II and was briefly arrested.^{[citation needed]}

Goodall joined the Sadler's Wells company, forerunner of the English National Opera, in 1944. An early triumph was his conducting of the premiere of Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes in 1945. He conducted this again later at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, where he had first conducted in 1947. He was an assistant conductor to the music director of the Royal Opera House, Karl Rankl, in the late 1940s. Goodall also conducted at Glyndebourne, including another Britten premiere, this time of The Rape of Lucrece, which was also his first recording, with EMI.

Goodall spent much of his career conducting orchestras at the Royal Opera House and Sadler's Wells Opera. He left Covent Garden for Sadler's Wells when Georg Solti was made Music Director of the Royal Opera, partly because Solti was 11 years younger, partly out of racial animus. At Sadler's Wells, Goodall collaborated with Leonard Hancock, the head of Sadler's Wells music staff.

A modest man, Goodall achieved his own prominence in later life once he was able to come out from under the shadow of some of the great German and Austrian conductors of his era, for whom he understudied, conducted rehearsals and provided vocal coaching. But it was not Otto Klemperer, Herbert von Karajan or Wilhelm Furtwängler with whom he was then compared. It was with Georg Solti, when both were conducting and recording Ring Cycles by Richard Wagner. The differences in tempi and temperament were most notable, but Goodall was most appreciated for his attention to detail (and Wagner's annotations) and for his extensive rehearsals. Solti's recordings made in Vienna had the advantage of attracting the more remarkable soloists (singing in the original language) and are probably now better appreciated, not least for their more spirited tempi, though recent recordings by Daniel Barenboim and James Levine have returned to a more measured approach.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Goodall conducted several celebrated Wagner productions at Sadler's Wells Opera that reversed the decline in his prestige and established him as one of the leading Wagner conductors of his time. He conducted The Mastersingers in 1968, and the full Ring Cycle from 1970 to 1973, both productions sung in English. Goodall was much loved by musicians and singers with whom he worked over long periods, building up a mutual understanding and rapport which showed in the quality of his recordings, especially with British singers, notably Rita Hunter and Alberto Remedios, whose careers he fostered. Many British reviewers consider his Ring to be vocally one of the most beautiful, even if the entire tetralogy lasted three hours longer than under the batons of Karl Böhm or Pierre Boulez.

His last public performance was in 1987 at the Royal Albert Hall, London where he led the English National Opera Company in a performance of Act 3 of Wagner's Parsifal. The cast included Gwynne Howell (Gurnemanz), Warren Ellsworth (Parsifal), Neil Howlett (Amfortas) and Shelagh Squires (Kundry).

John Lucas published an authorized biography of Goodall, Reggie, in 1993.

External links

• "The First Digital Tristan - a talk with the Maestro, the Hero and the Boss" by Bruce Duffie. Wagner News, February, 1982.
• Stereophile review of Goodall's Ring, reissued on CD 2001
• "Reginald Goodall – the holy fool", On an Overgrown Path (blog), 8 May 2007 blog entry.
• Interview by Bruce Duffie, November 18, 1981