Steuart Wilson

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Sir James Steuart Wilson, born Bristol, England, 21 July 1889, died Petersfield, 18 December 1966, was a tenor singer and musical administrator.

He was the youngest child of the Rev James Wilson headmaster of Clifton College. He was educated at Winchester College and King's College, Cambridge, where he read classics but developed a strong interest in music. His first public appearance as a singer was in Vaughan Williams’s incidental music for Aristophanes’ The Wasps in 1909. He made his first appearance in opera as Tamino in Mozart's The Magic Flute in 1911.^[1] He studied singing with Sir George Henschel and Jean de Reszke.^[2]

At the outbreak of World War I Wilson volunteered for action and was commissioned as an army officer. He was badly wounded and was invalided out of the army. Authorities differ on whether his wounds affected his singing voice. The Dictionary of National Biography states that they did not; The Times, in its obituary states that they did.^[3]^[4] He developed an interest in early English music, and was instrumental in founding the sextet, the English Singers in 1920.

From 1921 to 1923 Wilson taught music at Bedales School, an appointment that left him time to take singing engagements up and down the country. He was a leading interpreter of the Evangelist in Bach’s passions, and sang the title part in Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius under the baton of the composer and of conductors including Hamilton Harty,^[5] Malcolm Sargent,^[6] Albert Coates,^[7] and Adrian Boult.^[8] The Times called him ‘the best exponent of [Gerontius] at the present time’.^[9]

As well as his singing Wilson also made respected English translations of German Lieder and choral texts, and achieved a wider fame for his successful libel action against the BBC in what became known as ‘the case of the intrusive H’. The BBC had printed in its weekly magazine The Listener a letter accusing Wilson of the technical fault of aspirating his runs in decorated music.^[10] He sued and won £2,000 damages.

At the age of fifty Wilson gave up singing, and took up a post at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. In 1943 he was appointed music director for BBC Overseas Services. In 1945 he was music director of the newly formed Arts Council of Great Britain. In 1948 he became director of music for the BBC. The Times described this appointment as ‘not a success’, and it is chiefly remembered for the controversy Wilson provoked by engineering the forced retirement of Sir Adrian Boult as chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra. It was widely thought that Wilson had a personal motive for Boult’s removal: in 1932 Wilson’s wife Ann had divorced him for cruelty, and the following year she married Boult.^[11] Wilson was 'an implacable enemy'.^[12]

He moved to Covent Garden as deputy general administrator of the Royal Opera House, 1949–1955, where he resented being subordinate to David Webster and he resigned.^[13] His last major appointment was as principal of the Birmingham School of Music, 1957–1960, but this is described by Grove as ‘an unhappy episode’.

[edit] Recordings

On a recording made in 1927 during a performance at the Royal Albert Hall, London, Wilson sings in extracts from The Dream of Gerontius conducted by the composer. He also recorded Vaughan Williams’s On Wenlock Edge and songs by Denis Browne.^[14]

[edit] Notes

^ DNB
^ The Times, 19 December 1966
^ DNB
^ The Times, 19 December 1966
^ The Times, 19 February 1926, p. 12
^ The Times, 28 March 1930, p. 12
^ The Times, Thursday, 23 March 1933, p. 12
^ Elgar memorial concert – The Times. 15 March 1934, pg. 12
^ The Times 13 September, 1930, p. 8
^ A (theoretical) example would be in the first line of Rule Britannia, rendering the five-notes of ‘first’ as fir-her-her-her-herst.
^ Kennedy, Adrian Boult, pp. 131-2
^ DNB
^ Haltrecht, pp. 157-8
^ Kennedy: Grove article