Sir Reginald Goodall: An Appreciation

Sir Reginald Goodall

I am linking the following article on Sir Reginald Goodall (1901 – 1990) because not only was he a great conductor, he was also racially and politically aware and paired these convictions with an unusual degree of courage.

In the 1930s, Goodall was a member of Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. He was an outspoken opponent of the Second World War, and he was briefly arrested for his views. Goodall was also keenly conscious of the Jewish question.

Even more remarkably, Goodall retained these convictions after the Second World War, in spite of almost universal opprobrium. He was, moreover, a very ambitious man and well-aware that his convictions could only harm his career. But he never recanted, never apologized, and endured many years in obscurity before, on the strength of sheer talent and willpower, he finally broke through.

Goodall was one of the great Wagner conductors of the last century, and his recordings of the Ring cycle and The Mastersingers of Nuremberg would surely would rank among the very greatest, were it not for one lovable but very real flaw: they are English-language versions, part of a quite noble attempt to make Wagner more accessible to the English-speaking world.

Unfortunately, as beautiful as these recordings are, I find the English distracting because I know the German texts quite well. But if I’d heard these recordings when I was first listening to Wagner, they really would have made him more accessible.

Goodall’s recording of Tristan and Isolde and his two recordings of Parsifal (on EMI and BBC Legends) are in German.

The chief complaint about Goodall is that his Wagner is slow. His recording of The Rhinegold is the only one that takes three CDs. His The Twilight of the Gods sprawls on to five! (Goodall’s Ring cycle occupies 16 CDs, whereas Pierre Boulez’s takes only 12; most take 14.)

Under the best of circumstances, Wagner puts strains on the attention span, and in the age of MTV, channel surfing, ADD, and the internet, Goodall may be asking too much. For my part, however, I find that Goodall’s performances do not seem slow, because they are utterly spell-binding and open up a world of musical details obscured by other conductors.

Goodall was also a very fine conductor of Britten (The Rape of Lucretia) and Bruckner (Symphony No. 7/Wagner, Meistersinger Prelude, Symphony No. 8/Wagner, Tristan and Isolde, Prelude to Act I, and Symphony No. 9).

Really, his name should have been Allgood.

“Reginald Goodall–The Holy Fool”
On an Overgrown Path, May 8, 2007

Sir Reginald Goodall rehearsing "Parsifal," Act 3, August 1987

Goodall showed that as a Wagner conductor he has no equal. His control of the musical architecture is absolute. The huge span of the score was shaped as if in a single phrase. At the same time the music seemed to move spontaneously, by its own inner force, and with a glowing beauty of sound, an inevitability of rise and fall and a kind of natural momentousness of expression that will remain ideal.

These were the words of David Cairns writing in the Sunday Times in August 1987. The occasion was Reginald Goodall’s last ever conducting engagement, the Proms concert performance of Act 3 of Parsifal shown in the rehearsal photo above. Wagner’s saga of the holy fool somehow sums up Goodall; as David Cairns wrote he was a Wagner conductor without equal, he was also a champion of Britten’s music who conducted the first performance of Peter Grimes, yet he flirted with fascism and alienated himself from many who tried to help him during a career that lasted more than sixty-five years. . . . More